Melanie Schaffel: Acquiring Email Leads On Social
This 2024 Nonprofit Technology Conference conversation helps you ensure your email acquisition efforts are targeting those interested in your work. You can incentivize your social audiences so they’ll willingly share their emails and you can measure the success of your acquisition campaigns. Melanie Schaffel from Parkinson’s Foundation helps you get started.
Julie Ziff Sint, Alison Hermance & Mark Doty: Matching Gifts 101, 201, 301
Julie Ziff Sint, Alison Hermance and Mark Doty, also from 24NTC, explain the different types and styles of matching gifts and challenge grants. How do you ethically message and how do you establish your own matching gifts asks? What if you don’t have a matching gift to take advantage of? And more. Julie is with Sanky Communications. Alison is from WildCare. And Mark is at San Francisco SPCA.
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Welcome to Tony Martignetti nonprofit radio. Big nonprofit ideas for the other 95%. I am your aptly named host and the pod father of your favorite abdominal podcast. Oh, I’m glad you’re with us. I’d get slapped with a diagnosis of primary sclerosing cholangitis. If you inflamed and scarred me with the idea that you missed this week’s show. Here’s our associate producer, Kate with the highlights. Hey, Tony, this week we have acquiring email leads on social. This 2024 nonprofit technology conference conversation helps you ensure your email acquisition efforts are targeting those interested in your work. You can incentivize your social audiences so they’ll willingly share their emails and you can measure the success of your acquisition campaigns. Melanie Saffle from Parkinson’s Foundation helps you get started then matching gifts. 101, 201 and 301. Julie Zant Alison, Hermance and Mark doty. Also from 24 N DC. Explain the different types and styles of matching gifts and challenge grants. How do you ethically message and how do you establish your own matching gifts? Asks what if you don’t have a matching gift to take advantage of and more Julie is with SI Communications. Alison is from Wild Care and Mark is at San Francisco S PC A on Tony’s take two travel convos were sponsored by Virtuous. Virtuous. Gives you the nonprofit CRM fundraising volunteer and marketing tools you need to create more responsive donor experiences and grow, giving. Virtuous.org here is acquiring email leads on social. Welcome back to Tony Martignetti nonprofit radio coverage of the 2024 nonprofit technology conference in Portland, Oregon where we are sponsored by Heller consulting technology strategy and implementation for nonprofits. Before we start the conversation, I wanna let you know that you may hear sounds of a uh a AAA tear down around us. There’s uh 24 NTC. The, the archive is uh being taken down booth by booth around us. But nonprofit radio perseveres, this is irrelevant to us. Uh We have our own power. I have a generator outside uh uh and 50 gallons of diesel fuel. So we’re, we’re prepared to continue regardless of what happens around the nonprofit radio uh booth. And for our, this is our final conversation of 2024 and it is with Melanie Saffle. She is senior manager of digital advertising at the Parkinson’s Foundation. Welcome to nonprofit Radio Melanie. Thank you, Tony. Thanks so much for having me. It’s my pleasure. Thank you for rounding out our, our many conversations. I won’t say save the best for last. That’s a lot of pressure, but it’s a little no No, no, don’t do that to yourself. It is breaking down, but it’s irrelevant. And uh I’ve been looking forward to this because I think, I think these conversions are important. So we’re talking about acquiring email leads on social. We’re trying to uh convert our folks, right? Take a next step. You’re active with us on social. You might like us on social. Have a finger, grab a hand, we’d like a little more come over. We’ve got more things to offer on email for sure. So um a lot of the discussion we had was about all the social email website, all of our digital channels working in tandem. Um So we know that there’s a lot of people on social that have proven interest in us already. So if they don’t know already that we have an email series that they can join, we want to let them know how to easily get into it. Uh Let’s let’s start with identifying who the best prospects are for uh for this upgraded engagement opportunity. Let’s call it the uh the uh the upgraded, yeah, the Eoge og we always know that upgraded opportunity. Um who who should we be focusing on uh in our in our social channels? So an efficient way that we found to focus on the people that are proving interest is to use that first party data that for us meta provides these ads will be right through meta, right on the platform and we can upload our lists, we can create lists from different engagements that people are taking on Facebook, whether they’re watching our video or D ming us sliding into our D MS, right, ending up in our inbox and using that first party data. Just because in this more and more cookie less world that the whole wide internet is joining in on that. The first party data is key here. So we want to focus in on that and a lot of the session also focused on creating look alikes of those. So people that act similarly to the people that have proven interest to help broaden the reach a little bit wider, creating look alikes. That sounds like something phony. What does this scamming and fishing and ransomware? What is this? It is my favorite way to sound really impressive to my colleagues when I tell them that this is an option at all. So meta can create a whole new list based off the way that people act online, they act at least similarly online. And so whether the places they’re visiting, uh the actions they’re taking online based off their emails, based off the list of emails that we provide uh meta can generate a lookalike list. So just people that are acting similarly to the ones we already know like us and hopefully they like us too. OK. So these are folks that you don’t know and meta is finding them bringing them well, they’re not bringing them to you, but they’re identifying them for you. They’re not currently engaged with Parkinson’s, but they act like a lot of people who are, is that the algorithm is working in our favor that way? I see. Well, I’m glad it has some value for somebody somewhere that’s mildly reassuring. Infinitely reassuring. But I’m glad it’s helping you. Um All right. So then what might you do? How do you then reach out to those folks? So we’re targeting. That’s right. So the whole discussion did focus on the lead generation ads that we create right in meta. The idea behind it is that people are scrolling in their news feed when we want them to do an action. A lot of times we don’t, they don’t want