Alright. Let's go ahead and get started. I am coming to you from sunny Lakeland, Florida. So many of you are joining from all over the country. I am delighted that you're all here and talking to me because it is no fun to do a webinar when no one talks to you. If we haven't met before, my name is Abby. I'm with the team at Neon One. I've been in the nonprofit tech industry for a long time. I've been here for twelve years, And what I'm really passionate about is understanding what donors and other supporters want from their favorite nonprofits and what that means for you. So how you can take what they want and give them what they want so you can build really beautiful relationships with them. But first, gotta do a few housekeeping items as per usual. Alright. A note, especially today,. I say this every time, but especially today, you're gonna see some screenshots and examples, and they all come from the Neon One system. Now that said, everything we talk about today is going to be applicable to you regardless of the system you're using, I promise. And for those of you who are here who are using Neon One, I'm actually gonna have a a link for you. Our team is gonna do a a session on August twenty seventh, I think it is, on using segmentation in email specifically. So if you have additional questions, or if you really want to dig into how this works in your system, I will have a link for you for that. But regardless of what system you're using, this is going to be applicable to you. Small thing, Obviously, I love it when you all talk to me. That's why I keep asking you to talk to me in the chat. Nothing really bums you out like speaking into the void. That said, chat can get moving pretty quickly. So if you do have a question, please try and drop it in the q and a bar or the q and a panel. I do keep an eye on the chat as I'm talking. I will try to answer questions as they arise. But if you have any questions, do please try to drop it in the q and a box. That is much less quick, and. I will be sure to catch it. The thing that I say every time that I do wanna reassure you on, we are recording the webinar. Let's let's make sure we are recording the webinar. And then we are going to send you the recording tomorrow morning. It's all the email is gonna come from me. It'll have a link to the recording. It'll have a link to the slides and some additional resources. So you are gonna get that from me tomorrow morning. So keep an eye out on that. Okay. Now I want to gauge you all and your familiarity with this topic or your comfort level with this topic. How do you feel about segmentation? Do you just not even wanna talk about it? Are you just starting to dip your toes in? Could you be doing this webinar in my place? Are you just, like, super awesome? Like, I could cry. Britney, if that isn't the most relatable thing. No crying. We're gonna we're gonna go into we're gonna go into segmentation. We're gonna talk about how to make it happen. Miguel is here. Oh my gosh. Miguel loves it. Hi, Miguel. Miguel is an absolute star. They're wonderful. Familiar, but need to learn to leverage better. I feel like I can segment, but then not sure about next steps. Dipping my toes in.. Not sure how to use it. Okay. We are covering we've got a we've got a broad mix of people. Okay. For those of you who are here who do have some experience, we love people who are just getting started. This is a good place for you. If you do have experience with this and you see someone in the chat that maybe has a question that you know how to answer or talk to me about it. I we wanna hear from you. My favorite thing about these webinars is how collaborative they are, and I love watching you all talk in the chat. Okay. If you want some help, if you've never done this before, if you feel like you're gonna cry, I do have this nonprofit segmentation worksheet. This will help you just plan the basics of segmentation, and then it was gonna help you think through how to use that segmentation. So I'm gonna drop the link here in the chat as well just in case you like me, can never get your phone to read a QR code correctly. Pick that up. This will help you just think through the basics, and then as you get the hang of it, you won't even need this sheet anymore, You can come back to the next session that I do on this topic and wow us all with your expertise. Okay. If you are a newbie, let's answer some important questions. You've probably heard me or someone like me talk about segmentation and why it is so important, but what is it and why does it matter? So put extremely simply, segmentation involves splitting your group of supporters into different smaller groups, all of which are the all of which share specific characteristics. So what this can help you do is it makes it possible for you to talk to each of those groups in a way that's really relevant to them, and then that relevance will help you improve, engagement. It will help you build deeper relationships with people. It it really is a powerful tool. So now that said, no two organizations have the same mission. They don't have the same programs. They don't have the same activities. They don't have the same donor base. So no two organizations are gonna have exactly the same segmentation strategies. Okay? That said, there are some very common segments that you're probably gonna want to plan on talking to. Some really common ones are people who are active donors