Megan Castle: Fundraising Storytelling To Show Your Impact
Lots of nonprofits don’t have direct monetary impact to promote their work. If that’s you, Megan Castle has practical tips and strategies to collect and distribute quality, down-to-earth stories from your real supporters. She’ll help you engage your audiences, increase donations and save team time. Megan is CEO of Soapboxx. (This is part of our coverage of the 2025 Nonprofit Technology Conference.)
Patty Breech: 5 Common Email Marketing Mistakes And How To Fix Them
Yes, email performs well. Period. But you want your email campaigns to perform best. Are you making typical mistakes with inducing folks to join your list; welcoming them; bloating your messaging; talking too much about you; and, in who’s sending? Patty Breech explains these common mistakes and how to correct them. She’s founder and CEO of The Purpose Collective. (This is also part of our #25NTC coverage.)
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Welcome to Tony Martignetti Nonprofit Radio, big nonprofit ideas for the other 95%. I am your aptly named host and I’m the podfather of your favorite hebdominal podcast. Oh, I hope you loved last week’s show, the 750th. Great fun. Great fun. Hope you’re with us. And I’m glad you’re with us this week. Because I’d suffer with duodnitis if you inflamed me with the idea that you missed this week’s show. Here’s our associate producer Kate with what’s on the menu. Hey Tony, I hope our listeners are hungry for more of our 25 NTC coverage. Fundraising storytelling, to show your impact. Lots of nonprofits don’t have direct monetary impact to promote their work. If that’s you, Meghan Cassle has practical tips and strategies to collect and distribute quality, down to earth stories from your real supporters. She’ll help you engage your audiences, increase donations, and save team time. Megan is CEO of Soapbox. Then 5 common email marketing mistakes and how to fix them. Yes, email performs well, period. But you want your email campaigns to perform best. Are you making typical mistakes with inducing folks to join your list? Welcoming them, bloating your messaging, talking too much about you, and in who’s sending. Patty Bree explains these common mistakes and how to correct them. She is founder and CEO of The Purpose Collective. On Tony’s take too. Beware of this planned giving scam. Here is fundraising storytelling to show your impact. Thanks for being with our 25 NTC coverage. That’s the 2025 nonprofit technology conference. We are all together at the Baltimore Convention Center where our coverage is sponsored by Heller Consulting technology services for nonprofits. With me now is Megan Cassle, CEO at Soapbox. Welcome, Megan. Thanks. Excited to be here. You are. I am. I’m glad to hear it. Your session topic is show. Don’t tell your impact using stories as a foundation of your fundraising. Uh, first, before we get into storytelling. Your advice and uh strategies around that. Why don’t you just share what the soapbox about the CEO? Sure, yeah, so is a software platform that was built for nonprofits to help different organizations collect and share stories from their supporters for advocacy purposes, fundraising, marketing, really anything that you would want to use user generated style storytelling for. So our mission is really to help organizations that often have low capacity. Low resources, low budgets, collect stories that are really authentic and not highly produced like a style videos, but people sitting on their own couch in their own living room talking about ways that they’ve been impacted by policies or different things in their own communities and leveraging those stories for nonprofits to be able to use them for a number of different ways. So is your background as software developer or nonprofits or both? Good question. Uh, my background is in journalism and nonprofit marketing. Yeah, so I started off as a journalist, but this has really been an interesting intersection between storytelling and marketing in my current role because we do a lot of storytelling, of course, but with a lot of different nonprofits we’re working with a little over 70 but um it’s a lot of marketing too because once you get the stories, how to get the stories and how to share the stories is all about marketing. Right. Um So you’re um. I guess your your session is about uh helping nonprofits that don’t have a direct uh monetary impact to to share with with folks uh so the easy case, you know, for $5 a day you can buy lunch for children or pay for spay neuter, etc. so folks that don’t have this kind of monetary impact. So what um what types of organizations are you focusing on in your session? Yeah, so it was hard to come up with the learning objectives because I think there’s a lot of different ways that we could go with this, um, but it sounds like you read the description. That is true that it’s excellent work, homework you listen to some of our episodes. I listen to. preparing for each other. Trying to be as eloquent and analytical as the rest of them. Um, but yeah, so we work with a lot of organizations like I said that are doing advocacy work and it’s really hard to show that there’s like a tangible impact to that kind of work which often deincentivizes donors, not only to donate more amounts but also to donate more frequently or become a reoccurring donor, things like that. It feels in a world of instant gratification it’s really easy to want to donate somewhere where you know exactly what essentially product you’re buying for that and when it’s an organization that says that they’re going to work on economic justice or childcare policy and maybe that’s a 15 year fight or something that we’re still fighting for, it’s really hard to prove that those donor dollars actually went to something that’s making a real difference in their own community. And beyond that, even just proving that it’s something that’s going to impact their family as an independent person and not just like the whole of America. I think a lot of these things become very abstract, so being able to tell somebody that. By donating this $20 on a reoccurring level, it’s gonna be something that’s gonna impact your individual family is something that’s really, really difficult for nonprofits to prove and through storytelling I think that’s really the only way to do it is being able to have people that they can relate to and that seem like a real person and a real human kind of show the impacts that they’re actually making on like a daily or yearly or quarterly kind of way. I there any kind of Uh, infrastructure, uh, I don’t mean that technical sense, but like processes that we need to have in place before we can start to get, you know, these down to earth good, good stories, valuable stories. Yeah, I think that there is. I think a lot of organizations often go for quantity over quality in this sense and that. They also because they’re usually the bandwidth of the capacity that these organizations have for marketing or communications is has a big play here. I think a lot of the times when you say you need to be collecting stories, the first thing that nonprofits think is they’re like oh we don’t have a person for that, we don’t have the capacity for that, we don’t have a video crew for that and you really don’t need any of those things. Um, it’s something that a lot of Almost everybody in the world has a smartphone with a camera on it and it could be accessible for them to be able to record something right there that can help your