00:00:04
            

Well, hey there, everyone. Welcome back to another episode of the Holy Donuts podcast. Really excited to be joined today by Dane Barnett, who is the engagement manager at Medical Teams International. You're at a Grand Rapids up there, but the ministry is based in Portland. Shout out remote work for the win.        

00:00:21
            

Dane, how's it going, man? Thanks for being on the show. Good. Thanks so much for having me, Matt. I really appreciate the opportunity.        

00:00:27
            

Absolutely. Okay, so, engagement manager. I mean, literally, like, our tagline is like, this is a podcast on, like, nonprofit donor engagement. So obviously my heart beats for engagement manager. Tell us a little bit more about what that role means and kind of give us a little bit of backstory of how you got to medical teams international.        

00:00:44
            

Yeah. The title is, whenever I talk to anyone externally, I always say it's kind of a catch all for whatever doesn't fall into any other category. So my team does all of our donor events, as well as donor relations reports up to me as well. And then any additional opportunity that comes our way, any partnership opportunities, podcasts, conferences, school fundraising, church fundraising, and engagement, peer to peer fundraising, all of that is under me. I was going to ask medical teams International, for those who are not familiar with the ministry, give us a little bit of a rundown of kind of the ministry itself.        

00:01:24
            

What you all do, kind of who you serve. Yeah, that is a great question. We were founded in 1979 when our founder saw on the local news the cambodian refugee crisis, and he thought, I can do something about that. And like many great nonprofits, that's how it started, by somebody who was passionate and saw a need and thought, I can fill that need. So we were started in 1979.        

00:01:52
            

Our mission statement is daring to love. Like Jesus, we boldly break barriers to health and wholeness in a hurting world. I love that. I love that. Yeah.        

00:02:02
            

Yeah. So it's really. We have a really open tent where people from all faith backgrounds are welcome to be involved in our work. Our donors, our employees come from really diverse backgrounds and come froms, because as long as we understand the work of Jesus and what he was trying to do, you're welcome on our team, and you're welcome in our donor base. And now, 45 years later, we're about to celebrate our 45th anniversary in September.        

00:02:35
            

We are working in crisis zones around the world. We're in Ukraine, Sudan, Ethiopia, Tanzania, Colombia, and then we also have mobile dental clinics in the Pacific Northwest. And so we really pride ourselves in doing loving, life saving care. We care for the whole person. And so our work looks very different depending on the context in which we serve because we want to listen to the local populations and follow what they're saying that they need.        

00:03:09
            

That's so cool. Why don't we dive in? Let's go a little bit. You mentioned before starting, you said, hey, I'm tactician, but I'm also kind of philosopher, which resonates with me. I spend way too much time thinking thoughts instead of doing work sometimes.        

00:03:22
            

But let's dive into a little bit more of the nitty gritty. One of the things I always like to ask is about strategies, campaigns, but really it's what have you done in your time or what has your team done at your time that has really done a great job of engaging donors. Like, what's something that you can look back on, say, oh my gosh, we crushed it when we did that. And I love hearing about specifics because often, like, we learn the most from, oh, yeah, that's different than us. But I love hearing the specifics of like, what's worked well for you all with engaging donors.        

00:03:52
            

Yeah, back up just a little bit. I have a philosophy of the donor is the hero. In our story, we could not do any of the work we do around the world without our donors. And so every single thing we do has to go through that lens of how are we speaking to our donor is the hero. And whether they're a five dollar donor or a million dollar a year donor, we treat them with the same dignity and respect because that five dollar gift might be as much or more of a sacrifice than that million dollar gift was.        

00:04:31
            

And so obviously you have to scale your strategy. Right. Right. You're not sending a major gift lie to every $5 donor. Right.        

00:04:41
            

So that's kind of the lens through which we look at how we care for our donors and how I've done it throughout my career. And so when it comes to strategy and tactics, we look at how do we make this piece of communication, this thank you card, this thank you call as specific and personal as humanly possible. And obviously we have to scale it. We have a large donor file at medical teams, so we can't sit down and hand write a card to every five dollar donor. But we use tools like ignite post to make those cards feel personal.        

00:05:31
            

And then we can also write personal messages that can go into those mass produced cards. So strategies like that to really make it more scalable is really important for us. Something I am really proud of isn't necessarily a tactic, but the questions that we ask each other in our meetings, we sit down and we say what does this piece of communication or card or email or video or event or whatever we're doing that day add to our donors lives? We don't believe in just taking the money, saying thank you, and moving on. We want to build a relationship with our donors, and that means it's a give and a take.        

00:06:17
            

They're donating to us, and then how do we add value back to their lives? Through education opportunities. So every. We have a dedicated group of women called Healthy Women, Healthy World. And it's a group of our major donor women who lead a book club every other month.        

00:06:36
            

Yes. That's so cool that they read a novel or a nonfiction book together, and they invite our entire donor community to it. And those are the kinds of opportunities we look for to say, we're not only a transaction, but we want to be a part of your life. So how can I ask? Just a follow up question.        

00:06:54
            

Because one. Yes, and amen. Love that. How do you, in some ways, train donors? Right.        

00:07:01
            

So it's one thing to say that, but, like, a lot of donors are used to be being treated pretty poorly by the organizations they give to, unless they're a super major donor. But, like, let's think of, like, your average mid file donor, right? Like, that donor is like, they're not really on the radar of, like, hey, come to our president's, you know, luncheon and, like, meet with our executive team, and often they're kind of an overlooked. How do you, like, train your donors? Maybe that's the wrong word.        

00:07:24
            

Like, how do you help them understand, hey, our vision for you as really one of relationship and partnership, not one of transaction. Yeah, we just walk the walk. We show up. We. We call every new donor.        

00:07:39
            

It doesn't Matter how big or small your gift is, you get a phone call from someone at medical teams to say, thank you so much for your gift. Every donor gets a thank you card. And then we do, obviously, have exclusive opportunities for larger donors. But for our donor, for our events, everyone's invited. It doesn't Matter.        

00:08:03
            

We make sure we get a big enough venue and enough tables, make sure. Anyone who wants to. Yeah. Yes. Because I'm also a firm believer that.        

00:08:15
            

And there's obviously we. It's because we care, but there's also a strategy there that you might be giving $10 or $15, but the person you invite to go to the event with you might have a larger capacity than you or be connected to someone with a larger capacity. And I think oftentimes in our siloed strategy work, we miss those opportunities to say, well, that $15 donor might know a million dollar donor, but because we're treating them with such a small lens, they're going to return to us with a small lens, rather than saying, hey, how can we partner together and be together in this work? Right? Well, and there's so much too, like, we see this where we talk, you know, we talk to clients all the time about, like, hey, someone's coming in.        

00:09:01
            

Like, one, like, you know, if, if your ethics of an organization allow for it, wealth screen every donor, because just because someone gave you a, you know, monthly $15 gift doesn't mean they don't have the capacity to give you a monthly $5,000 gift. Right. And on top of that, you never know. To your point about how you treat people. Right, one of my kind of the drama beat over and over again is like, we're about to see the greatest wealth transfer in history from the boomer generation to millennial and Gen Z.        

00:09:30
            

And if you've not cultivated a relationship with these folks who right now, yes, they only have the capacity for a $15 a month gift or a $5.01 time gift, but in 20 years, they're going to find themselves perhaps flush with millions of dollars of cash. And if you're waiting till they have the money to build a relationship, you're too late. And so if you start not only. To build the relationship, but also, I'm a, I'm a younger millennial, I'm a nineties kid. And so we, we also expect something different.        

00:10:05
            

Absolutely. From organizations than our parents did. So as that transfer of wealth is happening and this is kind of getting into, what I see as, like, kind of a threat to our industry is, especially for older organizations who have the systems, have the procedures and are just running, we could be caught flat footed. Absolutely. If we're still, all of our processes and all of our strategies are focused on a donor generation that no longer has the wealth.        

00:10:37
            

Right. Yeah. If the strategy is, hey, we're just going to keep sending our monthly direct mail appeal and you do nothing with texting them. Right. That's one of those flat foot scenarios.        

00:10:49
            

I mean, we see that all the time where it's like, yeah, we know we should do texting at some point. And it's like, yeah, at some point. It was five years ago. Like, we might be there today. So, yeah, and I also hear from friends in the industry and people all the time, well, we don't leave voicemails.        

00:11:06
            

If, if I just have a missed call from a random number. I'm not calling you back. Absolutely not. But if you leave a voicemail and say, hey, this is Dane from medical teams, and I'm just calling to say thank you so much for your gift. I'm here if you have any questions.        

00:11:20
            

That's the kind of message that a millennial and a Gen Z donor will respond to, because we're not going to pick up the phone. No. And so it's still an important thing to do because it shows that you're taking the extra step, but it's adapting in those little ways to say, hey, we're here and we're listening to you and what your needs are. I also think that younger donors are less transactional than older donors. They want to be a part of something bigger than themselves.        

