Tag Archives: email deliverability

Nonprofit Radio for May 19, 2025: Employee Wellness & Email Deliverability

Mandy Kutschied & Sam Hanley: Employee Wellness

Meet a company where one of the employees is a wellness coach for all the others. Mandy Kutschied and Sam Hanley are with The Fresh Perspective Group. They share practical strategies for employee wellness; ergonomic resources; a 4-day work week; productivity tips; and, talk about the ethics of wellness coaching in the workplace. Sam often hears things she cannot reveal. This is part of our coverage of the 2025 Nonprofit Technology Conference (#25NTC).

Anne Paschkopić: Email Deliverability

This comes up frequently at the Nonprofit Technology Conference, because the rules often change about whether your emails get delivered and how they get treated by email providers. Are you right to only mail to people who’ve recently opened a message from you? No. Is it good practice to make sure everyone has opted in to your list? No. Anne Paschkopić explains why these and other former best practices, are no more. She’s from M + R. This conversation is also from #25NTC.

 

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Welcome to Tony Martignetti Nonprofit Radio, big nonprofit ideas for the other 95%. I’m your aptly named host and the podfather of your favorite hebdominal podcast. This is show number 740, which means we are a mere 10 shows, 10 weeks away from number 750. Nonprofit radios, unbelievable. 10 weeks away. Oh, I’m glad you’re with us. I’d be stricken with dextroduction if I looked to the right to see that you missed this week’s show. Here’s our associate producer Kate with what’s up this week. Hey, Tony, more conversations from 25 NTC. Employee wellness. Meet a company where one of the employees is a wellness coach for all the others. Mandy Kuthi and Sam Hanley are with the Fresh Perspective Group. They share practical strategies for employee wellness, ergonomic resources, a 4 day work week, productivity tips, and talk about the ethics of wellness coaching in the workplace. Sam often hears things she cannot reveal. Then Email deliverability. This comes up frequently at the nonprofit technology conference because the rules often change about whether your emails get delivered and how they get treated by email providers. Are you right to only mail to people who have recently opened a message from you? Now Is it good practice to make sure everyone has opted into your list? No. Ann Paskaic explains why these and other former best practices are no more. She’s from MNR. On Tony’s take 2. The federal budget, part de. Here is employee wellness. Thank you for being with our 25 NTC coverage. We’re all live at the Bal Baltimore Convention Center. With me now are Mandy Kutchide and Sam Hanley. Mandy is vice president of people at the Fresh Perspective Group. Sam Hanley also at the Fresh Perspective Group as wellness coach. Mandy, Sam, welcome. Thank you so much pleasure, pleasure to have you. How’s your conference going so far? Good. It’s awesome both of our first time here. Have you done both first? Oh, this is a very good conference, isn’t it? I mean so far? Yeah, it’s great. This is our 10th or 11th. Uh, having the podcast here, yeah, capturing interviews, it’s a very good conference. You chose you chose well it’s a good vibe. Um, and your topic is what employee wellness really means and why it matters. Um, Sam, let’s start with you because I don’t know any other companies besides the Fresh Perspective group who I’m just meeting today for my first time, uh, that have a wellness coach. Maybe it’s very common. I don’t know, but, uh, why is it so let’s answer the second part of the, uh, the topic. Why does it matter? Why does it matter? Come a little closer to the mic. Yeah, thank you. Um, I think it’s very rare to have someone as a wellness coach on a team. No, not very common. Um, typically speaking, many orgs have human resources, so it’s even a shift to be more people oriented and so I have a background in counseling and behavior analysis, so my intention is to support the company as a whole. In the culture and how we operate and embed wellness into our culture but also on an individual level level so supporting employees one on one whether that’s just venting or need an emotional release or something’s going on at home because home life and work life are so interwoven together so how can I support our employees as as human beings. OK, um, and, uh, we’re not gonna do this right now, but part of what we’re gonna talk about is what the ethical considerations are when people vent versus talking to their HR director. It’s very different, I imagine. OK, we’re gonna talk about we’ll, we’re gonna get to that. um, Mandy, what, what, why does the you’re a vice president there, officer? Why does the fresh perspective group, um, invest? I mean, you’re paying, uh. Paying salary to Sam and benefits, but she is a benefit. He program is a benefit to the employees so but I don’t mean to answer my own question. Why, why is the fresh perspective group investing in employee wellness to the to the point of hiring someone to do it? Yeah, we think it’s incredible incredibly um critical to our success. So the company itself is a people centric organization that does sales force consulting and manage services for nonprofits who are. Struggling with their technology as we’ve heard throughout the day and we know that what we’re selling is our people the the the keynote speaker this morning 10 minute gap or the sound went out but also she was talking about, um, we, you know, technology part of the, the issue with adoption or how we use it is like the people using it are really designing how it gets used um so what we’re selling is our people, our consultants, obviously they’re great. At tech, but they’re also human beings and we know that in order for them to support the nonprofits that we serve, we need to be supporting them as humans um so that’s really critical and one of the ways we want to do this is by being different in how we structure so I came out of HR I almost 20 years of HR um and there are some legal ramifications and sort of legal things you have to think about when you try to structure support in this way, but we knew that we really wanted to be people centric. Want to build something that was different, that really took care of the whole human and we were going to do that with intention and with care and part of that was having a wellness coach that was focused on the individuals. Yes, yeah. Well, she’s a founding member, so we all founded the company in July. We’re only 8 months old. Yeah, it’s a new venture. Yeah, so she’s been here since the beginning really helping us a people-centric culture through the decades of the practical strategies for employee wellness. Sam, I’m guessing that is more suited for you. I’m just answering. I’m, I’m not, I’m, I’m not committing you to anything. This is from your session description. You looked a little nervous. Practical strategies for employee wellness. You’re committed to this. Yes, OK, um, Mandy and I and I it we’ll we’ll talk to you so when employees are on a big project, so allowing a bit of breathing room afterwards, what does that look like afterwards, what do you, how do you how do you? Looking at what do you what do you say to them? Uh, what is your plan? What does your schedule look like? Is your calendar completely jam packed in full, or do you have space to take lunch? Do you have space to go for a walk? Do you have space to take an afternoon off? Our pay time off policy is very flexible, um, so if you need to take a Friday off, go take a Friday off. We also work 4 days a week, Tuesday to Friday, so we every week have Monday off. Um, so all employees except for myself work 32 hours a week, um, and so having that Monday allows just natural breathing room in our everyday week in itself because it’s embedded in that. So our every all our team members have that day to get appointments done, relax, be by themselves at home. Weekends are always busy doing errands and family functions and events and all that stuff, so just allowing that space and making it sacred so. We all know not to ping anyone on a Monday, um, so after projects making sure that continues to be sacred, but also checking what’s your schedule look like? Is it jam packed? Can we, can we check you is this you emailing to remind people or is it you knocking on, you’re probably not you’re virtual knocking on doors but how do you practically how do you do it? What do you do? Yeah, a one on one or 15 minute call. Your plan, how are you doing checking in? What does your rest look like afterwards? What’s your workload look like? Is it is it manageable? Do we need to support you in finding ways to take things off of your plate? Do you need to lean more on other team members and just giving them the autonomy to make those choices but still being proactive in that check in? What does that look like? Yeah and Sam has um scheduled one on one sessions with everybody who wants to they can opt in or opt out. Most of our folks opt in. Um, she’s so she’s taking that sort of like individual care, but then if she’s hearing something, so for example I think this is a good one, we, when we were launching as a company, there was a lot of heavy lifting from our marketing team right away when you launch a company, right? There’s a website, there’s branding, there’s material, so our marketing team is one person and one consultant, and they were doing a ton to get us ready and so Sam had been meeting with the our director of marketing individually noticed. That you know there was just a lot going on so after the launch um we worked with the marketing director and their supervisor and we said OK we’re gonna get, we’re gonna throw a couple extra days and we’re gonna ask if she has the capacity to take that time off and she did we said great, go like rejuvenate a little bit and recover and restore so you can come back refreshed um and she did, she said, oh, I feel like I can actually come back and like feel excited instead of daunted and drained and. And tired, so it was a it was a good sort of in the moment recovery plan. Now Sam, if you hear from someone that they’re overburdened, maybe they need to they need do you have a link to the CEO do you how do you get the person the help that they need. So in one on ones it’s what does that look like for you? How can I support you in your communication with others to be able to lean on them. Um, do you feel comfortable talking to the CEO or talking to your supervisor in, in getting support, um, I think that’s 1414 now. I was relevant for folks to know how big an organization we’re talking about 5 or 14, so you were saying that uh you’re asking. How comfortable do you feel or then can you be a voice on their behalf if they don’t feel comfortable, but then if they don’t feel comfortable, you’re going on their behalf. They know they came from you. How does that give them greater comfort ultimately everybody knows that it came from them. Yes, I think that plays into the ethical consideration so just really. Staying grounded in the relationship with that person and knowing that I’m only doing anything on their behalf with their consent and having that discussion first so if they want me to speak on their behalf or support them in that way then it’s important that I have their permission and that we do that together. I want it to be. Involved partnership to get help them help them get what they need. What if they aren’t comfortable with you speaking on their behalf, but this remains a challenge for them, and obstacle it’s burdening them, but they’re not comfortable speaking or having you speak on their behalf, then what? That’s that’s difficult. So a part of my job too is looking for themes so on in my one on ones are the themes that are coming up is communication being lost is one team feeling more stressed than another um so then I talked to Mandy and we figure out how can we support this individual, um, theme or this team team as a whole, um, and we yeah. And that’s why I think like in our session we talk a little bit about the evolution of workplace wellness and the history from you know industrial era to post COVID time and a lot of it is around the systems that we set up so there may be individual themes of burnout or um not feeling like there is that sort of self advocacy or self care that you can enact with your supervisor because maybe it’s a lack of emotional intelligence or empathy from. The leadership, so if we’re seeing those themes, then we know our systems need to improve. We need to train our leadership on EQ and emotional empathy and how do they have engaging conversations with their direct reports or is it more around like how we work and how we’ve designed work? Do we need to rethink those systems and structures, um, because sometimes it’s at an individual level, but a lot of times it’s on a systems level. Has this all come up in just 8 months? I mean it’s come up in other organizations for me over the last 18 years, yeah, but we haven’t experienced as much of that, not to any extreme. Yeah, yeah. OK. Um, since we sort of touching on ethics, what about, um, confidentiality? I mean, are you, are you sworn to confidentiality if the person doesn’t want anything revealed? Yes, OK, OK. And then, but your role is to try to aggregate themes, but. That might not be that might not be part of a theme. It might just be individual and the person so like is there a resource of referrals like would you make a referral to a deeper consulting that you can’t do or therapy basically we’re talking about therapy yeah so yeah if there’s deeper concerns or things coming up, yes, it’s referring out to counseling services. Can I support you in finding the appropriate service provider to help you with your mental health? Um, I, I had a thought there, um, I think sometimes at work, you know, you, you have something going on in your life and you go to your manager and so you dump your emotional things that are happening for you to your manager and the manager isn’t always equipped to support that person and so both people are kind of feeling disconnected, not sure where to go from there something’s there’s kind of a bit of a. Elephant in the room and so I’m, I hope that I can be that mediator of come let’s let’s chat get get what you need off your chest and then let’s move forward into that problem solving piece so I can be there for the empathy help you problem solve so you can go to your manager and say hey I’ve had a death at home I I need more space my brain is not in it this week whereas I think like Mandy said um historically there’s just that pressure to perform. Form and get work done no matter what else is happening in your life. So how can I help people move through that process a little bit smoother and still feel heard and supported and know that their workplace has their back even when something else is going on in their personal life. Encourage everyone to take their lunch break away from their screens, um, so, uh, there’s even a couple individuals at work where it it was encouraged to put that into their calendar. They just blocked off for lunch. No one can book a meeting at that time, so that kind of holds us accountable to actually take our lunch, um, rather than meetings just be booked and you then don’t have lunch, you’re not eating, you’re not taking time away from your screen, you’re not getting up and moving your body, um. So in that lunch break going for a walk, uh, we also have every week I post something and it’s often around that physical health so moving our body um snacks, getting exercise water yes. Stretching was an issue. I was she’s very good at reminding me to drink my water. I don’t drink water. I think ergonomic is also in the virtual world there’s a lot of because we’re working at home and we haven’t really thought about ergonomics set up to be physically supportive we’ve talked a little bit about how do we make sure folks have the right level for their computers so they’re not um putting pressure on shoulders and how do they have the right chair and we have a budget for that so we can support standing you got it yeah I have a walking pad, yep. see me in my walking. Oh, it’s just like why is it not a treadmill? It doesn’t go as fast. It’s just walking like a desk you’re walking you’re OK. We had Beth on a couple of years ago because she had just written a book on wellness for nonprofits she had a co-author too. I’m sorry, I don’t remember the co-author’s name, but Um, she was, they were advocating, um, doing walking meetings, physically walking out and you’re you’re in a meeting. Why not, right? Our brain works differently that way, yeah, getting fresh air and the repetitive movement of our body walking there’s real digital screen fatigue happening right now, so it’s like how can you also make sure you’re limiting some of the screen time. Uh, you have any other tip tips so the pad I’m sorry, it’s not what’s it’s OK um what else do I appreciate that you’re sitting on a ball, so you’re just you’re naturally moving your body and it probably feels more comfortable on your body to be that way. I use it at home it’s actually born of an NTC. In previous years they contracted with a furnishings company for the booths back when we had booths 10 by 10. This is your first ATC, but every year before this it’s been 10 by 10 booths, and the company that they use, uh, is expensive. Like a chair is like $300 or maybe I’m exaggerating $200 for the 3 days, right? And then, but I wanted a nicer chair, so I was like a 4 or $500 chair for 3 days. That’s a. That’s that, you know, I, I got my my ball and just blow it up and I’ll spend $0 and I’ll be more comfortable and you’re $500. So it was born of a couple of years, I think last year was the first year. I just got tired of the ergonomic chair expense. So yeah, yeah, OK, so, uh, yeah, it’s movement, right? Is core like centering taking even 5 minutes to step outside, sit on your front step. Breathe in some observing outside what do you see for distance it helps your eyes like you need a yeah just that quick yeah reset, refresh, change of environment for a moment can be really helpful in getting you back and refocused, um, having snacks at your desk, chewing things can be helpful for your nervous system, help regulate just simple little things, yeah, yeah. Oh yeah, that oral sensory feedback, yeah, more crunchy or like like peanut butter is sticky, so you’re, you’re working your oral motor and it can just be helpful to regulate your body so it doesn’t have to be anything major, right? We don’t have to get our 10,000 steps in and we don’t have those types of initiatives at our at our work, um, but. Just getting those small little things 5 minutes away from your desk standing up yeah it can be in your in your 5 NASA says the optimal nap is 22 minutes scientists and they know this 2 longer than they. Longer than that and you’ll feel groggy and a little disorient maybe not disorient groggy when you wake up shorter than that, not restorative. So the optimal nap according to NASA 22 minutes but I’m a proud napper. I love. Yeah, OK. Um, the 4 day work week last year at NTC we had advocates, we had, we had the leader