Tim Sarrantonio  0:07  
All right. Hello. Hello, everyone. We're just getting started. We got a good turnout for today on this beautiful Tuesday. My name is Tim Sarrantonio. I'm director of corporate brand here at NEON one, we're excited to do today's presentation with our fantastic partner Mallory Erickson Gold partner for putting a name to it, what to say and how to say it crafting effective email strategies to boost donor engagement. So we're gonna get started very shortly, I just want to go over some base housekeeping items. First, we are recording this and have turned on the captions, the slide deck will be provided. So hopefully that saves us a few chat questions, because that's always the most popular question. Second popular thing to do is for people to use the chat. So let's test that out. So we know that Mallory can see it, and our team can see it. I'll be watching the chat for questions and conversation. So let's test that out. Okay, we got a few people doing that. That would be great. Once you tell us who you are and where you're talking to us from. I'm actually in a different location. I'm in New York City today. Like Jean Janine, but not like Melissa, perhaps. So I'm down right by the next to the office as a Smile Train. I was supposed to be in their office. But that didn't work out. So I'm going to Starbucks next door, folks. So we're going to get me off here real quick. Awesome. So we're going to be watching this, but there's also a q&a capability for zoom. And that means that if you want to make sure that Mallory sees a question, then go ahead and ask it now, Mallory is an expert in a lot of things. But she's also not really going to be touching on anything product related today. So this is not a product webinar. We have those don't worry. But today's not that. So if you're expecting some other resources, don't worry, we got you covered just not in the next 60 minutes. So other than that, the chat works. q&a is going we got the recording going Mallory, I would say I'm going to turn myself off and be here for you. But otherwise, the floor is yours.

Mallory Erickson  2:23  
Amazing. Okay, awesome. Welcome, you guys. I'm so excited to be with all of you today. Tim gave me a really warm welcome. But my name is Mallory Erickson. I'm the creator of the power partners formula and the host of the podcast, let the fundraising if you want to connect with me on Instagram, or LinkedIn or want my website, all of that information is there, I'm gonna start just giving you a little introduction to me, for those of you who might not be familiar with my work. And you can tell me in the chat if this applies to you, too. But I became an accidental fundraiser first, actually, when I got promoted into a managing director role, and then an executive director role, and it came with really big fundraising responsibilities and tell me in the chat, are you an accidental fundraiser? How did you find yourself doing the work that you're doing today? Yes, Melissa? Definitely. And honestly,