00:11:55
            

So you have to tell the story without confining it. Your gift did. This is still true, but we need a larger story. We need to say, your gift and all of these other people together did this together. We're in a movement, and I think there are a lot of places that, especially our section of the industry, the christian nonprofit.        

00:12:22
            

We have so much to learn from political fundraising. Like, if you watch how the Democratic Party specifically has been messaging to their donors over the last month, we have so much we can learn from how they're talking about, we are in this together. This is a movement, and we need you at the table. We want to be invested in the organizations that we're supporting more than just financially. We want to be able to share content.        

00:12:52
            

We want to be able to volunteer. We want to be able to dig deeper and meet other people that are doing it in ways that older generations also did, but at a lower scale. Well, hey there. Holy donuts. Listeners, ever feel like your nonprofit's donor experience is like a jelly filled donut with no jelly?        

00:13:10
            

Well, don't fret. We found the jelly. To your donut dilemma. Enter. We give, the software tool that's like the cream filling to your eclair, or should I say the glaze to your donut.        

00:13:21
            

With we give, you're not just taking a donation, you're rolling out a red carpet for every person who gives to your organization. And with we give, you get an incredible donor portal, events, pledges, surveys, segmentation on and on. We could go on the features and those checkouts, though, smoother than my attempt to make homemade donuts, which, let's just say, didn't quite rise to the occasion. See what I did there? With we gives innovative engagement tools, your donors won't just feel the love they'll be coming back for second because nothing says thanks for your dough better than a world class experience.        

00:13:58
            

So if you want to sprinkle some extra special magic on your donor relationships, check out we give.com.        

00:14:08
            

there's a guy I follow on LinkedIn who's a fundraiser for, I think it's summit ministries. It's John. I forget his last name. I'm totally with John right now, but he literally posted, sorry, John, if you watch this. Yeah, shout out to John.        

00:14:21
            

I'll shout you out on LinkedIn with, like, when I search your last name, but I forget what it is. We've met at a conference sometime, but he had this awesome post where he talked specifically about the largest cash gift their ministry has ever gotten. And it was a multi generational approach. Like, it was a parents and the kids, and the kids specifically. I guess I think from the context, they were kind of millennial age.        

00:14:41
            

The difference was the parents wanted to know more about, like, the finances of the ministry, the cause, the mission. The kids wanted to visit the ministry, like in person. Like they want boots on the ground to see the people impacted by it. They want to touch and feel it and really say, hey, what's the culture about here? Like, what's, what's the corporate culture, right.        

00:14:59
            

Of this nonprofit, before we give the you this huge gift ended up, that went through like a million dollar and a half million and a half dollar gift. So it was huge gift. Awesome, praise God. But that just illustrates the difference, right? Like younger generation, not nearly as transactional with the giving, and they want to be part of it.        

00:15:16
            

That's so good, Mandy. And we're more skeptical. Say more about that. Yeah, I think because we were raised with the Internet and being advertised to every moment of our lives for as long as we can remember. I mean, I got a Facebook account in 2007, so definitely since then I've been advertised to for hours every day.        

00:15:43
            

Yeah. So advertising and those quick hit messages fall on deaf ears with our generation a lot more than they do the older generation. So you have to be able to cut through with a larger message. Then this person is hungry and we need money now. We need a bigger story.        

00:16:03
            

Yeah. We need, we need to trust that our money is obviously going to help that child in poverty. But we're also better educated about how the interconnectivity of global issues. And so we need to also know that you're not just doing handouts, you're doing handouts. You're empowering the local population.        

00:16:24
            

If the problems of climate change that are going to keep worsening refugee crises around the world. If you're not focused on that, our generation is going to walk away because we understand that everything is connected, every issue is connected to another issue. And if you're not addressing that, we're going to go find somebody who is. Yeah, I always think, for me personally, one of the things I look for if we're giving to a ministry is I always think, like, especially if it's a humanitarian thing, I always want to know, like, is do you even have a, even if I know it's pie in the sky and probably never happened, do you have a roadmap to a solution here? Like, is there actually, because, like.        

00:17:05
            

Or are we just going to feed the system of aid handouts forever? Right. Like, for this community? Like, is there a really sustainable growth model here that gets it to self sufficiency where, hey, the best thing that could happen is they don't need us anymore. And so I am always looking at that, like, do you even have an ideal endpoint for this ministry that, I mean, hopefully in the 20 years we don't need you anymore or we only need you in a different area.        

00:17:30
            

Like if you went out of business, that would actually be a good thing for the world. And so a hundred percent always looking for that. And it seems like it's pretty uncommon to find that. Yeah. I mean, our role as fundraisers.        

00:17:44
            

Yeah. Is to hopefully not have a job by the time we die. Right. That's not going to happen. Of course not.        

00:17:51
            

Right. But that should be the goal of that. By the time we're done with this thing, there's no need for us anymore. That's great, man. Okay.        

00:18:02
            

We could talk. I think we probably go for 2 hours. So I'm going to try to respect your time, though, because we only have a certain amount of time. Okay. Let's pivot a little bit.        

00:18:10
            

We've kind of hit on some of these already, but macro level and then also kind of. Yeah, go wherever you want this, but mostly macro level. What's a trend that you're seeing that's got you a little bit concerned and one that's got you a little bit more hopeful for kind of the faith ministry, nonprofit space? Yeah. I think what's got me concerned is especially with larger and older nonprofits, I have friends that are consulting with big ones right now.        

00:18:38
            

I'm not going to name drop because now I'm going to tell negative about them, but they're trying to hold on to tactics that are working for a donor base that's dying out. And christian nonprofit, especially here in the states, has been such a good movement, and we've done a lot of good in the world in the last 50 years through organizations like compassion and World vision and medical teams and international justice mission and these big organizations that are doing really good work. But part of the harm of those, when you get so big, it's really hard to turn a big ship. Yeah, but they, but we need to turn, and we need to turn faster because the world's problems are growing. And my concern is that our language and our marketing tactics won't change to the new generation.        

00:19:39
            

They'll go somewhere else and there will be big, big hard consequences to that, to people suffering around the world. And so that's kind of my big concern, is that the child sponsorship model of the nineties is all the things we were just talking about, about the interconnectivity, and we want to make sure that we're doing hand ups and not just handouts and all of those things. That model doesn't work in that world. And so how do we still make sure that all those children who were under that child sponsorship model from the nineties and two thousands don't fall through the cracks now that the donor doesn't resonate with that anymore? Yeah, absolutely.        

00:20:25
            

And the programs, that the programs team on the ground are saying this isn't the best way to do aid anymore. So it's kind of a both. And on that, the thing that makes me really excited there, this has kind of been happening slowly, been building maybe over the last ten years, is we talk about overhead better than we used to.        

00:20:50
            

Overhead was such a bad word in fundraising for so long. Everybody was always asking the question, what youre a overhead percentage? What's your overhead percentage? But that question misses so much context because it's more expensive to work in an active conflict zone than it is to work in, you know, somewhere in the states, for instance. So it's not apples to apples, and it also costs money to raise money.        

00:21:24
            

And so there's this agency in Australia that I've had several friends connected with. It's some ex world vision folks called integrity, and they're doing some really, really good work around educating around overhead right now. So go check them out on LinkedIn and on their website. But they are really kind of changing that narrative and they're really passionate about it. And that's something that makes me really excited, because if we can educate a donor base to say no, I understand that some of my gift is going to go towards admin, it's going to go towards fundraisers, it's going to go towards finance, it's going to go towards salaries and buildings and gas and food for staff.        

00:22:06
            

We're not only going to be able to do more good in the world, but we're also going to be able to attract better talent from the for profit world if our salaries and our benefits start to be competitive. And so because of that concern about overhead, we've lost a lot of really great talent to the for profit world as people grow in their careers. Totally. And I would argue, just as someone who we do a lot of kind of the fractional staffing side, we see a ton of this, where it's okay if oftentimes agency partners end up actually having far more tenure than internal staff because an agency becomes a central source of knowledge, and we actually outlast multiple hires in the same role. And we're sitting there going, I mean, wouldn't have been better just to pay someone great and treat them really well and pay them 15% more, but now you don't have to go through three hires and pay this other staffing firm to go find a new.        

00:23:01
            

It's like, it would have just been cheaper to find a great person and pay them well, like, so much more money doing it that way, if you. Have good donors who understand that. Yeah, great. Yep. Absolutely.        

00:23:11
            

But you gotta have that, right. Super, super helpful insights on that. Dane, one of the things that. On your point of concern. So I come from background church world, and this is a similar crisis.        

00:23:23
            

What we've seen in churches in the United States, which is a lot of the big behemoths of the past have started dying. Right. You think of any number of denominations as, like, indicative of this. But what we've seen has been really interesting, is, like, this flourishing new amount of church plants. And what I kind of came to realize, like, there's just a life cycle of an organization that they.        