of the 4 day work week. Um, nonprofit. I, I forget what 4 days a week or I forget what it’s called, but he, he and a couple of panelists, including someone from N10. N10 has a 4 day work week here. Patty was on, um. but you chose Mondays off instead of Friday would have been the natural choice, I think for a lot of organizations. Why did you choose Monday? It was really intentional. So the again, the organization that we work in is consulting and we consult with nonprofits and so just the organic cycle of the stuff we do, we felt, um, there’s a lot of Tuesday Thursday meetings with our nonprofit clients so there was like uh inherent Tuesday could be meeting heavy day Wednesday could be. Down work day Thursday could be meeting heavy day. Friday we’re taking that feedback and kind of making changes and Monday we rest. So it just like it worked with I think um for us it worked because of who our clients are. It’s gonna be different exactly yeah you got it, yeah, exactly. It’s also an interesting mind shift too because most people work until Fridays and so you’re getting ready for that weekend naturally with. Community and so then you’re having your fun on the weekend and then you get that Monday oh yeah I have Monday and it feels more productive naturally because that’s what we’re all used to so you can get your chores done you can schedule in your massage um you can get the all the the housework done. OK, an intentional choice to make it to make it and just to be clear we’re talking about a 4 day 32 hour work week, not a 4 day 40 hour work week 2 hours. Yeah, yes, that’s what the campaign is all about. We, we had the panel on, yeah, that’s it. Yeah, OK. OK. Um, you mentioned massage. I’m, I’m a massage, I do, it’s not luxury, it’s it’s part of taking care of myself massage massage advocate as well. Yeah, we have quite a comprehensive benefits. acupuncture, it’s part of the, yeah, we’ve got different levels for folks, right? So depending on what you opt in high deductible, low deductible, but it’s acupuncture, yeah. It’s I I’m I’m from Canada too and so Mandy is from here, um, so we, we, we’re a little bit different anyways, um, so I can’t always speak to what I can’t always speak to that. But I think a lot of Americans consider that a luxury. Like when I’m at the resort for a week, you know, I’ll I’ll get a, I’ll get a spa treatment. I’ll massage, but it can be very, I mean like yeah very yes exactly physical touch that. Muscle movement and it I mean we have uh I have a coworker, we have a coworker at the Fresh perspective group who goes in for medical reasons monthly and because she can’t move her neck otherwise and it’s like she needs that and it is it’s not, it’s not nice to have it’s need to have. And, and, and can I go one bit deeper than physical touch is the human touch. Like this is something I never want a robot to do. I don’t want AI massage as as good as some, some, uh, medical services company may tell me that it is, uh, I don’t want it. I want, I want the human touch. We want to be seen and heard. Um, 4 day work on site counseling. I think we kind of talked about on site. It’s all virtual you can check in any time. I mean if you’re in a crisis, and I, I need to I need to I need to. I very much encourage everyone to book one on one, same day, any time, any length of time that they feel they need. And is there routine check-ins too like do you have a monthly or weekly with everybody or how does that work? Yeah, it’s about monthly for about 45 minutes, yes, yes, yeah, some opt for more and some opt for none some have their own um counseling services outside of the workplace too that they’re very regular and feel very well supported in that way so yeah. Uh, creating a culture of wellness at work. I mean, it comes from the top down. The CEO must be devoted to this, yeah, definitely, and, and again that was very intentional when we were setting up the organization. She was very much, um, a fan of a people centric culture, so I wanted to make this into policy process practice, so things like the 4 day work week, but also, um, when we have a decision and you know. You know we have to prioritize something we tend to prioritize people first and that means our clients but also our employees and then we might prioritize, you know, the tech or the finances and they go hand in hand, but we’re often um we’re really looking at the impact on the person so when we look at our benefits package when we look at our time off policy like all of those things we take up people. First lens too and like is this really improving the wellness of our culture or is it not um so thinking about just those systems are really important um so I’ve been really happy and you’re right from the top down like you have to have the buy in of the CEO or it’s never gonna stick um and I think she’s a huge advocate for wellness which is makes it a lot easier for sure. Uh, have you hired any new team members since the inaugural team? OK, um, so we only have a sample size of one, but what was the reaction when they were told that there’s a wellness, you’re, well, the wellness. Uh, the wellness coach, yeah, we have a wellness coach on on our team. What was the reaction? I think it was a huge draw so, um, part of the recruiting process, everyone we talked to the candidates before we made our final selection we’re all very excited about it. I think at first we had to explain it because it’s not something you see often so there’s a lot of education around this is. Resource for you they’ll be, you know, counseling available they’ll also just be a coach there to help you with your sort of own understanding of all of the dimensions of wellness, um, and it’s a 4 day work week like all those things were huge draws. I think it got us the the the big candidate pool that we saw, uh, and the final candidate that was selected was very excited about it. outstanding and uh productivity. I don’t know you don’t have a, you don’t have a control group. it wasn’t a pre-A and now how do you measure the productivity of the wellness program? It’s a great question, and we talk a little bit about metrics in our in our session tomorrow, um, because you’re right, there’s no control group pre wellness coach and 4 day work week and sort of people centric culture, but I think the metrics you we. And look at and use are a lot of the ones that other places have things like your employee engagement scores so like net promoter um but also just feedback. I know you know feedback is um is often seen as anecdotal but like anecdotal data is still data and so feedback from employees um we we haven’t um launched a net promoter score survey yet but we’ve gathered like you know monthly feedback on different offerings we’ve talked. The the staff, um, but I think turnover is like the biggest thing I look at it’s a lagging metric, um, and nobody has left. Well, always a good thing, right? Like no one’s like, I’m out of here, this isn’t working for me. There’s no exit interview data, yeah, exactly, um, so I think those are just big things to to keep an eye on and then there’s just, you know, participation rates of who’s engaging with the the services we offer, the programs we offer, um, their satisfaction from those programs and all of that that you can measure. Right, Sam, can you leave us with a wellness tip that we haven’t talked about yet? I’ll put you on the spot. You must have a deep repertoire of a tip tip. Yes, yes, your screen or away from screens. OK. Um, Mandy, Mandy, uh, vice president of people at the Fresh Perspective Group. Sam Hanley, wellness coach at the Fresh Perspective Group, Sam, Sam, you go by Sam Andy. That’s yeah that’s our duo name now. It’s the the the team, thank you, thank you very much for sharing. Thank you for having us. Thank you very much. And thank you for being with Tony Martignetti nonprofit radio coverage of 25 NTC, the 2025 nonprofit technology conference, where we are sponsored by Heller Consulting technology services for nonprofits. It’s time for Tony’s Take 2. Thank you, Kate. Very similar to what I said last week. The federal budget process is still ongoing in Washington DC. There are hearings, there are negotiations going on, and there are bad things in the budget for nonprofits. For instance, uh, uh, something that I didn’t mention last week, the, uh, the permission of the authority for the Secretary of the Treasury to singularly denote that a charity is a terrorist supporting organization. Now, you may recall, that sounds familiar, because back in late last year, There was the House resolution. Remember 9495, it was the nonprofit killer bill, a lot of people called it. That’s what 9495 allowed them to do. Now that that didn’t pass in the last Congress, so it’s not called that anymore, but the, the unilateral authority for the Secretary of the Treasury to designate a charity in that way and thereby, you know, canceling the charitable status, that is part of the proposed budget. Um, there are also the, the big funding cuts to, uh, USAID and the State Department for, uh, for foreign funding, um, so, you know, there are, there are bad things in the budget proposed for the nonprofit community. I’m urging you to contact your Congressional representatives, senators, and your House of Representative, House of Representatives representative, your congress people. Uh, let them know how important your work is and how important our nonprofit community is that you don’t want to see it threatened. That you don’t want to see funding cuts. How vital the work is that all the members of the nonprofit community do. Uh, I had said last week, I, I, I had a LinkedIn post last week that had a link for how to find your senators and your congressmen or or congresswoman. Um, you know, it’s easy to find. You don’t, you don’t need my LinkedIn post. It’s just last week I had done it, but I do urge you to reach out to these folks. I’ve been doing it, I’ve been, my people, uh, the, the, the three that I call, you can only leave messages, it’s unbelievable, and nobody ever picks up. But if that’s, that’s all you can get, that’s fine. They need to hear from All of us how important. The nonprofit community is in the US. And that is Tony’s take too. Kate I remember in high school we had to, one of our assignments was to actually make an email and then send it over to our congressman. So if a high schooler can do it, I think anyone can do it. Uh, absolutely, yes, it’s not hard to, you can reach them by email, by phone, uh, you can go in person because they have offices throughout your state, however you do it. It’s, it’s, yeah, very doable. We’ve got bou but loads more time. Here is email deliverability. Thank you for joining our 25 NTC coverage. We’re live at the Baltimore Convention Center. My guest now is Ann Paska. Very close. Pashka Pitch. There’s an accent over the sea, which is an unusual character. accent is. Yes, it is. Uh, well, it’s actually my wife’s last name. I’m Pasky. She was co-pitched. We’re married now we’re Pask pitch, uh, and she was born in Yugoslavia, which doesn’t exist anymore. OK, yes. Yeah, so I haven’t seen that before. I don’t know if it’s definitely a lot of our friends thought we were joking until they saw it on our legal documents, but it’s, uh, we didn’t wanna pick one over the other. Well, did you decide who goes first? No, we just thought Pakay. I agree. OK, OK, wonderful. Uh, she’s Ann Paskaic, managing production specialist at M. They probably just say, yeah, it’s uh we are a consulting firm, uh, we do digital work, advocacy, audience research, advertising, uh, mostly digital, some PR social media, well, most of that’s online as well, um, we work with nonprofits across the country and across the world. Your topic is email deliverability. Have the rules changed? That’s almost an ironic or sarcastic question, uh, because they have indeed changed. We’re gonna talk about. Uh, you know, so we’ve had this topic over a few times in the past 3 to 4 years, uh, probably because the rules are, are, are changing. So, so the answer to your question is, uh, or maybe it’s a rhetorical question. Yeah, the answer is yes, right? It’s mostly changed. There’s some things that have stayed the same, um, I mean for a given level of same, of course we’re sending emails and. Not just uh mail and phone calls anymore, but some stuff is the same but a lot has changed. For instance, uh, you say in your session topic, are only mail the people who’ve opened recently. Oh no, that’s not true anymore. Now it’s clicked. Only mail to people who have clicked. So where, where do we get started with this? Is this an OK place to start or what? I think this is a great place to start because I think who do you email? How can you tell that they’re consenting is essentially the question, you know, of course you’ve got people who hopefully have opted in um at a minimum you wanna give them the language that says you’re getting emails maybe you have a confirmed opt in, but then once they’re on their list, how can you tell that sort of ongoing consent? I think that my approach to this is, you know, deliverability can be really technical and complicated, but you just have to remember that the people on the other end are humans and you’re trying to read those signals to try and understand what’s going on with the human at the other end. In terms of the opens question, um, of course Apple came out in 2021 with the Apple privacy policy for emails, uh, which basically said it’s common knowledge, it may not be common, it’s not so common, but, but you’re the expert so I glad you thank you for breaking this down for us, but, uh, just in case there are any listeners who didn’t, uh, who didn’t know that, uh, I’m with you. I did not know that Apple came out with this, uh, 4 years ago now. Yeah, so give us the history. No, no, I’m not, I didn’t want you to gloss over. I just want, I didn’t want, I don’t want anybody to be uh disappointed if they didn’t, they weren’t aware of this common knowledge. That’s true, that’s true. I I I assume obviously it’s my. If you were watching your email open rights, if you’re in the part of your industry that does that, you probably saw them go haywire in early 2022 and that is because of this change. So what Apple did is they said essentially You know, when somebody opens an email, the way that we track opens is whether or not they download a tiny little tracking pixel, so essentially an image, and when you download that it sends a bunch of additional information to the CRM that you’re using, whatever, um, where are you, what’s your IP address, what device you’re on. And essentially Apple said, you know, we’re really big on privacy and we think that that’s too much information. So what they did is that anybody who opted into this new policy, which they opt you in by default, so pretty much anybody with an iPhone has opted in, yeah, yeah unless you’re a real nerd and you’re like, I’m gonna go 3 levels down on the menu and turn it off. Um, what they do is they essentially open the emails on your behalf. So instead of like Ann Paska Pitch Malden, Massachusetts, my home’s IP address, if I have an iPhone, then that privacy policy just says, oh this was opened by Apple and you know Pasadena, California or wherever that IP address is, so it is protecting my privacy. On the marketer’s end, instead of getting, well, OK, probably a human person downloaded this tracking pixel and we can see where they are, we can see what their devices, you just get well Apple opened this and because Apple opens that for everybody with an iPhone, just a lot of people, what happened is Openreach just kind of went everywhere. Um, it depends on the email tool you’re using. Some email tools that, you know, this is confusing, we’re gonna separate it out, we’re gonna, we can look at the signals and say. This is a human eye open, um, yeah, you know, like oh it’s Pasadena, California and Apple’s IP that’s a machine, you know, it’s a little more complicated than that, but from our end we were able to be like, oh OK, this is human open, this is machine open. Usually they prioritize looking at those human opens your open rates go down. For everybody else, the CRMs went like, I don’t know, it’s still an open, it’s all the same and so their open rates went up because everybody with an iPhone was quote unquote opening everything, yeah. And then coming back to the like how do you target your emails um before this change we said you know opens are good top of the funnel indication that somebody is probably looking at your email, you know, it’s a bit of a rough it was a it was a rough statistic even then because of course if you have all your images blocked or you’re just on a slow connection and the images don’t load, doesn’t matter if you read the email, it’s not going to download that tracking pixel and track it as an open. And then on the flip side, if you’re one of those people that opens an email in order to delete it, that was tracking as an open, but an open was still kind of a good indicator that at least a human was using that email address and probably looked at your email. OK, right, that that we could say. Yeah, and it was like a good rough estimate. And of course Apple comes out with this change and everybody’s like, well now I don’t know if a humans looked at it, uh, you know, the machine is doing this and I don’t know if somebody’s completely ignoring it, um, so a lot of organizations said, well, I’m not going to take into account Ops anymore because I don’t think it’s a good good success. So we’re talking about the users or the the email the email providers. Uh, neither the, the nonprofits who are sending our email, yeah, yeah, yeah, OK, we’re part of this too. OK, so we don’t know what to. Yeah, yeah, you know, like I’m somebody reading my email. I’m not gonna notice the difference. Inbox providers, they can still get all that information because they have access, you know, if I’m Gmail, I own the inbox, even if you’re looking at it through your Apple iPhone. So they’re still getting the same data. It’s just us as marketers who are using a third party tool that’s, you know, only tracking opens through that little pixel. That’s where our data starts to get weird and our decisions about who to send to has this whole other variable. OK, so let’s drill down on that because that’s what our listeners I think are gonna be most interested in um at least in this around this part of the, this part of the topic, who should I be mailing to or who should I be scrubbing off. Or whatever that’s not the right. Who should I be dropping off our list because they’re not engaged. They’re bringing down our engagement rate. They, they don’t, they don’t open or maybe we, we don’t know if they open or even if we assume they open but they don’t click, they’re still bringing down our engagement rates because because the providers know all this, right? You know, they know what you see, they know if you, if you, if you open it or if you only look at it in your um. The browser, not the like the preview pane yeah yeah if you only see the preview pane you know if you click, you know if you open or open and then click. They know everything they know how far down you scroll. They know how many times you looked at it. They they know if you like after