to be taken away from their scroll. They don’t want another app to pop up or a browser to pop up. So by keeping them right in the platform, there’s a form that pops up from the ad that they can fill out real quick um in exchange for a resource that uh we hook them in with already and just give us a quick piece of information. A lot of it. Also, if the user has already approved autofill and whatnot on, on Facebook, then it kind of just pops in and generates there already. So it’s a really fast track to the finish line for the user and they just give us their name, email, we get out of there. They get their resource. Everyone, everyone wins. What’s your resource hook? So we’ve tested, this was like uh over six months, we ran about six ads only for about a week each and we tested different resources each time. A lot of times we focus on things that we know our audience wants and likes uh based off of seo social learning. Um You know, whether it’s a highly trafficked page or a resource that’s already, that usually performs well and highly engaged with organically on social things that we know people want. We can um kind of hang that like a little carrot on the stick, right? I don’t know if that’s the same carrot for the user, right? Carrot on a stick, carrot on a stick, but the carrot on a stick works too. Ok? Ok. Um So in our case, um maybe exercise content performs super well. Um I’m at the Parkinson’s Foundation and exercise is really important for people with Parkinson’s disease. So they’re always looking for what kind of exercise should I be doing or how often? And so if we have a PDF fact sheet, something like that, we let them know like if you just give us this little piece of information, we’ve got a PDF on the other side for you. OK. And you’re asking very low threshold, like first name and email, first, last name and email, hand, first, last email. So very low boundaries. I always object and I never fill in the phone. You know. What, what state are you in? I even object to state. I mean, I’ve been asked state. I don’t know if I’ve seen zip code, but I would find that equally annoying. Look, you’ve just given me a little PDF or a link to a video or something or a white paper for God’s sake. You know, I’m not, it’s not a marriage proposal. That’s right. I think we’ve done lead generation ads and where we have asked for state, if it’s like a volunteer opportunity, we just want to be able to sort them through to the right person. But for this, we just want you on the email list and I think there’s an opportunity here for people. Uh we, we can get them in a different welcoming series, right? All the people that joined us through the lead generation ads, maybe we start setting them up in a welcoming series where we get to know them and can ask more intimate questions. Like, do you want to join our local chapter or, you know, when were you diagnosed or different things that might help us get them into the right um journey, right? Uh Depending on how specific we might have those options. But, but yeah, there’s opportunity later to get to know them a lot better and we’re just starting off just by collecting their email and we can work with that from there. Don’t ask for everything at the outset. It, it’s a journey. There’s a chance of getting the band in from there and we just want to maximize the, you know, the, the efficiency here. Something to the finish line. You said, sprint to the finish line and then we’ll take our time. We can get to know you. There’s plenty of time. Um What did you call it? That, that meta will give you the, the, the people who act like the people you identify a look alike just called lookalikes ads. Yeah, when you upload a list or you create a list that’ll ask you, do you want to create a look like? And this is something that even if so one of the ways too that we try to what we’re after are new emails. We want new people into the database. We’ve also found that people that we’ve already had in the database that found these ads, they’re finding like new value from this. So it’s also OK if new people are seeing this ad, but the focus here is trying to grow the email list, grow our email size. So the focus is with that. But in order to kind of exclude the people that we already have, we upload our email list and we exclude that. But when we upload it, Facebook says, do you want to generate a look alike list of this? So while we’re excluding the ones we already had, we can include the look alike. So it’s a nice and you trust Facebook when you upload these email addresses and that it’s not a perfect science. Let’s put it that way because hey, maybe you logged in with your Facebook with an email from 2010 and maybe you don’t use that one anymore. So maybe you’re on a different one and that’s why it’s not a perfect science with this strategy. About 50% are new um in total to our database. So like I said, it’s not what we’re after is, you know, repeating customers, but we are re-establish value in a different way. So it kind of works out well. There’s that, there’s that too, but I was asking about trusting Facebook with the emails, but you’re giving them, you trust them with that. You don’t have a choice, I’m sure. Well, do they say something like, you know, well, this is a subject to our privacy policy which you can go read at 79 pages. And ultimately, you know, ads in general digital ads in this world we live in is like they get a super bad rep a lot of times and rightfully so, right, wrongfully using different pieces of information. But as a nonprofit, we’re just trying to accelerate our missions good. So we’re, you know, targeting certain people, but they need our resources and so we want more people to have them. It’s time for a break. Virtuous is a software company committed to helping nonprofits grow generosity. Virtuous, believes that generosity has the power to create profound change in the world and in the heart of the giver, it’s their mission to move the needle on global generosity by helping nonprofits better connect with and inspire their givers. Responsive fundraising puts the donor at the center of fundraising and grows giving through personalized donor journeys that responds to the needs of each individual. Virtuous is the only responsive nonprofit CRM designed to help you build deeper relationships with every donor at scale. Virtues gives you the nonprofit CRM, fundraising, volunteer marketing and automation tools. You need to create responsive experiences that build trust and grow impact virtuous.org. Now back to acquiring email leads on social with Melanie Schaffel. Is there another way to do this? Get these conversions from social besides targeted ads? This is the easiest way to do the in platform form solution, right? You can do an organic post that sends them to your website where it might be