00:23:43
            

They get big, they get stuck in the mud, that mud turns to cement. They can't move, they can't pivot, and then they turn to dinosaurs and calcify, and that stinks. And it's awful to see. But this is where the faith element, right? Like, I think God and his kind of, like, grace to all of us and being good to the world, right, and wanting to see it flourished, does this really cool thing where that kind of death creates new growth in lots of other organizations that then are able to flourish and do new things and train up.        

00:24:11
            

So, like, I don't want to see any organ of the behemoth organizations die. I think there will be collateral damage with that. But I also have really strong confidence. I'm seeing a lot of cool new startups, like startup nonprofits, who are willing to take risks and try new things. And what I know about corporations or churches or any ministry is if you don't adapt, you'll die, but someone will take your place.        

00:24:32
            

Like that need will get served and those people will be served. It's just going to be a different organization that gets the blessing of being able to be on the front lines of that to make that world change happen. And so, yeah, I think that's an. Interesting point because we talk a lot about how good industry disruptors are in the tech world specifically, but they're also really good in our world. Absolutely.        

00:24:58
            

They keep people on their toes. They're bringing new ideas. Before medical teams, I was at one of those disruptor organizations. And so, and there was a lot of energy in that, a lot of people signing on board, a lot of influencers, a lot of stage invites, a lot of conference invites. And even though, and the hope of those is when you're in them, like I was, the hope is that you're not only doing good work yourself, but you're also changing the conversation for people in the room that you're talking to.        

00:25:35
            

Absolutely. And so just because, so we would have meetings with some of the behemoths, you know, and say, well, how are you thinking about this? How are you talking to your donors? How are you creating new media and meeting people where they're at? And so disruption in any industry is good, and that's even true in ours.        

00:25:54
            

Yeah. In all fairness, one charity, water existing. Right. Coming into existence changed the way nonprofits think about how you treat monthly recurring, giving more than 10,000 hours of paid consulting everyone. Hundred percent.        

00:26:11
            

Right. Because everyone says, oh, that's how you do it. They get a vision for it because they can see it. And they say, oh, we're so far from the mark, like, we need to change or we're going to die. And so, yeah, I'm a big fan of that.        

00:26:21
            

I think you're right, that disruption is helpful. I'm excited to see new organizations pop up that challenge the status quo and for some of these behemoths, hopefully a few of them, to actually change. And if they don't, confidence that others will rise up to take up their place and serve those needs. Okay, I'm going to try a lightning round the last two here. Really quick resources blogs, podcasts.        

00:26:42
            

What do you like to recommend to people in this space? Fundraisers who are interested in donor engagement. Yeah, that is a great question. I am always trying to be ahead of the curve, and so, so much of what I've learned and what I've implemented doesn't come from our space. It comes from the for profit space, because they just have more resources to innovate.        

00:27:10
            

So I've got two books. One of them's a little older. Power of moments. Okay. Love it.        

00:27:18
            

Chip Heath. Dane Barnett. I take every team I've ever led through this book.        

00:27:25
            

The kind of underlying philosophy of this book is that it doesn't take a lot of money to make a memorable experience for someone. And so this is really great for anyone who's doing really anything, even if you're not a fundraiser and you somehow found yourself here, read this book. But definitely for people in our space. Definitely for people in donor relations and events. Then the other one is, this is a newer one.        

00:27:56
            

Unreasonable hospitality, will guadara. This has kind of been all over the spaces I've been paying attention to the last year. But the subtitle is the remarkable power of giving people more than they expect. And for so much of our industry, we tend to give the bare minimum. And rather than looking for those opportunities to go above and beyond.        

00:28:19
            

And it just takes, and I think a lot of us get worried because we're like, well, I don't have any money or any staff. That's the beauty of both of these books, is they're not. None of the answers are spend more money. It's reallocate the money you have or be creative and find free, more intentional ways to engage. Okay, we will link to those in the show notes.        

00:28:44
            

And then last question. How can people connect with you? Is it where you at on the socials? Yeah. What's the best way to get in touch with you and say, hey, you got some interesting stuff to say.        

00:28:53
            

I want to talk more. Yeah, LinkedIn is definitely the best for me. You can put the link to my LinkedIn there. My personal email is Dane Barnett, 92 at gmail and my work email is dbarneticalteams.org dot. Awesome.        

00:29:10
            

Awesome. Well, thank you for sharing that. Guys, go talk to Dane. He's awesome. Thank you for being on the show today, man.        

00:29:17
            

Really enjoyed the conversation. Every now and then I'm like, we should have repeat guests. I think you're going to be in that category if you're open to it. Thanks for joining me. I appreciate that.        

00:29:23
            

Thanks, Matt. I appreciate it.        

‍

00:00:04
            

Well, hey there, Eddie. Welcome in. Thanks for joining me on kind of a special episode. We're gonna be doing these a few times a month for the Holy Donuts podcast, where we do a deep dive into all things nonprofit, donor acquisition retention strategy, campaign strategy, digital ads. I mean, just really, it's a time for us to nerd out on all things nonprofit marketing.        

00:00:24
            

So, man, I appreciate you taking the time to join me today. Yeah, thanks for having me. So, really quick, why don't you give a quick bio for people who don't know you, tell us a little bit more about you and kind of how you got into nonprofit donor acquisition. Donor development work. Yeah, so I kind of stumbled into it.        

00:00:44
            

Going to college, worked for a small nonprofit, and then just through that, really enjoyed seeing how we could efficiently fundraise and do more for the nonprofit. Going from that smaller nonprofit with a team of five, moved up to helping churches for a good bit, where we served over 600 churches utilizing the Google Ad grant. And then from there took a turn and went more. So performance based marketing. We were doing direct fundraising and split testing, conversion rate optimization for the past four years.        

00:01:22
            

And so I was a senior media buyer and mainly on the Google side, but also meta and direct deals where when I had left there, we had our, a couple clients hit million dollar months in just the channel of Google when they started out at like $12,000 a month. Yeah, that's awesome, man. So you are kind of expert in all things digital fundraising, which is what I always love talking with you about. So today we're going to go pretty specific for this episode where we're going to deep dive on meta a little bit more. So Meta is, I know, a controversial ad channel for some controversial channel in general, just to manage and try to look for donations.        

00:02:07
            

So give us your kind of just 30,000 foot view of meta as a channel for nonprofits when it comes to fundraising. Yeah, it's, it's a channel that I'd usually start with if you're just getting started, you know, the Google Ad grant is great. I consider those kind of training wheels. And then Meta is a really great place to get started when you're starting with paid ads. And so it can work for the small local nonprofit as well as a larger enterprise nonprofit.        

00:02:36
            

Whether it's getting leads, whether it's getting donations, whether it's maximizing your brand efficiency and reached, Meta is always a good place to start for those use cases. Cool. If someone is just getting started, what's the first ad campaign you would ever test in Meta for a nonprofit. Let's just say if they're just doing general brand awareness to start. Yeah, the first thing that I would do is find out if you have your value proposition worked out of.        

00:03:12
            

If you've got your value proposition figured out, you're really ahead of the game. And what I mean by value proposition is why do people give to your organization? And so if you understand why people give, use their language in their ads, that's going to go really far, no Matter where you put it. If you have that on your donation page, if you have it in your ads. And so how does that correlate to the first ad campaign?        

00:03:41
            

Well, it correlates because you can do ad messaging testing for basically $50 or less to test different, what we call concepts. And it's testing the different value propositions in rapid succession to find out where your wins are in terms of what resonates, what gets your audience shaking their head yes. And understands very clearly what your organization does and how you serve, who you serve. That's awesome. So with that kind of micro testing model, how long of a timeline is that all happened within a few days?        

00:04:23
            

Is that a few weeks? How many campaigns are you talking about running to kind of get that data on? What gets your audience shaking their head yes to your offer? Yeah. So each micro test takes 24 hours and it usually costs dollar 25 or less for each microtest.        

00:04:39
            

So when I said $50, I just ran one for 72 hours and it concluded three tests. So we had a headline test, an image test and a description test, but it was basically another headline test. So all in all, it's testing those different messaging, those messages as value proposition, and then also images that work well for where you could insert them anywhere. Say it's a swipe file. If you're familiar with marketing terminology, it's what you would put in your swipe file for your organization.        

00:05:18
            

Cool. And so those microtests are just like deep in the ignorance pool here, right? So micro tests are just going to a donation like page. Are they going anywhere? Or are they just literally just testing the headline to see how many people click, how many impressions they get?        

00:05:34
            

Are they actually terminating anywhere? That is a great question. So with these, these are run a little bit differently than normal meta ads campaigns. And so what we're doing is we're only trying to get about 400 impressions from these. And what we're looking for is just a click.        

00:05:51
            

And if we get a click on under 400 impressions and it's under a dollar CPC, we consider that a win. And so that would be one that you would add to the swipe file at that point. Awesome. Awesome. And so how many of these do you want to run before you say, okay, we've got enough data to build a whole campaign on this?        