reading it, did you like carefully file it away in a file folder or did you delete it? Did you forward it? Did you, yeah, like all of these things they’re collecting every single data point. And feeding into their machine learning and we’re over here with that for your emails to people’s inboxes or not that’s the subject. OK, so what’s your uh expert advice? Who should we be taking off our list or if you want to approach it in the positive, who should we be mailing to so. I’m gonna say you should actually be emailing people that open and this is not what we thought was gonna happen when Apple came out with this whole machine thing but it turns out um whether you’re looking at just machine and human opens or rather whether you’re able to distinguish between them or they’re just in a big pool, you can’t tell the difference, different tools are different. Opens are still a really good indicator of whether somebody is using that inbox and it turns out that that is good enough for inbox providers um yeah pretty low threshold it it is a pretty inbox, yeah, well, it’s not just somebody owns it, it’s that. So sorry, I’m I’m gonna, I’m I’m gonna do other sidebar. So Apple’s robots will only open emails if one that email is landing in the inbox. So if you have a bad reputation, your email is going to spam, the robot’s not gonna open that essentially they’re like this isn’t good enough. I’m not gonna open it. Probably nobody’s gonna pull this out of spam and look at it. They also only open emails if somebody’s actually using that inbox. So if you, you know, we talked about me changing my name when I got married. I’ve got an Ann Pasky email address. If I don’t use that anymore and I stopped using it, so I stop logging on, then Apple’s gonna stop opening those emails for me, you know, they’ve they’ve they’ve got a lot of server space but it’s not infinite, so they’re not gonna spend it on people who aren’t using their email. So, if you get that machine open, it might not mean that I actually saw it, but it does mean that it 1 landed in my inbox and 2 that I am actively logging into that account. And it turns out, and again like this is not what I thought was going to happen, you know Apple came out, we said you should look at pulling back to just looking at other indicators, but what we saw is that the groups who were like I’m gonna wait, I’m gonna like wait until I see problems uh by targeting these opens that may be humans and may be machines they never had problems um they they saw that continuing to email. Active addresses whether or not those people were actually engaging with their emails in terms of opens kept them in a healthy deliverability spot. OK yeah, alright, so, so encapsulate to summarize that for our listeners who are not technologists but they’re certainly technology users uh into a sentence or two that we can digest. Yes, so if you are targeting your email list based on activity and open is a good indicator of activity. That was very concise. Thank you. I hope it was helpful. Yeah, yeah, it’s, it’s not the only indicator, you know, I think you should also be looking at clicks, you should be looking at things that aren’t deliverability related but are important to your program, whether that’s donors or event attendance or whatever other indicators somebody’s giving you that they’re going to be engaged because Tony, deliverability is not the point, right? It’s a tool, it’s a, it’s a requirement if people aren’t gonna read your emails if they can’t see them, but ultimately most people aren’t running a program where the goal is to deliver emails to the inbox. They’re trying to change the world. They’re trying to like talk to people, yeah, so. That’s why I say like also target people based on recent online actions because that’s what you’re actually going for. It’s not all about the technology and it’s it’s a yes, absolutely. It’s an online but it’s a nonetheless. Um, OK, making sure everyone has opted in. No, that’s not quite true anymore. Now we want double opt in. What, what, what’s the issue here? This is, this is a big one and one that I think is really different in the nonprofit space compared to, you know, obviously a lot of the advice out there is for for profits, you know, assuming you’re you’re selling the shoes or something like that. And this is where I feel like my take is maybe a little controversial but it’s based on what I’ve seen you don’t have to do a confirmed opt in if somebody is, for example, donating. They are putting down their credit card information they’re saying I care about you as an organization and I’m giving you my money and it is OK to just say, hey, thank you as part of that we are opting you into email. Obviously always give people the option to unsubscribe um you know there are some situations where you might want to do a confirmed opt in where it’s something like. Uh, we have an organization that sends, uh, cards to children in the hospital, and a lot of people want to do that, but they don’t actually care about signing up for the email list. So that’s a situation where we might want to do a confirmed opt in or a double opt in. Um, or anywhere where you’re a little bit worried about the quality of names you’re getting. So if you’re having people like sign up at a at an event and they’re typing things into an iPad or even if you’re writing your name on a piece of paper, that’s where you might want to make sure, hey, are you, did you make a typo? Is this really your email address? Did you really mean to sign up and send them that email confirmation that they have to click on to confirm, you know that? That is what a double opt in is, yes. you did not explain that. Yeah, we have jail. Yeah, opt in, confirmed opt in. It just means I put my email in on a form, but then I have to go to my inbox and click that link before I actually start receiving emails. Yeah. We do that all the time exactly a couple times a week. I mean it seems routine, OK, but that’s a double opt in so initially we’ve included you but please confirm. And then you confirm through clicking on an email, yes, yes, and that is kind of the gold standard of opt in, but of course a lot of people don’t do that so you have to kind of gauge what are my quality of names, what’s the likelihood that they’re going to see that one single confirmation email versus maybe the quality of action that brought them onto your list. How does this impact deliverability? the the inbox providers know whether there’s a double opt in? They do not. All they know is what happens when your email gets to the inbox that they own or you know, that they provide for your subscriber, their customer. Um, I guess they do it, yeah, yeah, they’re providing a, yeah, they’re providing a service to the user who is your supporters probably, um, and I feel like it’s important. I’m talking here about, uh, mostly free mail providers like Gmail, Yahoo, Microsoft, you know, Hotmail, AOL, um, when we’re talking about. Uh, like, like a corporate inbox provider, um, meaning like I have a company and our IT team runs the spam filters versus Google running the spam filters. Those rules might be different. Most nonprofits lists are, you know, individual people using those free email boxes. The rules are a little bit different if you’re, um, mostly talking to corporations. Well, now we get to what which email address people have provided. Isn’t the personal, isn’t the personal email more valuable because it’s less likely to change through a person’s life? Yeah, yeah, but I think it also depends on like what context you’re talking in, um, you know, like I I just signed up for your list and I give you my work email because this is a work relationship so uh different organizations are gonna be relating to people in different parts of their lives. Right. Well, I guess it, I guess it depends on the relationship from the user perspective, which, which you gave us the second rate email because you might change your business and then I would lose you. I might, I might, but I don’t know. I’ve been in MR for almost 13 years now, so it’s, it’s pretty good. I just always have. I, I’m not disparaging your joining our list. Thank you. I’m grateful that you joined the list. I’m not disparaging the email you gave us. I’m having an academic discussion about which is, which is more valuable. I would have, I would think that someone’s Gmail or their, their home, their home, their personal account would be uh a more valuable over time. Address that I think all other things equal somebody’s probably gonna be on their personal email address for a longer period of time, but the thing to think about with deliverability is what what does that person want? Look how smart you are back to the top. I’m I’m wildly digressing and to the topic. Well, I can only speak to my area of expertise, so you’re doing great. Thank you for trying to build up. Um, no, but I think it’s a good question because it’s asking what is valuable to you as the sender versus what is valuable to the recipient if, uh, you know, we’re talking about, um, I mean yeah, let’s keep using me as the example. I’m like, OK, I want I want to know when my recording comes out. I want to know what other sessions you’re doing. That’s a work topic. I try to have good work life boundaries, you know, not always perfect, but so I wanna be like I wanna know when that’s coming out at work and you know be able to forward that email straight from my work email to my marketing email. If your email came to my personal inbox I’d be like no I don’t wanna think about work. I’m trying to trying to see when my pizza is delivered. I’m trying to see what my grandma sent me last week kind of thing. So it is, it’s relative. I might get upset I mean not me, but the hypothetical me might get upset if you’re sending work emails to my personal inbox. So I think that is a thing to be balanced. Like, sure, if I leave my job, you can’t email me my work email address anymore, but that’s where I want it. So I digression. Thanks for using yourself as an example all the time. I don’t know. Does your grandma send you stuff online? She’s pretty savvy. She does sometimes. She’s she’s got an Apple watch. Uh, she’s very, she is 92 and pretty savvy. 2. Yeah, I wouldn’t have even thought that old. Wow, 92 in an Apple watch it? Yeah, she does get her email on it? Uh, I mean, I don’t know if she gets her email. She does try to answer her phone on it sometimes and that’s it’s a little hard, but she’s great. She’s trying, yeah, yeah, not afraid. Apple Watch 92 savvy. Yes, let’s get into some nasty acronyms. Uh, we’ve, we’ve talked about these in the past. I was telling you off mic it was either last year or the year before we did email deliverability from uh at an NTC. SPF or DKIM first I live on the beach, so to me SPF is the sun protection factor. I look for at least 30 sometimes I I may transition to 50. I know that’s not what you’re talking about. Uh, let’s acquaint us first with these before we get to the deliverability advantages or disadvantages of each. Yeah well you know what I I’m gonna actually throw a third one in there and that’s D D M A C, OK, yeah, yeah, we’ll take one at a time. What’s our SPF? Gosh, OK, now I feel like you’re quizzing. It is a sender policy framework SPF. So there you go. Alright, yeah, and what’s its relevance to us in in the deliverability subject? Well, I’m gonna, I’m gonna actually bucket these together. I’m not. No, no, so I think that these are, these are really important to understand. They’re very technical. I will say you only need to understand them once, probably, uh, the first time that you set up your email system, and then you only have to change them if you either change your domain name or send your change your sending IP address, which you probably don’t know what your sending IP address is, so TLDR if you move to a different email system. You know, whoever you’re sending from owns that IP address. All of these different frameworks are just different ways to say, hey, I’m sending an email and I’m allowed to do that and I am who I am, so I like using myself as an example. This doesn’t apply I’m not a bulk sender, but if I were a bulk sender. We’ll use MNR. M&R sends a labs post periodically, you know, I write about deliverability you get in your inbox. Um, the SPF DIM and DMmark are all different ways of saying hello, this email is indeed from M&R. I’m not spamming you. I’m not spoofing. I have permission to send, I have permission to use this IP address and these things all line up, um. Part of the reason I’m bundling this together is honestly, I have spent time trying to understand the technical differences between these and what all of them are. And it doesn’t stick in my head because I don’t need it that often. I mean we needed this initially when we set it up set up our email with our provider, yes, yeah, you, you need to talk to your your email provider, your CRM, whatever you wanna call it, and you need to have access to your DNS, which is the back end of your website essentially, yes, exactly, and it is essentially taking different pieces of code from different. Places and pasting them in other places to say what I said that you are a legitimate you’re sending OK so I think it’s bucket. There are a lot of really great resources about these. I, I will be honest, I am not one of them. I can tell you that you need to have it and I can tell you you should check and keep an eye on it to make sure it doesn’t break, but it is. Hopefully you set it and forget it. If we don’t have an IT uh CIO or an IT director manager, who should we check with? You should check with whoever you are sending your email out of. So your Salesforce, your Fonterra, every action, they will have their support team, um, so one of these again, uh, I don’t have a best friend of mine, one of those, they, they will. have to set up for you to provide the code to say you know we own this IP address and you’re allowed to send from it, but they will be able to help you through the other pieces because obviously they they want you to be able to send email successfully out of their system so they will be able to walk you through the technical difficulties or hopefully not difficulties, the technical details, give you the code, tell you where to put it, talk to if you don’t have an IT team, whoever is the best person with access to the back end of your website. Um, and that sort of thing that they’re gonna be a good resource. This is all about proving that you are who you say you have to send this. Name the sender that we’re telling you it’s coming from. It’s both the domain so whatever parts after the at sign of the email address, so MRSS.com for me uh and the IP address that is owned by that email tool that you’re using. OK, OK, um, we can spend more time together if if there’s more you want to say about deliverability that we haven’t talked about yet. Let’s see, I think the one other thing I wanna say is that um it’s really important to pay attention to and that means some sort of monitoring or reporting system. uh I think that it it is it can be tricky, right, because if you’re a small nonprofit, you don’t have a ton of resources, you’re gonna try to not pay attention until there’s a problem. That can be costly because then first of all you, you have a problem that you haven’t noticed for a while um and then it can be harder to fix and then you’re also trying to fix it at the same time you’re trying to figure out how can I tell if I fixed it. So I think it’s worth taking a little bit of. of time and setting up a couple of tools that will let you monitor what your deliverability is. Is it still generally better to have a mail to a smaller list that’s more engaged than a larger list with a lot of unengaged addresses? That’s a that’s a yes no question and I like to say it depends. um I think that what you wanna look at is how many people you’re actually reaching. I’m not gonna say like smaller is always better. I’m, I’m honestly more in that middle part. I wanna try and figure out how many people you can reach to maximize your program without hurting deliverability and kind of find that line and stay just on this side of it, um. Look at your actual numbers oftentimes if you’re sending to a huge list of people, the only big number is how many emails were sent and how many emails were delivered. You wanna look at, you know, we like to look at percentages, but you wanna look at like who in terms of numbers is actually opening or clicking and especially donating or taking action or signing up for your events or whatever that end goal is. Yeah. Yeah, yeah, exactly. So yeah, so there’s value, you just said this. I’m just reiterating. Uh, there is value in looking at the metrics, some key metrics. I don’t know, once a month or something or maybe more. It depends on how often you’re sending email, but I, I will say not once an email. Um, deliverability can be kind of volatile. So if you’re looking at it once an email is a good way to give yourself a scare and like have a false false positive in terms of there being a problem. Uh, once a month is usually good for most people or once a campaign. Um, and just taking a look at looking at that performance, if you can looking at performance by recipient domain, so dividing up and saying what was the open rate for my gmail.com subscribers, what was the open rate for my Yahoo.com subscribers because all those inbox providers have their own spam filters, so. Even though they use the same kinds of data, their users have different data points, so a decline consistent trend with one provider compared to the others, you might have an issue with that provider web person or IT provider. Rules at that provider. I mean, if you, if it’s noticeable enough that if it’s if it’s enough of a decline that it’s, it bothers you. And if it doesn’t bother you if it’s only a couple of maybe it’s not worth spending time on that. Yes, take a step back, look at your whole program. Yeah, I mean it’s good to look at individual domains because if Gmail thinks you’re you’re absolutely peachy and Yahoo thinks you’re sketchy, why would you do anything about Gmail? Why would you cut back on, you know, maybe main fix that you have is is to send to less engaged people and more sorry less unengaged people and more engaged people and if Gmail says, yeah, no, everybody’s engaged, why would you cut back sending there if the problems with Yahoo. OK, savvy advice overall. Thank you. All right, Ann, Ann, and Pasaic, managing production specialist M and give your grandma my good wishes. I admire 92. I do plan to fundraising, so I work with 70, 80, 90 year olds and I don’t know any 90 year olds with an Apple Watch, so she’s an outlier on, on the good side. On the on the Ambitious. Yeah, in the connected. Thank you. Thank you very much, Ann. Thanks for sharing and thank you for listening as 25 NTC, the 2025 nonprofit technology conference where we are sponsored by Heller Consulting. Next week, healthier productivity from AI with Mika Whitlock and Jason Shim. If you missed any part of this week’s show, I beseech you. Find it at Tony Martignetti.com. Our creative producer is Claire Meyerhoff. I’m your associate producer Kate Martignetti. 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.