parkinson.org/subscribe or something, right? Where they can put their email in on our website. We have different forms like that here. You can hear the booths coming down around us literally uh as the carts go out, I hope there aren’t bodies in these carts. I can’t tell they, they have opaque of law and order. Those don’t look like that. Oh, you’re an expert, you’re an expert. Those are, those are clean. I was talking to a law enforcement expert. Forensics. She’s also a digital forensics expert. Uh, she can, she can find your, uh, your date of birth. Not through this. A no, but she’s seen a lot of law and order. So expert. Ok. Those cars are clean. Um, there may be forklifts coming around too so soon. So we may hear backup buzzers. You know, this is a, it’s a menagerie here, but nonprofit radio perseveres. Ok. Um, so I was asking about other methods besides digital ads. Yeah, of course, there’s the organic way to get people. It’s really efficient just to get them right in the platform. I think, you know, there’s other social platforms that have similar opportunities to do these foreign lead generation ads, but a majority of our audience is on Facebook. So we’re just grabbing them where they are and what, what um what age cohort is the largest proportion for you. We find a lot of our audience are Children of the people with Parkinson’s. So the Parkinson’s patients, there are, there is a large audience of people with Parkinson’s too, but let’s call it like, you know, 5060 year old, older adult Children of people that are living with the disease later in life. Yeah, we have a lot of caregiver care partner resources as well for sure. Uh Just so folks know, you know, what age group we’re talking about, you’re talking mostly people, 50 plus we have opportunities for, you know, a lot of people are on Instagram too. And we’re also trying to engage grandparents of people, grandchildren of those living with Parkinson’s. There’s a lot of really fun fundraising opportunities that we provide for them as well, but the information going right to the source. A lot of time. Yeah, right in that Facebook opportunity. Um So just drawing from your, your your description, um we’ve talked about how to, how to do this, how about measuring ro I metrics? What do we look for? So, one of my favorite parts of the lead generation ad is that it hits on all these different points on the marketing funnel, right? We’ve got awareness. So at the very least these ads are going to reach people that may have never heard about our brand and the ads that we’re creating the creative part of it. We’ve got our blue, we’ve got our logo. So at the very least we’re going to have a brand awareness moment. Then one step down, we’re informing, we’re informing that we have this resource and we’re also informing that we’re in the business of sharing resources. So we might get some new followers along the way on top of the reach and the brand and the impressions. And um so one and two checked off, then we’re also like converting people to move away from just being interested to uh loyal um advocates for us as well by joining our email list. So they’re, they’re working their way down the funnel, maybe the first time it doesn’t hit them and they convert, but it’s a series and maybe the second resource we’re offering is more appealing to them. So we might get them on the next try. So it’s an interesting ad because we’re also, we’re doing impressions, brand awareness, reach kind of arbitrary, but it still counts for something. We’ve got website traffic. We’re going to get people when they click on the resource to um get this, they’re clicking through to the website itself. And then we’re also opening up our email leads at the same time. So it’s hidden a lot of pieces at once. What was interesting for this presentation? It went back into each constituent profile and kind of looked at what their journey was since they were served the ad and we saw enough donations come through after they were served this ad to justify the whole spend of our series. So positive row as on top of it all, we love it. What a turn on ads not return on a ro I thank you. Otherwise you’d be putting drug in jail return on ads. Yeah, we have, well, it’s related to your, your law enforcement background. I hope not. Nobody listens to the show. It doesn’t matter. No, that’s not true. That’s not true. Um OK. Roa, we turn on ads be, thank you. But we do have Jargon Jail on nonprofit radio, but you skirted it very quickly by defining your jargon. Um What else can we talk about? We still have a few minutes left. What else did you share with your audience that you should share with nonprofit radio listeners? I also shared how, you know, maybe you don’t have the budget right now to invest in an ad strategy. Maybe you and your boss haven’t had that conversation yet. One, the examples in the strategy that we talked about, maybe this is a good opportunity to ask the powers that be the purse that maybe this is a good opportunity for you to uh trial, maybe get a little small investment. You never know what the results can turn into. Maybe they’ll be super impressed and they give you more of a budget and it kind of opens up your ad advertising program from there. But even if you’re not there just yet, there’s a lot of steps you can take for when you are there, like growing your audience now um and doing a lot of social listening and seeing what is working in your other channels, like your email, what are people clicking through? What do people want? You can create more of that content on your website so that when you are ready to launch these ads, you have like the perfect piece of content that will push people over the ads. You can have something ready for them to offer up anything else we can do in preparation to getting the budget for the ads, I think going back real quick to growing the audience and just kind of doing a lot of organic work. It’s just going to help you with that first party data when we’re doing all the targeting and everything. So putting in that work up front is only going to benefit you more down the line. Are you ok? If we leave it there? I’m great with that. We haven’t, we haven’t given short shrift to nonprofit listeners. It felt good. I don’t know. I, I want them to get the full, this is a 30 minute, this is a 30 minute session or it was a short 30 minute session. Just a little me up there. And uh yeah, a lot of positive feedback. It’s been a good week. It will continue as folks hear you here. She’s Melanie Saffle, senior manager of digital advertising at Parkinson’s Foundation, Melanie. Thank you very much. Thank you so much as, as 24 NTC comes down around us. I thank you for being, she’s giving a queen’s wave to the forklift truck that’s uh going by. I thank you for being with our coverage of 20 the 2024 nonprofit technology