organization make a really big difference, um, but also meeting people where they are I think is really important. So if it’s a written story that comes from email or it’s a comment on Facebook that you can kind of use to turn into a story or potentially contact that person on an individual level to get a video from them later, I think that’s great. Um, that’s really what our tool has done in a lot of ways is just make the storytelling more accessible to people so it doesn’t feel like such a heavy lift to do it, but I think in terms of the idea of like what kind of process we can have, I think like I said, meeting people where they are to make it incredibly easy and being OK with it not being perfect. I think a lot of organizations want the really polished like end of year wrap up video that looks beautiful. And costs like 80 for a 3 minute video that they can use for a bunch of different things, but truly the most impact we’ve seen with the stories that come in are often like I said, like somebody sitting on a couch in their own living room talking about how expensive childcare is and how a specific organization can maybe help that. um. Very low production value, high sincerity, right? People speaking from the heart, genuine, not actors like their hair is messy doesn’t matter what the lighting is. I mean, as long as they can be pretty well and it’ll be. Yeah, maybe they have a cluttered kitchen behind them or kids running around in the background yelling and that’s all the better. Uh, people feel the same way about editing the videos when they come in. There’s gonna be a lot of ums or ahs or any of these things in them, and they’re always like, well, how can we cut these out so it has a higher production value, but in the end that’s how we all talk on a daily basis, so making it seem really conversational and relatable is actually a lot more impactful than having a highly produced video style ad. Um, you just complimented, uh, nonprofit radio without knowing it because I don’t edit out ums and ahs and somebody on a previous panel today said, uh, you know, there are video editors, I mean audio editors, and there are that you can just give your file to and they’ll, they’ll spot the ums and ahs. and I said no, but that’s human. You know that’s the way we talk and I want a conversational show, you know, uh, we’re, it’s not David Muir. And I I think it’s easier for people to follow along if it sounds like a conversation than it is if it’s like perfect. I think, yeah, I don’t you think it’s easier to follow too? I do. I mean if it’s we’re used to dialogue, right? I think that we’re used to having this is we’re having a conversation right now that I could have with valid. I think your podcast is the best podcast. On the market, yeah, but you’re gonna make me sound perfect, right? Yeah, there’s nothing to do. OK. Alright, so we’re talking, the point is it doesn’t have to be high production value, right, to be sincere. I mean you were saying you think it’s more listenable, more approachable it’s more approachable, right? It is, yeah, and I think, um, just to repeat myself again, I think meeting people where they are is really important. I think a lot of nonprofits have the issue also that their donors aren’t always the same people that their organization is impacting. So creating like networking capabilities or just like being in the community and making partnerships with community members that are maybe working on the ground with people that you are impacting is a really good way to connect with people to get stories, but this is also something when we talk about this we want it to feel, especially my session is specifically about fundraising, how to use storytelling to increase your donor dollars and we don’t want this to feel exploitative. It shouldn’t feel like something that’s like we’re gonna use your really personal story about Medicaid or something like that. able to get donor dollars. It should be something that feels really empowering. People are really struggling out there and that’s why nonprofits exist, right, is for the common good of people that are having issues or things in their in their world that they need help with. Um, so empowering people to uplift their voices is Really, I think in a lot of ways empowering to them but it it it works really well for nonprofits as well, but it should feel like something that they’re a part of and we often see that organizations that include their donors or people impacted in their own storytelling um are actually usually going to donate more because now they have an attachment or like a sense of ownership in the organization because now they’re a part of it. It shouldn’t just feel like something that you’re going to use in a fundraising ask but. It’s also something that the staff is listening to when you’re working towards your mission and like creating operating values and all these things of having member voices. All right, so, um, after we’re, uh, conscious and reaching out to folks where they are, we, we see a potential, you see a potential story you mentioned maybe a Facebook post or something or some social post that is a potential story, uh, what’s where, where do we take from there? How, how do we how do we reach out to the person. Again, now from our perspective, sincerely nonexploitatively, but you know we think that there could be something there that would encourage others to to support. Yeah, that’s an interesting question partially because for the the work that I do specifically we work with so many different organizations and they all have a little bit of a different approach for this because their audiences are so different. I think a really common way we see it is people that are already on a list like a marketing list obviously if you have like a really big email list sending out and ask for stories is really helpful. I like to do anybody that’s already taken an action so donors are obviously great. I think giving money is like the highest bar action so even in like a donation receipt email that they receive, you can include an ask for storytelling there, whether it’s a Google for asking. For a written story or a link to something where they can upload a video or something like that. I think that’s a really good way to do it. Same thing with live events. If somebody is willing, especially in our day and age where everything is virtual, if somebody is willing to physically show up at an event for you, they’re for sure going to be willing to record a 20, 32nd story of something that they’re dealing with because they obviously have a deep value or attachment to your organization. In terms of like at the events you could ask them right there. We have a lot of people that do that, absolutely, and it helps just add like a little bit of fun to the event too like I don’t know, you go to a wedding and there’s like a goofy photo thing, you know, like people like to do that kind of stuff and it. There’s a lot of different ways you can do it. It doesn’t even have to be a video. It could just be a photo or something. Um, I think that too is like having a little bit of a user journey is often helpful. You don’t need to go from 0 to 100 right away. It doesn’t have to be like, we heard you have this issue, we want to get a 30 minute interview style story with you. It could be something like we would love for you to even like signing a petition, like, so you sign a petition first. If they sign the petition, you send them an ask for a written story. And then after they sign on a written story, you