Nonprofit Radio for April 8, 2024: Email Deliverability & Email Welcome Journeys

 

Jamie McClelland, Natalie Brenner & Alice AguilarEmail Deliverability

In our age of rampant spam and artificial intelligence, you need to know how to give your emails the best chance of getting delivered. What are DMARC, DKIM and SPF, and how do they help with deliverability? This 2024 Nonprofit Technology Conference panel is Jamie McClelland, Natalie Brenner and Alice Aguilar, all from Progressive Technology Project.

 

Patty Breech & Elizabeth Sellers:  Email Welcome Journeys\

What happens after your emails are delivered and folks want to support your cause? How do you bring them into your family so they’re engaged and stay with you. Also from 24NTC, this panel is Patty Breech at The Purpose Collective and Elizabeth Sellers with Humanity & Inclusion.

 

 

 

 

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Welcome to Tony Martignetti nonprofit radio. Big nonprofit ideas for the other 95%. I’m your aptly named host and the pod father of your favorite abdominal podcast. Oh, I’m glad you’re with us. I’d be stricken with Eisenmenger syndrome if you broke my heart because you missed this week’s show. Our associate producer, Kate is sick and lost her voice. Of course, I wish her a speedy recovery to good health. But then a question comes to mind. Do we need an associate producer? Let’s see how it goes this week, email deliverability in our age of rampant spam and artificial intelligence. You need to know how to give your emails the best chance of getting delivered. What are D mark D Kim and SPF? And how do they help with deliverability? This 2024 nonprofit technology conference panel is Jamie mcclelland, Natalie Brenner and Alice Aguilar, all from progressive technology project and email. Welcome journeys. What happens after your emails are delivered and folks want to support your cause? How do you bring them into your family? So they’re engaged and stay with you. Also from 24 NTC. This panel is Patty Breach at the purpose collective and Elizabeth Sellers with Humanity and Inclusion. I’m Tony take too. I love the wise. We’re 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. This is getting exhausting here is email deliverability. Welcome to Tony Martignetti nonprofit radio coverage of 24 NTC. It’s the 2024 nonprofit technology conference. Of course, we’re in Portland, Oregon. You know that you’ve heard this already. Our continuing coverage is sponsored by Heller consulting here at 24 NTC. Heller does technology strategy and implementation for nonprofits with me now is Jamie mcclelland Technology Systems Director at Progressive Technology Project, also Natalie Brenner, Director of Resource mobilization at Progressive Technology Project, and Alice Aguilar, the leader, the executive director at Progressive Technology Project. Jamie Natalie Alice. Welcome. Thank you. Thanks for having us, Tony. Thank you all. Uh Your session topic is email deliverability in the era of spam and artificial intelligence. Um Alice, let’s start with you. What could you just kick us off? We have plenty of time together but general strokes. What, what could we be doing better? What are we ignoring? Why do we need this session on email ability? This session is really, really important for nonprofits and, and grassroots organizing groups, you know, um in PTPS 25 years, we know that email has been really critical to organizations and, and organizing. Um It’s a critical communication vehicle, um, to get the word out quickly to groups so that they can, and their community so that they can take action. Right. There’s no stamps. Right. It’s pretty instant. As long as somebody on the other side is watching. Right. And, and you know, the thing about email, it’s also the place where we control our own messages. Uh, we control our own lists, you know. So it’s, it’s democracy at work. we control the timing, the timing of it, right? Um So there’s nobody there, you know, like, you know, to like to look at our content. At least that’s how it has been, you know, email is Federated. You know, anybody could be an email service provider and send out your email. But now here’s the thing that we’re seeing, right? There’s this concentration of ownership around technology and you’re seeing this in email. So when organizations are sending out email, about half are going to gmail Yahoo or Outlook Microsoft, right? So, um if you think about that, it’s like now with this most recent changes, if you had seen there’s changes in, in uh Google and Yahoo had changed the rules about what emails are gonna be sent. So there’s a concentration and the rules are changing by the, the companies that control 50% of and so they’re controlling the deliverability, correct, you know, and, and like email is supposed to be different than platforms like Facebook or, you know, X you know where they’re monitoring your contact and the algorithms. Email is your, that’s your words, your story being told. And so, you know, it’s, it’s really critical for our groups to get their messages out. Right. And so now because of these rules and these changes and, and eventually they could just totally, they’re gonna make all sorts of decisions about what email is gonna go. Um We have to, we as organizations have to jump some hoops and take responsibility now to make sure that our emails are delivered and it’s really hard for folks to keep up with this. And that’s why our session is, you know, PTP is gonna help uh groups figure out how do we at least get our messages through these corporate gatekeepers, right? To be able to get that out. So that’s the, that’s the purpose of the session, Natalie. Um Who uh can you expose us to some of these rules or, or one of the rules that’s changed? We have plenty of time together, but Alice mentioned all these rules changing. What, what, what the hell is going on? Thanks, Tony. I knew you were going to ask me the technical question. Are you the person? I’m the accidental techie of the. However. Yeah, absolutely. Does that mean Jamie is the technician is I should say he surely is. Yeah, absolutely. So as Alice was saying, you know, email is kind of kind of the dinosaur of the technology world at the moment, but it’s also so critical still like Alice was saying, even after our 25 years, we’re seeing groups still relying and counting on it. And now they have all these acronyms to work through D Mark D Kim SPF. And what in the hell do those mean? Most of the groups we work with don’t know, I don’t know what the hell they mean. And so our session is going to expose that for folks and tell them how to work through all that Mark Net non profit radio. We have jargon jail. You just transgressed terribly like you are in it to bail you out. Obviously. D Mark D Kim and I am in jargon jail and I totally accept that will get you out. Pf to me is some protection factor because I live on and I probably even said the wrong jargon. We don’t even know, but I live on a beach in North Carolina. So to me, that’s my 50 at least help us just before we get into the technical details. Just what are these rules about, right? The, the main goal of the rules is to stop fraud. Um You’ve probably received an email that was sent from Tony Martignetti and it wasn’t you? Yeah. Yes, I have. It’s another guy out there and there are other folks I think I might have just called you Mark. By the way, it’s Jamie because we have another, it’s not D Jamie. It’s D mark is the acronym and Jamie is the, that’s where it came from. Thank you. That’s very gracious of you to bail me out. It was my fault. It’s mine. I made the right Jamie. So the main idea is fraud because Google and Yahoo, in this case, at least they’re trying to impose new limits for a noble cause which is they want to stop people from being able to send messages that claim to be from your domain name, but they aren’t. And your domain name is the part after the at sign in your email address. And you don’t want, I don’t want to get a message from Alice at progressive tech.org that says, hey, Jamie, your payroll didn’t go through click here in order to make sure it’s proper, that’s what we’re trying to stop. Have there been problems with Mark’s payroll payroll? No, I get it from Natalie asking me to like, hey, I forgot the login for our bank account. I need to get these checks. Can you please just click here and just give me you hover over the email address and it’s like that’s not Alex dot ru when you hover over. So they’re doing it for a noble cause they’re doing it for a noble cause. And you might, you know, 10 years ago you got these also, but they were full of typos and they were so obviously not from Natalie or not from Alice, but now with artificial intelligence. It’s possible for anyone you don’t even like, you can be anywhere with any kind of language skills and you can have a perfectly written email that’s very convincing. And, and they’ve also cut down on the, uh, the estates, you know, a $45 million estate greetings of the day, you know, from one of the African countries, you cannot, they are smarter, they are smarter and they’re closer to the real thing, close to the real thing. And so, you know, if you hover over and it says.ru it’s easy. But what if you hover over? And it says Alice at Progressive tech.org which it can you just to make clear.ru is a domain, a Russia, it’s a country level domain name. It’s owned by Russia and it could be anything. Tony dot Ma Ma is Morocco, it’s country of America. So every year I think I pay 75 or 100 and $75 or something to the, to the to the my domain provider. Of course, but they’re paying the country of Morocco for my dot Ma U so.ru is Russia, which means it’s very likely spam. I’m sorry, Jamie. That’s great. So the deep dark secret is that from the beginning of the internet, you could send an email that was from progressive tech.org and you still can send an email, you can put whatever from address you want in the email protocol. It allows it, you can put whatever you want in the from address and it really will be whatever domain name you want it to be. So these new rules and regulations are intended to stop that. And there’s two main rules that are used to test and the test, one of them is called SPF for Sender policy framework, policy framework. And that one says I can, I love the energy between the three of you, Natalie and Alice are giggling while, while Jamie is talking, I love the energy we’ve been working. Plus there’s this guy Mark who’s presence is hovering over us. We’re channeling Mark even though he’s 3000 miles away. Are you, are you based in New York or a Texas, Texas? Paul Minnesota. I’m in New York is somewhere. We’ve worked together for over a decade and he’s only five 100 miles but his presence is felt we’re channeling. So SPF again, SPF is center policy framework and this allows us as progressive tech.org to publish to the internet to say if you get an email that claims to be from progressive tech.org, it has to be sent from one of these 10 servers. And if it wasn’t sent from one of these 10 servers, you should consider it fraudulent because there’s only 10 servers that legitimately send our email. Those are the email servers of our internet service provider. So that center policy framework, if Google or Yahoo or proton mail or may 1st mail, whatever, that’s an email that claims to be from progressive tech.org. That email provider can look up our SPF record check to see if it was sent from the right server and if it wasn’t sent from the right server, it fails the SPF test. D mark. Let me do D mark last DKIM. Let’s work on Kim. There’s no, no job description. Your name must be Kim. We’ll accept middle name, first name preferred. We’ll keep an open mind. Kim is a signature. It’s a digital signature. When we tell us what the acronym stands for, can I on the domain key identified? Male? Yes, there’s math involved. There’s math involved. There’s some very cool math involved. So he said cool math what I was saying? I thought it was redundant. So dkim, when a message is sent by us, we insert a digital signature into the header part of the email, the header is usually hidden from most people. So you can’t see it, but a digital signature is sent with the email message. So when the receiving server gets the message, the receiving server sees the signature and then it has to look up your DKIM record to see if it’s a valid signature and if it is a valid signature, then you pass the DKIM test. So two tests every does every email have to pass all three of these tests that we’re talking? Right? So that’s where Mark comes in. This is the rule. Oh jeez, don’t ask me what that one stands for the D mark is when you make those two tests and then the receiving service says, well, what do I do if it fails? And a dar policy can be, none says, don’t do anything. It’s OK. You can be fraudulent and two is reject and three is quarantine, which are in practice mostly the same. So in other words, you can set your SPF and your DKIM so that the receiving server can tell whether it’s valid. And then you can say this is what you should do if it fails either one of those two. So if the rule is you only have to pass one, so you can fail SPF. But if you pass DKIM, you pass, you can fail DKIM. But if you pass the SPF and the reason is because there’s actual legitimate reasons why you might fail one or the other, it’s still valid and you could fail one or the other. So you just need one. 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 respond 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. Virtuous, 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 email deliverability. This really is getting exhausting now. All right. So we’re acquainted with what the rules are rules, these are new rules. So this is, this is, I mean, if you consider relative to the internet, this is ancient history. These rules have been around for over 10 years, but the way rules become adopted is very slow. So what Yahoo and Gmail have done is they’re trying to speed adoption of these rules by saying we’re going to reject your email if you don’t have these three things in place. And it’s kind of interesting because D Mark is supposed to say no, you’re supposed to accept it if the policy is none, but Gmail is breaking that protocol and say no, we’re going to reject it. If you don’t, if you don’t have one of SPF or Din, we’re going to reject it regardless of D Mark. If you send more than 5000 messages a day, we’re really going to make sure you have at least one of these two and you have to have ad mark policy, even if the D MARK policy says none, you still have to have that D Mark policy if you’re a bulk sender and we’re gonna stop you. We’re gonna, we’re gonna break away from the technology part of it. I wanna talk. No, no, we’re not abandoning. I mean, it’s important, but we’re gonna move to leadership Alice. What, what is a nonprofit leader’s role in ensuring email deliverability? Well, you’re the executive director. What, what do you feel you take on in, in, you know, in your role obviously as your role as executive director, what do you think is your responsibility around email deliverability? Our responsibilities are responsible to our help our groups because that’s what we do. We support community organizing groups, that’s our niche. Um really think about like, you know, because we care about their work and we care that they get the communications out. It’s our responsibility as our team to understand these rules to be on top of this stuff, which is really hard. I mean, we’re a team of three plus mark out there. Don’t forget I can’t, you know, and so we have to like sift through and keep up with these rules because our groups don’t have time for that. We work with small to medium sized organizations that don’t have a tech arm. They don’t have a techie, they have accidental techies like Natalie, um which we make Natalie do a lot of things, right? They make me do a lot of, you know, so, so that’s our responsibility to move. We were there to really help groups navigate this world and also help them understand the role of technology in their organizing work and the impacts um that technology has in society and for social change. And this email stuff is critical because there’s so much dependence, we call it dependence on the master’s tools. You know, Audrey Lord, uh the master’s tools will never dismantle the master’s house. You know. So for us, it’s like having we, we throw in a lot of political education around the role of technology. Email is like the one that everybody understands, but they don’t realize that as organizations that their emails are not getting sent. And they’re wondering like, why can’t we move our folks just because they’re not receiving an email. And so our responsibility is to help them get that word out. And so we deconstruct this stuff, figure it out. Jamie memorizes these acronyms and we hold trainings, we actually hold trainings, we help them navigate, help them get things set up. That’s our, that’s our role. My role is to work to move our team to make sure that this is we’re doing the best we can. We work with almost 100 and 50 organizations, nonprofit, uh grassroots organizations. It’s, it’s our job to make sure that we’re on it and in a timely way and we keep up with it and also translate, right? We got to translate this stuff for the groups that don’t have a technologist. They don’t have the benefit of a Jamie, right. And also the, the understanding is not, it’s, it’s again, understanding that role because we sort of like use whatever is easy. But to do this stuff is actually takes a little bit of, you have to dig in a little bit and that’s our job to help dig in and we’re gonna get to what to do very, very, very shortly. But this is why this is perfect for our listeners because most of our listeners small and mid-sized nonprofits, they don’t have the benefit of a full time or even maybe even an outsource technologist, like you’ve got Jamie. Alright, Natalie, how do you, how do you fit into this? So, um I have been with progressive technology project for 11 years and I started in an administrative role um and in a small organization that doesn’t take a whole lot of time. Um And so I started to learn how to do technical support and started working on the programming aspect of things. Um started training alongside my colleagues. Um We provide several trainings a year online and we’re going to do our first in person since COVID this year, probably this fall. Um And so I do a little bit of everything and it’s wonderful. Can you so can you help us start to get into the topic of how to design your own emails so that they, so that they meet, meet the criteria? Don’t suffer the uh the consequences of, of D mark. I got these acronyms down. Now, you got to do one of the two SPF or D Kim and D Mark will evaluate, will instruct the internet. Well, the email provider, what to do if, if one of those two tests is not passed, I’m, you’re like your name. I didn’t say hirable. You don’t want me as an employee. I’d be a terrible employee. You wouldn’t want me as an employee. But yeah, there’s a lot of things you can do to help before you get to the acronyms. There’s a lot of things that you can do on the front end to help your emails get delivered. And that has to do with setting up your template, not including weird characters or you know, animated GS like the word free can sometimes be, don’t use the word invoice or free in your subject line in your subject line. Don’t send an email to 20,000 people and include an attachment, things like that. And so we do train on things like that as well. And then on the technical end of things, you’ve got all the acronyms to work through and there’s lots of ways that you can get help addressing those if you don’t have a technologist at your organization or if you’re not with a social justice partner, like progressive technology project, um where we provide uh really awesome support to help you through that. So I want to go into a little more detail about the structure of emails, the planning of emails. So that uh Jamie, you want, I mean, I don’t know, Natalie, should we stay with you? I, I’m just, I’m still concerned about the subject line. Leave out free, leave out invoice free at if you’re sending to thousands of people that don’t do attachment. What else just about? Yeah. So, you know, there’s a lot going around these days from different consulting firms or organizations talking about how to craft a subject line that will gain attention. And that’s really important. But you also have to just be careful about the buzzwords that