when I started fundraising, I had these views or these beliefs about how easy it might be to fundraise. I was never going to work more than 40 hours a week, I was going to have donors coming to me. And the reality was quite different, actually. And I show this image all the time. But I call this phase of my life Impact Report fake, where I felt like I had to put on this appearance everywhere, like I had it all together. But the reality was that it was a constant hustle. And I didn't have a donor pipeline that I trusted, I was working 12 to 15 hour days, I ended up developing chronic pain. And I really hit this moment in my career where I was like, I cannot keep doing this year after year, I either need to figure out a different way to fundraise a different way to make this thing work for me, or I have to leave the nonprofit sector. And I knew I didn't want to leave the nonprofit sector. But I ended up going and getting executive coach certified. I got trained in habit and behavior design. And in design thinking all of them were a little bit accidental. But at the same time I was frontline fundraising. And I was able to apply those frameworks to my fundraising. And it radically shifted the way that I showed up as a fundraiser. And the actual, like financial impacts were tremendous. I moved an organization from a million to 3.8 pretty quickly. But more important than that, in my opinion, was that I started to love fundraising. And I always say to people, like if I can love fundraising, anyone can love fundraising because nobody hated fundraising more than me. And so that is what ultimately led to the building of my signature program, the power partners formula, and it really is this combination of executive coaching tools, modern fundraising, strategy, design, thinking and habit and behavior design. And everything that we're going to be going through today is inspired by and taken from this In this program, okay, so all of the if you've never been to one of my webinars before, then this might be new to you. And if you have come before them, you have seen this before, but it is actually so important that you are being reminded of this really consistently. So everything in fundraising comes back to what is happening inside of us as fundraisers today, we're talking about how to create magnetic messages, how to create email, copy, and engage your donors through how you're communicating with them. Where that starts, where your ability to communicate with your donor starts, is inside of you what is happening inside of you. And so having awareness around our emotions is the very first step our emotions are an incredible lens, okay, they are a window into what is happening inside of our head, what is happening inside of our body, and how that is going to impact how we show up as a fundraiser. So this is the cognitive behavior loop. This is the idea that our thoughts and our beliefs, inform how we feel, and then ultimately how we show up. And then our results, right. So our emotions, give us some insight into some of the thoughts and the beliefs that we're holding. And it gives us an opportunity to shift those thoughts and beliefs to ultimately shift how we feel and be able to show up differently, okay, so if you're about to click Send on your email campaign, and your emotion is one of a lot of fear, a lot of stress, a lot of resistance, right? You're getting those butterflies, maybe you feel nauseous, I always joke that like I had felt like I've throw up before every major donor meeting, that's a great opportunity to ask yourself a question about, okay, what are some of the thoughts and the beliefs that I'm holding about this email? Or about this campaign? Oh, I feel like I might be bothering people, Oh, I feel like it might be a bad day to send this or I don't think they really want to hear from me about this thing. And we're going to talk about how to correct for all of those different things. But the very first step is to just have awareness around this connection, this connection between the thoughts and the beliefs that were holding, and how we feel as fundraisers. Because when I started to look at this for myself, when I started to say, okay, here I am, in my impact report, fake stage, I am totally burnt out as a fundraiser. I hate fundraising. Why do I hate fundraising? I was like, What do I What do I like believe fundraising is or what are my thoughts about fundraising. And I thought that, you know, fundraising was trying to convince someone to do something that they didn't really want to do. But you were trying to figure out the exact right way to ask them to do it so that they would do it anyways. And I really felt like I was hounding donors and chasing donors. But when I took a step back, and I said, What do I actually believe that good fundraising could be rooted in like fundraising at its best, when fundraising feels good? What is happening in those moments? And it led to now what is the mantra behind power partners, which is that great fundraising is not an ask, it's an offer. It's about partnership and opportunity, inviting people into your organization. It's about vulnerability and connection, and really about partnership, right? I think sometimes inside the nonprofit sector, we take for granted a little bit what it means to live lives where we get to make a positive impact on the world every single day. Not everybody does that through their work. And they do it through giving through investing in causes and trying to build the world that they want to build in other ways. And this really is what good fundraising is about. And so for, you start to think about what are some of the thoughts and the beliefs that you're holding about your own fundraising? And how might shifting those change how you show up to writing that email to sending that email to walking into that donor meeting, because we're going to be talking about fundraising strategy today. Don't get me wrong, we're talking about email, email strategy and engagement strategies. But the thing that holds us back from actually being able to realize all of these strategies that we talked about on webinars like this are a lot of the limiting beliefs that we hold. So the idea behind the cognitive behavior loop is to give you the beginning of a tool to start to remove some of those limiting beliefs so that more of the strategy we talked about on this webinar today can actually get put into use. Okay, so we're going to dive in the first thing I want. So everything we're talking about today in terms of email engagement, okay? email engagement means an email that a donor takes an action on, right if we are measuring our donors engagement, we are measuring essentially an action or behavior that that donor takes, right. That's how we know they're engaged. They opened the email, they clicked on the link in the email, they gave a donation. Okay, so the very first thing I want to start us off with today is helping you understand what gets a donor to take out Action. Okay, any action. And we think about this particularly in terms of money, right. And the first piece of this that I want you to understand is that donor behavior is, is a response behavior. And actually, this is true of all behavior. And we'll talk about that in a minute. But donor behavior is a response behavior, okay, your donors do not wake up in the morning, and say, Oh, I was just thinking about so and so organization and the fact that there was a donate button in my email 10 days ago, and they probably still need money today. So I'm going to go on their website and make a donation, right, that is not how it happens. Donor behaviors, the response behavior that happens when they are prompted or not prompted would mean that they don't take the behavior, but the donor behavior happens when they're prompted. And 90% of the time, what is prompting that donors behavior is the fundraisers behavior, we make that call to action in our email, we send the email in the first place, right? Those behaviors are giving the donor a prompt, that they then respond to, okay. And the number one thing that impacts our behavior as fundraisers are is what's happening inside of our head. And so that's why we started this whole thing, talking about the cognitive behavior, because your behavior as a fundraiser, what you write in that email, whether or not you click Send on that email, all of those things have to do with the narratives and the stories and the thoughts and the beliefs that you are holding inside of you. And so it's really important to understand this chain of events, because when we say our donors like blah, blah, blah, usually, we gave them an opportunity to demonstrate that they liked that. And we didn't give them other opportunities to demonstrate that they liked other things, because they were responding to a prompt. Okay. So anytime a donor takes an action, three things need to come together. And this is true for all behavior, actually, but we are talking about your donors, in particular, because we are talking about how to more deeply engage them. So for a donor to take any actions, three things need to come together in a single moment, motivation, the ability to take that action, and a prompt. Okay, we already talked about the prompt part a little bit. But this happens on a spectrum. And so I studied habit and behavior design under Dr. BJ Fogg, out of Stanford, and he has created this incredible Fogg behavior model that I think just demonstrates this so clearly. So in order for us to do anything, we need to have enough motivation, and enough ability, and we need to be prompted to do it. So if our motivation is low, even if the action is really, really, really easy to do, and we're prompted to do it, sometimes we'll get over the action line, right, so let's say a donor opposite opens an email. And you have made, maybe you haven't put a ton of sort of inspiring stories up at the top and really engaged them yet, but you have a very clear, very easy call to action button to learn more information, you've prompted them, you've made it very easy for them to take an action, they might still click that button and open the email, okay, because that call to action was at the top of the email was very simple. Okay, so they didn't need a ton of motivation to take that action. But let's say your call to action button is actually three pages down your email. And all the text above it also, isn't that inspiring or engaging, but it's just kind of a lot of information, it's much more unlikely that they're going to click that button, because now we've made it a lot harder for them to click that button, we didn't increase their motivation. And we made the action easier to do. And so even though we're prompting them, they are not getting over the action line. Okay. So it's really, we're going to talk about how you increase motivation, how you make the action easier to do, I'm gonna walk you through five different tips around this in terms of your email engagement. But I want you to understand this concept. So anytime you're looking at an email that you're sending out, you want to be thinking about, are we motivating our donors in this email to engage? Have we made engagement incredibly easy to do? And are we prompting them clearly, and I will talk about this more later, are we prompting them clearly, with the engagement with the thing that we want them to take? Okay, this is the core of all the tips that I'm gonna give you today are going to come back to this right? Because donor behavior is a response. Okay. And the number one thing I would say if donors are not taking an action that you want them to take, the very first question you should ask yourself is did we prompt them? Right? Because sometimes we go out there and we talk about our organization in the most passionate way, right? We are telling incredible stories about our organization, and we know that on our website, it's very easy to Make a donation. But at the end of our incredible story about our organization, we are not inviting them to give, we are not prompting them. So when there is no prompt, there can be no response from the donor. Okay? So it's so important, the first thing that you're doing is making sure those prompts are there. Now, before we get into the five tips that I have pulled out for you today, I want to just bust a little myth really quickly, which is about donor fatigue. Okay, so I deeply believe that donor fatigue is a myth. We earn people's attention with value and quality. Okay, so does it mean that our donors are never tired of particular emails? Not necessarily. They might be. But to me, that's not because of how many emails you're sending. It's because of what's inside those emails. Nobody gets tired of valuable emails of quality connections. Think about your friends for a second. Think about your friends that every time you are with them, or you interact with them, it feels really good. It brings you energy gives you energy boosts you up. Do you ever get fatigued being around them? You're like, oh, I can't spend can't spend more time with Carrie like, she's just she's so positive. She makes me feel so good. Like, she can't do that all the time? No. But then do you have other people that you see twice a year and you're like, holy moly, that took a lot out of me? Right? So it's not we think donor fatigue is about frequency. Okay, we think it's about we've emailed them too much. We