conference where we have been sponsored by Heller consulting, technology strategy and implementation for nonprofits. Thanks so much. It’s time for Tony’s take two. Thank you Kate while I was away for the two weeks, uh doing lots of donor meetings uh that I talked about last week I had the chance to talk to two guys, uh, one in the airport and one on a plane. Vaughn and Jorge and they’re both very different. Uh, Vaughn is uh mid seventies, maybe even, uh, maybe even 80 but still working. Uh, he’s from Kentucky and he owns 13 Papa John’s franchises and very interesting talking to this guy. Uh, you know, deep in the baby boomer ages, uh about how work has changed. Uh He, he cites that labor is his biggest problem. You’re keeping 13, Papa John’s franchises staffed uh people who with, you know, in the face of people who just don’t show up for work. They, they don’t just, they don’t even, you know, people don’t call and say they don’t want to work there anymore. They just don’t show up often often and I’ve heard that from lots of other folks too. Uh But so just, you know, very interesting talking to Vaughn about how work and, and attitudes toward work have changed uh that he’s experienced, you know, as a 7580 year old. Uh and hiring lots of folks in their twenties or even teens, so teens, twenties. Um and, and, and thirties is, is mo mostly where his workforce comes from, but it’s actually mostly teens and uh and twenties and then Jorge uh talk to him on a plane. So he is about, I’d say he’s about 32 or so. Uh And he has an interesting career he, you know, he works in finance for one of the big tech companies full time. Uh It has a finance MB A but then he also develops real estate projects. Uh And he, he’s on his second one, which is a 32 unit residential building with two or three commercial units on the ground floor. So, you know, talk about the way career has changed. I mean, here’s a guy who wants to be doing something different and he’s gonna make you making that transition on his own happen by reengineering himself as a real estate developer and, and all the financing that goes into that, getting loans, getting investors, you know, permits and hiring the, the contractor. Um So, you know, uh Jorge was kind of exemplifying what bond was telling me about, you know, the way he has seen work and career change. Uh So very interesting conversation. So I would, uh you know, I guess I’m always curious about people. I mean, if they don’t want to talk, you know, I’m not the annoying guy who keeps talking to them, you know, even after they put their air pods in, you know, I’m still talking to them. I, I don’t do that. I asked them to take their airpods out. No, I just, I just leave them alone, leave them alone. But uh you know, but I’m naturally curious about people. So if they’re willing to talk, um I, I uh these two guys were quite interesting. Vaughan and Jorge and how work has changed, career has changed. And that is Tony’s take too date. I think the coolest part of public transportation is meeting a bunch of different strangers. And like, that’s what I miss about taking the Amtrak train just back and forth from home to, to the city. You used to talk to a lot of folks on Amtrak. I remember one girl, this was my first time on the train alone. I couldn’t find a spot and she was getting off the next spot and she told me to come sit down with her and then we started talking about college and all this stuff and she was actually designing um public playgrounds for different schools. Um And like, we just got to know each other in that like 15 minutes that we had together and like I really connected with her, it was so it was a good experience. That’s it. Yeah, connections. You’re right. You’re right. Well, we’ve got Buku but loads more time here is matching gifts. 101201 and 301. Welcome to Tony Martignetti nonprofit radio coverage of 24 NTC. It’s the 2024 nonprofit technology conference. We are all at the Oregon Convention Center in Portland, Oregon. Julie Alison Mark. Welcome. Thank you so much for having us. It’s my pleasure. Julie Zin is Vice President account and strategic Services at Sankey Communications. Alison Herman is at, is Director of Communications and Marketing at Wild Care. And Mark doty is Director of Annual Giving at San Francisco S PC A. And we are talking about matching gifts. Your, your session is matching gifts. 101201 and 301. So we’re gonna run the spectrum, not the phd level, I guess that’s, that’ll be next year. We’re still undergrad here. This is undergrad and you took your senior year off. Indeed. We’re not doing the 401. Ok. Um Combined it all into one hour. Ok. Well, we’re gonna, we’re gonna condense it down even a little more, a little more. Um Mark, I’m gonna start down there with you. Ok. Um What? Well, just generally just like sort of tee us up. What, what could we be doing a little smarter better? Uh generally with matching gifts with matching gifts? Uh two things, there’s a lot of different kinds of matching gifts. So there’s a perception out there that if you’re doing a matching gift, you need large amounts of money, you need to double triple, quadruple it. There’s actually a number of different kinds of matching gifts you can do and they have different uses. So you don’t necessarily need a lot of money. You can do what we call a contingent match. For example, where if we’re gonna get into the details. Ok. So in general, I would say, um, consider doing a match, even if you don’t have large amounts of money. Um Make sure you plan it out and make sure you work with your organization, like your major gift officers and maybe communications department to make sure it’s well publicized and that you can actually get the dollars for a match. Ok, thank you. Um Alison, I I’m taking from your session uh description uh and Mark started to allude to these different types and styles of matching gifts. Can you? Uh Now, since he mentioned, contingency, is this, is this an OK place to talk about. Contingency. Am I the person to talk about that? I mean, I’ll be the person to talk about that specifically. But no, it is, it’s, it’s uh the thing about matching gifts that I think people really, we want people to take from our session is that they are incredibly effective and they are incredibly, it something that people get very excited about both your donors and your team members. So introducing the concept of a matching gift to your donors is something that’s going to inspire their giving and also inspire your team to reach new heights and do better things with your fundraising for your organization. OK. OK. So let’s start to get into some detail then Julie, but uh I’ll try you. That Mark mentioned contingency. Are we, why don’t you acquaint us with different types? Yeah, no problem. So most people think about the standard of all