versus people who are in your database but haven't made a gift yet. You could be talking to recurring givers versus people who give on a one time basis. You can talk to people who volunteer. You could get really enthusiastic and talk to people who have given to a very specific campaign. That's all segmentation. So if you have ever sent an event invitation to someone who you know has attended that event in the past, and you're asking them to come back instead of to come, that segmentation. If you are sending an appeal for volunteer sign ups and you are excluding people who are already active volunteers, that segmentation. Segmentation is probably just a really official sounding word for something that you're doing already at least in some capacity. Now, when you do this, you're giving the people in your community the kind of really personalized experience that they expect. We all are kind of hardwired to expect personalization now. Our social media algorithms show us personalized content. Our for profit companies show us personalized content. Amazon is constantly blowing me up with suggestions for things that I've thought about buying and have in no way indicated that I was thinking about it. We expect it. Now giving people that kind of personal experience is one thing when you've got a really small group of supporters. Right? If you've only got fifteen or twenty volunteers, for example, it's probably pretty easy for you to look at your list and say like, oh, Abby's already signed up to participate in my trail cleanup. I probably don't need to invite her again, so you can just take me off that list. But that kind of personalization is way harder when you're dealing with a much larger group of people. So if you start using good segmentation practices now, what that will help you do is grow your community without, losing that personal touch that you have. So this is a really, really valuable skill regardless of how large your organization is. But for those of you who are beginners and you're kind of stressed out by this, I promise this is something that is gonna be useful to you now and then as you grow for a long time. Okay. So let's talk about why it actually works. So there are three well, two reasons and one practical application. The first reason that this is so valuable is because people are involved with you because they really care about what you're doing. You can use segmentation to send those people really personal feeling relevant messages. And when you send them that really relevant messaging, if you share the impact for a particular campaign that someone supported, or if you are emailing a volunteer and you are celebrating how many volunteer hours they've donated, you're making them feel individually seen and celebrated even if they know rationally that you're not actually sitting down and writing them and them alone in email. Then not using segmentation can result in irrelevant communications to your supporters, and that can have a really negative impact on the way they feel when they interact with you. So this actually happened to me fairly recently. I am a monthly donor for a local nonprofit here. I have been a monthly donor for, I think, three or four years at this point. And a few weeks ago, I got an appeal asking me to create a monthly gift. They acknowledged my past donations, and they asked me to continue my impact by creating a monthly gift. Now I work in the nonprofit tech industry, and I understand why that happened. I understand that there was probably a field mislabeled somewhere, or I was accidentally pulled into the wrong list or something. Still, I was a little taken aback that I, as someone who has been a monthly donor for years and years, was getting an appeal for a monthly donation. And I imagine those feelings would have been much stronger in someone who isn't part of the nonprofit sector and didn't understand the ins and outs of why this is happening. So that's that's one thing. Another whoops. Another more practical reason that this is so effective is because the world is noisy, and making sure that you send people very relevant information helps you stand out from the noise. A few years ago, campaign monitor found that, emails that have really, like, personalized content saw a seven hundred and sixty percent increase in revenue over emails that didn't have that kind of personalization. Now, those campaigns were probably sent from for profit companies, but the same idea applies. So if you send someone a one size fits all Giving Tuesday appeal. Hey, Abby, it's it's Giving Tuesday. We know you're passionate about the work that we're doing here. We'd love you to get involved by making a gift to help achieve x. You're probably gonna get some gifts. But if you send a Giving. Tuesday appeal to a group that you know gave last year, and you tailor it a little bit, you'll probably get much better results. If you send me an email, it says, hey, Abby. Giving Tuesday is today. Last year, you gave to help, I don't know, send kids to summer camp. This year, we're gonna be raising money for the same thing. Here is a little story about one of our campers. Can you make the same thing happen for this for this kid again this year? I'm gonna be much more likely to give you an additional gift. So this kind of segmentation can really help you see some outstanding, results. Let me look at some of the questions that are popping up here because you guys