you’re using to avoid the pitfalls. And it’s not that hard if you’re talking about a subject line. Do you guys have anything to add? I think everything Natalie said is straight on some of it. It is common sense. You receive lots of spam messages and you don’t want your email to sound like that and look like that. And some of it can be obvious the no free act. Now there’s a lot of exclamation points, things like that sometimes get picked up. But I think that’s important. It’s becoming less important as these new rules and regulations are happening because it’s getting bigger, the data’s getting much bigger. And I feel like the big providers are really getting a little bit better at differentiating between the spam and the non spam. So I think that really important is following these rules and getting your domain names properly set up. Um, the only other things I would add are just, there might be personal preferences. Like a lot of people have the subject line newsletter number three, number 12. And it’s like, no, it’s the same thing I find too. I think most personally and this is very, like, there’s a matter of taste. I’m not a big fan of the newsletter that has 12 different stories in it because I see a subject line and I decide whether I’m going to open that message based on what’s in the subject line. You can’t put 12 things in a subject line. Yeah, but then whatever is not in the subject line is buried and it’s difficult. I’m a bigger fan of sending out more frequent emails with um that are shorter that like you, you see in the subject line, what it is and then you’re going to open it and you’re going to read it as opposed to a long newsletter. Now, do things like frequency. Does that impact your deliverability? Frequency? So too many, too much. No. In fact, it’s the opposite quantity and volume help you because a lot of these are percentile rankings where the providers are going to say, oh, wow, we received 1000 messages that were successfully sent and not complained about and you got two complaints. That’s a, you know, very tiny percentage. If you send 10 messages and you get two complaints, it’s, you know, it’s like a complaint can sink you more. So they’re tracking, there are, aren’t, aren’t the providers also able to track what people do with your message, whether they, whether they, whether they, whether they put it, whether they market junk, do, are they able to track that you’re doing in your inbox? They’re 100% able to track it. And it’s a black box as to what the algorithm is as to what they’re doing. And this is one of the, when you’re talking about, I think what leadership as a nonprofit sector, a lot of that has to do with paying attention to the power we’re giving these corporations. You’re familiar as a media person in the nineties, we were really fighting hard against the concentration of media ownership. It was a huge threat and it’s still a massive, massive threat. The same thing is happening with email, there’s a concentration in owner within the internet in general and with email in particular with Google Yahoo and Outlook. And we think, you know, Google is free and it’s not, it is like it comes with a price cash. Right. Exactly. Exactly. Surrender, privacy, surrender. Yes. What did you say? Free as kittens? Ac RM kind of thing. Free. Yes, exactly. So, but that’s where this black box comes in is that we’re giving the power to a very small number of corporations to decide based on our actions and based on who knows what, whether the message should arrive in the inbox. Now, these new regulations, I think they are in the public interest. I’m very glad that Google and Yahoo have decided that they’re going to cut down on fraudulent email. I applaud that, I think that’s good, but they’re doing it for their own reasons. And that means next time they might have other changes that they want. And I’m not at all comfortable with us as a sector saying sure, we’ll give three corporations the ability to dictate what messages land in the inbox, especially during these really crazy political times, it’s un predictable what could happen. And I prefer for us as a movement for us as a nonprofit sector to diversify. I really encourage people to look at other providers. Don’t just go to Outlook or Google because your a technologist says, oh, this is a simple thing that everyone’s doing. It’s really important to diversify to go to other providers. And I just want to say like, you know, we can make a choice, we make a choice to voluntarily give up our, you know, work, go to gmail because it’s oh, it’s so easy and, and it does all these things, but we can make changes now, right? I mean, I think that’s what PTP, what we stand for is we believe in people controlled technology for social change because then we can control, right, our data, our messages, how we wanna get things delivered. And so and, and also design it the way we need it right? To design it, the way organizations and organizing, really need to do the work and in our language, right? So this is where we can make choices. But it’s, um, it’s usually most folks get directed, right? Because of whether it’s consulting or sometimes it’s foundations. I hate to say it. But, you know, because you’ll get free money if you just like, everybody get on 365 Microsoft. right? It’s like without thinking and it’s like, but meanwhile, here they are doing work, you know, and that’s anti corporate work or something, you know, and so be conscious about your choices, especially how it may, may uh coincide with your own cause you were going to say something. I am in total agreement with all of that. And I just wanted to go back to a little bit about email deliverability on the recipient’s end. A shout out to all email recipients out there. I know the spam button looks very inviting for every single email that you don’t want to see in your inbox. However, if it’s not real spam, if it’s from an organization where you went to their gala maybe and you decide you don’t want their email, try to click unsubscribe because when you click spam, you know that goes in to mark against that organization and maybe that’s not what you intended. The user actions that do get collected aggregated. I was gonna ask you too, Natalie about Alright. So as a recipient, be thoughtful. Not real spam and we get it. You don’t want our stuff. That’s totally cool. You get to make that choice but just like unsubscribe instead of a spam. What about cleaning up your list? I mean, isn’t there in, in having a smaller list that’s not gonna mark your spam that’s more engaged with your emails and having a bigger list and, and lower quality receipt actions. That’s such a good point. And uh with power base, the database for community organizers through our support, we do a ton of work with um the groups we work with on duping, making sure you have valid and correct email addresses, you know, having a sign up sheet at your gala or your event is great. Um However, if those people are clicking unsubscribe, make sure they’re actually getting unsubscribed in your database. Um You can even go so far as to if you want to keep them in your database, remove their email address, just you brought up such a good point. Make sure you’re not sending it’s, you know, quality over quantity. Definitely you don’t need to send to the world, you know, do some searches in your database for who is the most engaged and send them a particular email segmenting your list can be very helpful for that. Yeah. Did you have more to add? No, I was just saying it’s like, it’s sort of interesting because the idea of unsubscribing, people should know that they’re only unsubscribing from that one list. And organizations are great at like, creating multiple lists for multiple different things and just like, I have 1625 30 different communications lists and like, people are wondering why am I getting all these emails? Because, well, you only subscribe from the one list, you know, so what that email list was on and sometimes you may not know what list you’re on so organizations can do that too. I mean, if you think it’s good to have 25 communication lists, maybe you should pair it down to 10, maybe like limit. I have another technical question. Mark Jamie. I want to ask you to myself. Don’t be so harsh if I was a DJ DJ. Got it. Alright. Um You mentioned setting your domain name up properly. What did you mean by that, please? So with Dkim Dar and SPF these all are referred to stop laughing at the, stop laughing at the acronyms are bona fide. He got you out of jargon jail. Some gratitude. I would, I would charge you interest on the bail payment. I just made quite an acronym. Yeah. Jeez. So how do you do? How do you put up with this? This is a virtual organization. I was glad you’re not all based on the laugh at your technology. So your domain name, she’s I know she’s going to apologize for that. I know she feels bad already. I can say she’s blushing. I’m putting, I’m putting her on the spot. Does she feel she feel bad? I do. I sorry, deeply sorry, apology accepted. I know they really care about setting up your domain name. So if you own your own domain name, then you have a company that’s called the Registrar, which is where you pay an annual fee. Usually about $20 a year for the right to have this domain name. Domain 10 one is a big one. Hover name.com, gandhi.net registrar.com. There’s a number of different ones. The company you’re paying for your annual registration exactly. Now, that often is different than the company you’re paying to host your domain name. Now, these are really subtle and nuanced differences but they are important differences. The company that you pay to host your domain name is usually the same company you pay to host your website or your email or something like that that’s usually packaged together. Now, the company that’s hosting your domain name is where you can set what your domain name records point to. So that’s what you say DNR S domain name records. Yeah. Well, DNR, I don’t know if I haven’t heard that accurate. That makes me think of testing Department of Natural Resources. We can name them. All right. Look, I have the board here. I can shut your mic down. Not supposed to make fun of the host that consolidation of power. You’re damn right. This is not progressive technology project. Nonprofit Radio. This is Tony Martignetti, Nonprofit Radio. You’re damn right. The middle aged white guy is taking over explicitly. At least I do it explicitly. I acknowledge the power so I’ll shut you down. All right. So no domain name record if we spell it, DNR do. So that’s what you’d say. This domain name points to this IP address. If you want to send an email to this domain name, it should go to this mail server. Those are the historic ways that domain names have been used and they’re being added to and order to support the SPF, DKIM and D Mark records. So SPF is a kind of a domain name record called the text record. And DKIM is also used as the text record. So you say for progressive tech.org, show me the text record and it will say SPF policy is this or you say, OK, and you look it up just the same way you’d say for this domain name. That’s the IP address. How do we make sure we’re set up correctly? You know, I would love technical help with this. I would love to explain to you how to do that. That would take a diagram in 45 minutes. It’s painful. I’m embarrassed as a technologist, how complicated it is to do this. The best I can say is first ask your consultant, staff or volunteer if you’re lucky enough to have one, if you’re not then ask your web host and if your web host can’t do it and you have a database, maybe you have power base or maybe you have um sales force or maybe you have networks nation or any of the other corporate places. Ask them because they’re the place you’re sending your bulk email, they have a responsibility to help you and they should be able to help you solve this problem. That’s valuable. Natalie, I’m going to choose you to bookend us. So the Accidental Techie, which a lot of a lot of people find themselves in that position. Uh You know, just take us out with uh with final thoughts. Yeah. Um Well, we really appreciate this opportunity this time. It’s been a while since we’ve done a radio show and progressive technology project is growing. Um We’re a social justice nonprofit organization that believes in transparent and democratic technology. Um like Jamie said to get help with this stuff, your database provider should be helping you, your technology providers should be helping you with this, so seek their support. Um And then, yeah, we’d love to hear from anyone out there who’s interested in learning more progressive. Tech.org is our website. Ok. Thank you. And just to set the record straight, it’s a podcast. It’s, it’s called Tony Martin TI Nonprofit Radio, but we’re, we’re a podcast, weekly, weekly podcast. Alright. So they are Jamie mcclelland, uh at Progressive Technology Project, Natalie Brenner with progressive technology project. And Alice Aguilar, the leader, the executive director, progressive technology project, Jamie Natalie Ellis. Thank you very much Tony and thank you for being with Tony Martignetti nonprofit radio coverage of 24 NTC, the 2024 nonprofit technology conference where we are graciously sponsored by Heller consulting our booth partners, technology strategy and implementation for nonprofits. It’s time for Tony take two. I’m at the National Association of Y MC A Development Officers Conference, the National Association of all the Y MC A s in uh Mexico, Canada and the US. We’re in Denver, Colorado and I have to admire the w for just all their camaraderie, you know, their support for each other. Um I saw it today at uh two round table conversations that I hosted the desire to help each other. Um These were all small and mid size wise and the sharing of ideas, you know, the, just the, the getting along the collegiality. Uh It’s really delightful to see. Uh There are about 1800 people at this uh North American Y MC, a conference and I’m delivering uh a session on planned giving, not surprising, planned giving 101. I haven’t done that session yet, but from everything I’ve seen the two days I’ve been here, the WS really do support each other throughout North America and it’s uh it’s, it’s inspiring, it’s really, it’s, it’s uplifting to, to see everyone just desiring to help each other so much. Uh sharing ideas, you know, and just laughing and understanding. Yes, understanding, empathizing, even if there isn’t a solution or a suggestion, but, you know, just the empathy. So my, my hats off to the Y MC A s of North America. It’s a real pleasure and a privilege to be at their conference. And that is Tony’s take two ordinarily I would say Kate, but she’s not with us. Uh uh III I think she’ll be back. Uh I think we’ve got Buku but loads more time here is email. Welcome journeys. Welcome back to Tony Martignetti nonprofit radio coverage of the 2024 nonprofit technology conference where we are in Portland, Oregon at the Convention Center and where we are sponsored by Heller consulting technology strategy and implementation for nonprofits with me. Now are Patty Breach and Elizabeth Sellers. Patty is founder and CEO of the purpose collective. Elizabeth is us, Director of Communications and Development at Humanity and Inclusion. Patty Elizabeth. Welcome. Thanks for having us. Good to be here. Pleasure, Patty for you. Welcome back. I think this is your third spot on nonprofit radio at NTC. You’re a perennial. It’s great to be back. I’m glad, glad. Thank you and Elizabeth. Welcome. Welcome. First time we’re talking about the secret to loyal donors. Email, welcome journeys. Um Elizabeth, why don’t you start us off with how important because we’ve heard from Patty on this subject in the past. Uh I believe it was two years ago, but it, that was two years ago. Uh start us off motivation. Why is the email? Welcome journey so important? Sure. So we’re all nonprofits. We all rely on donors to do our work and have impact. So we’re welcoming donors into our organizations every day. Um But so often we’re not nurturing them in a way to share the impact they’re having and share other opportunities for them to get involved. So welcome journeys, really provide an opportunity for us to introduce people to the organization, to our work and to ways that they can take part in our work with us. Um And of course, whenever you’re able to automate a welcome journey, it helps small teams like ours at Humanity and inclusion to welcome those donors out as much capacity or or resource of a manual welcome series. So for us, the initial need for a welcome journey that kind of pushed us over the edge was two years ago when the Ukraine conflict started, we work in situations of conflict and disaster mostly with people with disabilities. And we saw an influx of thousands of new donors who really didn’t know much about our work. And we’ve caught ourselves with the problem of how do we tell them who we are, why we’re managing this emergency situation. And the answer to that was the email welcome journey. And we’ve now added more of those to our repertoire to bring new donors into our space. And and Patty, we can do this with, with uh automation, but also, as Elizabeth said, also nurturing we can, we can automate and nurture together. Yeah, absolutely. Um I think the primary goal of any welcome journey is gratitude. Um We want to thank the supporter for whatever their most recent action was, whether it was a gift or joining an email list or signing a petition. We really want to validate that decision and say um you know, we really appreciate you and we’re so glad you’re here. Um Patty, I gotta ask you a question from previous years. Are, are you the person who told me that you, you, you go on dates and they google your name and they find your nonprofit radio appearances was that you, it wasn’t you? I thought it was, you know, well somebody did tell me I thought it was you. Uh no, you’re not, you’re not seeing that. Ok? No, you would remember all. I’m just sorry I I remembered the wrong person but uh it is happening. I I can’t say that there are any uh marriages have spawned from nonprofit radio appearances. Not yet, but I’ve only been at it 14 years. So I’m still working to get to reach that marriage threshold. Somebody did tell me that their dates were, were mentioning their appearances. Yeah. Yeah. Alright. So it could happen in your future, you know, I don’t know if you’re dating or not but let’s talk about uh is this, I mean, there’s a series, you have a, you have a kind of a, this is a series of like four or five emails properly timed. Ok. Now, let me ask, uh Elizabeth, are you working with the purpose collective in your email? Welcome journeys. We presume we’re here, we’re here together. Ok. Um So Patty, you’re the expert here. Uh How do we, how do we get our plan started? We got to think about the timing, the messaging, right? Like isn’t the first one supposed to be within, within 24 hours, 20 four hours? Ok. Describe what that first message should look like. Yeah, so that one is just a simple. Thank you. Um We usually recommend that it comes from someone recognizable within the organization. So like the executive director or anyone who has name recognition with your supporters. Um and the email can be really simple. It can even be plain text. And the goal is just to say I saw your donation come in and I wanted to tell you how much we appreciate your gift. Ok. So really simple. It doesn’t have to be formatted. Like plain text is great. It’s like like the digital equivalent of a quick handwrit note. I saw this come and it moved me and I want to thank you. Of course, you’ll hear from us, you know, you’ll get something more formal maybe or something. Yeah, that’s a great way to describe it. OK? Ok. And that within 24 hours, I mean, with automation, I mean, should we do this within 15 minutes or 30 seconds? Yeah, it depends on the system you’re using. Sometimes there’s like an overnight sink that it happens between like your, your database, your donation platform and your email program. I’m also thinking timing wise, if you want it to look authentic, if it comes within 15 seconds, it’s unlikely that your CEO could have, would have typed that and now you’re giving away the authenticity of it, the authenticity. Yeah, so that’s, that’s actually why wait until the next day, we usually wait at least a couple of hours if it’s a more automatic sync. But if you have an overnight sync that can, that can work in your favor because it looks like the executive director saw your donation come in first