could even just send them back their written story and ask for a video. Um, that’s actually advice that I got from uh somebody named Felicia at Mom’s Rising. That’s the way that she does user journeys to get videos on soapbox and it’s been really effective for them. So it’s kind of like again meeting them where they’re at and then asking for like a little bit more every time um and getting them into something that they feel really comfortable with. Although the journalism part of me is like if you see a comment on Facebook of somebody saying something, I personally would reach out to them personally and ask them like just in a message or something, we saw that you wrote this, we’d really love for you to get involved and I think that’s a good way to do it. It’s not saying we need a story from you to use for this thing, but saying we would love for you to get involved um with our mission and it will help us in these ways are great strategies gave us like half a dozen. Methods of gathering story whether it’s an event, uh, you know, face to face, uh, or, uh, or virtual, um, other, uh, so this is, you know, I mean this is, I think this is the part where it it may break down like there’s we see potential but we don’t. Take advantage. We don’t, we don’t reach out to the person, not take advantage of the person. We don’t take advantage of the potential that’s there to, to support our mission, you know, we just kind of let it go or, you know, oh that that sounds interesting, and then we’re on to the next post or something, you know, or I’m glad that glad she said that, but then nothing more comes of it, um. So anything else at this at this stage that um yeah I mean I think storytelling has to be intentional like you’re saying, I think people will even like hear the things that I’m saying now and be like, well, maybe we’ll think about it or like it’s gonna take effort. It is something that you have to like consciously think about. It’s kind of like. I, to be honest, I think about this a lot like fundraising. If you, they say on average it takes 7 touch points before somebody will actually donate, it might take a couple of different touch points before somebody’s actually going to give you their story, but if we asked once for donations and they didn’t do it, no fundraiser would stop asking, right? Like you have to come up with other strategies to do it and once you come up with a strategy for storytelling that really works for your specific audience and your organization, it can really help make those asks a lot easier so it is worth the effort. Um, I do think though it shouldn’t feel storytelling shouldn’t feel like something that’s sort of parallel to the work that you’re doing, it really should feel integrated. It shouldn’t feel like, well, I really need a second staff person or something to be doing this. It should be something that feels really in line with the fundraising and the marketing strategy that you already have like for nonprofit to have a marketing strategy that doesn’t include storytelling, I think. a really big loss. Um, it should feel very integrated in that and if you’re doing it correctly, it shouldn’t feel like it’s like the work for 3 people. It should feel like it’s integrated into what you’re already doing. It’s part of the process see something that could be valuable. You talked about the journey, the content provider journey, you didn’t call it that, but uh. I don’t know why I’m using jargon. I have jargon tail on my own show, and I’m, you know, no, but it’s a journey for the person. They may not be a content creator. They are for you, but um. Yeah, no, it’s very like low lift in the beginning. Like it could just be a photograph we just use the post that you just quote the post that you just wrote something like that. You’ve already written it we use it on our website. Can we quote that in an email in a newsletter? That’s a really compelling story. We’d love to put that as a pull out quote in our next newsletter. People love that kind of stuff. Yeah. And people will feel special about it and then they might even share your newsletter on their own social media because they’ll be like, look, I’m quoted little vanity, yeah, we love to brag about ourselves, especially if we’re given a good opportunity. Look how we become validation personal validation now we’re the and there’s no humility on this podcast, um. OK, so now we’re at the right, so we’ve gathered some content. Some folks have said yes. Some said no, but that’s OK because like you said, we wouldn’t stop asking if it was fundraising. So we’ve got some, got some stories, different formats, um, suppose it’s just, well, you suppose it’s just a written story and, uh, we got their authority, their consent to use it in a newsletter. Anything more that we thank them. I just wanted these little mechanics. We thank them before we ask them if they take a further step like write a paragraph or something or a little fuller story. Any anything else we should be doing? Yeah, I think. Not to use the classic, it depends, but I think it does depend a little bit on like. It does kind of a little bit come down to capacity and volume like we have some partners that will be collecting hundreds if not thousands of videos at the same time. So it’s really difficult to be able to have a personal touch with like each of those individuals, right? Um, but I do think having like an auto triggered this is where tech comes in like having an auto triggered email that can go to every person that submits it saying thank you for the the video or the submission and also telling you, telling them what you’re gonna use it for. I think it’s really helpful. um I think a lot of nonprofits fall into abstract when they talk about use cases where they’re like we’re gonna use this for like tech justice or like. You know, fight this economic disparity, um, but that’s not really telling them what you’re actually going to use their story for and what it’s actually going to do and that kind of falls into that impact part is like now they feel like they’re submitting it to a black void that’s never gonna happen, um, so telling them like this is potentially going to be featured on our social media or embedded on our website like do something that’s actually going to tell them where to look for it. I think it’s often really helpful and deeply incentivizing for them to want to submit it and also potentially want to submit again in the future um and to share it, which is helpful. Um, but yeah, otherwise like we see a lot of people that will put stories on, yeah, like embedded on their website or like we work with a lot of member organizations if you’re looking for members, um, have members talk about what they like about your organization and embed a bunch of videos on your website under the membership page or take action page. um, yeah, otherwise. Mechanics, I guess it just it so depends on the on the people. I think if it’s a small group, like if you’re asking 5 volunteers, we have a lot of organizations that will do this even with just volunteers. They just have volunteers talk about different things and ask their friends to submit stories. If it’s like a group of just a few, I think even like a handwritten note thinking them or something would be amazing. I’m a big fan of handwritten notes. I think a handwritten note or like maybe a discount on like an event registration or something or a free event registration or something, a t-shirt, anything like that. I, I, I think it’s important to steer away a little bit from