00:06:10
            

Yeah. So generally you can do up to 20. So up to 20 images, up to 20 headlines in a campaign. And like I said, you'll run it for about 24 hours, then anything that's got under a dollar per CPC is the one that you would pull out and consider that a win. Now, another important thing to note on this, and we could put together a general one pager resource guide if you were interested in a campaign like this.        

00:06:40
            

But there are automated rules within Facebook, within meta, that help you pause the ad set or the ad specifically, so that it doesn't run over 400 impressions. Okay, cool. So that kind of is your upper limit, like rate limit, right. So you're not just end up accidentally spending way too much money on a micro test. Right, right.        

00:07:04
            

And these are indicators. These are ones that are most valid to test. So instead of coming up with an idea and writing out all of your funnel, this is a way to say, hey, these are the ones that are most proven to be likely to succeed. So let's see if we can craft a message from what we have here. Take these elements and put them together into something that we believe will ultimately convert and have a higher throughput than just taking a shot at the dark with something that we've put together.        

00:07:39
            

Yeah. Okay, so we kind of talked about the micro testing, right, to be able to test just all the different elements, images, headlines, kind of subheadings, and doing that really, really cheap to figure out what's the main value prop for your audience when it comes to meta ads, do you see it more as a brand awareness tool or is it really a tool that can actually be used to get new donations? Absolutely, it can be used for both and more specifically for donations. It's a great place to start when you're looking to prospect for new donors. And so there's two things that are really critical when it comes to generating new donors online on Facebook.        

00:08:18
            

And I'll say three. One, we won't talk about, which is tracking, that's more so getting set up on your Facebook pixel, things like that, server to server tracking. But there's two things that are more so broadly more important, and that's the audience that you're targeting, which we'll touch on today. And then also the creative, which we kind of previously touched on which is how to find your best creative to put out there that will get the best response. Well, hey there.        

00:08:51
            

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00:09:02
            

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00:09:33
            

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00:09:56
            

so let's dive into audience, right? Like, what are some general best practices for trying to figure out who the audience is? I mean, I'm imagining it's not just going into meta and saying, hey, I generally want to hit people 45 to 65 in our state who like this page or that page, right? Like, it's a little more sophisticated than that, I'm guessing, in terms of how we need to run these audiences, right? Yeah, absolutely.        

00:10:21
            

And as time has gone on with meta, it's best to stay as broad as possible, because the pixel will learn who will gravitate towards your messaging. But if you're just starting out, you know your audience best. And so you kind of need to put those guardrails on Facebook, on meta to let them know, hey, we're kind of looking in this direction. So how you balance that out is really looking at, you know, what I would look at first is if you're a local nonprofit or if you're a national nonprofit. And so based on that understanding, looking in your and CRM or your ideal core demographic, like, who responds most to the message that you're looking to get out there?        

00:11:09
            

And so if you're looking for families within the, within the local area, you know, I would look at targeting people that are, you know, in their thirties to fifties, that are within driving distance of your church. And so driving distance is another thing to consider, if you're, if you're talking about a local nonprofit that serves an area versus somebody who may know that their audience is more female, between 45 and 65, you may target in that way. But as far as performance, fundraising, when it comes to raising donations, where I would really start, before we get into demographic information is the place that I would start, is just creating a lookalike audience based on your donor file. So Facebook says if you have 1000 people within your database, you can upload that and you can create a match that will find people who are most likely to look like what your file upload looks like. So I would consider that if you were to think about rings on a bullseye, that would be your center.        

00:12:29
            

Bullseye. And so a lookalike audience could be, it creates an audience that's about 2 million people. So you go from 1000 people to people who look like your ideal profile for 2 million people. A second close one that I would look at is retargeting people on your donation page that didn't actually give. So if they visited your donation page, that's as close as they're going to get to becoming a donor.        

00:13:06
            

But if they didn't make that donation for some reason, that's another audience that's really good to target for nonprofits. Yeah, yeah. And that all goes back into tracking with that Facebook pixel. Right. And having that actually set up on your site correctly.        

00:13:20
            

What? Absolutely. If a nonprofit's out there, because I've heard this before. Oh, we tried meta ads. They don't work.        

00:13:26
            

We've tried this. They don't work. It's garbage. It doesn't do this. Help us understand.        

00:13:31
            

So first thing. Cause my theory is a lot of times they actually don't, nonprofits don't spend enough money actually running a test. Like, they throw dollar 50 at it and they're like, eh, it didn't work. We didn't get donor out of it. Sorry, it doesn't work.        

00:13:43
            

What's kind of minimum threshold do you recommend in terms of how much to actually spend once they've tested? Right. Then the micro testing on a, let's say one, a brand awareness campaign, and then second, how much to spend on a, a new donor acquisition campaign on Meta? Yeah. So in general, you want to spend at least ten times what you expect what your CPA to be.        

00:14:09
            

So if you're not sure yet, what I would say is start out with $2,500, and then at that point you'll have enough to spend a daily amount. That should validate what you should validate a baseline. And so in general, you'll see within five to seven days your performance will generally show a baseline or it'll show a trend where it's going to baseline. And so I would give it five to seven days without touching it at all. So if you're just getting started, you're not sure where to start.        

00:14:47
            

Start with a budget of $2,500. Give it five to seven days to see where it's going to baseline, and then you'll have an idea whether or not where performance will be cool. And any thoughts on using meta just for general brand awareness, just for brand building of audiences and how you would do that, notoriously, that's going to be hard to track the ROI on that. So any thoughts on using meta ads for general brand awareness? Yeah, generally it's my media buying side that really kicks into gear for that when I start thinking about like how big is your audience and then figuring out what it is for touches per user.        

00:15:31
            

So generally, if you look at brand awareness, you do see that there are that organizations that cultivate their donors throughout the year have bigger year end gifts. So if you're really doing a good job in cultivation and messaging in terms of like keeping up on your emails, your emails are getting opened. You've got a healthy house file. You know, it may not quite be for you, but if you're someone else who has hasdeenen, they're not reaching their entire house file. Maybe there's some disengaged users that you want to reengage.        

00:16:13
            

Maybe you wanted to get them multi channel, you wanted to get them from offline, which is postal. You wanted to see if you could activate them online. All of those are really great use cases for building brand awareness, making sure that you have a strong year end. Awesome. I love it.        

00:16:31
            

Yeah. And so what we're not saying, I don't think is, hey, be lazy for ten months out of the year, and then in November go and dump $10,000 into meta ads for brand awareness and hope you still get your nice end of year pop. Right. It always happens. And while, while you will see some improvement from it, it's best to cultivate that through the year.        

00:16:52
            

Yeah, absolutely. That's, that's great. So if someone doesn't have any meta ads running right now, we're going to recommend start out 25, start out micro testing, right, some of these kind of key headlines, images. Then we're going to suggest $2,500 as an ad. Spend five to seven days to see what's actually working.        

00:17:11
            

Get kind of a good baseline and then from there talk to us about some of the more advanced stuff you can do with meta, obviously, like shameless plug. We've got some tools that we think work really well in terms of building lookalike audiences based on your current website traffic. But give us some of the kind of advanced stuff for those who say, oh yeah, okay, we're already doing this kind of stuff. Yeah, absolutely. So one of the new things that we're testing is a partner network through personify.        

00:17:37
            

And so personify basically has a network from, you know, if someone did their, basically what it does is like it, it identifies some of the anonymous users that didn't convert and it gives you that audience information so that you can then go and utilize it for email marketing. You can utilize it for Facebook targeting. We're seeing some really good results from that so far on the email marketing and the Facebook targeting side. And so what it does is basically you put a pixel on your website and then it starts giving you the audience information of people who are visiting your website to start build your CRM list. So if you are using it for lead generation, you may be paying Facebook for leads.        

00:18:34
            

And this will start building your leads just automatically within your CRM database. And so having your CRM be filled with potential leads is really great. The second thing is being able to use it as first party data to create lookalike audiences. And so we talked about that bullseye of the donors look alike. Well, with personify, the tool, we're seeing that it is closely following as the second best option, even past house files.        

00:19:11
            

So people who are on your list but haven't donated yet, this audience is actually converting better and turning prospective donors into activating them for actual donors. That's amazing. And so that allows essentially someone to have a whole new audience channel they didn't have previously, that are people who have visited their website. So there's at least awareness of the brand, but haven't actually converted to give their email address, right? Absolutely.        

00:19:42
            

So if you were to target a cold audience or anything like that, or even if you were to say to use the pixel, these things are temporary in terms of these audiences with privacy going away and pixels not matching as often as they can, specifically with meta and Google, this one actually gives you the first party data, which is the email address, which then you can follow up with them. And we know like email as a channel is the highest ROI channel. So there's a case for that. And then also there's a case for owning that information so that you can then target them as a retargeting campaign and finally doing it as a lookalike. So that's what we're doing currently, is testing the lookalike and also building some of that data audience insights.        

00:20:49
            

So if somebody visits your page, we're looking into. We're building it. It's in beta right now where we can see, like, what is that Persona of the person visiting your site and be able to turn that anonymous click into a Persona or a user base that we would understand why they're visiting your site. Yeah, super exciting stuff coming out, man. And excited for all the work you put in.        