thing the next morning and wanted to send you a note. Ok. Alright, Elizabeth, what kind of responses have you seen? You? You’re getting emails back. Like people believe that the executive director really did take the time. Yeah, we do sometimes get emails back. Um just thanking us for the work that we’re doing asking if there are other ways that they can get involved. Um So yeah, we do see some people who reach out on those um on those emails and, and the best thing about those emails is they’re when someone is super warm to your organization. So our open rates are are much, much higher. So we’re automatically seeing more engagement from those folks. After that first email. Are you adhering to the patty breach purpose collective best practice of doing it within 24 hours that first? So yeah, so our donors, they actually do get an immediate thank you receipt if they’re donating online. Um So they get that immediately and then that first email from our executive director lands within 24 hours. And what’s what’s the next step in the in the journey? The next step is story of impact. Um So for us to her validation, for nonverbal validation, story of impact, gratitude and validation happening with our glances at each other. So yeah, have you done your session yet or no? It’s coming up. Oh, good. Let’s have some fun prep. Ok. Alright. So next uh story of validation. No, no validation is of impact is what you get from your consultant of impact. What does this one look like? What’s the timing, story of impact? Um We’re letting the donor know the difference that they’re making with the gift that they’ve sent. Um So for us, we typically will feature someone who’s directly impacted by our services. So our most, I guess most used donor welcome journey features the story of a little boy who was injured by a landmine and actually lost his leg to that explosion and went through our rehabilitation services and was fitted with a brand new artificial leg. So he’s, there’s a photo of him happily running through the streets and just the story of his recovery and, and the life that he’s living now thanks to our donors and I’ll let Patty answer the exact timing of that timing. Well, what is the format? What does it look like it? Now, this is, this woman has pictures and or maybe video or something. This is not the not akin to the first one, right? This is not plain text. We want people to actually be able to visualize the impact that they’re having. So um your typical kind of designed email with, with photos with text, maybe bolding certain um certain pieces that you want to stand out. Um That’s what it’s gonna look like. And what’s our timing? Timing is 2 to 3 days after the first email, we have data behind these uh these timing the flow. I mean, like if it comes too soon or if it, if it’s a week, it it it diminishes the uh the engagement with it. Yeah, exactly. We found that if you wait too long to send these emails, um people kind of forget about the donation that they just gave you and the email feels like it’s coming out of the blue and they’re like, why are you, what is this? So we definitely have clients who are nervous about. They’re like you want to send two emails within the first week that feels like a lot. Um How do you reassure them? We reassure them with the data behind it so we can show them that the open rates, the click rates are really high, usually double or triple their usual email newsletters. So that shows that people want to get these messages and they’re happy to receive it. And we really are striking while the iron is hot and we’re not annoying people with too many messages. And Elizabeth, you haven’t seen push back that, you know why? Two messages after I made my first gift or something. I mean, it seems it’s, it doesn’t seem likely. I mean, II I just made you a gift. I mean, I actually appreciate the attention and knowing now from the second one, what, what my gift is doing but, and just validate, you’re not, you’re not seeing no push back on that. People are opening them, people are engaging with them. I think the important thing on that second email is that we’re not making any sort of ask. We’re just providing them information on the impact they’re having no follow up. You know, if you want to do more for you, it’s too soon. Let’s talk 2 to 3 days much, too soon. Patty, what’s uh what’s our third? How many, how many are there in the The Journey Series? How many emails? Yeah, for a donor welcome series, we recommend five. Ok. Um and we’re about to do number three. And what are the other types of series you folks might have um you could have one for new subscribers. So whenever anyone joins your list, you could send them a welcome series. Um You could also get more specific about your donor welcome series. Like you could have one series for people who give a one time gift and a different series for people who sign up to give monthly. And then depending on your organization, um like Elizabeth’s organization has petitions that people can sign. And so we have journeys tied to those. So if you add your name to a certain cause we can send you a personalized series of emails about that, that cause. Um but yeah, if you also, if you’re recruiting volunteers, that’s a great time to send a welcome series. If someone signs up to volunteer or maybe after they do their first volunteer experience, they spent their first half a day or whatever. Yeah. Yeah, absolutely. Alright. So bring us back to number three, the third one in our journey. What’s our? So the first one was 2 to 3 days after the first email, which was within 24 hours. When should this third email be timed? This is one week after email number two and this is an invitation to become more involved. And so the key here is that this is also not a donation ask, but we’re asking them to take some sort of action with the organization. Um That could be anything from, you know, will you, will you become a volunteer with us? Will you follow us on social media? Um In the case of humanity inclusion, it’s, will you take a survey because we want to get to know you better? Um And the goal is basically saying like, we appreciate you so much. We want, we want to invite you into our inner circle. We want to get to know you. We wanna, we wanna have more interaction with you, Elizabeth. What does that survey look like in this third email? Sure. So we really wanna get to know our donors, so who they are, what motivates them um and what it is about our work that matters most to them, which then of course, helps us tailor our communications to them in the future to really make sure that we’re nurturing them and nurturing their interest moving forward. It takes like two minutes. It’s three questions um very, very easy to complete. So at this point, you’re not asking how, how do you like to hear from us or how often or anything like that? You’re saying it’s only three questions we’re not asking much on um on preferences of that nature, but really just what, what areas of our work they want to know more and and why so you can segment your future communications. OK? Anything else on email? Number three? Either of you that it is important for us to know we wanna do this journey correctly. Now, we don’t wanna, we don’t wanna uh we don’t want to uh walk off the path to follow the path correctly. All right. So we’re OK. Don’t message number three. Yeah. The only other thing I would add is that you can test this out for your organization, you can try a survey and if you’re not getting a lot of responses, you can try something else. OK. How about number four, kick us off with that one. Number four is another story of impact. So we as human beings interpret the world through story, we love stories. So I don’t think that there’s such a thing as too much storytelling. Um And this is just another opportunity to say um Here’s how you’re changing the world, here’s the impact that you’re having and again, that gratitude message, we really appreciate that you’re helping with this work. And again, no, no, no. And what’s the timing for number 41 week after the previous email? Ok. So we’re about two weeks after the right? Aren’t we about two weeks and 2.5 weeks or so after the action that began the journey another week? OK, Elizabeth, what are you doing? And number four? Sure. So number four clients. So we actually, we do have a story of impact, but it’s a little bit interesting because this email actually comes from one of our staff members on the ground in Columbia who works as a Dinor. So, clearing weapons contamination from communities and she’s actually clearing contamination from community, the community that she grew up in where she actually herself as a child stepped on a land mine that fortunately did not explode. Um And she opted to become a de miner and later went back and cleared that same area where she had had that interaction as a, as a kid. So, yeah, so it’s a really, it’s a really nice like behind the scenes stories getting to know both the impact of our work. But it’s another opportunity for us to showcase the boots on the ground that we have as an international organization. And that um you know, the staff that we’re working with are local and are working to improve their communities and they’re doing that. Thanks to our donors, anything you wanna add about? Uh your email number four feedback. Are you still? Uh So it’s through the journey, we’re doing five messages. Are you getting feedback? Uh like through you said when you get the first one from the executive director, you do get some messages there. Do you find much response to 23 and four? Yeah. So sometimes we, yeah, sometimes we get responses. Sometimes we don’t, I think the important thing on these journeys is to recognize that it’s really about keeping your audience warm and informed and familiar with who you are. Um So that whenever it it it’s right for them to take the next action, they know what they can do and why it’s important that they do it. Um So we do sometimes hear back from people. Um But for us, I think the most important thing is just knowing that people are reading those emails and they’re seeing about our work and the impact that they’re having. Um, so that we know that they’re gonna continue to engage with us and that goes to Patty’s point that some folks will forget that they even made the gift of you said, if Patty, if the second email comes too late, folks will wonder why you’re writing to me. You know, they don’t even remember. So you’re trying to keep them warm and engaged as you’re saying, Elizabeth. OK. And how about your, your fifth email, Elizabeth? What is that the the fifth email is the ask? So we’re looking for validation in that one. Yes, we’re asking. So um in that fifth email, um we are typically asking and encouraging those one time donors to now take another step forward and become a monthly donor and join our monthly giving community. Um What if they, what if they were monthly donors to begin with, if they are monthly donors to begin with? So we do have a separate, we have a separate journey for monthly donors. And so in that one, we’re asking them to upgrade their monthly gift so they can give extra and that’s actually a really good point. There’s a filter before this email. So in case anyone signed up to give monthly in the meantime, um they’ll be excluded from this message. The last thing we want to do is ask someone to give monthly who is already giving monthly. It makes it seem like we’re not paying attention a little bit, just a little. Ok. Ok. And what’s the timing patty for this fifth male? We want ideally be a month after the gift. So it should be about two weeks after email number, right? Ok. And so, and you feel comfortable Elizabeth that asking for do more within a month after about a month, right? Yeah, I think, I think that can initially be scary to folks. How is this, you know, are we going to offend anyone? And if we’ve offended anyone, they haven’t told us that we’ve offended them. Um So you got that right? No, we haven’t gotten that feedback. And in fact, we’ve seen people who have either made a second one time gift or people who have decided to start um that monthly gift or maybe they don’t take an action immediately after that email, but two months from now when we continue nurturing them and showing the impact that they’re having, maybe they make that gift, you know, two or three or six months down the road. Um But yeah, we haven’t had any, any negative feedback. I think the important thing is that, you know, donors choose their philanthropy and they choose when to give and how to give and where to give. And so for us, you know, I think Patty and I were talking about this earlier, you miss 100% of the shots you don’t take. And so, you know, we’re just asking, we don’t expect anyone to do anything that they can or don’t want to do, but we’re giving them that opportunity to make another gift and broaden their impact. If that’s, you know, if that’s on the table for them. And at this point, they’ve learned how important that gift can be and the, the life changing um actions that it can, can fund Elizabeth if it, if it was a petition, that was the first action that began the embarkation on the journey. But I love this journey. So I’m sticking with this journey metaphor. You have the path and it’s a cruise, maybe it’s a cruise ship or um if, if so, if they were uh they signed, they signed a petition, then I assume your ask in email five is for a gift. And how do you decide how much to ask for? Um We actually don’t, we don’t include amounts. Um So, you know, that’s something really up to the donor. We actually um I will give a plug to fundraise up, which is our donation platform and we actually use their machine learning um which A I is, I’m sure gonna be a focus of some of your other interviews. Um but we use their machine learning and they actually will suggest gift amounts. That makes sense to the person who is, you know, coming to our site and opening that donation form. Um But yeah, if they, if they sign a petition that last ask is just to make any gift, whatever the amount um to fund our work. Ok. Ok. Patty gift number, email number five. You haven’t said anything about this one yet? What do you want to add? Um Yeah, I would just add that. I really recommend acknowledging the donor’s previous gift um explicitly in this email. So saying like we remember that you donated to us a month ago, we’re still thinking about how great you are over here. Um We’re still really grateful for that and we wanted to invite you to become a part of this monthly giving program because we think it would be a good fit for you because we know that you’re passionate about this cause it’s because you gave us a donation a month ago that we’re now asking you to do this. So again, we want, we want to make it seem like we’re paying attention. We remember you, we see you um and we’re not just blindly sending out donation requests. I appreciate that. It’s because of your first action that we’re we’re asking this. Alright, we still have some time together. Is there more that you’re gonna share with NTC attendees? That you have not yet shared with nonprofit radio listeners. I mean, I don’t, I don’t appreciate you holding back on uh on our listeners. Is there, is there more that uh we haven’t talked about yet? Um Yeah, I mean, one thing that we’re going to mention in our presentation is that if creating a five part welcome series, feels daunting to you, you can always start smaller, you could start with 123 emails in the series. And as time allows, you could add more emails to them or not like the petition series at Humanity Inclusion. It’s a three part series and that’s it just three emails. Um So we believe having something is better than having nothing even if the something isn’t like the full recommended journey link. But you can set these up as automations in probably any decent email provider, right? I would think contact mailchimp sales force. All the big ones have automated series features. And Elizabeth, is that just a capacity issue for now? I thought you said, I thought you have four and five on the donor Impact Journey. We do have on the on the donor welcome journey. We have five, the subscriber series. We have five, our petitions, we only have the three. So we have two petitions that we ask people to sign. So um so on that one, the j it’s a thank you for adding your name. And then the second one is again that story of impact. And then the third one is that one time ask. Um So I think it depends on to the action that someone is taking. What makes the most sense and what kind of that final ask how it compares to the one before. So if someone’s already given you money, I think nurturing them a little bit more before you ask them for more money is important where if someone is, has taken an action like adding their name to a petition, then for me, it feels a little bit more comfortable to more quickly ask them to, to make a gift. So they get the shorter journey. The three messages makes intuitive sense and you’re seeing good results. Yeah. Another thing I want to mention is that we really recommend segmenting anybody who’s on a journey, segmenting them out of your general newsletter list until they finish the journey. So, ok, your regular list. So like we don’t want someone to get email number two in this journey and then six hours later get your monthly newsletter that might feel like email overload for someone. And um we also feel like it’s the point of this is to nurture someone to the point where now they’re ready after the five emails, now they’re ready to be added to the general list. But for that first month, let’s really make sure we’re just talking to them about their donation and their donation only. Ok. Yeah, it seems disruptive to the, to the, to the whole cause of the whole purpose of the journey to, to have other communications in there. There might, there might be an asking that you might be asking that a newsletter, right? I mean, there probably is and now it seems incongruous like what? But I, I thought you were. Yeah, II I thought I just gave especially if it comes too close to the gift to the initial gift that started the journey, I could see. All right. That makes sense. It’s confusion. It’s disruptive. Ok. Ok. Ok. This is exclusive for the first month. They are exclusive communications. Ok. Is there anything else I I would just say for nonprofits, especially smaller teams, it can feel daunting to set these up at the start, but it’s really worth the time and investment to do that because you, you are now having these personal tailored touches to every donor that’s coming through or every subscriber that’s coming through and there’s a little bit of work on the front end. But really these journeys, once they’re, once they’re set, you can kind of set and forget, you know, maybe do a refresh every 6 to 12 months to make sure that the is still relevant to make sure that, you know, maybe you have a new story of impact that’s more recent that you wanna change out. Um But once you get these going, um they make your job as a fundraiser as a communicator as a marketer, a lot easier um to, to meet these donors where they are. That’s a perfect place to end. Thank you. That’s Elizabeth Sellers, us, Director of Communications and Development at Humanity and Inclusion. And with her is Patty Breach founder and CEO of the purpose collective, Patty Elizabeth. Thank you. Thanks very much. Thank you. Thank you and thank you for being with Tony Martignetti nonprofit radio coverage of the 2024 nonprofit technology conference where we are sponsored by Heller consulting technology strategy and implementation for nonprofits. Next week, the generational divide. That’s not a joke. You’ll see, you’ll see it’s coming. It’s next week. If you missed any part of this week’s show, I beseech you find it at Tony martignetti.com. We’re 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. I think this went pretty well. Uh It’s, it is exhausting. Uh um And I’m a little tired of hearing my voice. Uh But you know, I’m the 1st 600 40 shows were all me and I didn’t get tired of hearing myself for those 13 years. So we’ll see, we’ll see the, the jury is out still about uh whether we need an associate producer on nonprofit radio. Our creative producer is Claire Meyerhoff. The show’s associate producer for now is Kate Martignetti. Our social media is by Susan Chavez Mark Silverman is our web guy and this music is by Scott Stein. Thank you for that information, Scotty. You with us next week for nonprofit radio, big nonprofit ideas for the other 95% go out and be great.