fatigue them with too much email know, if our donors are tired, it's because of how we're communicating not how much we're communicating. Okay, so we need to be communicating more, but we also need to be communicating better. Okay, that's the core to this. And if you feel overwhelmed by this, you're like, oh, Mallory, but we really do send four emails a year, and I'm very overwhelmed with the fact that you're telling me to email my donors more, I'm very nervous about fatiguing them, if I do this, I'm gonna give you three very quick tips, okay to dip your toe in this a little bit. Okay. So if you feel overwhelmed by this, focus your emails on value, focus on giving value in your email, increase your free frequency by 10%. And test what happens, see what happens focus on value in those emails, increase your frequency by 10%, then maybe another 10%, and maybe another 10%. And just pay attention. And you can another tip you can try if you're very nervous about fatiguing is you can give sequence opt outs. So we all know that there's unsubscribing from full lists. But let's say you're going to build a whole sequence around a certain campaign, you're going to do a whole campaign where you're talking a lot about one program, in particular, maybe it's a fundraising campaign that goes to that program, you can actually give people the opportunity to opt out just from that sequence. So they stay on your newsletter list to Okay, so I want to make sure we have a lot of stories and a lot of narratives that hold us back from sending more emails, I want you to send more emails, okay, so here are three really quick things to start to dip your toe into increasing your email frequency. The reason why I'm suggesting these things, and particularly number two, increasing your frequency by 10%. And testing, seeing what your donors actually do is because nobody can predict your donors behavior, like your donors themselves. Okay? It's great to look at what other nonprofits are doing and to try to look at them, learn from them to look at benchmarks that are happening in the sector to give you some orientation in some contexts for things, it's great to survey your donors and ask for their input. But nobody can predict your donors behavior, like your donors themselves. In that moment, as humans, we are not that great at saying what we would like in the future, what we say we want, and how we actually respond in that moment, when we get it are very, very, very different. Okay, so testing is a huge part of all the things we're going to be talking about right now, I want you to think about all of this is like where can you play? How can you test? How can you see how people respond because your donors are going to give you the best insight into how these different tips and tools work for all of you. Okay, I need to take a quick sip getting excited. Are you guys still here? Are you with me ready to dive into these tips? You can tell me why take a quick sip of my tea.