gifts up to $100,000 will be doubled, right? And that, that’s kind of your standard double match or you could say tripled and that’s your standard triple match. When you get into some of the other, other types of matches, you can say things like if we get 50 new sustainers, 50 new month donors will get an additional $10,000. That’s a contingency match where we have to reach this threshold and then we’re going to get this lump sum of money. It can be a much easier ask, especially when you’re asking for a certain number of donors. You don’t have to give dollars. You just have to be one person. Um You can also get into different types of matches where if you have the money already in hand, you can say this major donor is ma has made this donation, will you step up and match their gift? Um You can even have a campaign where you ask your donors to create a matching gift fund to then inspire their peers. So there’s a variety of different types of tactics and ways that you can use, talk about and create matching gift campaigns. Are we considering corporate matching gifts here too or is that something? Is that something different? We are. It’s in our 101201301. So corporate matches are a little bit different. We’re not really going to be talking about corporate matches as much. Although corporate matching gifts are certainly very valuable it’s more of a individual um individual technique that, that is often valuable on the back end. So someone makes the gifting and you say, do you work for a, for a corporation for an entity that’s matching your gift? So we’re talking here about individual donors doing different types of matches or collectively. OK. Go ahead. I was gonna say at my organization Wild, what do you do at my organization in Wild Care? There is some confusion between the two ideas of matching and so you have corporate matching, which is I work for a company and I make a donation and then I request for my corporation, my company to match that gift. So that’s what we consider corporate matching. You can also have a corporation that gives your organization a gift to be matched. So we’re talking about that idea of money that’s being donated, that will be an incentive for individual donors to match. And so sort of two different things with sort of the same name. So a source of confusion for us as well. Thank you. I mean, you all have been thinking about this for a long time. I’m a neophyte. Um Mark, how about you at uh at San Francisco S PC A? What, what do you, what are you doing there around uh matching gifts around matching gifts? We plan those into our annual planning process. So we will actually sit down and say, oh, we’re gonna do a big campaign around the holidays. We’re going to be do a big campaign around the end of our fiscal year. We’re going to need a match for those s so we will actually um go out to our major gift officers plan out our timing, say we’re going to need, we’re going to need you to secure some matches for us by this date. And then we actually integrate that into actually producing campaigns which we then promote with the hope that the match is going to inspire more people to give and when they give to give more and indeed it does. Ok, they do work. I mean, otherwise we wouldn’t be here. This is a, this is an upbeat, don’t do matching gifts. There’s no question here and we were actually just talking about how you never test this because you would never want to give half of your audience something that didn’t include the matching gift. They are that successful that you don’t eat. We test that we know how well they work, our consultants on the team on the panel. You agree with that. Absolutely. We have done a lot of testing around things like match length, for example. So there are a lot of giving. Exactly. So for example, giving Tuesday a lot of organizations have a match. If you don’t have a match on giving Tuesday, you’re going to need to think about something really exciting to cut through the match clutter and the match language that other organizations are putting out. But there are now a lot of organizations that have started promoting their giving Tuesday matches before Thanksgiving, we have tested things like that. And when you’re, when you’re looking at, at elements like that, that giving Tuesday preview match before Thanksgiving, it doesn’t actually work. You’re not going to get a substantial lift on it. So there are definitely times and ways that you want to use your match and promote it to have the most efficacy. But overall, all of the data, both data around the industry and data from our clients where we’ve done a matching gift campaign versus not a matching gift campaign or have multiple clients where we can see who has matches and who doesn’t. Um, every, every data point shows that having a matching gift of some sort is always going to be, be beneficial for your campaign. Ok. Ok. Um Alison, what type of different asks do you have? Can you acquaint us with? You started to allude, you know, you made the difference between corporate and individual on the individual side. What are some of the sample asks? Well, we’re very lucky at wild care. We take care of injured and orphaned wild animals. So I have uh absolutely adorable animals like baby opossums or baby raccoons or baby squirrels or an animal that’s going to be really compelling. But one of the matches that we frequently do is our summer match and the summer match is to help raise funds for our wildlife babies to help them to grow up healthy and be released back to the wild. And so that gift is that matching campaign is really, really effective because you can show the benefit of the match for the actual individual animals that are, that are being raised and being uh being treated at our wildlife hospital. So, uh that is a really, that is a really fun one. Another one that we do is uh Julie talked about not making a preview for your giving Tuesday match, but we do have started doing every year a matching gift fund which is asking individual donors to contribute to the match before the giving Tuesday. Actual matching gift goes into effect. So it’s building that matching gift fund and same thing uh you know, doing it for the animals giving the, the care that the animals need and raising that money to be an inspiration for other donors on giving Tuesday. It’s alright. Now Julie, let me go back to you. How is that different than what you said? Doesn’t do well pre pre giving Tuesday, we’re only 10 minutes in. It took a while, but finally a decent question. We’re only seven minutes in. So I give myself a break. These are all excellent questions. Thank you. Oh, no. So how, what’s the distinction here? So that is not, you’re not previewing a match. You’re actually asking people to make a gift to build a match fund. Um which it sounds, it sounds a little bit