being like here’s compensation for recording a video because I do think once you compensate people will kind of say whatever you want them to say and it does affect the authenticity of it a bit. Um, but providing them a t-shirt with your logo on it, I think it’s a gratitude. It’s like some of these stories that we’re collecting are really personal about people’s use of Medicaid or gun violence or abortion care and so for people. to put themselves out there and really do that for you to be able to make a difference at your organization I think deserves a thank you in some way. And that’s how you’re building engagement, right? Like so you want them to be a donor in the future like you’re just building a relationship with them and they took a really big step so you should take at least a medium sized step to meet them. You got a good story, you can share? Um, let’s see. Yeah, we have, uh, I mean we have lots of places that are using it really effectively right now. I think I keep mentioning Medicaid because it’s so topical that we have 4 or 5 organizations right now doing save Medicaid campaigns um for advocacy purposes. Um, we work with the National Education Association, um, and they’ve been doing a lot of getting a lot of stories from educators about why public education is important, why the Department of Education is important, um, things like that which have been really great. Um, we worked with, trying to think of like volume over over quantity a little or like quantity over quality. Uh, we have some places that like I said, we’ll collect thousands of videos on our platform for something like Color of Change collected thousands of videos after George Floyd’s murder, um, on our platform, basically just saying that they like stand with the family and that things need to change, um, but then on the flip side of that, we have an amazing organization called. Community catalyst that they work on health justice and they’ve been getting a lot of really, really amazing stories about medical debt that have actually like done a lot to impact policy and we talked about personal stories. I mean, medical debt now you’re now you’re saying to the world that you’re suffering financial difficulties, things are challenging for you and that’s, that’s very personal. I mean, a lot of the stuff we’re talking about is we talk about abortion access and that’s also a deeply personal. Um, they specifically do a really good job of, I think you can use storytelling in a really tactful way to distill really difficult information or like policy, right? Like. We’re not, not all of us are really well informed about what certain policies will mean for us on a day to day basis or like for our family and community catalyst in particular I think does a really good job of taking like high level decisions and distilling it down to what it actually means on a human level through storytelling. They did a campaign about nonprofit hospitals and I had no idea like what the impact of nonprofit hospitals were before they did this campaign. Um, it’s something that almost everybody has in their community, but we’re not really aware of, um, so storytelling is a really powerful tool to be able to change those kinds of things. Um, have you done your session yet? I haven’t. You haven’t. It’s coming. OK. OK. I know I’m giving away all my tips. This is not gonna nobody listens to this podcast. Um, no, we have 13,000 listeners. That’s amazing. It’s good. It’s a, I’m grateful to have that many people listening each week. Um, otherwise, yeah, otherwise I would have asked you, uh, some of the questions that you got from the audience, but, um. So, uh, leave us with something that uh we haven’t talked about yet or maybe amplify something we did talk about, but you wanna go a little deeper. Um, with some encouragement. Leave us with something good. Yeah, um, I think a big reason why just like a little bit of my own story I guess like I went to school for journalism and a really big part of that was um making sure that voices are being heard that aren’t normally being heard by the mainstream media or just different things and I think in nonprofits it’s easy to target people that have like a really good story or um are already active or have a community following or things like that but I think some of the most impactful stories are the people who have tried to tell their story a lot of times and felt like it never has gotten heard and so they just stopped telling it. Um, that was a really big part of my sort of like journalistic career was um talking about the um so I’m like stumbling a little bit I just haven’t talked about this story in a minute but. Um, was talking about the healthcare access and like federal funding access on Native American reservations in rural Montana during COVID and they had like absolutely no belief that the federal government was going to be helpful um through IHS funding at that time and they there was no coverage in Montana about what was going on in those areas um through like funding. And it was a really big sort of like catalyst for me to be like I just want there to be a really accessible super easy way for people to not only tell their story but feel like that story is being heard um and like actually get used for something that could be impactful. So that’s sort of really like a big part of why our company is the way that it is now is just feeling like everybody has the same opportunity to tell their story in a meaningful way. Megan Castle, CEO of Soapbox, thanks very much for sharing all your ideas. Yeah, thanks Tony. It’s been. Thank you, my pleasure and thank you for being with Tony Martignetti nonprofit radio coverage of the 2025 nonprofit technology conference where we are sponsored by Heller Consulting. It’s time for Tony’s steak too. Thank you, Kate. I have to thank our long time listener and fan of nonprofit radio, Cheryl McCormick. She’s Been with us for many, many years. She’s CEO of the Athens Are Humane Society in Athens, Georgia. And she alerted me to a planned giving scam. That has been run in two charities in Canada. And the exact same thing, storywise and. Document wise happened at. The Athens Are Humane Society. What happens is they’re preying on small charities that would get excited by a $95,000 planned gift. And they promised to send you the check, and, but Cheryl and her team had some suspicion about the, the way the conversations were going and the strange email address was an AOL address, but the person was claiming to be an attorney. And there was no obituary for the person that they claimed had died. There was no will available. So these are the things that raised their suspicion. Uh, the, uh, $95,000 check did arrive. To the Humane Society, but Cheryl and her team had figured out the scam in advance because they found some news coverage of the exact same scam run against two charities in Canada. And I did a LinkedIn post, if you want to go back to my, look at my LinkedIn posts from last week, you’ll find a link to the news coverage of that, uh, that scam against the two Canadian charities. What is the scam? They send you the $95,000 check, then they tell you, oh, you made a terrible mistake. We sent you too much money. We need you to wire back 70 or $75,000. You were only supposed to get 20 or 25. You wire the money back. And after that, the $95,000 check bounces. And you are out the money that you wired them because they’re long gone. So Beware. Uh, it’s people preying on small charities, uh, who would get excited, you know, uh, well, any