already have some. How do you segment a group of patrons that overlap between various segments? For example, they are a donor, come to events, and volunteer. Judy, I'm gonna get into that actually in a little bit. So hold on to that thought. We've got Susan Miel. I operate a nonprofit that offers assorted educational events for kids, adults, and families, and does fundraising. How many questions should. I asking at the point of newsletter sign up in order to segment? One school of thought is not to ask too many questions. Yep. So when you are doing this kind of segmentation, Susan, when you're and just for everyone, if you're starting very broad, if you're just trying to get people onto your mailing list, getting people on your mailing list is not when you want to start asking questions about about their preferences. Your goal is to get people on your newsletter list. Similarly, if we're talking about even donation forms, I would highly recommend you not add a lot of different questions to your donation forms, your membership forms, your volunteer sign up forms. I wouldn't ask for a ton of information there. There one is because that can have a really negative impact on your, conversion rate. If I go to sign up for a newsletter and you're asking me about, like, where I live and what I'm into and have I donated recently, I'm not I'm not gonna fill the help form. What you can do instead is you can segment people based on their activities. So once someone signs up for your newsletter and then they become a donor, you'll run, you'll create a list for donors and they'll be there. When you are doing your donation form and you notice that someone makes a recurring gift versus a one time gift, you'll run a report of people who made recurring gifts and talk to them that way. So we'll get into that a little more in a minute. Okay. This concept of segmentation applies not only to appeals. I have used that that example a couple of times, but you can send really fantastic impact updates. So if you know that. I'm picking on someone, if you know that Jesse has donated faithfully to your children's summer camp program, you can send Jesse updates about that program. But if you know that Gabby has donated regularly to your, after school tutoring program, you'll send them updates about that program in particular. And you can always cross pollinate. You can send people general updates. What this lets you do, is it lets you speak specifically to the interests and passions of the people who are supporting different parts of your work. You can send really personal feeling emails to try to engage a lapsed donor. You can tell them that like, hey, it's been a year since your last gift. We really miss you. Here's what we've been up to. We would love for you to continue to partner with us as we work to achieve x. And then give them a donation link. You can do this when asking people to volunteer. You can do it to send really engaging, invitations to events. You can there are so many different possibilities. Let's see. I will you be showing us how to segment? I'm gonna give you guys some pointers on how to segment. Yes. I promise. Speak of the devil. This is an excellent segue. So this all sounds really great, but how do you actually do it? The first thing that you're gonna want to do is identify the group or groups of people that you want to talk to. You can get really granular here. However, I would tell you that if you join and you're a newbie, if you want to cry thinking about segmentation, if you've never done it before, start really broad, really high level. You can always get more specific later. Broad categories. Donors versus non donors. So if you are, Susan, and you've got a list of of people who have signed up for your newsletter. You can take that, you split it into two. You've got group that subscribes to your newsletter and donates. You've got a group that subscribes to your newsletter and doesn't donate. That's those are your two segments. I'm gonna get into more of how you do this in a minute. If you are running a membership campaign, you want to talk to first time members or returning members. You are running a volunteer campaign. You want to talk to people who have volunteered before, or people who have never volunteered. Once you've got a couple of groups, then you can start practicing the way you talk to them. And then once you feel like you're starting to get the hang of it, you can start getting much more granular with your segmentation strategy. So Luz asked, for example, how deeply should we do our segmentation? Luz has five target audiences. There are students, but then inside of those students, you've got alumni, new students, donor students, etcetera. Liz is getting very advanced and sophisticated with that segmentation. And you can get as deep as you want to. If you are starting to get really granular here, and you notice that your lists are getting smaller and smaller and smaller, what you really have to think through is how effectively you're gonna or how much time, I guess, you're gonna put into it. So if you're going to try dividing, for example, your one time donors into different groups, you can divide them into groups based on, say, the size of their last donation. You could then send a so you've got I'm just going to use small, mid size, and large donors. The way you define that will be up to you. You could then send appeals with more specific ask