00:21:18
            

Yeah, excited to get that launch out in the wild with some of those new features here soon. Why don't we do this? I think it'd be helpful for someone to know. We mentioned the tracking, like tracking Facebook Pixel on your site, being able to actually attribute revenue correctly. I think one of the things a lot of the nonprofits struggle with is maybe they run an ad campaign, but they really do struggle sometimes with, okay, how do you get this set up for actually tracking properly?        

00:21:44
            

Is it possible in a quick snapshot, to kind of give the basic steps of how you'd set up to make sure that you're tracking correctly from your Facebook campaign? Yeah, I mean, the basics of it are that you'll want to, that you'll want to get set up with through Google Tag manager. And so if you go to Tagmanager dot google.com and you install the Pixel through that, so they have a template, that's the easiest way to get started is to install it through tag manager. And so sometimes you already have that installed on your website, tag manager. And basically it's a way for you to take all these different marketing tags, whether it be Facebook, Google Analytics, LinkedIn, TikTok, there's different tags that people say put on your site for your pop ups and so on and so forth.        

00:22:43
            

It's a way for it to house all that information. They've made it really easy to just basically copy and paste the code and install it. And then the second thing is, when it comes to tracking donations and the values of donations, that's where I would reach out to Matt or myself or developer that, you know, to help set up some of this e commerce tracking, because it's a little bit more in depth in order to track the revenue to feed back to the Pixel and start getting an ROI on your spin, on your ad spend. Yeah. And that's where it really does come down.        

00:23:28
            

To what sort of donation software you're using. Right. Like, are you on, you know, are you on donor box? Are you on we give. Are you on fundraise up?        

00:23:37
            

You know, like, some of those tools are all a little different with how you set those up in the Google tag manager. So definitely something that if you're looking for help on that, feel free to reach out. We'd love to connect you with the right people for that. Cool. Yeah.        

00:23:50
            

Any last thoughts on meta? Anything that you're seeing with meta that you think is exciting or that you want to share?        

00:23:57
            

I would say that's the channel that I would start first. When it comes to, if you're looking at Google, if you've got your Google Ad grant up and running and you're looking to put some paid ads out there and you really want to see results from them, I would definitely start with meta first and branch out from there. Very cool. Well, thanks so much, man. I appreciate it.        

00:24:17
            

Absolutely. Thank you.        

‍

00:00:04
            

Well, hey there, everyone. Welcome back to another episode of the Holy Donuts podcast. Great to have you with us today. And a huge shout out to our sponsors. We give.        

00:00:12
            

If you are looking for the best donor experience on the planet, you got to check out we give.com dot. They actually have a fancy new thing where you can actually go sign up for your own account. Don't even have to go through a sales process just to see what the tool does. So go check them out. We give.com.        

00:00:24
            

and moving to more important things today, I'm joined by Bryce Hillhouse. He is the director of development for Favorite International. Bryce, how you doing today, man? I'm doing well. How are you?        

00:00:35
            

I'm doing well, man. I think we're both scorching it out in, in West Texas and Tampa, respectively. It's the time of year where I just want to melt like a snowman and move somewhere like Canada. But we're going to, we're going to soldier through it today, man. Of course, of course.        

00:00:48
            

Yeah, no, I remember the humidity in Tampa. I don't have it anymore over here, but it's still kind of hot. Yeah, yeah, it's a different beast, man. We were talking about that before we started recording it. You're originally from Tampa.        

00:00:58
            

That's where I'm at home base here, so always great making those connections. Well, for folks who, you know, who don't know anything about favor international, could you just do us a quick favor? Give us a rundown of the ministry and then maybe talk a little bit about your story, your journey into working with favor. Yeah, no, of course. So favor was originally started by our founder, Carol Warden, who saw vision to, as she put it, you know, she wanted to be sent where no one wanted to go.        

00:01:27
            

So she saw a need in Uganda and she went out there and she wanted to minister to the people and do what she can to develop the communities and just, you know, bring, bring new believers into the body of Christ. And since then, she's grown that mission to not even just being in Uganda, but it's eight countries in Africa. Most recently, we've started pushing into Chaddhenne and just doing what we can to connect people. But I mean, if we look on like a yearly basis, we're looking about 100,000 salvations. You know, these are building churches in each place.        

00:01:58
            

You know, we have women empowerment programs. We have what we call our gift program, where we focus on impoverished youth that are out in the streets and we raise them up and we do what we can to put them in a right state so that they can actually flourish in their own life with Christ. That's amazing. That's so cool, man. It's just a holistic, kind of gospel centered development program.        

00:02:20
            

It's actually a wonderful, wonderful system. There's quite a bit of different nonprofits and NGo's that you see working in Africa, but this ministry in particular has an all encompassing approach. And it doesn't just focus on any one thing. It focuses on striking at the heart of the issue and empowering people. That's amazing.        

00:02:40
            

So how did you find your way into working with favor International? What's your story? So all the way back or just. Just favor? Hey, you can.        

00:02:48
            

You can go all the way back, man, because we love hearing. Kind of like the journey that God's taking you on. Yes. So I originally grew up in south of Grande Port, Tampa, Florida. And then from there I actually joined the army, got stationed in Fort Bliss, and when I was attending college, getting ready to graduate, I got a job offer for a development position at a local private high school that was a christian ministry, and that's what started my initial approach into nonprofit work.        

00:03:21
            

And so this one in particular focused on underprivileged youth on both sides of the border. And then eventually from there, I started working in a gospel based one that was focused on, it was similar to the WeGive's, but it focused on spreading the gospel of John. And that was called the pocket Testament League. And they do wonderful work all across the world. And then from there, I got reached out to by favor.        

00:03:44
            

And it's been wonderful ever since. Yeah. And how long have you been with favor now? So I've been with favor now probably just about six months. I'm fresh with them, but it's been, it's been amazing.        

00:03:55
            

And what was wonderful is it turned. Out that they're based over there by my home. You know, they were probably about 25 minutes from where my dad lives, and the president actually goes to the church that initially saved me, which is the river. That's amazing, man. Yeah, yeah, absolutely.        

00:04:11
            

I know the river the right up the road from us here. I live probably 15 minutes from that church and know well, man, that's so cool. Yeah, it's so cool how God does just kind of full circle stuff like that and works things out. Yeah. So, okay, so you've got several kind of ministries that you served under your belt now kind of have a good footing of the way, you know, you like to kind of work in and helping these ministries raise funding to do really, really important ministry so for you, what are any strategies, tips, like techniques that you've kind of come across the way that you think are real game changers for ministries out there?        

00:04:44
            

Yeah, I mean, I like to focus on more of like a putting together, like a multi channel campaign that focuses on storytelling because if you just focus on just, you know, just particularly data driven insights, it'll get a little bit dry. But if you keep storytelling at the core, I think it really connects and resonates with people at a higher level because, you know, when you center on that, you focus on the communities that are positively impacted and then you tell those stories, you can do it through various formats, like video, written, testimonial, photo essays. But if you ensure that each story is personalized and, and it'll resonate different segments of the donor base, I think it's really important if you focus on that. Yeah, no, that's huge. How, in terms of, like, your donor base and maybe some of the ministries you serve, what channels do you like to get those stories out there?        

00:05:39
            

Right. It's one thing to tell a great story. You can totally dive in on that, too, because I'd love to hear your thoughts on it. But, like, what channels you use for distribution that you found are most effective. Yeah.        

00:05:49
            

So, I mean, I, I would say for older crowds, you want to focus on direct mail. Right. I think that's a better approach. But, you know, the younger donors, I'd say social media is pretty, pretty huge in terms of the way it can impact. And then email is always quite effective across the board.        

00:06:11
            

As long as you just maintain the consistent messaging and branding across each platform, you're going to ensure that you have like, a unified, cohesive campaign, you know? Yeah, absolutely. So, okay, let's talk storytelling. How do you all come up with stories that are obviously God's doing the work? So you probably have a ton of them.        

00:06:30
            

So maybe it's more of curation. Like how do you figure out, okay, this is the right story to tell and are you thinking through the donor in that or are you thinking through just. No, no, this is just a great story. Can you just walk us through a little bit more of you all storytelling process and how you get to those. Stories for us, we actually have a wonderful system where we get daily field updates of what's going on out there and this is coming in from multiple countries.        

00:06:57
            

And then we curate the stories to make sure we relay the story to the right donor because some people are going to be focused more on the youth, whereas others are going to focus more on women empowerment. And some are going to focus on community development. So you got to know, you know, the right story to tell that will actually resonate with the donor. Well, hey there. Holy donuts.        

00:07:22
            

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00:07:34
            

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00:08:03
            

See what I did there? With WeGive's innovative engagement tools, your donors won't just feel the love, they'll be coming back for a second, because nothing says thanks for your dough better than a world class experience. So if you want to sprinkle some extra special magic on your donor relationships, check out we give.com.        