Okay, okay, got it. Got it Tim's? Okay. All right. So let's start by talking about how we increase motivation. So I shared with you the Fogg behavior model and that our goal is to get folks over the action line right, we are testing we are getting looking for engagement. We are looking for a donor response. Okay, so we want to get folks over that action line. So the first thing I want to talk about is how you increase motivation. shin. So in fundraising, you can increase motivation through identity, belonging and connection. Okay. And you should, you should check out if you haven't already, oh, I meant to have the link ready, maybe Tim can throw it in the chat, the neon ones email report, which is so cool and has so much information that I learned from an integrated into this webinar in a lot of different ways. But let's start talking about like how you increase motivation for donors in particular. So one thing I want to sort of call out is that one of the things that I think gets kind of confusing in fundraiser, one of the ways that I think people don't necessarily understand how to market when it comes to their nonprofit, is they think about marketing through a consumer lens, they think about marketing as being this thing out there trying to sell us lip gloss, right. But when we are being marketed to when when marketers are trying to increase our motivation to buy a product, right? They are really building that based on how this is going to impact you directly, right? How is this like going to impact your personal gain or utility or satisfaction? And so I think sometimes in nonprofit marketing, we, we get kind of confused. And we're like, Well, how do we do this? Because we don't want to make it all about the donors. We don't want to center the donors and do a bunch of Savior ism stuff. But so how do we then increase their motivation without it making the whole thing and all the work all about them at the center. And I think this is really where it comes down to is increasing their motivation through the connection to their identity belonging inside the organization, and then connection with you and with the organization itself. So in order to do this, and I'm going to talk to you about different ways that you can create more of that identity, belonging and connection. But I have to say this first, in order to do this, especially when we're talking about email, and one to many emails, okay, so that's like newsletter emails where your organization is sending one email and is going to many people, many different donors at a time. One way, you can absolutely increase identity belonging and connection through those types of communication strategies. But you cannot do that, while you are trying to get everyone in the world to fund your organization. Okay, when we are so afraid of coming on too strong, like we're so afraid in the sector of coming on too strong, because what if some of our donors don't like what we have to say, and so in a lot of our one to many emails, we end up keeping things super, super neutral, okay? Which actually just means that they are very bland. And in the attention economy that we are in right now, it is so much worse to be bland than to have people not like you, okay, because for every person who doesn't like you, or who doesn't agree with you, there are going to be three people that love you. And you do not need a bunch of lukewarm supporters. Okay, you need advocates, you need writer died, you need partners, right? We call these power partners inside my program. And so you need to start to understand what do the don't your donor base, your donor communities, your donor avatars, your donor identities? What are they? Who are they, and then making sure that your communication is making connections to their personal identity, we know that the people who are here care about XY and Z, a sense of belonging to the right group, when you indicate what you care about as an organization where you stand where you take a stand. That's how people know Oh, I'm in the right place. Because I care about what they care about, right? The least that their involvement matters. We have seen all the metrics, all the things about how people want to know that their impact made a difference, right? And you can take this down to the nitty gritty of trying to say, oh, my gosh, we have to tell our donors how exactly we spent their $25 No, you don't. You need to help them believe and see that their particular involvement matters, okay. And then the other thing is that donors are looking for a positive memories with the organization. Now again, if you are trying to make every single person in the world feel this way. Nobody's going to feel this way. Can you imagine if I came on this webinar, and I said, Okay, today I'm going to talk about email engagement for people who sell cars, and nonprofit fundraisers, and actually anybody who is trying to make money for anything in the whole world. How long would you have stayed on this webinar? Would you have thought that I was going to have actionable advice for you when you're going to understand think that I actually understood your organization's needs, or could speak to your Organizations particular problem areas, then you'd be like this is super generic. How do I know that any of this is going to be valuable to me? Okay, you in nonprofits, we have a really important choice, okay? You get to hold one of these to help funders find your organization. Okay, you are standing out in a big field, okay. And your potential donors are flying around you up above, and you have two things you can hold. You can stand there with a torch, or stand there with a laser. Okay? If somebody's holding a torch in a big field, for me, I'm like, is that for me? Are they talking to me? I'm not really sure. If they point a laser directly at me, I know, they want my attention. And that is what it looks like when we get specific about identities. And when we create actual belonging, right, we need to identify the people who are aligned with our organization. And we need to point that laser at them very kindly, okay, because if we try to be for everyone, we end up being for no one. And so the first step in this in creating more belonging and identity and increasing motivation, in that way, when you're talking to your donors is to be really clear about who you are as an organization. And how do you want to be communicating in those one to many emails? What's your tone? What are you talking about? What are your guidelines? What do you say? What do you not say? How do you want people to feel when you read those emails, I get tons of nonprofit newsletter emails, I don't think most of them are asking themselves before they write that email. How do I want people to feel when they read this email, they are sending me all these updates. There's no emotion in there. There's no connection, there's no belonging, there's no identity, any of those things. Okay. So I'm going to double click on this and take this a little bit farther. Tip number two is around building connection. So related to belonging and identity, I love this, quote, quote, unquote, people like us do things like this. Your donors are constantly asking yourself, asking themselves subconsciously, do people like me do things like this? Do people like me go to this event? Do people like me click this button? Do people like me read this other article? Do people like me watch this video? Okay. And so that's why in our email communications, we need to be focused on this, your donors want connection, and connection happens over touchpoints? Okay, so when you think about your emails, right now, you're thinking about maybe one particular email, or maybe you're thinking about a campaign, but I want you to recognize the connection between all these different pieces, okay, you can't just write one email that really includes the donors identity and sense of belonging, and, you know, really nurtures that emotional connection. And then, okay, we did it. And now we're gonna go back to our monthly emails that are updates about these things that have ended up, okay, your donors want connection over multiple trust points, okay. And here are a few different things that I think about when I think about how to create connection. So that we have heard a lot of us this idea of know, like trust, which comes from the consumer side of things, right, that in order for people to buy something they need to know, like, and trust it, something similar is true and nonprofit, but we really have to take it to this 2.0 level, okay. In order for us to be known, we have to actually let ourselves be known and to create space for the donors to be known as well, okay. And that means having more vulnerability, and respecting the relationship, I sharing things that are true, and are actually happening inside of our organization. And we build trust as well by sharing challenges and mistakes. And it doesn't mean all of a sudden, we have to share everything at once. And, you know, tell them everything that's ever happened that's gone wrong inside of our organization, there's this great idea of the 15% rule. How can you share 15% More insider information than maybe you've been willing to share before? How can you increase connection in these tiny shifts that let people in let people see behind the scenes a little bit more. So they really feel like they're insiders. There are some pieces from me on one's email report that I love that are just quick tips for increasing connection in your email communication. So use of the word you Okay, use of personalization. So personalization, I'm actually not sure that's the term that they used inside the report. But personalization is like using dear first name, and then the system puts the first name in there, right using personalization, asking questions of your donors and sending surveys. I said before that a lot of times survey information doesn't necessarily tell you how the donor will behave in the moment. That is true. But surveys are wonderful for another reason, which is that you're asking for feedback. You're letting communication and go both ways, all three of these things, increase your connection with your donors. And that's what's going to make them engage more with all of your content, okay? In that email in the next email, the phone call, you make all of those things because they are increasing their relationship to you. One of the things, we have a mini series coming out in June with neon, that was some of the research that I did behind behind some of what you're seeing inside this webinar. And one of the things I think is really important to know is that prioritizing connection is not the same as centering donors in the work of your organization. So something I see a lot in terms of like a sticking point around communication, is I see this like tension between community centric versus donor centric communications. And sometimes when people see suggestions like use the word you or use empathy to understand your donors perspective, they people can get nervous about what isn't that becoming too donor centric. But we have to build, there's a difference between centering donors in the work of your organization, and making sure that your email communication is connecting to the audience, okay. And remember, you can create belonging and identity rooted in the shared goals of the organization, the work you're doing together with the community, with the beneficiaries with however you define your entire ecosystem, that doesn't have to put donors at the center of it, but allows them to feel a sense of belonging to the entire group. And so the suggestions that I'm giving to today really have that framework in mind, this is not about, you know, making this is about using behavioral science to have donor communications that allow your donors to connect, but not that allow them to put them to that, but that doesn't put them on a pedestal as being the saviors of the problem that your organization saw. So this is the like, sweet spot in that conversation. Okay, so tip number three, is around making the action easier to do. So again, the purpose of all of this is creating engagement. Okay, creating more engagement in your emails. So one of the biggest things that holds people back from being able to take an action is how easy it is to take that action, right? It should be fun behavior model and how that works. Okay, so the first thing to think about if you're like, Okay, Mallory, like we don't know, like, are we making these actions harder to do? We're not sure. Here's some questions you can ask yourself, how hard is it for people to do what you're asking them to do? So that could be something like a donation form, right? You've asked them to make a donation, all of a sudden, they have a 15 step process that takes 10 minutes long, and doesn't give them transparency around where they're going? Yeah, we've probably made that action too hard to do. Okay, if you've asked them to watch a video, but they click on the link to watch the video, and they have to put in a bunch of information in order to actually watch the video. And so you're not seeing a good conversion rate on that video,