nuanced. But when you say in early November, we have a donor who’s giving $20,000 to create a giving Tuesday match. But we know we’re going to raise a lot more than that. On giving Tuesday, we need your help to match more money. Will you help us increase the matching gift? And then, and then what care does? And it’s, it’s an incredibly successful campaign is their broader donor base will actually contribute to the matching gift fund. We have several clients that do a similar type of campaign with their mid-level donors where donors who are giving $1000 plus at $1000 plus level will contribute to that matching gift fund. That particular audience type is typically not always less focused on making a gift for a matching gift campaign, but they can be really, um but but they can really help contribute to building a match campaign. So then let’s say at wild care, they would say, ok, now we have a matching gift fund of $42,700. Then on giving Tuesday, they go back out and they say we have a matching gift of $42,700. Will you make your gift for this matching gift campaign? Ok. And then what, what do people have to do to, to qualify for their gift to for you to get the 42,700. I’m missing something. Well, it’s kind of, you don’t necessarily have to have it be a challenge or a contingency. It can simply be that we have this money. We want you to help us match it. It’s not that you help us match what we’ve already help us match what we’ve already earned. And it’s, those are sort of two different types of matches. You can have challenge match, which is essentially if you don’t do this, we have to offer to give the money back. And that’s one type. And you hear that a lot on the N pr fundraising. Exactly. But it is, it seems to be exactly as effective to say we have this. Will you match it? Will you bring us this funding? Yeah. And I think that’s a common misconception about matching gifts. You ok, go ahead, Julie often times what we often times what happens is when you have a matching gift campaign or a matching gift effort, you’re not really relying on the gifts to bring in the match. You actually want to have a matching gift such that you will absolutely hit it and your matching gift donor has already committed to it. So if your matching gift donor says I’m going to make $100,000 gift, you say I’m going to create a matching gift campaign with the specifications and the timing and the length and the channels where I think I’m going to raise 100 and $30,000. So I’m absolutely overreaching that 100,000 and I’m absolutely going to have that money in hand so that you’re raising money on the match doesn’t actually, um, is, is not actually necessary for the gift for the matching gift to come in. And I think that’s one of the biggest misconceptions is for the general public is, it really is a fundraising tactic. It’s, it’s a strategy that, that we all do and that we all know in the industry. But when you look at folks who are outside of the industry, they don’t necessarily realize that this is a tactic that isn’t actually meaningful that when if you give your $100 gift to an organization that says your gift will be tripled. It doesn’t actually mean that they’re going to be getting an additional $200 because of your $100 gift. It means that they have this money in hand um or pledged or committed and that, that you’re, they’re using that to inspire that giving mark. Can you share with us? Uh Some specific asks that you do around matching gifts at San Francisco S PC A. Yeah, actually, most recently, we basically did what’s called Gamification of a match gam game playing radiation, radiating the animals or Gamification, Gamification. And this is where we try to turn, uh we introduce a lot of many goals and ask donors to help us achieve those goals like you might find in a lot of apps or uh or anything else. But um what we did was for giving Tuesday sat down and said, ok, we need to raise this much money that actually corresponds to uh the amount we spend for in a full year on our mobile vaccine clinics where monthly we go out and vaccinate about 4 to 500 animals in the space of a few hours. So uh we actually sat down and messaged to donors, hey, we need to fund 12 months worth of this mobile vaccine clinics. Will you help us do it? We’ve got matching funds and every dollar you you donate will be matched as well and then kept them updated over the course of giving Tuesday to say, hey, we’ve matched, we’ve achieved four months. Can you help us get to five? We’re at six months by the 11 o’clock, we’re saying we’re at 11 months. Can you help us get over to that? 12 months? And just introduced a lot of little goals to ask donors to help us match, um match their gifts and get to that goal. I love the, I love the time. You know, the the time challenge we’re at 11 months, help us get to 12 for God’s sake. Don’t leave us hanging with 11/12. You often do find that that deadline is what’s so critical. You can, you can message as much as you want, but three weeks out from a deadline. You’re never going to have quite the same sense of urgency as saying our deadline for this match is tonight at midnight. And I honestly, I have no idea why people are sitting at home on December 31st at 11 p.m. making their donations. But there are so many people who decide that that is their moment, don’t we all wait for the last minute for things? I mean, pretty routinely. I mean, I know I do, you know, I have a two week, I have two weeks and then I’m doing it the night before. I don’t know. I just, I think that’s our nature. I wanna, I wanna get to something that comes directly from what you just said, Julie is what if gifts come late? What kind of policies do we have? Do we, do we bend the rule or what, what’s best? It’s a terrific question. Um We actually, recently you have a lot of these, you’re with this, Tony, we had this conversation recently with one of our clients. They are based, um, they’re based in New York. Um They have an international presence and an international donor base, both across the US and internationally and they had a matching gift deadline at and we had countdown clocks. We had all sorts of things saying get your gift in before midnight on the matching gift deadline. And one of the staff members said, is it midnight Eastern? Is it midnight pacific? What about our donors who were in Dubai. Um And so fun question. Um So a lot of the tactics that we can implement technologically actually allow us to let that, that, that deadline, that exact 11:59 p.m. uh be catered towards the recipient’s home schedule. And so countdown clocks on emails, search engine, marketing ads on light boxes. We can, we can actually direct all of those to the recipients um time zone At the same time, most organizations are going to have some fluidity around it. And so if a donor calls you up at 3 a.m. God