Nonprofit Radio for August 31, 2018: Stay Out of Email Jail & Real Estate In Prospect Research

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Buy-in hello and welcome to tony martignetti non-profit radio big non-profit ideas for the other ninety five percent. I’m your aptly named host. Oh, i’m glad you’re with me. I’d suffer the effects of cola sister gas draws to me if you gold me with the idea that you missed today’s show, stay out of e mail jail and avoid deliver ability traps, segment reengage analyze what the heck is a pristine our non-profit technology conference panel breaks it all down. They are amy braverman from cdr fund-raising group and dan class skins with dv disabled american veterans real estate in prospect research. Maria simple is our prospect research contributor, and the prospect finder she returns with resource is tips and strategies for reactive and proactive real estate research. I’m tony steak, too, the late summer finger wag responsive by pursuing full service fund-raising data driven and technology enabled tony dahna slash pursuing capital p wagner, cps guiding you beyond the numbers regular cps dot com by tell us turning credit card processing into your passive revenue stream, tony dahna em a slash tony tell us and by text to give mobile donations made easy text npr to four, four, four. Nine nine nine here is stay out of e mail jail from welcome to tony martignetti non-profit radio coverage of eighteen ntc non-profit technology conference coming to you from the convention center in new orleans. Sponsored, of course, by hosted by non-profit technology network and ten this interview, like all our eighteen ntcdinosaur views, is sponsored by network for good, easy to use dahna management and fund-raising software for non-profits my guests are amy braverman she’s, associate director of digital media at cdr fund-raising group, and dan class ken’s, digital marketing strategist for dvd disabled american veterans. Amy dan, welcome hi! Thanks for having us. Thank you for having this time. Have you not brought radio? My pleasure. Your workshop topic is stay out of email, jail and avoid deliver ability. Death traps. Yes, that’s. Very good. And we now i covered this probably two or three years ago. And i learned that there’s such a thing as a une e mail deliver ability specialist that’s a title. People people study this stuff. You have to study this stuff to stay on topic. Okay. It’s a full time job. Really? Amy let’s, stay with you. Why? Why? Hyre what kinds? Of problems that we having generally, we got plenty of time together going to detail. Okay, start us off, general. Generally, i think our biggest problem is that there’s a lack of control there three main factors that kind of go into email deliver ability, and that is the email platform that you’re using you yourself, the non-profit and your best practices hyre how you’re sending e mails and then lastly, the mailbox providers, gmail, hotmail, yahoo outlook they all have different rules for how you get your emails in their inbox is how you reach your supporters and because of those three factors and the complexities that they all have it’s really tough. Teo, just stay on top of everything makes it a full time ok? It sounds a bit of a morass. Damn morass. Yes. Oh, i mean, absolutely. It’s changed your q. I think your radio probono hyre on dan. I missed the count. Well, i think what we’re finding honestly is people you want to engage with people that want to get they want you to engage with them, and i mean, we as marketers way are not really big fans of having to keep up. With these rules, but as a consumer, tony, i mean, you only really want to get the information that you’re interested in, and from that standpoint, i think google and yahoo and i mean they’re their jobs not to serve us it’s, to serve the consumer, and i think they’re doing a good job of it, okay? So they have the interest of their customers, principally, right? And not you other people are serving you, but not the email providers. Yes, i think i think the biggest challenge is it’s just it’s such a huge change of mindset, of going into it because, you know, in the in the world where i live in a stable american veterans, i mean, we’ve been one of the very large direct mail operator for a long time, and i mean, buying less ranting list, i’m as part of the direct mail business, and there you just take every address and amy and get you send a mail, right? It doesn’t work that way in the inbox anymore and it’s causing us to really change the way we think about how we do email folks and i think it’s also because it usedto work. Like that, i mean, email best practices years ago where send your e mails to everybody, everybody and anybody, we don’t care who you are. We don’t actually really care if you’re that interested in us or what you are interested in. And because of the fact that our in boxes are generates so much information. So many e mails? Well, yeah, i mean, it was even three years ago. I remember before i join cdr doing an email audit where that was the organization’s practice, and i was trying to explain to them, hey, we can’t keep doing this because you’re going to get these five percent open rates are going to ruin your center reputation, and they’re like center what? Like, you know, two years ago, i’m sure there was folks in our session today who are, like, we’re still sending to anybody we know about this segment thing, and we know why we should do it, but weren’t we have to it’s a total is dance, i’d like change your mindset of going from we want to reach everybody, and we need max impressions, too. We need to make sure that we are maintaining our reputation and how we’re interacting with our supporters, okay, this center reputation it’s a pretty simple phrase to understand, but it’s it’s it’s what? The platforms, the email platforms are these have judging the fight. They each have their own score that’s what makes it tricky? They don’t all play by the same rules. Yeah. It’s a morass, right? Yeah. I mean, extended reputation. We’re saying in our session today is basically like, your credit score is already done. Yeah, where you going? Outside or on the downside? We’re coming on the booze. You’re the khumbu. What? You even show happy hours here, right after this and the wind, the open bar non-cash bars only about twenty five feet away. Also we figured, hey, why not reach more people and tell them about all of our trials and tribulations and successes and maybe not such here’s the thing email, i mean, whether you’re a large non-profit like myself, a disabled american veterans or you’re the smallest non-profit in this room, this challenges facing all of youse gotta send her reputation. You know what? It or not? You’ve got one. You’ve got one, okay? And it may be good or maybe bad and it’s the same like analogies of your credit score. If you go to buy a car, you can buy a car with a bad credit score. There’s going to be huge interest rate, you can still send emails with the bats under reputation. You just might not be actually getting to the people. What are some of the factors that go into the centre reputation, dan? Well, i mean, i definitely understand it varies across email platforms. Yes, so i mean, how much people engagement your emails? Are they opening your e mails? Are they clicking on things who you’re sending it to? We’ve spent a lot of time our session today talking about spam traps and, you know, the providers out their pristine spam mail traps, for instance, or one where they actually put thes fake e mails out there. And if you’re not practicing best practices, buying list and doing these other types of activities where these e mails are on there and you’re going to them that’s a trigger that you’re not following these best practice. So there’s these traps out there, it’s like a land mine, and we’re just walking through there drops spam traps, there’s all kinds of so they’re seating bogus addresses on tow until lists that it shouldn’t be buying. Yes, okay. And you maybe what? What? What traps way covered four of them today. The four main ones we did the pristine. The next one is the recycled spam trap. And this is something that so pristine. The big difference is a human never had that they’re created tio by the email industry to make sure you as an e mails under r following good practices a pristine a pristine, pristine, pristine like a pristine beautiful beach with your note. But it’s not very beautiful. Now, it’s not okay, what’s a pristine okay, so the first teen is they’re created by non humans to monitor your email practices to make sure that email centres like devi or any non-profit or any for-profit consumer product is sending emails responsibly. How does it do that? How does it work? I have no clue because i am not that technical, but you can google and find out a little bit of i mean, look into pristine there other type of perhaps we talked about were like way too so for typos like you misspell it. Like instead of gmail g mall, yahoo without the one of the o’s or something that gets onto your list fake address. You don’t really want to give someone your address, but you need to complete the form. So if you’re sending to a lot of these like where the email addresses misspelled, they’re the domain is misspelled. That’s ah, that goes into this. Yeah, it’s not as much of a factor of some of their you know their heads. Different variants is teo, but they all play into it. It’s, time for a break pursuant. Their latest paper is pursuing e-giving outlook. You’ve heard me talk about it. They took the latest fund-raising reports. They boiled it all down. It’s ah it’s ah it’s! The thie essentials that you need from all the fund-raising reports that have come out recently all in one concise content paper plus there’s a video archive. Go to tony dahna em. A slash pursuing remember the capital p for please now, back to stay out of email. Jail. Okay. And then what was the fourth one? The fourth one is a role account. It’s a little bit more difficult to explain. But it’s it’s kind of in that same vein of, like, it’s? Not really you it’s something else that was added on there, and then the recycled, which we touched on for a second. But that is an email address that used to exist by a real human being and then is no longer in use. And after a period of time, the email provider the mailbox provider has said, this is not tru e mail address anymore. Okay, so they wait all these things together. They put them through their mash, and they decide on your center reputation. Yes, and it’s like a scale from one to one hundred. Anything above eighty is great. Seventy to eighty is saying you’re doing well, but you have room for improvement below seventy says, wow, you really need to fix your practices and that’s where it could impact you deliver ability. So so you’re saying the email providers will just not deliver your messages? Yeah, they just go off sometimes in the la la land buy-in we’ll sail on the whole the whole campaign with this one whole send all of it tonight could do that or it’s going to vary again. It’s going varies. Based on the timeline out provider that you’re going through to get to your constituents, that is okay, but you shouldn’t be risking obviously don’t want be risking it. I mean, if you’re if you’re below seventy with female, you’re in bad shape. I think the big thing is your score coming from coming from a fund-raising perspective at a non-profit like d a d i mean, we are driven by the ultimate dollar, right? So trying to get folks to realize that, hey, we can’t blast out all five hundred thousand of these people because half of them aren’t even open in the e mails if they’re not opening, they’re not engaging it’s, hurting all all that impacts deliver ability, but amy is found with us, and with other accounts of cdr and an industry has is we’re actually emailing less people more frequently, and we’re generating more revenue from it. Okay, okay, you’re deliver ability. Your reputation is hyre you’re engaging with, you’re sending two people who truly are engaging with you all those reasons, right? Exactly. Okay hey took the cliff notes version of our session today. We’re drill well. Let’s. Wrap it up. I got another. Fifteen minutes or so, roughly, but it’ll go fast. Kruckel okay, so we talk about avoiding the death traps, all right. Are there any more death traps? Anything we need to know about about what the industry is doing to snag us up recovered? Yeah. I mean, spam traps were the big thing. And the thing that we really shared with people today is that hitting a spam trap isn’t the end of the world. When you google for reports or to find out about spam traps, the resource is like what you’ll see back is all these very dramatic things that make you feel like a horrible e mail market or if you hit a spam trap. But it’s, not the end of the world you can really recover. And spam traps are telling you that you actually have a symptom of a larger problem. That there’s something going on with your email practices. That is just not working. And you need to take a look at it and figure out, you know, what will work. You know, i was actually thinking about this, dan, like when we hit a pristine spam trap in january of twenty. Seventeen and had a two percent open rate from an audience that we were getting seventeen percent open rates before so it’s a huge drop and it let us know we clearly have an issue, and i honestly think that hitting that spam trapping experiencing that was really the best thing has happened to us definitely opened our eyes and change the way we act. Yeah, you work together, we work together, we worked with cpr. Yes, dahna could never you could smoke whatever with your eyes not aware we want teo, especially our fund-raising right, it’s growing it’s always fund-raising growing doesn’t talk about sex vacation because that’s that’s a solution to this isthe dan, how is segmentation solution? I think just knowing what people are interested in and feeding them, information that relates to their interest is huge, and once again, i mean, we’re come from a world of direct mail where we’re mailing out this mail piece toe hundreds of thousands of people and that’s what’s cool about digital is you can really get it down to a very small interest group and hit him with that interest. I think what we’ve done with our segmentation has really paid. Big dividends and the fact that, you know, we’re able to see, because each of these people respond differently the types of messages to the different types of subject line, so we were able to test better with segmentation and overall, i just think that it goes back to what i said before, people that want to get our stuff, they’re going to get what they want and that’s, why we’re seeing the metrics and the click throughs and everything else respond accordingly. Is there any segmentation beyond interest? Well, yeah, i mean, we we got the frequency that they donate, obviously. I mean, you know, when’s the last time they made a gift, what type of action did they take with the organization? I mean, where do they attend a Job fair where they’re 5 k participant? Where are they? A veteran? Are they not a veteran? I mean, there’s, a lot of things of in segmentation there’s a lot of layers to it. You need a really good date. I think one of my challenges at our organization and we’re striving to get better every day is taken. All these separate databases out there that you know, these silos that exists and merging them together and having this global view of how this hand impacts this hand and, you know, it’s part of my job every day, and, you know, about amy and her cd, our team really works on developing great strategy, i’m in there educating the stakeholders and trying to manage, you know, all the politics that go on inside a large, large organization and, you know, making strikes, people are listening to what i’m saying, they’re so that from that point, you know, we’re doing good things, okay? Okay, amy, anything you want to add on deputation or you like them, dan covered, and i think the best thing about having dan as like our email partner or digital fund-raising partner and marketing is that he’s done an amazing job educating internally, learning, learning we’re all learning together and then getting those stakeholders bought in and if you’re a non-profit out there and you’re struggling with this, that is probably the hardest part is educating internal resource is and just stake orders about hey, we’ve got to make these changes because, yes, the money is still coming in, but eventually, if our center score continues to drop, we’re going to not see that money. No, you have a case study one hundred twenty six percent increased in open rates. Is that is that a tv or somewhere else knows it was that dvd. So when we hit that spam trap in our way, we’ll learn from what can we learn from it? We can learn that you need teo segment your audience. Find out what content is relevant to them. Get buy-in from internal state quarters and you can recover from any mishap that has happened to you. You can get open rates that go from two percent up to where ours air usually steady now in them twenties at twenty three. Twenty four percent. You know, we used to judge a good open raid at, like fifteen percent was an industry standard. I think for us a deviant cdr. I get bummed out when we’re not at a twenty two or twenty one. I’m like, oh, let’s, figure this out, let’s see what we can do. I think the other metric that is our new favorite is open to cliques. So this says of the people that open my email, this percentage clicked on. It and that tells you if you sent them content quick, something is like something in it, like click to a donation form, click to a survey promotion, more anything and that tells you if your message and the content you’re providing your supporters with means something matters to them, it allows us to also see the content they’re interested in. What are they clicking on? What aren’t they click on? I think the other thing that’s really played into the whole email challenge we face is the the idea of unsubscribes for spam people marking you as a spammer is like death sentence. I mean, essentially they’re saying your spam and not only they saying that they don’t want your stuff, but they say they’re your annoying them and that you’re not they don’t. They didn’t ask you to come there in the first place, and what we’ve learned and we’re learning every day is, you know, we sent out a large audience and you get a handful of spam rates, but the percentage is so low that it’s not as impactful if we just be about one hundred people and two people. Click on spam suddenly that’s two percent and that span percentage rate is another thing that plays into deliver ability. So one of the things that we’re working to do and put more in our strategy is to make it maur educate people how it have two unsubscribes easier making unsubscribes more available because if they don’t want to be bothered, then we want to stop bothering them. And that’s that’s really what these providers air forcing us to do. And at the end of the day, i think from from a consumer standpoint, it’s awesome, but from a marketing standpoint, a those that adjust and and go and change the way that they do things i think there’s still going to find probably way we’re fine is even more success than the way we used to operate have a hacker, the rial spammers getting through that because i’m you know, i’m marking junk all the time. A lot of i p addresses a lot of their spoofing are there? Or are they just there constantly turning over? Yes, every day i mean there’s a lot of everyday, they change, i think, there’s something like two hundred thirty four million spam traps out there. And there’s it could even be billion like it’s huge and there’s a a not a crowd sourcing thing that allows you to track spam and see how many traps are currently live and what’s happening in the internet just to give you like a thermometer checking the pulse rate of what’s happening out there because i know i know some of the bad guys are getting through. Yeah, they get there. You just want to minimize it. I mean, at one point, when we in order to get that very low open right, have issues that we saw. We probably hit a few hundred spam drops. You’re not going to hit one spam trap, there’s. Not like one out there that like. Oh, i hit the one you were going to hit multiples. You could hit three recycled like we celebrated huge success going from a few hundred two. We only hit three like that’s. Amazing. Because there’s. So many out there and it’s. Very easy to get to let’s. Talk about re engaging you. You touched on amy reengaging. People who aren’t engaged aren’t clicking. What are some tips for? For this let’s? Spend a few minutes on this. Yeah. I think one of the things that we all struggle with is it’s hard to say good bye to people like you want you know it as fundraiser isn’t even unsubscribes way don’t like to see that list, especially for what we pay the cost per acquisition in this industry is so high that it’s like it’s hard to give up on that, so what we’ve started doing is every time we’ll do it full, send sometimes to r un engaged file and will recover some people, which will see that as a win will take the hit on the spam complaint rate to bring back some more folks we’ve advertised to them in different channels, whether it’s, facebook or doing in male ads like for yahoo, our gene mail, those air this sponsored ads at the top of your inbox and then what we’re actually really focusing now on is how can we be a lot more thoughtful in trying to re engage so making the qualifications for who’s going to get that reengagement email stricter, you know, like let’s send to lapse donors from the last two years and see how that gets us let’s do laps donors the last year. Let’s do laps donors for a year and open an email a year ago. So we’re like working through to see what kind of rates we can get. Who we can bring back and figure out what that unique. What works for davey and that’s that’s. Kind of our re engagement tactics. What do you feel is a decent reengagement rate? I don’t think we have that yet. I don’t know, i don’t think we have that thing is every time we hit this un engaged audience so there’s good there, i’m out of it, but there’s bad too. So what we’re really trying to drew is sort of strike a balance of what that is, and i think it d a v for us as well, it’s harder not to crack because we’re dealing with a lot of different groups here, like we have our donors, as i mentioned right there, there’s the one point three million members of the organization that an entirely different group of folks we have our advocates, those that are part of our commanders action network, that air really interested our legislative issues and all these different arms out there. What might work in one audience doesn’t necessarily translate to another audience. So i think as you look at your organisation, you have to that’s where it goes back to the segmentation, understanding what drives those people, what motivates those people in the more data you have to support that, i think it will help you figure out what are the better strategies to re engage in these folks and at what point is amy said, are we willing to say goodbye? Is it possible that we’ve talked around it’s a little bit to figure out why your emails aren’t getting what? Why your emails aren’t getting through to you? Can you tell what whether you had a spam trapper was pristine? Or is it possible to evaluate that or you can their companies out there that can give you reports to tell you what types of spam traps you’re hitting to tell you how many different ip addresses air out there for you so there’s lots of different ways to figure out they’ll tell you what’s going on, but they won’t say, oh, this is specifically why you did it that’s kind of up to you to figure out, but chances are that you can get that information at least on how many types of traps you’re making your hitting because what it does it allows you then to do to go clean up your file, i think that’s another important topic that we haven’t talked on is let’s clean up the file. So now that you identified a problem, i hit to spam. Traps or one hundred, spam traps. Whatever your case may be, you can work with different services to have them look at your file. They match it up with the different mailbox providers, and they’ll tell you whether or not they’re valid email addresses invalid. Whether they have, ah, hard number of heart bounces off, bounces that, whether their spam complainer. So they have the propensity to hit spam on your emails. And what that allows you to do is put on lee, sent to the valid e mails. You know, take all of those invalid, take all the ones that are marked as spam, and put them in a group and not talk to those people. So then that also helps to ensure your developed deliver ability is happening, and that you have a good center score oppcoll way still have a few minutes left together. What what haven’t we talked about? That we should be flushing out more. I definitely think the tools we’re using, you know, different non-profits of different sizes have different tools, and she mentions a lot of these providers that score your tools, but just the tools that you have, i mean, obviously, you know, there’s big companies like blackbaud there’s the male chimps in the different things, but knowing how, you know, turning to them as a resource on some of their standards, because as amy mentioned before, there’s three parties in this and they’re one of the parties, so the googles and the yahoos and all those providers they’re i mean, they’re they’re the gatekeeper on that end, and we can practice our best practices there, but take advantage of those resource is out there. I don’t think that enough people actually go on and look at the research and the information that’s out there, and this is very nice that you’re saying that the email provider, the email providers they themselves put out there and, you know, amy and i, we’re we’re more marketers than we are techies. So if your organization has so somebody in charge of email that’s, more of a marketer or somebody in the communications team, for instance. It’s, good to loop in some of these folks i know for me and my organization. I have been lost without some of the stuff that cd ours helped assan cover. Having them to turn to is a resource helped implement some of these things because it changes every day to wave made a lot of progress. But this story’s not ending because then you could be two steps forward. One step back kugel changes something they’re not sending out of press release, right? We’re learning you want after that after after you dahna campaign or ascended it’s fun, you know the job’s never the same any day. That’s one thing that you can say for sure when it comes to evil marketing hundreds and like dan it’s totally right, you know, even us, as you know, as a friendraising agency are focuses on fund-raising and marketing, raising money and using the reaching out to your the platform that you’re using to send your email getting their technical help. It’s huge! I don’t think i would be where i am or as a group with davey without having the support of their i t department, they helped us do cem further very authentication called demark and deacon. Which folks can google learn all about it’s? A little bit confusing, but it’s really important? Because it insures that hackers aren’t spoofing your emails and that aren’t sending things under the dv domain that are actually devi. We have george in jail on twenty one radio you just transgressed seriously, we’re ah, i don’t think we have enough time to explain, but just repeat de marque de marketmesuite oppcoll that and decamp d market with the c a r c and d kim decay. I am i’ve seen these things in print. I don’t know what they mean. All right, we’re gonna let you