maybe you've made the action too hard to do, right? So first looking at when people are not taking an action you want them to take How hard is it for people to do what we asked them to do? How much time do they need in order to take the action, right? Remembering that so many people are viewing your emails on their phone, right? Or they're viewing them in between quick meeting times when we check our email, right? Because we don't feel like we have time to do other work. And so giving people both quick things to do, but also telling them how long it will take, watch this two minute video, right? Watch this 32nd clip, right? And if people aren't doing it, asking yourself, How much time do people actually need in order to take the action that we're asking them to take? Is it too much time? And then how much motivation? Do they need to take that action? Okay, if you're asking somebody to donate $100 to something, they likely need more motivation before taking that action than if you've asked them to donate $1 to something now, it doesn't mean Okay, switch till you take $1 You know, and ask everybody for $1 but just be aware of whether or not you're building the appropriate amount of motivation for the action that you're asking them to take. Okay, so how much motivation do they need to take that action? Have we built up that motivation over time, when we talk about nurture emails, nurture sequences, pre campaign nurture emails, a lot of that is this it's building up that motivation to be able to take the action is to take the action more easily, or to be able to get over the action mind more easily. So I want to give you a really interesting example of this. So there was a study done where where People were asked to show their support for something, or to make a difference in it, okay, it was like show your support, you know, click here to make a donation to this campaign, or no, that make a difference was a separate one. So show your support or make a difference. Okay. The campaign that used show your support the test that you show your support, had a much higher donation rate, so many more donors donated to it. And they donated, but they donated lower amounts in the test that use make a difference. Less people gave, but they gave higher amounts. So what this is an example of is is how a donors beliefs impact their ability? Do I believe I actually have the ability to make a difference, right? What what do I believe to be making a difference? Right? Does $5 make a difference? I know we say that in our emails, but do donors really believe that? You know, but showing our support? Okay, showing our support? That's, that's something I can easily do. Right? That's something I can really easily do. I can show my support with $5. I can show my support with $1. Okay, so sometimes ability is about our actual physical ability, or the actually the money in our bank and whether it matches the level you're asking me for. But sometimes it has to do with our beliefs about our ability to take that action. Yes, the text? Yes, exactly. The text was identical. And only the call to action was different in this study. Exactly. So only the call to action was different. Show your support or make a difference. And that was what they saw in the results. Okay. And the scientist who did this research was Ayelet Fishbach. Yes. Super, super, super interesting, right? And it's, it's just a really important example of how ability is both our actual ability and our believed ability? Okay, so here's some other things a little bit repetitive the slide before, but I wanted to drill these home, right? What impacts our ability how easy it is to give it this is when we're talking about donations in particular, can they give the amount you're asking for Okay? And do they believe they can actually make the impact you're inviting them to make? So those are questions to sort of ask yourself, as you're going through and thinking about these calls to action, I want to make sure I have time for questions at the end. So I'm gonna go through the last two tips. So tip number four, make the call to action clear. That's what CTA is, which by the way, I always forget that acronym. So I probably should have just written the whole thing out but call to action, right? That's the button. That's whatever prompt you are giving them to take an action, okay. So make the call to action clear. And particularly in donation emails, give your readers one call to action per email. Okay, I know in eons in neons email report, they showed some great examples of newsletters that have multiple hyperlinks and things in there where you can learn about a lot of different things. But in your donation emails, really focusing on one call to action for email, okay, but you want to give them a few ways to engage with it, right. So you can put that hyperlink in the text of a sentence and then a button below, and then all caps text with the hyperlink like gives them a few different ways, but all the call to action lead to the same page. And the same thing, when we don't do that, when we're like, we would love it, if you would give to this campaign, and follow us on Facebook and follow us on Instagram and share it with a friend. And like, too many choices. We've given them too many calls to action, and we've think about BJ Fogg behavior chart, all of a sudden, we've made it super confusing. We're like, well, how much motivation do I have to like, share it? And like, do I have the easy ability to share it? And but how much motivation do I have to give like, we want to give them one action, one action, we want to motivate them towards one action. We want to make it super easy for them to take that one action, and we want to prompt them for that one action. Okay. And repetition is your friend in these emails. Now, again, for this one, I'm talking specifically about campaign donation, like emails that are about driving donations. Okay. Tip number five, create your own benchmarks for tracking. So one of the things that I love about neons email report is that it gave some really important nonprofit fundraising email benchmarks because we haven't had those before. And we've had to rely on a lot of consumer benchmarks to try to understand how we're doing okay, so a benchmark is what is sort of an average percentage open rate, for example that are profits get, and what is an average percentage click rate that nonprofits get right. Those are those are examples of benchmarks. What I love about neons email report in particular is that they also segmented large nonprofits from small nonprofits, which has shown some really fascinating results, if you really, if you haven't looked at this email report should definitely look at the email report. But I also really want to recommend that for your organization, you create your own benchmarks, because I know I showed you this chart before, but what's so important is if you want to change donor behavior, if you want to change how people are engaging with your material, donor behavior is a lagging indicator, right? It's the last metric that we actually get information about, okay, what we want are earlier mid metrics, earlier engagement metrics to know how we're doing, okay? And we can use this is to drive to donations. But let's say the donor behavior that you want to start tracking first are open rates, and then click rates, right, those are going to be the types of donor behaviors that ultimately lead to understanding better how you're going to do with your fundraising outcomes. Okay. And so you want to create here are the three things in particular, that I think you want to be tracking in terms of your own organization, your open rates, pay your email, open rates, your click rates, your donation conversion rates, and you want to be looking at these things over time. You want to, you know, I really recommend for the organizations that I work with having a monthly meeting where you're looking at your metrics for the month, what emails did really well, what emails did not as well, you could maybe probably some of you guys are like, Why weren't you tracking unsubscribes Mallory? So let me tell you unsubscribes, create a lot of limiting beliefs inside our brain, you could maybe have one person on your staff that pays attention to unsubscribe rates, but I would not really have conversation around it too much. Like they could flag if like, hey, you know, this email, for example, had a high open rate, but a really low click rate, and it had an unsubscribe rate, maybe we should have a high unsubscribe rate, maybe we should look at what happened inside this particular email. But I think you going into your email every single day, and looking at your unsubscribes is not a healthy practice, okay? Remember where we started with the cognitive behavior loop around how our thoughts and beliefs impact how we feel. And then ultimately, how we show up looking your unsubscribes are not good for your emotional wellness, okay, they just are not, they lead to a lot of false narratives inside our head. And they do not lead to us taking the most effective action moving forward. So these are actually the three donor behaviors that I would start to track. And then I would look at these over time and try to learn from them. And when you're increasing your email frequency, by 10%, start to look at these things. How is it impacting your open rate? How is it impacting your click rate? For a lot of people increasing their email frequency actually really increases their open rates as