forbid, you’re answering the phones at 3 a.m. But if you get that message at 3 a.m. from the donor that says I just got in my gift, will it be, will it count? You just say yes, just say yes. You don’t want to say no to the donor. Exactly. We are flexible and you also can set those policies based on your own needs within your organization and be fluid about them within your own parameters. So it’s, there’s not some hard and fast like overall arching rule about matching gifts. It’s a, it’s within your own organization that you can determine that. One of the things you can do is actually plan a strategy around people not making it in, in time. One of the reasons we know matches work is if you look at hour to hour donations, the minute that match ends, you see donations drop off like a cliff. So people really are giving up to the last minute. But one thing you can do is um follow up and say, hey, we’re gonna do a small mini match for those people that missed it and that can be a very effective tactic. So in giving Tuesday, we’ve actually sent out a smaller match the next day and said we have a little extra money. If you missed it, please give again very effective for our large end of calendar year uh uh a month long match. Uh We’ll actually plan in January to send out direct mail and email that says in case you missed it by the end of the year, here’s a small smaller follow up match just for those guys that didn’t give. So people don’t feel bombarded again. Very effective tactic works very well. So it’s very humane and gracious too if you missed it, you know, if you still have more opportunities to give us money, right? You do. Yeah, even if you’re worse than procrastinating like you the deadline, you didn’t just wait till the end of the deadline, you blew it. There’s still a chance for you. There are still puppies and kittens and babies, squirrels and baby opossums that need help, that need you one of your uh session uh objectives, how to apply matching gift tactics across each channel. We haven’t talked about specific channels. Mark, let’s let’s keep with you. What do you do across channels. This is an important part of keeping your organization looped in on what you’re doing with the match. And we will actually sit down and have people from marketing communications. We’ll have people from development. Um We’ll have the major gift officers and we’ll all talk about, we’re gonna be having this match. What can everyone do in their channels to support this match and support this effort? And we’ll have a group conversation about what we’ll be talking about what the messaging will be and get everyone on the same page and then everyone is sort of in charge of uh going off and executing in whatever it is they’re due. Whether that’s the website, we will get it on the website. Uh If we’re on social, we will get it in social. Um We will put it in our DM and email appeals as well. If we have newsletters going out, it will go in the newsletters. Our MGO will again be talking to people about what the match is about and will they support it? So we just get everyone on the same page and that way everyone in the organization that’s in charge of some kind of communication um can, can communicate that out and whatever, whatever they’re working on. We uh we have Jargon Jail on uh Tony Martignetti Nonprofit Radio. Now you didn’t, no, you didn’t really transgress. I mean, you, you mentioned MG OS and D MS but, but I think people understand major gift officers are, those are, those are basic. I’m just alerting everyone that we do have jargon jail here. And I’d hate to see anybody, uh, imprisoned not wrongfully, it would be rightfully imprisoned. But, but you don’t get a jury. It’s just me. But no, you are fine because DM, everybody knows direct mail. Um, I, I do one thing. That’s, that’s interesting about a multichannel. Yeah, that’s interesting about the campaigns is you do have different timing for the different channels. And so you obviously have your direct mail pieces that go, you know, significantly in advance and there’s a much longer tail, a much longer time for those to have been effective. And then you would have the model that goes up on your website, which usually corresponds with the time that your direct mail is hitting mailboxes in case people open the letter and then go to your website and then, oh, sorry. Yes, I’m doing jargon. That’s the pop up thing that shows up on your website when you open up a website and something pops up in front of you. That, that’s what’s called a model and there’s a link on that that would go to a donation page. So we don’t call them pop ups anymore or light, what do we call them? Moss I learn that pop up a pop up. Technically speaking, a pop up is different technology. A light box and a model are interchangeable Um And the, the technical term, this I consider one of my key roles in my company being translating between our developers and everybody who doesn’t speak, developers speak, which I don’t. But a modal is the technical way that a lightbox is coded. And so a motel and a Lightbox are the same thing. You can say. Either one pop up is a little bit of a different story and that gets blocked by pop up blockers and all of that sort of thing. So you’re fine. I’m fine too. None of us are in jail. My language is not ancient anyway, but I love this because I just learned something new as well. So Lightbox modal being the two things that pop up. Exactly. So you would have that correspond with the time that your direct mail piece hits people’s mailboxes. And then you would also have a, an email campaign and a social campaign that usually start and run on a faster schedule. You would want that to be closer to the deadline and be able to send those messages out. So you’re getting, you know, people often participate with your organization’s communications on many levels and having that same messaging the same images, the same compelling ask that goes with the match coming both in your mailbox also on the website, also on your social feeds and also on your email is a very, very compelling and effective way to raise donations and having that match with the timeline, just makes people jump in with both feet and donate and donate more. It’s wonderful. You had asked about what happens when people make their gift after a deadline as well. Direct mail has an extremely long tail. And so it’s very common that people will, I mean, people will hold on to direct mail and then send a check. Two years later, I don’t understand that. I’ve seen that I do plan on giving fundraising. I’ve seen two years. I’ll send me information on including you in my will. It’s wild. But so what we do when we’re promoting a matching gift is direct mail. We actually won’t promote the deadline. So you just don’t lift the deadline. You can put in very fine print