amounts, and then use donation forms with a different array of suggested giving amounts. So if you know that last two or three times I've donated, I gave you twenty bucks, you could send me an appeal and ask me for twenty five. And then the form that I get has giving options that range from twenty dollars to fifty dollars. If you know that I gave two hundred dollars last time, you could send me an appeal for two hundred and fifty, and then show me a donation form that has a suggested giving range from like, I don't know, a hundred and fifty to three hundred. You can get really creative here. One of my favorite examples of this kind of really granular segmentation comes from one of our customers, Pacific Opera Project.. They're so cool. What they did is they a performing arts organization, and what they did was they pulled a list of people who had attended multiple nonprofit, or gosh, I can't read and talk at the same time. They had attended multiple performances, but they had never made a donation. So they had that list of people who had attended multiple performances, but never made a donation, and then sent them a specific appeal that referenced their, you know, their past attendance, referenced why they're fundraising, and then invited them to to make a gift, and they saw really amazing results. So that very kind of personal approach, there's a lot of room to get creative, which is why it can feel so overwhelming. That's why I encourage you to start really broad, and then start to narrow in. But it's it's very effective. Now, as you do this more and more, and I do for those of you who are so overwhelmed, I do want to tell you, you do not have to get very granular early on. I really want you to hear that and internalize it. Anything you do is fantastic. You can get sophisticated later. But the reason I talk about building these more and more sophisticated segments is because we know that your community is passionate about you. They want to support you, and they probably want to support you in different ways if they're not already doing so. So this chart here, is from some research that we published earlier this year. We looked at the different overlapping ways. Someone talked someone used the word overlapping. Judy, this is for you. We looked at the different overlapping ways that people show generosity to their favorite nonprofits, and this gives you, I hope, some ideas about how you can start segmenting things. So you could look and see that volunteers, where is it? They are really likely to attend events. So what you could do is take this knowledge, pull a list of your volunteers, and send them a very personal email inviting them to attend this event. So, hey, Miguel, you're the most recent pop up. So, hey, Miguel. We know that you love connecting with us in person. We love interacting with you as volunteers. We'd love to see you at this event. If you're there, come talk to us. We can also see like around nine percent of people who made pled whoops, who made pledges also set up recurring gifts. So if you wanted to, and this is this is for Judy. If you wanted to, for example, you could pull a list of people who made pledges. You could pull a list of people who made recurring gifts. You would use the recurring gift list as an exclusion list. So if we're don't I don't wanna get too technical, but you could basically say like, hey, I wanna email every person who's made a pledge, but hasn't made a recurring gift, and I wanna ask them to set up a recurring gift. That's a really cool way to use this kind of segmentation, to talk to people. What you could also do is look and say, alright. I want to pull a list of all of the people who have made pledges, and I wanna pull a list of all of the people who have made recurring gifts. And then I'm gonna find the people who have done both, and I'm going to email them, and I'm going to send them a special message thanking them for their generosity, and telling them like, I know that you plan on your gifts to us, and that's amazing. We appreciate you so much. Okay. This is where we're gonna get technical, and I'm gonna put in a caveat. So I'm gonna give you some insights into how you can use your tech to do this, but I want to tell you that screenshots that you're gonna see come from Neon CRM, but this should be possible in any system that you're using. Okay? So, if you are using Neon CRM, send did I send that a link to that? I'm gonna find the link and add it back. We have a a webinar coming up for those of you who use Neon One. You can attend this to learn how to do it. But if you're not using Neon CRM, this should be applicable for you too. I'm I'll find that link in a minute. Okay. So the most basic way to build an audience segment, is to first run a report of the people who have the cam or the characteristics that you want to target. So you're gonna use the names on that list as your email list. Okay? So say I want to send a. GivingTuesday appeal for this year to people who gave to my. GivingTuesday campaign last year. What I'm gonna do is I'm gonna run a report of everyone who donated to my Giving. Tuesday campaign last year. If you didn't set up a specific campaign for your Giving Tuesday campaign last year, you may want to just pull a list of everyone who gave to you on, I think it was. December second last year. Alright. So I have my list of everybody who gave to me on Giving Tuesday twenty twenty four. I'm going to