well. So you might find some statistics in here that are really that are really surprising, in a good way. But again, the most important thing is understanding that nobody can predict your donors behavior like you. Okay, so I want to make sure we have the last 15 minutes for questions like I promised, if you want to learn more about me about power partners, I have open just until the end of the week, this workshop how to harness the power of prioritization to raise more without burning out, you can sign up for MLA erickson.com backslash workshop, you'll get the replay right away. This is only available until Friday. So grab it now if you are interested in watching that and learning more. I'll put the link in the chat as well. Or you can connect with me. There's my website, Instagram, LinkedIn, find me there connect with me there. Oh, you know, I cannot chat all of you. I can only chat the host and panelists. Okay. Thank you, Tim. But I really want to make sure I can use these last 15 minutes to answer any questions that you all have. Since I know we busted through some serious content.

Tim Sarrantonio  44:19  
Right. I put the workshop chat. Thank you. So yeah, I mean, good stuff. Great stuff. Love, love several of the analogies as well. The blowtorch the laser, that's a good one standing in a field. And the friends one that's a new one Mallory. I hadn't heard that one from you. So come on, folks. What questions you got this is this is gold right here.

Mallory Erickson  44:50  
You can ask me anything you can say we tried this in our email one time and we saw this what does it mean or we're thinking about doing this for our next campaign? And or how would you do like, there's no question that's off limits, and you can throw it in the chat, you can throw it in the q&a, whatever you're the most comfortable with.

Tim Sarrantonio  45:08  
And if you're also excited about Mallory's insights, as well, as a ton more, we're going to be welcoming her two days from now at the individual giving conference as well. Oh, Mallory, do you want me to take this one about unreliability of open rates?

Mallory Erickson  45:24  
Yeah, I'm curious what you would say. And then I still have something I would say here. Yeah.

Tim Sarrantonio  45:30  
Generally, and we addressed this in the report that open rates are still something to pay attention to. But that, yes, there has been some variances because of Apple's privacy changes and things like that engagement, or the click through rate is really one of your best ones to focus in on. So that's what I would say on that.