charity, I think would get excited by a $95,000 gift of any type, planned gift or, uh, lifetime, immediate gift. Take your time. Now you’re aware of this scam, but generally, Trust your intuition. Do your due diligence, research. If you’re not sure about something, don’t say yes. You know, you don’t have to urgently accept a gift. Of any type, whether it’s a lifetime gift or or planned gift. Take your time. Make sure you Do the research. Because there are some folks uh taking advantage of our community, which Boils my blood. It was miserable. We we’re gonna fucking. Scammers picking on our community. Damn you, damn you scammers. That is Tony’s take too. Kate. We hear that scammers would be going after small nonprofits and not like. Rich people, they can do both like Jeff Bezos or something like Amazon and yeah I think they’ve got enough, uh, Bezos, but uh you can do both. It’s not mutually exclusive. So, I want folks to be aware that there are people preying on nonprofits. My favorite scam is the one that dad got, your brother, he got in the, in the mail that. He was like some long lost relative of some prince overseas and he has to like claim money or something and he’s like royalty now. Yeah, yeah. I think he told me about that. He asked me, I think he asked me about that at the time. That was a few years ago. Yeah, I remember we’re we’re descended from royalty or something like that, yeah. Martin Etis. The Martignetti uh science, the uh the. The, the Duke and Duchess. Oh yeah. I, I would be the duke, your dad would be the duchess. Well, we’ve got boo but loads more time. Here are 5 common email marketing mistakes and how to fix them. Hello and welcome to Tony Martignetti nonprofit radio coverage of 25 NTC, the 2025 nonprofit Technology Conference. We’re all together in Baltimore, Maryland. Our 25 NTC coverage is sponsored by Heller Consulting technology services for nonprofits. With me now is uh 33 timer back on nonprofit radio, Patty Bree, founder and CEO of the Purpose Collective. Welcome back, Patty Breach. Thank you so much for having me. I’m pretty sure it’s, I think that sounds right, yeah, it is, um, and this year. Your NTC session is uh 5 email marketing mistakes you’re probably making and how to fix them. That’s right. Uh, I think you and I kicked off our uh NTC journey with, with the, uh. The the with with an email journey, your your your email welcome journey, isn’t that what it was called your journey, yeah, that’s right. I’m a little bit obsessed with. OK, yeah, that the previous session attributed the 55 email journey to you and you’ve got exact time frames and first one should look like it came from the CEO or what like it was personally prepared. Yes, we’ve been through that. Um, so, uh, the 5 email marketing mistakes, why don’t you just tick off the 5 and then we’ll be happy to go into detail. Go ahead. What are the 5 you’re probably making mistakes. Yeah, so the first mistake has to do with how you’re collecting emails for your list and that is the mistake that you’re probably making is that you’re just asking people to subscribe to your newsletter. Um, the second mistake is that after you convince someone to subscribe to your newsletter. Um, you do nothing. You answer that with silence. Even just one email would be great, but a lot of people don’t have that. OK. Um, the third mistake is that your your emails are trying to do everything. They’re just they’re way too full. And the 4th mistake is that your emails are talking about you not talking to me. And then the 5th mistake is that your emails are not coming from a person. OK. Uh, some of these sound familiar, like talking about you, you, you like, you like it donor centric, donor focused, not about us, the work, about you, the donor, but we’ll get to that. That’s number 4. I’m jumping ahead, but some, some of these sound familiar, including the, uh, how you’re welcoming the welcome series. OK, but let’s start with number one, how you’re, how you’re collecting what what what’s, what are we probably getting wrong there again? Yeah, so I think um most of us are probably just putting something really simple on our website that says subscribe to our newsletter or join our email list with a little box to put your email in and I argue that that’s not very compelling. Nobody really wakes up in the morning thinking I need some more newsletters today so uh I’m gonna go to this organization’s website to get my fix. I’m so glad they asked me to join an email list I was really hoping to do that today. Um, so I encourage organizations instead to invite people to be a part of a movement, um. You know, include a call to action that’s really inspiring. What is it that you’re offering people like is it that you’re gonna provide stories of hope in their inbox every day which all of us could use a little bit more hope in this day and age? Is it um that I mean politicians are really good at this if you go to their websites and see what their call to action is on their email newsletters, it’s things like you know we’re gonna. We’re gonna dream big, we’re gonna fight hard, we’re gonna put power back in the hands of the people, like really inspiring messages where you read that and you think, yeah, I wanna do that. Absolutely, sign me up. Um, what pop-ups, uh, light boxes, what do you feel about, are, are, are pop-ups and light boxes, are they antiquated? No, pop-ups are still, I think those are good. Can you, can you do those like, well, you said it for like 15 seconds on the site and then it pops up or how do you feel about those? if they’re not good then say, say you’re, I’m out of, I’m out of line. No, I think those are great um I think what you said is really important like wait a little bit before a lightbox shows up so you can either do that with a time delay or you can do it with scroll depth on the page depending on your website so I think something that’s annoying is when you go to a site and you’re trying to read. Whatever it is you came there to read and like almost immediately something’s in your face and you’re like I was trying to read that like get out of here. I came here for a 1015 seconds with the info that I wanted 15 seconds in the world of websites is actually a long time to spend on a page so if you’re delaying something that long, great, like at that point someone if they’ve been there for 15 seconds, they’re probably interested in you enough to sign up for your email. But you want to know what your average time on the. On the site is, I mean, if it’s, if it’s 8 seconds, that’s, that’s pretty bad actually. If people are, people are leaving your site after 8 seconds, that’s bad. Well, now you know what, it it depends on the reason they go though if they, if they, if it was a search and now, now that brings in the Google AI summaries that is that is now reducing organic, uh, organic hits right because we’re getting it from the AI summary we don’t even scroll past that, but if you get past that and people came with a specific question and you’ve got the answer. Um, they might only be 10 seconds. Yeah. Yeah. They might only be 8 seconds on your home page and then click through to a different page. Um, so yeah, I think, I think lightboxes are great. I would just make sure they’re not immediately in your face. OK, OK. Um, right, so you wanna, you’re trying to draw people into your work in inducing them to join you, so not just get a, get a get a weekly. Yeah, you’re inviting them to be part of something bigger than themselves, joining a movement, solving a problem, being a