00:08:26
            

and so every day you're getting field updates. Is that just a form like your field staff is filling out? Is that an email they send? What's kind of the nuts and bolts mechanism? Like, how do they actually do that?        

00:08:38
            

Yeah, I mean, it comes in with a photograph or video, depending on the actual story itself. And then there's the context block that tells you the actual story that's going on there. Whether it's just, if it's just an image, then you definitely need that part, whereas a video, you can pull it together from that. But I mean, if we talked about the delivery, what we found is quite effective and efficient is actually WhatsApp, which is, you know, you wouldn't even assume that right off. Yeah, but no, WhatsApp, it makes sense though.        

00:09:07
            

Yeah. And you can all sorts of stuff on there. Yeah. It's such a lightweight tool for, I mean, that's, at the end of the day, that's the best tool or tool your team's going to use. So if WhatsApp has all the functionality, it's like, of course, just drop them in there.        

00:09:24
            

You have one kind of thread or multiple threads depending on different programs or different missionaries or, you know, they all have their own kind of channel and just drop everything in there. That's the simplicity of it is. What's genius about it? It just works, right? Yes.        

00:09:35
            

Yeah. Yeah. So when you look across kind of nonprofit landscape, are there trends that have you really excited and maybe some that have you concerned? Yeah, I'd say so. Right now, what's exciting for me at least, is probably one that others are going to find concerning, and I would say integrating artificial intelligence and machine learning programs into the marketing.        

00:10:00
            

And I like to use it as sort of like a proofread. Right. I put together a certain campaign design and then I run it through that and then it'll add suggestions and I find that quite effective because as people, we're going to make, you know, some mistakes here and there, whereas, you know, incorporating artificial intelligence, it's going to, it's going to focus more on the logic of it. Yeah. It's just a good backstop for your work.        

00:10:26
            

Right. It's not, you don't start with it, but it's good to have that extra set of eyes on it. Yeah. That's why, I mean, I said I use it like a proofread. Yeah, that's great.        

00:10:35
            

That's great. And then for something that's maybe a little less exciting, maybe a little more concerning, anything out there you're seeing from ministries, you're saying, don't love where that's headed for us. I would say, you know, you see it a lot lately. There's seems to be like an over reliance on digital channels and almost to the expense of personal connections. Right.        

00:10:57
            

And I think that that is where a lot of nonprofits are going to make the mistake of not having that personal connection with the individual and keeping them, because we saw a lot with what happened with COVID and I think people got too reliant on that medium. Yeah. So what, what are some things, if someone's saying, yeah, you know, we're, we are pretty reliant on the digital channels. What are some ways that they can work into that? Because, you know, we have to have the digital.        

00:11:23
            

It's not going to go away. What are some ways they can make their, their fundraising more relational and more personal? Even if they say, yeah, we do a lot of digital. Any touch points that you all have with donors that you think would be helpful? Honestly, like the most simple, you know, go back to the basics.        

00:11:38
            

A personalized letter sent to you, I think it adds a, an amazing touch. And outside of just an email, because sometimes, you know, you might get a thousand emails a day, you're not going to read it, but you get that actual personal letter in the mail. You're going to open it up and you're going to see what it actually says. Yeah, it's a big difference. Getting that in real life kind of communication channel is still.        

00:12:01
            

Still such a huge win, even though it's underrated now because everything's. Oh, that's so, you know, early. Two thousands of you. Right. But it's like, no, people still appreciate that.        

00:12:09
            

I know. I mean, unless it's something that's clearly junk mail. If it looks like it's personal to me, I open everything I get. So I'm going to guess it's a little better open rate than my email inbox. Yeah.        

00:12:20
            

I mean, I can guarantee we both have tons of email we haven't even looked at and they're sitting there on the red. Yep, yep. Now that you remind me, I need to get to that after conversation. Cool, man. Well, okay.        

00:12:34
            

Any resources, books, magazines, podcasts that you love that you know, as you're kind of a leader and you're always kind of trying to grow, what are some of those resources you look to that you like to recommend to others as well? Do you mean like books or programs? Yeah, could be books, could be online courses, anything that kind of helps you grow and your fundraising knowledge, spiritual growth, leadership, any of that kind of stuff. I mean, realistic. I can recommend some books like the art of nonprofit fundraising.        

00:13:04
            

It's by Doug White. I think that's a pretty solid one. Yeah. You know, because it focuses on principles of effective fundraising. It focuses on ethics, donor relationships, practical strategies that can be applied across various types of nonprofits.        

00:13:19
            

I think that's a solid one. But in terms of just growing as a. As a donor, donor relations manager or director of development, you know, anything in that field, I think the most important thing is going to be experience. You know, just actually going out there in the field talking work. Yeah, because you can read a book, you know, you can watch a course, but it's not always going to work out the way that it's designed in the book or the course.        

00:13:46
            

You know, the human aspect changes that whole thing. So it's important you're talking to. Yeah. And every ministry is different. Right.        

00:13:56
            

So what works in a book or a podcast or some article you read for another ministry may just not work for your ministry because of where you are in the kind of growth life cycle or how your donors respond or the organizational culture. So I love that answer, man. It's just like, hey, the best thing to learn, go eat your hands dirty. Go do the work, right? Go get out there and get punched in the face a little bit and learn from it.        

00:14:17
            

I mean, because if you just focus on what you saw here, it's bit too rigid, you know, it's too structured, and you're gonna. You're gonna look like a robot out there, and they're not gonna relate to you, you know? Yeah. Because you're not. You're not trying to make a personal connection if you do that.        

00:14:33
            

I love it. Very cool, man. Okay, so if people want to connect with you, if they want to find more about favorite international, this is your shameless plug. Like, how can people get in contact with you if they have questions about what you guys are doing? How can they contact the ministry?        

00:14:46
            

Let people know how they can connect? I mean, if they want to reach out to me, I'd say the best form is probably by email, and that's going to be my name. B r y c eternat favorintl.org. that would be the best way to reach out to me. Awesome.        

00:15:04
            

And then for the ministry, favor, dot in tl, favorintl.org. is that the website? Yeah. Awesome. Awesome.        

00:15:12
            

Well, man, perfect. Thank you so much for dropping the knowledge bombs today. Thanks for taking the time just to pour your heart out about. Hey, this is where God's got the ministry and kind of where you guys are going and what you guys are seeing for nonprofits out there. I really appreciate the time, Bryce.        

00:15:28
            

Yeah, no, of course. No, thank you for having me. It was a pleasure to be able to come on here, especially with someone in my hometown. Absolutely, man. All right, be well, Bryce.        

00:15:37
            

Thank you.        

‍

00:00:03
            

Well, hey there, everyone. Welcome back to another episode of the Holy Donuts podcast brought to you by we give. If you're looking for the world's best donor experience, go check out our friends at we give.com dot. Thank you to them for sponsoring this episode of Holy Donuts. Well, today, joined with a good friend, John Walsh.        

00:00:18
            

John, how are you doing today? I'm doing well. Thank you, man. Thanks for joining. Really excited to talk.        

00:00:24
            

We've had several conversations that were not recorded where we just nerd out together on all things fundraising, digital, email, the whole nine yards. Monthly donors. So pumped that we get to get this finally actually recorded and get some of that wisdom captured real quick. Why don't you give people just a quick rundown, like the back of the baseball card about you, what you're currently doing, your role right now and then, kind of how you've gotten there, working with nonprofits. Yeah.        

00:00:51
            

So I'm currently working as the director of annual giving at, at a seminary. So my job is to basically create and implement the entire strategy for our general donors and acquiring new donors. If I can, I can take you back home. It's actually almost been ten years now. Yeah, since I started digital is actually my second career.        

00:01:18
            

I was a music therapist at a nursing facility before I became a digital marketer. In my, my digital career began. It was one of those instances where my boss came to me and said, basically, hey, you have a Facebook page. We have a Facebook page. Why don't you run our Facebook page?        

00:01:40
            

And of course, being the team player that I am, and it was our CEO, I said, yes, I would love to do that. And she considered the fact that I could post pictures with, with texts as an expert. However, that was the start of a beautiful lifelong learning for me. I loved it. I jumped in.        

00:02:01
            

I started learning everything I could about social media marketing. And as a result, in a couple of years, our social media presence grew to national recognition in some ways. And so she was like, this is great. Now I want you to take on the email newsletter, and now I want to do the website redesign. And of course, I said yes every time, but I loved it.        

00:02:24
            

I mean, I just, oh, I just got so into it. I loved the feedback, the real time, data driven feedback that you get with digital. So I started taking classes, and, yeah, I became a digital marketer soon after that. My next step in my journey, after I got classes and kind of became a digital marketer, was the opportunity to work at the Billy Graham Evangelistic association as an email marketer. And that's really where I fell in love with nonprofits and christian mission focused nonprofits, more specifically there for five years, fundraising, events, everything that had to do with email.        