at the bottom. Nobody’s going to read it anyway. It’s fine. Um Whereas when you’re looking at the digital channels, you’re gonna have your countdown clocks and you’re really pushing the deadline and increasing your frequency as you approach that deadline and people don’t get tired of this. Shocking. No, no, especially as you’re increasing the frequency as Julie said, when you get closer to the deadline. No, it seems to just inspire them and you will have people that give again when they see the countdown clock when they actually the same challenge. Yeah. Yeah, we see that as well. Ok. All outstanding. We, we’re busting potential uh misconceptions. Um Well, we still have some time left. What else? Uh do you plan to talk about in your session that we haven’t or a little more detail that you want? I think one of the things that I think is really interesting is what happens when you don’t have a match and that is something that it’s valuable to have to have matching gifts. You don’t want to have a matching gift for every single campaign, but most organizations in an ideal world, you have a few matching gift campaigns over the course of a year. But on these key days, like giving Tuesday or 1231 most organizations, most of your competitors who are, who are hitting people’s inboxes have a matching gift campaign and there are always a few organizations that don’t. And so I think that that is an important thing to think about is what happens when you don’t. Um So for some of those campaigns, we often will fundraise around tangibles. We work with an organization habitat for horses. Um, out in Texas that um this past year on giving Tuesday, we were raising money for a new rescue trailer last year. On giving Tuesday, we raised money for a batwing mower. I didn’t even know what a batwing mower was, but it is really valuable. So don’t leave us all hanging a bowing mower. It’s a mower that has those off board things so it can mow a very wide path path. It’s a wide mower. But when you’re a horse rescue, when you’re a horse rescue, you need a lot of mowing capacity. Um And so, so we could run this campaign that really gave people a tangible and a goal even though we didn’t have a matching gift or um we work with Glaad, which works on LGBT Q issues. And this past giving Tuesday, they didn’t have a matching gift campaign and we had a really terrific campaign. Our creative team did a bang up job on it. But the whole I’m not sure if I’m allowed to say it, the whole theme of the campaign was it’s time to give an f and we’ve had people say fuck, OK, great. So the campaign was, it’s time to give a fuck. And we replaced the you and fuck with the heart from the Giving Tuesday logo. And it worked really well. And so if you have an organization where you can, where you don’t have a matching gift campaign, but you don’t have a matching gift available, but you have a tangible or a goal or um leadership allows you to curse across all of your, your direct marketing channel. There are different ways that you can break through, break through the clutter. This is swearing for a good cause I wanted to say actually, on that note, the opposite problem is I know a lot of organizations swearing enough, not swearing enough. 100%. No one of the opposite problem would be something that my organization certainly deals with, in that I wouldn’t want to necessarily fundraise every time for the bat wing mower, which I’ve never needed in my life. But because once you put a specific thing into your fundraising, that means that fundraising becomes restricted unless you’re very careful with the language. But one of the things that I love and my organization loves so much about matching gifts is the match gives you that specificity. It gives you that goal without having to restrict the gifts that are coming in in any way. It, it has that same psychology of oh yeah, I wanna give $20 for the batwing mower. That sounds amazing. But instead of having to say it’s for the X ray machine or it’s for specifically opossum formula or whatever you are saying, it’s for this monetary goal and this time goal and it has that same psychological benefit of. This is something I want to contribute to. This is something I want to be part of. And this is a goal I want this organization to reach. And that’s, I think the one of the main reasons that match is so matching gifts are so powerful. And I think uh so we know that there is hope in case you don’t have a matching gift, there is, there is the tangibles as Julie described. And I think um one take away from this and it’s important to keep in mind is to just stay creative with your matches. I have seen so many conversations where it’s like, well, we’d like to do a match but we don’t have sufficient funds to double or triple or quadruple what people are giving. There’s a whole lot of different ways, uh, to work with matches. Uh, we had a small match come in and it was just $10,000 and it was like, well, what can we do with that? Uh So we did a challenge grant and actually brought in 100 new sustainers uh just by sort of shifting it and saying, let’s just do a number of instead of dollars, we can absolutely use that money and we did and it was very successful. So stay creative, think of creative ways to to to get the message out and what you can do matches around and for a lot of listeners, $10,000 may not be such a small match at all that may be impressive for them. Um Alright, I I kind of wanna let Mark uh kind of bookend it us. We opened with Mark, we closed with Mark. Is there anything else anything else anybody? Ok. We’re gonna wrap it up then. Terrific. Good luck on your session. It’s gonna be a fun session. It will. And this is a little preparation for you. They are Julie Zin at Sanki Communications, Alison Herman at Wild Care and Mark doty at San Francisco S PC A. Thank you for being with Tony Martignetti Nonprofit Radio. Coverage of 24 NTC where we are sponsored by Heller consulting technology strategy and implementation for nonprofits. They are booth mates and thanks so much for being with us. Thank you. Thank you. Thank you next week. Prompt Engineering and getting the most from your current tech. If you missed any part of this week’s show, I beseech, you find it at Tony martignetti.com were sponsored by Virtuous. Virtuous, gives you the nonprofit CRM fundraising, volunteer and marketing tools you need to create more responsive donor experiences and grow, giving, virtuous.org. Our creative producer is Claire Meyerhoff. I’m your associate producer, Kate Pinetti. The show, social media is by Susan Chavez. Mark Silverman is our web guy and this music is by Scott Stein. Thank you for that affirmation. Scotty be with us next week for nonprofit radio. Big nonprofit ideas for the other 95% go out and be great.
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