part of the solution, being inspired, that’s really the call to action that I want every nonprofit to have on their website for their email newsletters. I have a good friend. Credit her because I’m gonna use her material, uh, Sherry Quam Taylor. Uh, we spent a lot of time together on LinkedIn. And she says that her advice is that you’re not giving. To us, you’re giving to the cause through us, so it’s 2 versus through. You’re giving to. Uh, solving world hunger through Feeding America or you know, um, etc. you know, do you, do you buy into that or you’re welcome to agree with Sherry disagree or disagree I should say. No, I definitely agree. Yeah, I think that’s that’s totally right. One of the examples I use in the presentation is a. The action that says let’s end malaria. It’s from an organization that’s working and you know it says like we believe this is possible. Join us. Like we’re we’re going to get rid of this disease. Let’s do it. And so the people who are signing up for that email list and donating to that organization. They’re trying to get rid of malaria. They’re like, Oh, is that what you guys are doing? I don’t know who you are. I want to get rid of malaria, you know, that’s the one thing I’ll join your list because, yeah, no, no, absolutely, alright, something bigger, right, something big, the bigger cause. Yeah, right, right, that’s the sort of inducing, uh. An opening relationship, you know, hear from us regularly. OK. OK. Um, so how are you welcoming? Uh, here we are now. 5 email, the, uh, the ubiquitous Patty Breach, uh, purpose collective 5 email welcome journey. Is that, is that what this is? How are you welcoming folks after the first one? I’m sorry, after they say yes, I will, I will, I’ll take your email. Your, I’ll take your newsletter, sorry, yes, I’ll join your newsletter. What should happen first thing. Yeah, so what I like to point out to people is that the journey that it took for someone to give you their email address, that didn’t happen in a minute. They probably, you know, first heard about you through word of mouth or some other means and so they maybe spent some time poking around in your social media. They liked what they saw, so maybe they ended up on your YouTube channel watching some longer form videos, maybe they popped over to your website, read even more about you, looked at your blog, and then decided. Yeah, I like this organization. I like what they’re doing. I wanna be a part of it. Here you can have my email address so that process that might have been days, hours, it was like by the time they give you their email address they are fired up about you. They’re like, yes, I’m in, sign me up, let’s do this let’s end malaria or whatever it is and if we’re not meeting that enthusiasm with our own excitement then it’s a really missed opportunity. So I recommend sending at least one email that just says yay, you’re here, you made a good decision, welcome. OK, OK, uh, that’s at least 1. Let’s let’s review the uh the 5 email welcome journey. You we we’re not gonna go into the 35 minutes that we spent, uh, 2 years ago, uh, no, 3, no 2 years ago. Yeah, this is the 3rd. Um, but you know, remind us what the, what this ubiquitous journey looks like. Yeah, so the idea is to capitalize on the window of opportunity immediately following someone’s action. So I recommend sending 3 to 5 emails starting as close to immediately as possible, so at least within the 1st 24 hours after this action. And going up to 3 or 4 weeks later. So, um. You can send as as many or as few as you like in that window depending on your team’s capacity depending on what you feel like you have to say um but I recommend starting with something simple that’s like congratulations we’re so glad you’re here you made a good decision, welcome to the team, yay um and then from there you can go into um more content that. Talks more about what it is that you do broadly, but we always want to make sure we’re giving someone something of value, so saying like. Um, here’s our most popular piece of content that we put out in the last year. We thought you might like it. Everyone else told us it was really great. Have you seen it? Have you seen this video? I’ve read this blog post, um, you can invite people to come hang out with you if that’s appropriate, like, hey, we have events we’d love to see you at one of them. We have volunteer opportunities we love to meet you, um, something that’s like really drawing them in to the work and making them feel like they’re an important part of what you do. And if you want, you can throw in a donation ask as one of those emails as well. So the, the second one, not certainly not the first one, no ask in the first one that I have your attention, can I have your money? Alright, so 2 or 3 you could put it in. OK. It could be, it could be a different ask too. It could be a volunteer ask, could be a sign, uh, a petition is a ubiquitous one. Survey, maybe you have a survey about your interests that are all valid calls to action, right? Absolutely, yeah, and they’re like I said, they’re very fired up about you at this point, so it’s an excellent time to ask them for something like this. And the second one initially joined 2 to 3 days after that initial action and the first one came within 24 hours. OK. OK, why don’t we suppose we’re we have the capacity for a 555 step. what are we doing in 4 and 5? Yeah, so, um, I would say that the time between emails should basically start doubling so you wanna have one email immediately, a couple days later another 15 days later another one, a week later, another 12 weeks later, the last one. Um, and I think you can’t tell too many stories in these email welcome journeys, so I like to do, um, you know, a simple welcome message for the first one, tell a story of impact meaning here’s the story of lives that are being changed thanks to supporters like you, like this is what the work that you’re making possible now that you’re part of this community. Third email can be some call to action like volunteer with us, come to our events, take our survey, make a donation, whatever it might be. 4th email tell another story, and then that 5th email it could be another call to action like we want you to read this, we want you to watch this video, we want you to donate if you haven’t asked that yet, whatever it might be. OK, thank you. Good overview of the welcome journey. All right, that’s how you should be welcome, but your advice was at least 1. That’s not just the regular newsletter, at least one personalized thank you, yeah, you’re with us. Thanks so much. Yeah, exactly. I mean it can be overwhelming to think about creating a 5 part series, so maybe just start with one, just at least get that going. OK, um, your emails are too full, too much, too dense. What, what does this look like? What’s, what, what are we probably getting wrong here? So, um, it sounds like you could have called this most likely like 90% chance that you’re getting these wrong instead of probably, but you’re being, you’re being thoughtful to to the community. You’re probably getting this wrong, but overwhelmingly likely. All right, what, what’s the matter with our, our dense emails? Yeah, so one of my mentors describes marketing communications as like throwing ping pong balls at people and so if I were to throw 72 ping pong balls at you at once, you might just like cower in fear like what is happening? You probably can’t like focus on catching one of those, um, and I think a lot of times that’s what our. Emails end up being like