if you're using a separate email service, you're gonna upload that list. You're gonna clean it up. So remove all the the excess data. You're gonna upload it to your email service platform. If you're using Neon CRM, you can just create the email audience and and use it, right in the system. And then I'm going to use that as my email list. I'm gonna take the Giving. Tuesday campaign email that I've already created, and I'm gonna tweak it just a little bit to acknowledge this group's past contributions and invite them to get involved again. Let me find someone, who is using a different or okay. So we're gonna talk to Luz. I I hope I'm saying your name right. We are gonna pull a list of all of your, let's see. We're gonna pull a list of all of your alumni, and that's gonna be your primary list. And then we're gonna divide that list into two. We're gonna we're gonna look at alumni who donated already, so they're donor students, and then we're gonna pull a list of alumni who have never donated. And we're gonna split our our communications that way. So this is kind of the basic the basic premise. If you have never done this before, this is how you're gonna start. Pull a list of people who have all of the characteristics that you want, and then use that list as your email list. Now you may be able to automate this. So if you can, and what you can do is you can create a dynamic report. Those are reports that update automatically. In Neon CRM, we call them live reports, and then use that as a segment audience. So, where's loose again? Say, okay. I'm gonna create a list of alumni students who have donated and alumni students that haven't donated. And the way that's gonna work is when an alumni student makes a donation, they're automatically moved into this report. That report, that live report is gonna update, and that's the list that I'm gonna talk to. This is like segmentation let's see. This is segmentation one zero one, pulling a basic list and uploading it. This is segmentation two zero one. This is where you can get a little more fancy. So for those of you who are familiar, you're you've dipped your toes in, you've got a couple segmentation, like, activities handled. This is your next step. You can build these dynamic lists, these live reports, and use them that way. Let's see. Now once you have your list, I'm gonna give you a practical example because the thing that I hear a lot is, oh my god, if I have six segments, that means I have to write six brand new emails every time I want to email somebody. That is not accurate.. Don't put that on yourself. I'm gonna show you something easier. Okay. What I recommend you do, and this is me with my marketing hat on, not my talking in a textural hat. In the marketing world, what I would have you do, is I would have you create a base appeal. So for this one, we're gonna do what are we doing? We're cleaning up. Peace River State Park. What I'm gonna do is I'm gonna write my base email. That's my one size fits all appeal. And then I'm just gonna tweak little bits and pieces of it for my different audiences. So for here, for example, I saw y'all talking about. LiveBunts and CyBunts. Write this down if you've if you've never heard it. LiveBunt means last year, but unfortunately, not this year. So these are people who are lapsed donors. They donated in twenty twenty four, twenty twenty three, but haven't donated yet. So what I've done here is I have pulled a list of people who donated last year, but not this year, and I pulled a list of volunteers. I have the same basic email, looks the same, most of the language is the same. All I've done is I've adjusted the first couple of sentences in this email. So Claire volunteered with me last year. I'm just gonna say, hey, you did this with us last year. I'm really excited to invite you back to this Peace River cleanup this year. I hope I hope I can see you. The rest of the email, just this the same base email. Here, Adam is a donor, not a volunteer, and he hasn't given yet this year. So I'm gonna say, hey, Adam, last year you supported this major cleanup effort. This year, we're doing the same thing, and I'd love for you to like, check out what you helped accomplish last year and get involved again this year. So as you're building these segments, I hope you don't start planning totally unique emails for each and every single segment. Now sometimes you're gonna want to do that, but most of your segmentation should just be you tweaking and iterating on existing content, so you can have four slightly different iterations of one email, not four unique emails. So I hope that makes you feel a little better. Okay. I'm gonna go over some questions. We went over a lot of information in a very short period of time. I wanna make sure we have some time to to answer those questions. Miguel, really helpful, added if you are a Neon. One user and you have questions about how to do this,. Susan, especially for you, since you're asking about Constant Contact, I would encourage you to look at that. I would also encourage you to look at some documentation around our Constant Contact integration. I'm also looking in my Slack off screen, so that's why I'm not making eye contact with you to make sure I find this session that we have coming up, for clients who are looking. Neon One customers who are looking to get familiar with the way this actually works, in the system. So I'm dropping that. If you're a Neon