00:03:08
            

And it was just, yeah, again, that's just kind of where I took my love for digital marketing and married it to christian minded nonprofits, which is where I've been ever since, as far as my passion goes. So, yeah, so it's been quite a journey from music therapist to digital to digital fundraising. But, you know, God works in wonderful ways, and I'm absolutely thankful for this opportunity. Yeah, man. And I love that your experience is so wide ranging.        

00:03:40
            

Right. Such a common story that I hear from people who are in the spaces, like, didn't really plan to get into this. Just God kind of stumbled me into it. And you grow on the job, you learn. And the best part about this, you test what works and what doesn't.        

00:03:54
            

Right. Like, you're not learning it in a lab or in a degree program, then coming out and be like, let's see. But it's like, no, we tried this. It worked or it didn't work, and that's how I learned to do it. So walk us through a little bit of some of the strategies, some of the things that you really value in digital fundraising for christian ministries.        

00:04:11
            

Like, what are some of the best things that you think ministries need to be focused on when it comes to digital fundraising? Yeah. And I think the first thing is what you just said, which is testing. And that's, I think a lot of, a lot of organizations don't test and don't test enough or they kind of test. They do what other people have tested that works for other organizations.        

00:04:33
            

And really, just because something works for one organization doesn't mean it's going to work for another. One audience is different than another audience. Even in the christian world. It's, you know, it's different. Different missions.        

00:04:48
            

You can talk about churches or, you know, humanitarian aid. You know, it's just so, there's so much variety. So, yeah, I would recommend testing. Testing everything. Really like it.        

00:05:01
            

You know, I kind of got into it with email and I mentioned social media, but. Right. You test website, you can test landing pages, you can test text messages. That's really the beauty to be of digital is. Right.        

00:05:15
            

You don't, you don't send something out by direct mail maybe, and hope it works. You know, you get, you know, maybe a couple conversions, you know, 10% conversion or 1% conversion. Right. And you think, oh, that did great, but I don't know, what about it? Did great.        

00:05:31
            

With digital, you can test things to the minutiae to find out what words worked great, what images worked great. So, yeah, so that's, first is test. Have that data driven mindset, which I guess would be second. That's, again, the beauty of digital is we have these numbers that we can go to and say to our bosses and to the presidents and the cmos and say, hey, this isn't working. Can we test something different?        

00:06:03
            

And this is how I know it's not working. I know it's not working because our numbers went down when I did this and our numbers started going up. So let's double down on this.        

00:06:16
            

This is great because, I mean, we talk about the importance of stories, and it is so important. Behind stories are a lot of great numbers as well. So kind of marrying those numbers with the stories just to keep people engaged. Yeah. Just to hop in there for a minute, because I know you love testing.        

00:06:35
            

What tools or do you keep in the tool belt, proverbially, for testing, what are the things that you like to use on a regular basis for actually getting to figure out which keywords are hitting best with their audience, which headlines. What are some of the tools that you like to employ? Just kind of tactical ground level for that. Yeah. And most of them are probably already built in because that's the tools I use.        

00:06:57
            

They're actually built in tools through a lot of your. Either your CRM or marketing platform, whether it's mailchimp, blackbaud. There are just so many. Right. And they're basic, but if you're just getting started, they're a great place.        

00:07:14
            

Get you started. I mean, I've used other ones that are a little bit more robust, but, yeah, really. I mean, my advice is, especially if you haven't done it before, is just kind of use what you have and then as you progress and, like, okay, I think optimizability is another one that our organizations have used in the past for website testing. So. Yeah.        

00:07:41
            

Yeah, that's. I know it's not. It's not like a, you know, great answer, but, yeah, just. Just start somewhere. No, it totally is.        

00:07:51
            

It's. It's exactly where a lot of people are, which is like, hey, if you're not using the tools that you've already got, you probably don't need to go look for the Ferrari. Right? Like, it's like, I see guys out, you know, down here in Florida golfing, and they've never even golfed before, and they go spend $3,000 on a new set of clubs and it's kind of like, maybe you should just learn to actually hit it off the tee before you go buy the $3,000 tool. Because a lot of times that's just in a built in excuse, right?        

00:08:16
            

It's like, well, we can't track because we don't have like all the great tools to do it with. It's like, yeah, if someone gave you the great tools, you wouldn't even know what to do with them. So how about you just start with the stuff you got, like Matt that out and then move to the more robust tools? So it's a great answer. I was just saying then you have the integration problems, right?        

00:08:34
            

Because if they're already built in, you're not going to deal with as much of the integration. Well, hey there, holy donuts. Listeners, ever feel like your nonprofit's donor experience is like a jelly filled donut with no jelly? Well, don't fret. We found the jelly.        

00:08:49
            

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00:09:06
            

And with we give, you get an incredible donor portal, events, pledges, surveys, segmentation on and on. We could go on the features and those checkouts, though, smoother than my attempt to make homemade donuts, which, let's just say, didn't quite rise to the occasion. See what I did there? With we gives innovative engagement tools, your donors won't just feel the love, they'll be coming back for seconds. Because nothing says thanks for your dough better than a world class experience.        

00:09:35
            

So if you want to sprinkle some extra special magic on your donor relationships, check out we give.com.        

00:09:45
            

so talk to us a little bit more because I know you nerd out like I do. Why are you passionate about monthly donor programs, sustainer programs, getting those monthly recurring gifts? Why is that such a big deal for you and the work you've done, but then also for what you're doing now with your seminary and some of your agency work as well? Yeah. So as you mentioned, the monthly donor programs, I mean, they're kind of the hot topic for the last couple years.        

00:10:13
            

It's been around for like, they're not new. It's amazing kind of how the trends go. And it's like, wow, monthly donors, well, I mean, they've been around for, you know, decades, so it's. But what we're seeing really is a trend in for profits with the subscription model. And really, I think a lot of nonprofits are kind of piggybacking on that, which is smart to do.        

00:10:36
            

And it's basically taking those same kind of concepts of subscription and monthly donors being very similar. We know from a lot of research is all coming out again. You know, monthly donors have a higher donor lifetime value. Monthly donors are the ones, in many cases, that become the major donors. They become the planned givers.        

00:11:02
            

They're a great way to, you know, sustain donors, and that's, that's what we want. And as you know, and our probably listeners know, we're in the nonprofit sector as a whole. We have an issue with retaining donors, and we want to acquire new donors, but really, it's more expensive to acquire new donors, and so it's cheaper to, cheaper to do the monthly, and that's really why I'm passionate about it. And then, yeah, and then to kind of speak into it from a practical standpoint, we're going through a monthly donor rebrand right now. We have a monthly donor program, but it kind of went stale.        

00:11:42
            

Nobody was promoting it. It was like, on the website, and it had some like, oh, this is what you'll get, but nobody ever got it.        

00:11:52
            

Yeah. And, you know, it's understandable. We can go into the whole reasons behind it. But we knew that it was very important to have this as a solid foundation because of the capabilities and the upside. So, yeah, so we're going through a rebrand right now.        

00:12:10
            

We created a new name, a new logo, some new incentives to go along with it. And we rolled it out. We rolled it out first to our current donors. Our current monthly donors, excuse me, just to let them know, because it's a new name, and some of them have been with us for 20 years. We didn't want to scare them away with a new name again, taking, you know, cues from major organizations do the same kind of thing.        

00:12:41
            

And we've seen great. So, so far, we've seen great results. We've, we rolled it out officially to our entire audience. We've, at this point, we've seen an 8% increase in monthly donors. Our biggest group of monthly donors has actually come at the $500 or more level.        

00:13:01
            

It's huge, which. Yeah, right. So, I mean, we're talking major monthly donors.        

00:13:07
            

And I think the kind of lesson I feel like I've learned through this whole process is that your donors want this. If you're not doing it, you have donors out there who are just waiting for this, they're waiting to sign up because we had a lot of people, like I said, sign up within the first couple days just to take a step back. We rolled it out via direct mail in an appeal, and we rolled it out via email. And now we're going to actually start focusing more on targeting some segments which, you know, which is nice. You know, those segments, like, you talk about nerding out, you know, your donors that give three to four times a year who don't give monthly, those are your, you know, we haven't done that yet.        

00:13:48
            

We're going to do that, believe it or not, we have monthly donors who give by check once a month who are actually already monthly donors, but don't do it automatically. So there's like, I was like, wow. Like, you know, we talk about low hanging fruit, so that's where we're going to next. But it's been very, very successful. Yeah, very cool.        

00:14:09
            

Very cool. No, that's amazing. Just to hear the inside of like, hey, this is what it really looks like to roll something like this out. And like, here's all the stuff you have to think through. And it really comes down to just, like, diving into the data, knowing, like, hey, where are we going to find the easy kind of wins?        

00:14:24
            

Like, what's that low hanging fruit that we can hit on first, and then as it grows, you can build into it. It goes back to the same conversation about tools. You don't have to go all the way there to get started. You can start somewhere and that's okay. And then build as you grow with the capabilities of your tools.        