in the nonprofit world it’s just information overload it’s just this this this this this this this and this and it’s like whoa this is like too much I I don’t know what’s going on in this message and a lot of times also I think they fall into this category that I like to call the phone call to mom which is if you could imagine. You know, a mother figure in your life calling you and saying like, hey, how are you? What did you do today? What did you do yesterday? What did you have for dinner? Where are you going tomorrow? This is a phone call from mom, that’s a better way to describe it. Yeah, but I think it’s better if the rare as that is, we know mothers never pick up the phone. No mother’s phones outgoing calls. They only they only receive calls. Uh, but if you know, but the, the phone call from hell or the phone call from mom. OK. Um. So that type of reporting. Of like this is what our nonprofit has been doing we bought new computers our CEO won an award that is only interesting to your mom. No one else wants to hear those kinds of updates so um I really challenge nonprofits to look hard at what they’re putting in their email newsletters and see if they can cut it down to just things that are relevant to their supporters like a story of impact could be relevant. And saying like you know here’s this wonderful uplifting story that we wanted to share with you it’s so heartwarming, it’s so inspiring and you’re a part of this work with us so thank you for being here and also you know inviting people to come to an event sharing a resource that might be helpful to them. That’s the type of content that I’d like to see more of in these newsletters, and it could be really simple just three pieces of information in an email. You could even just do one. You could have a newsletter where you send one topic, one story. You can do that. OK, yeah, your supporters don’t need to know everything, right? Like you serve a rack. We moved the server rack, uh, out of the ladies’ room. Now the devoted server closet. Thank you for your support. Alright, uh, yeah, see, the audience likes our idea. That’s the, uh, keynote keynote session going on in the background, but we persevere. Um, OK, yeah, so take a deep edit to your, your bloated emails like, so is it. All right, so some info just doesn’t need to be shared, like the, the, the new laptops and the server rack. That doesn’t need to be shared. But if, if, if we feel the information is relevant. Are you saying it’s better to maybe send more frequent emails that are less dense? Exactly, yeah. So if you’re an organization that is frequently updating your constituents, maybe you have a lot of events, maybe you have a lot of free resources there’s a lot going on. I would recommend sending more emails that are shorter. OK, what’s the maximum and maybe there isn’t a hard rule uh maximum number of emails. Let, let’s not even say a week. I mean, in a month. How many, how, how many would be too many, thank you, in a month. Um, that’s a good question. I don’t know that there is a hard and fast rule. You could go weekly, so that would be 4 in a month. Um, you could send 2 a week if you have a lot to say, if there’s a lot to update your supporters on. I wouldn’t do 2 a week if you’re just repeating the same content across those emails. Um, you might get people starting to to tune out, but if there’s a lot going on, yeah, weekly emails I think. All good. What’s your advice on uh resending to non-openers? Um, yeah, great question. That I think um it’s about time. It’s only 18.5 minutes in. You got a decent question. All right. That can be a good strategy, um, that has more to do with your Deliverability like getting people to interact more with your messages, um. My answer to that also I think would depend on like what is the bandwidth of your team’s capabilities and if getting the newsletter out the door is already a lot of work and it doesn’t really feel possible to go back and resend to not like that’s just too much on top of everything then I think you can skip it. OK, I mean, I, I think it’s an auto like just click click a button. Depending on your email provider, yeah, it can be. I use MailChimp. I know it’s, it’s an option. Just tap the button and then they’ll ask when do you, you know, when do you want to resend? OK. Uh, all right, so you’re not opposed to the idea. No, not opposed. OK, all right. Um, but you’re not enthusiastic about it either. Yeah, I mean, I guess. I have mixed feelings on it because I think that. I think that sometimes we can get a little fixated on the people who are not opening our emails, people who are unsubscribing. I hear this a lot from nonprofits they get. Um, they’re hurt by the people who are unsubscribing from their email list like why are these people leaving like look at all these people who don’t want to hear from us anymore like this is hurting our feelings, um, and I really want our attention and energy to go to the people who are opening your emails and are engaging with it like those are your supporters who are happy to hear from you. They’re excited about what you’re doing. And the other people who don’t want to read your messages, don’t wanna open them, don’t wanna be on your list, that’s fine, let them do whatever they want. Let’s focus on the people who are excited. OK, all right, very positive. The positive purpose collective, um, I guess the other thing you could do is look at how the resend does. If it’s very low, then you, then you’re just annoying people a second time. But if it, I don’t know if it does like 20, 20% or more. Of the the non-opener, now we’re now the population is the non-openers of the first one. I don’t know if it does 20% or more. That’s that worthwhile? Yeah it was probably worth sending, but it’s like 2 or 3%, people are, you know, they’re blowing you off a second time. Don’t resend again. I don’t know. How about this thing. 6 months later you’re getting the same email you got. All right, don’t do that. That’s another one you’re definitely doing wrong. If you’re doing that, you’re, that’s definitely a mistake. OK. Um, all right, so that do we cover email density, there’s almost only so much capacity in. Could be just 12 or 3 if you feel it’s necessary, but certainly no more than 3. And same thing with calls to action, right? Are you, you’re you’re a subscriber, I think or believer one call to action per message, right? Yeah, yeah, keep it simple. Um, click rates are, I mean, famously low across email. A good click, an amazing click rate would be 10%, meaning 90% of people are not gonna click on your email. And so I think we can do ourselves a favor by making that one click really count and just have the one call to action. So rather than saying you know you could do this or that or this or that like sometimes that creates decision fatigue and people choose nothing or not even just 2, not even 2 choices. I mean you could, you could definitely do too like um something that’s common is to include a donate button in the footer of every newsletter so maybe your call to action in the body is something different like. You want people to register for an event. That’s your main call to action. I think it’s fine to keep that other donate link in the in the in the body, keep it to one or QR code you like QR codes. Um, yeah, I love QR codes. I don’t know how often QR codes are effective in emails. Sometimes you’re on your phone that’s right. Most emails are opened by phone, right? It’s a very high percentage. Yeah, very true. OK. Right, those are more for social