Mallory Erickson  45:56  
Yeah, the other thing is, so you know, the protections are in place. So looking at trends over time now and forward is still going to be useful and insightful for you do I think you should look at your trends today versus a year ago, and then extrapolate a lot of meaning about your open rates from that? Probably not because of what Tim is saying. But the trend is still like if you are seeing an upward trend, or you're trying a new type of email, and you're getting that same open rate, that same click rate. You know, I think it's still really valuable insight. The other question I see here, images are no images, does it increase connection to make the email look like you'd get it from a friend? Yes, I mean, a lot of organizations have a very strong response to plain text emails. So plain text, emails, just look like you've taken out the formatting of the email, it doesn't mean you can't put an image inside of it. But it looks like an actual email that your Gmail account set and you put an image inside of it, those tend to do well for organizations. If you've never done it before, test it, try it, see what happens. A lot of organizations are seeing success with that Rick Kelly Feldman, who I interviewed for the mini series with neon talks about that in the episode, so definitely test it, try it. Also varying the sender can be really helpful for certain organizations and certain campaigns. So using if you're in a larger organization, where you have a development director and a comms director and the executive director, you can vary like the sender name that shows up so you're strategically using your executive director's name at certain points inside the campaign that had been proven for a lot of organizations to help with open and click rates as well.

Tim Sarrantonio  47:43  
One, yeah, so we got we got three outstanding ones right now.

Mallory Erickson  47:46  
Okay, hit me hit me,

Tim Sarrantonio  47:48  
we got one in the q&a tips for fighting email fatigue myth to the comms team, which you did touch on a little bit earlier. But I want to kind of give all three so we know where we are. And then you can take however you want. Okay, dad? How many emails to send? And and maybe we save that for a little bit after because we can have a bit of a debate on that one. My answer is, you know, however many it takes. Subject Lines. Are there any specifics? And I can I could feel that one from the report. But Mallory, which one do you want to tackle first? Yeah,

Mallory Erickson  48:21  
I'll go with the donor fatigue one first. And I can sort of go over these you know, quickly. So the fighting email fatigue myth, comms teen test, like 10% increase in your email, like, okay, maybe that feels crazy for them, go with 5% go with 2%. Like, just test it like fear, like fear around change and try new things is real. So use the Fogg behavior model, make the action easier to do, what is going to make it as easy as possible for your team to say yes to trying it, testing it, getting some information, and then learning from that and trying another thing. That's the that's the easiest way, I think, to sort of Wade people in? Yeah, I definitely think Tim should talk about the subject line stuff. There's some great insight in the, in the email report, in particular about subject lines. So I just wanted to flag that one. And then I'm already forgetting the third one.

Tim Sarrantonio  49:18  
Well, we had another great one about acquisition of new people. I think that's a really good one that Isabella touched on. And it's just how many emails to send, oh, how many emails and I just want to give a tiny bit of context there that the reason we did the report is that this, like Mallory mentioned, this is the largest analysis of nonprofit campaign email that's ever been performed. Part of the reason we did that is specially small nonprofits, like the ones that you folks are part of don't have data to reference to convince board members of these types of things or executive directors. So part of the reason we did it is to give you something to reference and go Well, this very large amount of research has said this. However, as Mallory dove into on the benchmark side, you got to make your own. So we we should be the first stop. We're, if we're the last stop of your strategy. That's actually bad. So, Mallory, we got acquisition of lists, how many to send and subject lines? Yes.

Mallory Erickson  50:19  
Okay. So the how many to send thing is, is a very tricky one. Because the first question is, how many emails are you currently sending? If you're sending four emails a year, I'm not going to tell you to send an email every single week, if you're sending an email a month right now, that's your newsletter email, that is the email type that I said that summary information. And, you know, just sort of update information, I would recommend starting with one more email a month, it's in plain text form that's written from your executive director, and is a little bit more single storytelling, right? Try to see how that does build connection, build belonging build identity, right? If you already send two emails a month, try one more like I think the bigger question is, what are those emails currently doing? And are they achieving your goals. And if you you know, what I find with a lot of folks is they're like, we cannot give up our newsletter email. We've been sending it for 10 years in exactly this format, and nobody's going to so fine. So add another email a month that try some of the strategies that we talked about today, see how it does how your donors feel. But again, I would focus instead of the number of emails, I would focus on increase and tracking those benchmark metrics to see how they're doing.

Tim Sarrantonio  51:31  
And one of the things to add is, what we're talking about here is campaign emails that you're sending out to a lot of people at one time, this is different than a welcome series that is highly personalized to somebody who may be gay for the first time or signed up as a volunteer. We're talking about this with Christina Edwards from splendid consulting next week, check out that webinar on welcome series emails, we're talking about basically newsletters and appeals today. So look at all the different ways that you have different levers that you can pull to engage people. If you can't, like Valerie said, get anybody to change the current behavior, you have several other engagement opportunities. So yeah, I'll get the webinar. Next week, Valerie keep going.