off the hook. Thank you. Or sorry for the jargon jail. But they are. It is very important. Teo, just go and check it out. Go ask your i t department about it. They can actually educate you on these two terms and check and see if you need to get better email authentication and implement these leads to tactics. Okay, dan, anything you want o close with god. Give you a few seconds to close. No. Honestly, i just think that, like i said, it’s it’s every evolving, so it’s going to change a month from now, six months from now stay on top of your game. If they want you, they want you to contact him. That’s what you want to contact, engage him and make it more about them instead of about you. And i think the more non-profits do that, the more success they’re going to find that’s dan class begins, i say right, you got i did with the hardy digital marketing strategist of devi, the disabled american veterans and also amy braverman, associate director, digital media at cdr fund-raising group. Thank you, amy. Dan. Thank you. Thankyou, tony. This interview sponsored by networked for good, easy to use donorsearch monisha and fund-raising software for non-profits. This is tony martignetti non-profit radio coverage of the twenty eighteen non-profit technology conference. Thanks so much for being with us. We need to take a break. Wagner, cps. They go beyond the numbers they’ve got. The resource is for you. Lots of different subjects at weger, cps dot com and you click resource is after you spent some time on the site. Pick up the phone. Go in. Real life talk to eat hooch doom. You know him? He was on the four hundredth show. He’s been a guest. He’s a partner there. He’s a pro. Good guy, wagner, cps dot com. Then have a chat with you now for tony’s. Take two it’s late summer and i’m wagging my finger at you reminder. I implore you. I can’t beseech, but i do implore make time for yourself over labor day weekend. You don’t just find it. I can’t find time. I don’t have time. I can’t find any time. Make the time make the time for you you have talking to you. You the person you personally make time for yourself over labor day weekend. Hopefully did doing summer sometime. But i regret to inform you that labor day is creeping up and, uh, you need to make time urine e-giving profession. You need to take as well that you can give efficiently and feel good doing it time alone is restorative it if it’s refreshing make the time there’s more on my video at twenty martignetti dot com. I’m very glad to have maria semple back. You know her for pete’s sake. She’s the prospect finder. She’s, a trainer and speaker on prospect research. Her latest book is magnify your business tips, tools and strategies for growing your business or your non-profit she’s, our doi and of dirt cheap and free. And i know she’s not gonna let us down today on that she’s at the prospect finder dot com and at maria simple. Welcome back, maria. Simple. Good to have you. Oh, it’s. So great to be back. Thanks for having me. Pleasure. Absolutely. Um, you want to talk about real estate and i was game real estate for prospect research. What’s the value here. Well, you know, it’s it’s kind of interesting because i always include real estate data in every single research profile that i do. So i almost feel like we’re doing a back to basics show here. Okay, you know what we’ve got? You know, the core pieces of information that that really should be part of every profile and real estate is is definitely one of them. And i was, you know, in preparing for today’s show. I was trying to come up with, you know, the why? Why would we want to even focus on real estate? Why is this important and so you know, i’m going to offer up a couple of reasons. You prepare one. You prepared. You wanted you wanted teo. I’m doing that. Okay. That’s. Something new. Okay, so one is from a report called the cap gem and i world wealth report, which indicates that really state actually account for eleven percent of a high net worth individuals. Total assets, right? So, i mean, when you think about the average person, right, if they own a home or they own a coop or an apartment or something, i mean that’s a significant portion of their wealth, right? Because, you know, are they going to gifted to you? Are they gonna liquidate that asset and give you the money? Probably not. However, that does lead me to think about planned e-giving, as you know, a way to think about real estate as well. Especially if you know, your prospects happened to be a childless couple. So plan giving is something that, you know you might want to think about with regard to any of their real estate holdings that they may have, whether it’s, you know their primary home or or secondary homes. Yeah, there’s. A lot you could do with real estate, certainly the methods you mentioned, if a lot of times you might hear that child or the children don’t like the beach house or the don’t like the home upstate in the woods or out in the mountains, and so that strongly suggests that it’s going to be liquidated or, you know, you might hear that those exact same sentiments and there’s a possibility that that piece of real estate could be left to you so that the person or the couple can continue living there for their lifetime and they pay all the expenses, and then you’re at their death at the death of the survivor, actually, with the survivors death, the property immediately is transferred to you because because you’re actually changing the the deed of the property that’s all called a retained life estate, she wanted to google it and find out more, but you don’t need the unity of the jargon just understand the concept, you know, if there’s a couple that is expressing dismay that the kids don’t really want the house? Uh, yeah, so that and, you know, by the same token, if you happen to come across in doing your research that a particular property of one of your donors is actually owned in a truck. You know, that kind of should send up that little signal flag to you that they have done sametz state planning. And you you want to make sure that you know you’re involving all the correct parties in the conversation. If you’re coming across the property owned in a truck, how would you find that out in your research? Well, if so, let’s say you have the name of aa prospect your your donor and you have their address and in researching their address, you find that the property is not in the the donor’s name or the donor and the spouse’s name, but rather it’s owned in a truss, actually that’s going to be? Yeah, yeah, totally it’ll be very clear because it’ll be titled that way. Ok? It’s it’s titled to the right the asset is titled to the trust. Okay, so so in your public records, that’ll do that’ll reveal itself. Yes, absolutely. So, you know you mentioned public record, so we’re very fortunate in this country in terms of doing donorsearch research on in these types of public records because all real estate across the united states is part of public records, most of it is accessible on the internet very, very occasionally, if it’s a really small little town that maybe doesn’t have a big web presence or they don’t have their tax assessor rolls, you know, available online, i might need to make a phone call, but i have to tell you that is happening less and less for me these days. Aziz, i’m able to find most of that data that i need online. Okay, you got i’m sure you have some sights, recommendations free and dirt cheap that you can share. Yes, absolutely. Absolutely. So, i think a really good starting place to be able to start finding, you know, ah, assessed value and taxes that people pay on their properties. Um, if you don’t know where you’re where the local tax assessor office is available online and so forth there’s one site that has a compilation state by state by state this toe where you can actually find the assessor info and it’s actually a fellow prospect researcher and she’s been maintaining this site for years. Her name is cristina. Pulawski and her sight is pulawski dot net, and i’ll spell that quickly uh, p u l a w s k i dot net and, um, if you go to that site, you’ll see a listing of all the states click through to the state of interest to you, and then you’ll easily be able. Teo, find the data that you’re looking for in the assessor and this is a free site. Yes. Pulawski dot net is free are doi n i knew are doing was not gonna let us down. Oi, end of dirt, cheap and free. Ok, what else you got? So so that that’s one that i really like is a good jumping off point for although that’ll get you teo teo, the assessor assessed values a cz well as taxes. So so let’s talk about those two pieces real quickly. You know, assessed values are very often not what the market values are. So in a minute, we’ll talk about some market values, sight. But, you know, i always like to include what is a prospect in my profile? I like to include what taxes are for the most recent year on that property, because i think it is very, very telling if somebody is able to sustain. And i did research once on dahna a couple who owned a property in in a wealthy area of new jersey but also had a house at the jersey shore. And between the two properties, tony, they were paying one hundred and fifty thousand dollars in property taxes. Okay? Yeah. That’s. A lot of money right there, right? That kind of tells you there’s some well, yeah. And then you take the take the value of those homes, multiply by nine and you’ve got ninety nine percent of their their their assets, right? Nine. Ninety percent of their wealth. Because you said for high net worth e the home is eleven per cent of the of the total assets. Yeah. Okay, very real. Look at look at all this information. We’re getting off just the that’s just from the assessed value. We don’t even know the market value of these properties yet, right? Okay, exactly way. Just have a minute or so we have a minute or so before break. So go ahead. But take take a breath after a minute or so. Hey. So the other thing i want to be able to tell you about is ways to find estimated market market value for the properties because, they said, it is very different from the assessed value on di think a site that we’re all very familiar with. Is zillow so kind of introduce that concept? If you need to go to break, and then we could talk a little bit more about zillow and different information that you could find there. Ok? The only thing i’ll put a finer point on is just to make sure that people know the assessed value that’s, the for those who may not own property. That’s, that’s, the that’s, the tax roll, value that’s, the that’s, the value of your home that is used to calculate your taxes. So they multiply that assessed value by the tax rate and that’s. How you get your your what you got to pay for taxes on that property versus market value, which i think is quite clear. Okay, let me take this break. Tell us you’ve heard enough. You’ve heard that you had to tell us moughniyah lt’s from charities that referred the companies for the credit card processing from the companies that are doing the processing and from those companies. Come processing fees and fifty percent of those fees go to those charities. You’ve heard the teles mony als that charity khun b you you can be getting the fifty percent of the fees. Go to the video. That’s. A place to start. Tony dot, m a slash tony tello’s. Now, let’s, go back to maria simple. Um okay, you were gonna hit us with market value. You got market value. Resource recommendations, love these are doi n, right? Right. So so i mentioned zillow and one of the reasons why i like zillow so much. Is that it’s a great snapshot of that property? I mean, literally, you will get a mapping. Sometimes there is a picture of the home. Uh, you’ll have information about, you know, the number of bedrooms, you know? Really, you square footage. What it left sold for three year. It was built. So you’re going to get a lot of information about that particular home, right? There, out of zillow, it mean it’s used extensively in the real estate profession, used extensively by anybody looking to buy or sell a home. So it is, you know, one of those sight that you definitely want to think about looking at, they call their estimates. It’s used extensively by me after i go to a friend’s house for dinner. And then i go home or i just go to the bathroom, and then i checked zillow, i got a guy i don’t know, i don’t know. What is this place worth? Sometimes i can’t even wait to get home. I was extensively you’re right. It is very use its used extensively. You’re absolutely right. Ok, is there another? Is there? Is there another market research resource? I mean, market value resource. Ah, well, if you are thinking about researching anybody in a city, it might be a little bit different self-funding example, in new york city, there is a site called city realty dot com, where you’ll be able, teo put in an address, uh, it’ll give you a picture of that building whether or not that building has a doorman, uh, you know, where recent sales were. Of apartments in that building uh, the year it was built, the amenities and so on and so forth. So again there you’re going to get an awful lot of information, even on those buildings where apartment, you know, maybe owned within a particular building. Yeah, cooper, condo and zillow. Zillow isn’t going to help you with with apartment properties, is it? Not much? I mean, you think the last time i was at a dinner with a friend’s apartment, whether i was successful, i don’t think i was able to find what i was looking for? No, i don’t think so. I don’t think they don’t know why i do it for all of them, so that nobody, none of my friends, they’re the only ones who’ll listen and none of them knows which which one i’m talking about. There just i do it universally. So i guess they should all just assume i’ll stop getting invitations. I don’t know one of the other. Um, yeah, but zilla doesn’t help with condos and co ops, right? I’m pretty sure. Yeah, yes. I want to look a city realty dot com that’s for new york city. Right? That’s for new york city, but suppose you’re one of the many, many listeners who does not live in the new york city metro area. What are you going to do for for condos and made it again? I would then go to, you know, look at the particular city that you’re looking for data on go to their main website as a place to start looking and start drilling down for any links that have to do with real property values. Realist, hey, you know any of those tax assessor’s. So those are some of the key words you want to start looking for in any of those drop down menus that you might find in any of the the city’s website. Ok, yeah, so you might you might have to just settle for assessed value if you can’t find a market value of cooper condo, right? But then you know what? They’ll give you the rate that you’ll be able to also, then, you know, multiply by to come up with an approximate, you know, tax tax assessment. Yeah, right. I was just saying, you know, just you might not be able to find market value for for apartments. That’s all. Yeah. You know, the best way i’ve done that then is to try and find an equivalent, uh, size department and what it’s sold for recently. Uh, look, it used to be able to find at least taels value’s. This’s why, precisely? You see you found a workaround. This is why you’re the prospect. Research contributed for now. Provoc radio. I knew there was a reason. Uh, no, i’m always reminded, but yeah. Okay, look, look for a comparable sale. Recent comparable sale. There you go. Brilliant. Brilliant. This is this is why you need to always, always, always go to that wonderful free site called google and put the property in there because right from that, don’t forget you’ll be able to get i mean, it’s just amazing. I can’t believe the precise photos and how closely i consume in on a home that i’m researching in terms of i can see number of cars in the driveway very often when i’m doing this type of research. So it’s, it’s amazing. He’ll definitely want to make sure you’re googling the address as well. So google as well as a swell a zillo. Okay for ok, ok. Um let’s see? Uh, you kind of like google maps for ah, well, before we go to google maps and broader real real estate discussion, is there anything more i don’t want to leave? You will leave your you’re good contributions unspoken. So is there anything more we need to talk about with respect to individual properties? Yeah, the only other thing i might mention is this sometimes sometimes in addition to putting ah, a property in the name of a trust, somebody might decide to really try and put some protection around that property and put it in the name of an llc. So if you’re resync researching someone like let’s, say you’re researching an entrepreneur and you know from conversations that you’ve had with them or from your board, that’s had conversations with this person that they have multiple property somewhere, and here your trying to find their name and you’re looking up their name, you know, the city that they live in a city and state, and you’re just not coming up with it. It might be that they own that property in an llc he might need to take one step first to go to the secretary of state. Database for that state. Put in the person’s name and see if it comes up connected to any l l sees, once you’ve got the name of the llc, then go back into your property database and research on the name of the llc as opposed to the individual. This is why she’s, the prospect researcher contributor. You gotta have a problem doing this work for you. If you don’t have one. Get maria. Uh, you know, brilliant. Brilliant. There you go. Very simple work around. We’re stymied. Everybody who, uh, who ran up against it, though. Okay? Yeah. Yes, holden elsie’s because, uh, i guess there’s, i guess there’s there’s a tax advantages, the business you’re doing, some kind of business passed through or something. Well, very often they’re just trying to protect the asset. So, you know, let’s say that, like i said, make-a-wish avectra nor or they own a big private company, um and they’re just trying to protect it against, you know, lawsuits and that sort of thing. Um, instead of putting it in their spouse’s name or a child’s name or whatever, still add maybe that extra layer of protection as a limited liability company. Owning the home as opposed to, you know, on individual a supposed them owning it personally and it being a personal i said it’s an asset of the llc. So if their personal assets wherever compromised for some reason thie the property in the llc would be outside that that reach. Okay, we just have to have a minute before break. So why don’t you just give us a little tease for what? How google maps could be helpful real estate wise that i bet a lot of people are not thinking about. So, you know, you and i have always often talked about pro active research versus reactive research. A lot of what we talked about it to this point in the show is on reactive research. Well, there’s a feature in google called my math that’s going to allow you to do some pro active research to really identify you know where some of your donors and prospects are based. Ah, and i’m going to give you some ideas and had to use that particular data. Yes, much more than just putting in an address. But that’s, right. Time for our last break text to give you get more revenue because they make e-giving easy for your donors. If somebody can send a text message, they can donate to you it’s simple not only simple but affordable, secure there’s taking care of these things for you, you text npr to four, four, four, nine, nine nine that’ll give you info, and you’ll also be able to claim your special listener offer npr to four, four four nine nine nine. We’ve got about six more minutes for real estate in prospect research and go ahead, marie simple reveal if this feature of google maps that we can use in our prospect research, i’ll bet a lot of people are not aware of, right? So it’s actually called my map and ah, the earl is a little bit long, so i’ll make sure that i get it to your social media team. Or maybe i’ll go ahead and upload it wherever you’d like me to do so. But it is google dot com slash math splash about flash my math. Okay, so it’s a bit long. I wish they had it a little bit shorter. You could probably find it anywhere, you know, once you first and foremost, you’ve gotta have a google account. So first things first, you gotta have that once you’ve got that, you’ll be able tio look at all the various tools that you know that that, uh, that place that you would go to once you’re logged in your google account, if you want to access to your calendar and all those other things and other features that google offers that you might be using, you’ll be able to find it there as well. So one way or another, you’ll get to it or just google google my maps, and then you’ll get to it that way. But what i loved loved loved about this, and i couldn’t believe how easy it was to use and how awesome the results were. Uh, it will allow you to upload a spread sheet into google and google wuebben map out while the addresses in that spreadsheet. So i started thinking about this and wondering, ok, well, i could see the applique ability for, uh, for a business to do this, but how can a non-profit potentially use this particular feature? And so i was thinking about a situation where you know, you’re thinking about running a special event or you’re thinking about running a cultivation event and you’re trying to figure out, where should we hold this event? You know, geographically, where does it make the most sense so that we could get the most people in attendance at the event? So you can upload a list of, say, the donors for that from that particular county or region or state or, you know, whatever it is, uh, and it will map out for you, it will put those little you know, those little markers were all so accustomed to teo jump a little pins, write it so it’ll will populate the entire map, and then you can actually hover over one of the over one of the pins and you’ll be able, teo, click on it and it’s going to give you all the information that you have tied to that particular prospect that you’ve uploaded from the spreadsheet. Yes. Oh, right, right. So all your data that you up, right, so it’s pinning the address, and then everything else you uploaded with it would would appear when you click on it or mouse over it. Or is it one of the other day when you picked up let’s. Just be careful because of that. Here’s. The caveat that you might not want to upload that personally identifiable information. The name you might not want to write. You might want to think twice about putting in. Um, they’re full name, for example in there or their email address or, you know, things like that or phone numbers. So you might be in this situation up loading less might be better just from the point of view that, you know, once you’ve uploaded this in here, this map is then saved in google under your map. This is a map you can call up at any time. Uh, and so i’m always wondering, ok, well, who else could potentially have access to this map then? You know, in the back of my mind, this is the way i’m thinking about. So i might be a little bit careful about uploading anything beyond city and state. All right, very good. Very good admonition. Oh, so? So you can use this map to see population densities within within a state. Now, did you see any maximum number of rose that you can? You can, including your excel spreadsheet. I mean, could it be ten thousand? Can you map the whole country? I didn’t, you know, i didn’t try anything with a huge spreadsheet. I sampled it with a much smaller one, but i you know, i have tto dig a little deeper, and in google’s, they do have a pretty good help section about how to use this so they might address that there. Um, but i’m not sure if they’re gonna limit you on the size of this. Okay, that’s a great question, but also, if you are, if you’re planning a visit somewhere, you know you’re doing your well. This is summer, so you’re not doing your winter visit to florida, but whenever you have to prepare for your winter visit for florida, so as you’re doing that what counties should be visit well, let’s, upload, let’s upload on a simple spreadsheet all our florida addresses query by state nfl put it in a spreadsheet exported to a spreadsheet. Upload that to google maps and you’ll see the population densities throughout florida and you’ll know which counties in town’s teo host in and then then you could then go for your personal visits. You could map your way through through the state dry, you know, find the best route, right? Doesn’t help you with routes. Yes, like so then you khun route from one visit one of your donors to the next to the next. And get get yourself a nice, efficient routes that you can maximize your time. You know, while you’re visiting florida so that you can visit, say, you know, five donors in a day is opposed to maybe you were thinking you could only get two. Well, wouldn’t it be great if he could get four or five people in that one day? Right? Google will will route you through them. Love it, love it. Okay, wait. We just have ah, minute left before we have to wrap it up. Maria simple. What would you like to leave our listeners with so two more deuces real quick. One is if you have a lot of you run five k’s and walk and things like that and you’re not. And some of these people may not be already tied into your organization to the level that you’d like them tied in beyond their participation. So why not again? Matthau out where all of these folks, you’ve got their registration data. They’ve registered for your race again. Tie in to google maps, find out where these folks are all coming from, to participate in your five k and see how you can have some further engagement with them. Another, you know, i thought about was we have to leave it. There dahna next next time. Maria simple she’s, the prospect finder, she’s at the prospect finder, dot com, and at marie, a simple thank you so much, maria, you’re welcome, good talking to you. Next week, we’re live with a studio audience from the foundation center. If you missed any part of today’s show, i’d be seat. You find it on tony martignetti dot com. We’re sponsored by pursuing online tools for small and midsize non-profits data driven and technology enabled. Tony dahna slash pursuant, well, your c p a is guiding you beyond the numbers weinger cps dot com. Why tell us credit card and payment processing your passive revenue stream? Tony dahna slash tony. Tell us on by text to give mobile donations made easy text npr, to four, four, four, nine, nine, nine a. Creative producers. Claire meyerhoff. Sam liebowitz is the line producer, shows social media is by susan chavez. Mark silverman is our web guy, and this music is by scott stein. You’re with me next week for non-profit radio. Big non-profit ideas for the other ninety five percent. Go out and be great. Schnoll you’re listening to the talking alternative network oppcoll waiting to get a drink. Nothing. Cubine you’re listening to the talking alternative net. Are you stuck in a rut? Negative thoughts, feelings and conversations got you down? Hi, i’m nor in something potentially ater tune in every tuesday at nine to ten p m eastern time and listen for new ideas on my show. Yawned potential. Live life your way on talk radio dot n y c hey, all you crazy listeners looking to boost your business? Why not advertise on talking alternative with very reasonable rates? Interested simply email at info at talking alternative dot com. Are you into comics, movies and pop culture at large? What about music and tv? Then you’re in for a treat. This is michael dulled, your host on talking alternative dot com. I’ve been professionally writing comic books, screenplays and music articles from fifteen years. 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