website. Yeah, or paper, you know, if you have like a poster somewhere, if you’re handing out a flyer QR code is a great way to get someone online really quickly. Yeah, you’re absolutely right. The vast majority of emails are on the phone, so you’re welcome to say no. Uh, talking, talking the subject matter, that the pronouns are wrong. Too much us and we and not enough you and us together. All right, expand on your, your thinking there. There’s the team. Here’s the team together. Purpose Collective, all three. Julia and Michelle just joined, uh, watching, watching the CEO. All right, you’re getting content. All right. Digital content. Don’t put too much in those emails though. Don’t fill those emails. All right. I told them, I told them in the previous, I’ll probably run these back to back week one will be probably be them with panel of three with uh, with, uh, Michelle Julia and, um, and Sarah from Brack, um, and then, and then this, this will probably be, will probably follow. I told them. Uh, you’re overexposed. The purpose is overexposed. Like every year now we got 100% of the team is on two different sessions. Next year it’ll be 4 people and you’ll want to bring them all in one sessions, yeah, so you need to sponsor. What you need to do is start sponsoring the podcast. That’s what. That’s what should be, says sponsored by Heller Consulting should be sponsored by the Purpose collector. So put that in the budget for for 2026, or even a spot opening, uh, even this summer. So you don’t have to wait you have to wait till next year. All right, so all three of you have heard it now. Yes, you do. All right, um. we’re we’re looking I think is what we’re probably doing wrong. So you might have heard me say this before. I believe the most important word you can use in any of your marketing is the word you and it’s really understandable how we end up talking too much about ourselves too much we focused language. Um, it makes perfect sense. We, we wanna show our supporters that we’re doing a good job. We wanna. Make a strong case for why our organization matters um we wanna prove that we’re doing what we said we would do with your donations um but unfortunately that can come across as um I mean one it can make it seem like we don’t need any support because look at us, look how great we’re doing we did this and we did that. Um, but the other thing is it doesn’t really invite the reader in to say you have a place here and you’re a part of this. It’s just, I mean it comes across as bragging like look at us, look at what we did, we did this and we did that and we did this other thing and now we’re doing this and we also did that. Aren’t we great? And so it’s a simple shift to just use more you focused language. So you know thanks to your support we’re able to do this um you’re changing lives, you’re helping to make the world a better place, um. I like it that you’re doing the work, not that you’re supporting us in doing the work because they all know that they know they’re not on the ground. They know they’re not visiting the homeless camps. They realize that they don’t do that. They know, but you can see it’s not like lying, you know, you’re, you’re, you’re saving lives, you know, whatever you’re improving the climate in Detroit. You know, it’s it, you don’t have to use the, you know, where you’re helping us do it. Yeah, exactly. And also you know just more gratitude when you when you add more language you end up with more gratitude statements like thank you so much for being someone who cares so deeply about this thank you for for making meaningful steps towards this goal thank you um I think that can really help your emails feel like. They’re relevant to the reader. It’s not just me talking about myself at this organization, it’s me saying to you, you matter, you’re a part of this, you’re really important, couldn’t do it without you. OK, OK. Um, email is not coming from a person. Yeah, so, um, I see this a lot where an organization will put the nonprofit name in the center line and the subject line will say something like spring 2025 newsletter and that just feels very corporate feels very one size fits all it feels like you know we’re just this. Nameless faceless organization that’s sending you an update. I think it’s much better to remind people that they’re humans who work at your organization, so put that, put a person’s name in the center line. You can still include the organization after that name if you want to. Um, but say you know this is from Patty Breach and sign the email as if it was from me, Patty Reach include my photo, you know, put something in there that shows people there are real human beings doing this work and we those real human beings, we want to talk to you are very important supporter and we want to send this message to you from us. Um, I think that personal touch can really help people feel more connected to the work that you’re doing, feel more connected to your team, and in the presentation I I include a screenshot that I pulled from my own inbox a few days ago where it’s just like corporate message after corporate message it’s like a receipt from the parking structure where I left my car to come on this trip and it’s like Toyota sent me. An email and Verizon sends me an email. It’s just like we’re so used to getting these meaningless corporate emails from companies. So if you put a person’s name in the center line, I think you’ll really stand out in the average inbox. I’m sorry, the line. Yes, yes. OK. OK. Yeah, right, right, yeah, Tony Martignetti. I do that. OK, good. I got 1 out of 5. Uh, no, this is not about me. Uh, all right, valuable, yeah, yeah, it’s, it’s the person and then you could say like CEO. I mean I’d be more apt to open a CEO’s email than, you know, if I get maybe I wouldn’t say director of development. I’d probably just leave that out. But yeah, a person, right, that’s a simple one. That’s a simple one. How do you feel about the uh yeah, using the name, you know, like addressing, you know, hello, hello Patty or you know, hey Patty or something like that I think it’s a really good idea, you know, you know, you know, the person didn’t write it personally, safe bet, you know, unless, but hey Patty, you know, hi Patty, you know, you’re into those dear, dear, yeah, yeah, great. OK. Even just even just first name yeah um Seth Godin says that what our supporters want most is to be seen and so to use someone’s name is one way you can say like I see you I remember you, I know who you are glad you’re here. Yeah, right, and now it’s person to person if the sender is a person and uh they’re saying hello yes exactly. How do you feel about uh leaving it there with personalization? That’s great. Is that right? Yeah, OK. Patty breach spelled like uh spelled like breech birth, not like breach, not like breach of contract breach, yes. Founder and CEO of the Purpose Collective. 5 email marketing mistakes you’re probably making and how to fix them. That’s what we just talked about and we are sponsored here by Heller Consulting. Technology services for nonprofits. Um, thank you very much for being with our 25 NTC coverage. Next week. Congrats, you’re a manager. Now what? And facing feedback. 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 Marignetti. The show’s 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.
Do you know that a big email list may be worse than a smaller one? Have you got ghosts or zombies in your lists? This all matters if you want your emails to land in inboxes instead of junk. Judy Freed, from 