Mallory Erickson  52:18  
I'll say it's like, if you have been silent with your email in between email campaigns, okay. That is really where I would start adding additional emails right now, I would have nurture value based emails, I would have three to four of them before you start ask emails for a campaign for end of year. And I think you do want communication year round as well. But I'm just trying to, like ease people in because I know asking people to do a one ad is really hard. But I think what most organizations are really missing is a lot of that nurturing email, they're used to doing their campaign emails, and then they think they should be silent in the middle because they don't want to fatigue their donors. But those emails in between are the emails, your donors want more than anything. And that's what's gonna keep them engaged and connected and feeling that sense of identity and belonging, and like they're a part of it, and in between, so definitely, like, add those emails. And yeah,

Tim Sarrantonio  53:11  
let me let me touch on the subject line item and then kick it over to you because what you're just saying connects to Isabella's question on acquisition too. And I'm going to bridge Yeah, perfect. Subject Lines, in general are like the welcome mat of the email in many ways. You got a few key components, subject line, preview, text, sender name, you know, think of it like John lip, John lip of creative deviations, great book on direct mail. Even kind of talks about things, like think of it like that's the outer envelope of a direct mail piece. That's what the sender name and the preview text and the subject line are, it's basically your outer envelope. So both our research, which used artificial intelligence, yes, ah, that's crazy stuff, right? Well, all it did was say, Okay, we have all these words that are 37,000 campaign emails, what emotions are people using that work best? Given Tuesday also did independent analysis of communication style as well. And what we both found is positivity works. So in your subject lines, use positive emotions. Don't try to scare people. There's a big difference between like, the horror versus like, we did a thing. And we overcame it. Right? So lean into those positive emotions, which leads into why is somebody going to sign up for your email list in the first place? And I'm going to hand that over to Mallory.

Mallory Erickson  54:34  
Yeah, okay. I love that you said that and because it actually makes me want to double click on one quick other thing, which is that you want to think about the relationships that you're building through these emails as not just the call to action that you want for that particular email. Right. So for I talk a lot about how like anyone can get a favor gift or a guilt gift one time, and so sure, you can Send an email that makes people feel really bad and has a very clear call to action for them to satisfy the guilt that they feel in that moment and get, you know, settle their nervous system down. So they gave you 10 bucks. But those donors are not coming back, like they did not have a positive emotional connection with your organization. And so that's why that piece around building belonging, connection identity, it's not just about that single email that's happening in but it's about the real relationship that you're building with those folks over time. And so I would just keep that in mind. Like, do you want to stand knowing at the end of year you've written all those emails, you're gonna email these people next year, too? So can you stand by what you're saying inside that email, knowing that next year, you're gonna email them again?

Tim Sarrantonio  55:45  
It's like, it's like, it's going back to your analogy. It's like seeing that one friend a year, and all they do is tell you about the terrible things that happened in their life. Right? Do you want to talk to that friend? Again, that's the I'm gonna run that analogy into the ground. So keep going. Sorry.

Mallory Erickson  56:00  
Okay, so then Isabella asked this amazing question about about questions about acquisition and like, how do you make sure that your acquisition strategies are matched up with that you are actually finding your like, quote, unquote, donor material. So when I think about an acquisition strategies, I really think about sort of the the helping people who want to become more problem aware of the issues that you are solving. So Isabella had put inside her question like, do we create an ebook around something. So if you are a organization solving, maybe like local climate protection issues in your area, having an acquisition like a free download, or that maybe you run Facebook ads to and lives on your website, and you're sharing on social media, that's about how to take action inside your home to protect this local animal safe sanctuary, that's going to make sure that the people who are downloading that resource we're coming onto your list are really value aligned their problem, like they're becoming more problem aware around the issue that you solve. And you can even create materials that are earlier in their learning, right? Like maybe people are like, what's that smell every time I drive by highway 202, you know, and what that smell is, is is the fact that this land is not being protected, right? So you can you can address people at different like levels of their awareness around the problem. But I think tying your resources and acquisition strategies to to the problem that you're solving is how you get the the highest quality leads. The other thing is, look, you don't always know how high quality the leads are going to be that come on your email list. So this is another reason why I think emailing people and being really clear about who you are and where you stand and what you're about and who's in the right place. And people unsubscribing is great. Let them help you identify whether they're in the right place or not. And if they leave, because they're not in the right place, that clarity is a gift, that clarity is a gift for you. And so part of that is the sort of like engagement cleaning, I call it to make sure that the people who are staying on your list are really the right people.

Tim Sarrantonio  58:26  
I mean, what gold that we just did we just have in this last 60 minutes, folks, really, really thrilled Mallory to be partnering with you not only on this, but on that many series and many things to come. So thank you, thank you again, we're at times,

Mallory Erickson  58:45  
everyone for being here. I love neon love partnering with neon. I'm so grateful for this opportunity and for being with all of you. And if questions come up, feel free, shoot me a DM on LinkedIn on Instagram. And I'm excited for you guys to test some new email engagement strategies, see how they work build more connection. This is such an important part of the

Tim Sarrantonio  59:06  
work. I'm also going to drop the podcast episode between me Mallory and Corinne Mitchell, my co host in flux who I am going to go walk down the street in New York City and go see her physically and a half an hour. So folks, check out this fantastic episode that Mallory and Corinne and I talked about the connection between fundraisers and funders to so this is a much more bigger, nuanced conversation that we're all starting to have and have, but it ultimately comes down to that connection. And there's no one better to understand that than Mallory Erickson. So,

Mallory Erickson  59:41  
Tim, you're so good to meet. Thank you. Thank you, everyone.

Tim Sarrantonio  59:44  
All right. Talk to you soon. Thanks, everyone. Have a good day. This will go up on the website by tomorrow. My coworker Abby is going to get on that we're going to get the email out and then we'll also see Mallory again on this Thursday at the individual giving conference, as well as As we got more great webinars resources and other things coming your way so see you soon

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