One user, sign up for this. We're gonna go over in much more detail how to do this in the system. Okay. We covered this. Alright. We have work in different states and countries, and would like to have people labeled so we can tell them about in person events near them. Nicole, I love this. Okay. So what's the best way to get this information if not on the email sign up form? Nicole, what I would encourage you to do is do two things. So one, if you guys, any of you, are looking for information from your supporters that would help you segment them, I highly recommend sending a survey. That can be a little tricky based on the the system that you're using in if you're using Neon CRM, you can use our survey thing. But what you can do is you can get information like zip code information from people. Or if you know that you are gonna be running a lot of these events, maybe you say like, hey, who am I gonna talk to? Hey, Marsha. As you're signing up for email, would you like to hear about upcoming events in your area? Check yes. Give us your zip code. You could try something like that. If you are messaging people who are already donors or are already, like volunteers or something, you probably have their zip code in your system. You can try pulling different zip codes to identify identify people in that segment. The reason I was so delighted when you brought this up is because an organization that. I really love sent me an invitation to an event. It sounded phenomenal. I went to go sign up for it and discovered that it is clear on the other side of the state. So if they had been able to segment based on location, I probably wouldn't have gotten that email. I mean, I'm not mad about it, obviously, but it would have been cool. Okay. In the former slide scenario, so let's go back to the former slides. What if Claire volunteer also qualifies for the LYBUNT version? Would they get two separate emails, or would Neon One recommend recognize duplicate? Okay. Here is where you're gonna have to get a little creative. So what you can do in any email system is use something called an exclusion list. Do you all know what that means? If I talk about exclusion lists? What I'm what I mean is, in any email system, you'll say, hey, system, I want to email this group of people, but I wanna make sure that no one on this list gets this email. So what you can do is decide first, you have to decide whether or not you want Claire to get the you want Claire to volunteer again, if you want them to donate. If you want them to donate, you're gonna make sure Clare is gonna be in the LiveBunt version. You're gonna use your volunteer list as an exclusion list. So you're telling your email system, hey, email everybody. You're gonna email everybody who is on the libent version this email. And then you're gonna do your volunteer version, and you're gonna use your donor list and say, hey, don't email anybody on this list. So hey, send the email version, don't send anyone the live on version. Or you could do it the reverse, or what you could also do is say, hey, I'm gonna email service. I'm gonna send this email, and then I'm gonna use the mailing list for this email as the exclusion list for this email. There are different ways you can do it, and it depends really heavily on your system. So with that said, because that that I mean, that is the case for a lot of this. There's a reason that email strategy is such an important part of any nonprofit organization. So you'll want to like sit and think through it, but it does work differently in every system. So what if you're using Neon. CRM, have two recommendations. One, go to the the webinar that I just linked in the chat, and then two, like, look at your look at our support documentation, and really think through how you wanna lay that out. If you're not using Neon. CRM, pull your lists, look at the the different options available to you in your email platform, and then make sure that you are using both send lists and exclusion lists. So that way you're not sending, if you do have an overlapping person. If Claire did give last year, and also volunteered last year. Using those exclusion lists will help you ensure that someone is not getting two versions of the same email. Okay. That is all we have time for.. I got most of the questions. I wanted to let you know, you guys have been absolutely fantastic today. Thank you for talking with me. And I do want to tell you, this is intimidating, and I I know that. If you are feeling like Britney, and you feel like you want to cry, I promise it's going to be okay. Because here's what. I want to tell you. Almost no one is doing this. So the number of emails that are absolutely not relevant to me or my experience with a nonprofit is very high. I get no segmentation. If you do the tiniest little bit of segmentation, simply talking to donors versus non donors differently, you're ahead of the game. So if you're intimidated, remind yourself, anything you do is better than nothing. And as you get the hang of it, you can get more sophisticated that way. Okay? Alright. Thank you all so much for being here. I know you're so busy, and that taking time out of your day is a big deal. I hope this inspires you.. Keep an eye on your inbox. I'm gonna email you tomorrow morning, with a link to this webinar and the slides and all of the things. You did great. We're gonna you can do it. Alright? We'll talk to you soon. Alright. Bye.