00:14:40
            

So I love it. I know you see a lot of stuff in terms of the industry, like, hey, what's going on? You are kind of a lifelong learner. You're always reading stuff. You're always recommending stuff on LinkedIn, which I love.        

00:14:52
            

What's a trend in the christian nonprofit world right now that's got you a little bit concerned? What's one that's got you a little bit more excited and helpful? Yeah. So as far as concerns go, my biggest concern is kind of the shifting away from building relationships with donors. And I think in the digital sector, with digital technology, that's really easy to do.        

00:15:16
            

And we've kind of defaulted to digital as, like, an item on a checklist. And that's really concerning because digital, email, social websites, it's a tool. It's a way to communicate with people. But I feel like it's gotten away from that. It's like, oh, well, we need to send an email.        

00:15:36
            

Let's send an email. Oh, we need a post or, oh, we need to put an update on our website, but there's no strategy behind it. And I have seen some data on that. One of the most recent ones was that about 70% of nonprofits do not have an email strategy. And so that's scary.        

00:15:58
            

Right. I mean, it's really scary because what they're likely doing is they're actually another, another data I saw was they're like, oh, we need a fundraise. We're behind budget, let's send an email. Well, that's likely, probably going to fail because it's just not the right mindset. Right.        

00:16:18
            

So you're not building relationships. You're only sending fundraising emails. You're only, you know, sending things people don't care about. And when you do send them, they don't know who you are because you haven't sent something in two months.        

00:16:32
            

For more money. Right, right. And, you know, they either unsubscribe or they unengage and. Yeah, yeah. So, yeah, that's kind of my biggest.        

00:16:45
            

What's got you a little bit more hopeful. Yeah. Well, it's the beauty of technology. You know, it's, yeah. It's that other side of the coin where a lot of organizations are using technology maybe just to send kind of whenever they want.        

00:17:00
            

If you use the tools you're given, and as you even mentioned, the full extent of the tools for the reason they've been built. And we are just seeing a massive amount of increase in technology. Right. And so, you know, the first one that comes to mind, which isn't even a trend, but it's actually table stakes now. It's automation.        

00:17:21
            

Right. And that's, and that's been around for a while. About 55% of marketers are using automation and email, but it's not enough. Like, email, automation is great, but you can automate so much more. It makes your life so much easier.        

00:17:36
            

So what I'm talking about is, as far as the trend goes, it's a comprehensive automation plan, which is cleaning lists, creating tests. You know, I mean, it just, the sky's the limit. I think we just are so focused on, like, the bare minimum. But the second trend that I'm excited about is hyper personalization. And that is.        

00:17:58
            

Right. So we know a lot of people know about personalization. They've heard about it, and basic personalization is kind of at the surface level. It's your first name or your name, donor history, geography. That's great.        

00:18:15
            

But it's not enough anymore. We're all used to getting emails with our names in it. What we need now is hyper personalization, which actually takes a supporters interests, their behaviors and puts it together in real time to create content. It uses AI and predictive analysis so that it happens in real time and you can send an email or anything else and the donor is going to get something that speaks to them, speaks to their interests, speaks to what they care about, speaks to the programs. And the beauty is since it is technology, it's dynamic so it can change.        

00:18:54
            

So if you care about one program, maybe you care about kids and I care about adults, we're going to get two different emails that speak to our cares. Or if you care about humanitarian aid, I care about church mission, missionary field or something, you know, and it's by the same organization. It can be all done. Or if you care about video and I care about articles, right? Yeah.        

00:19:21
            

So hyper personalization is really, I think it's the future of technology that's great. And any platforms that you recommend for that, that you've seen that do the hyper personalization well, because I can imagine nonprofit marketing director, development director, donor relations specialist, whoever it is that's listening to sit and they're going, that sounds awesome. One, I don't know if our tools can do that right now. Two, what tools would I even look at? Like how do I even Google search for that?        

00:19:48
            

Right? Do I just Google search? Hyper personalization, nonprofit tools. Like can you give a kind of take that next step to help us understand, like where should we be looking around for tools like that? Yeah, I don't actually know very many because it's really, I know virtuos does AI stuff in their CRM.        

00:20:05
            

I don't know if they've taken it as far as hyper personalization, but I know they have that capability. I'm trying to think of donor search does some stuff as well. But yeah, I've actually done exactly what you said, which was type in hyper personalization, nonprofit. It sounds like there's a massive opportunity for some company to come in and build a tool in that space. That's what it is right now.        

00:20:30
            

That's what it is. If they can figure it out, they'll be the first. Very cool. Yeah, well, that's why I love talking with you, because you're always looking at what's coming next and even kind of bleeding and stuff. So love it, man.        

00:20:42
            

John, if people want to connect with you, if they want to find out more about, you've got kind of an agency on the side that does some work as well. Tell us a little bit more about that and how people can connect with you if they just want to start a conversation. Yeah, absolutely. So I do like you said, I have a website. It's called the nonprofit campaign Lab, and the website address is nonprofitcampaignlab.com dot.        

00:21:04
            

Try to make it as simple as I could, although it's a long URL and that's my agency, I do some side work as well, focused on digital fundraising, things like monthly donor programs, email programs, whether it's audits, digital, or automations, as we talk about creating those automations organizations as well. So, yeah, again, nonprofit campaign lab, that's a side hustle.        

00:21:32
            

And then. Yeah, and then the other way to reach out to me is through LinkedIn. I'm very active on LinkedIn, so you can reach me there and. Yeah, or you can email me. It's at Johnprofitcampaignlab.com.        

00:21:46
            

Perfect. That's what I'm supposed to do. Awesome. All the ways to reach out to you. I appreciate it.        

00:21:52
            

John, thank you so much for taking the time, man. Excited to see how people are able to use this episode to further their digital fundraising efforts. And seriously, go follow John on LinkedIn. He's a great follower, always posting valuable content. And thank you all for watching this episode of the Holy Jonas Podcast.        

00:22:07
            

We'll see you back here next week.        

‍

Transcription

00:00:05
            

Well, hey there, everyone. Welcome back to another episode of the Holy Donuts podcast. I'm your host, Matt Lombardi, and today I am joined by David Schwab, president and chief strategist at three Dot Media, a digital agency that works with nonprofits. David, how you doing today? I'm doing well, Matt.        

00:00:22
            

Thank you for having me. Yeah, man, pumped to have you. Pumped to have everyone else watching along for the ride. Just quick, quick word. Got to pay the advertisers.        

00:00:30
            

Super grateful for the sponsorship of we give for this episode of the podcast. If you're looking for a world class donor experience, go check out we give.com dot. Now, David, give us a little bit of background of, man, how you got into nonprofit land. I know you've got experience in the tech side now, your agency life. We met through a mutual connection, Andrew Olson over at Dickerson Baker.        

00:00:51
            

Great guy. So just give us a little bit of the story of kind of how you got into space. So I, like many of you all listening, and many people who have found themselves in the fundraising world, fell into fundraising on accident. I was graduating college, had $200 in my bank account, and I had no job offers, and got a call from a company that I had interned with. They had a job, and they happened to be a fundraising agency.        

00:01:17
            

So I fell into fundraising on accident and absolutely loved it. I got to work with. So the first two years of my career were working with homeless, faith based homeless shelters across the country. My whole job was telling people how they could feed and shelter someone for a buck 50. And to see that kind of scale, that kind of impact and hear those stories from across the country, I was like, how can you not love this?        

00:01:40
            

Yeah, absolutely. So that's how I got my career started. I also recognized direct mail probably wasn't the future of fundraising. So I took a, took a bit of a career pivot, went to the for profit commercial world, did social digital influencer, all of that style marketing with the intent that I was like, hey, I want to go learn what the big, big players in the space are doing. Bring it back to the sector.        

00:02:06
            

Right? The social impact sector. So about five years ago, I came back to the social impact sector. Joined, actually worked with our friend Andrew Olson at an agency, like two or three agencies ago for both of us now, but we worked together doing. I was leading digital fundraising.        

00:02:25
            

He was leading the agency for social impact organizations, specifically ministries and organizations like that. Then I took, like you said, a brief stint in the tech side. So as a digital strategist, it was part of my role was, hey, how do we have better structure behind what we're trying to do, right? So we're spending all this money to send a bunch of people to a broken infrastructure. What if we spent all that money to rebuild the infrastructure?        

00:02:52
            

And I got really, really excited about that and spent some time actually in the nonprofit tech space specifically to say, hey, this is better, this is available. The whole industry needs to be asking for more. And I'm going to go spend all my time talking about it. But I really missed consulting and being on the ground with funders and fundraising leaders. So I'm actually back now in the space and I'm starting a fundraising agency, like you said, throughout marketing.        

00:03:20
            

Awesome, man. Very cool. Very cool. So, okay, I love your background because it spans corporate impact and then also kind of agency life tech. Literally the full gamut of, kind of like the stack of what you'd ideally want, right.        

00:03:33
            

With a partner. So with what you've seen in digital, obviously, let's kind of segment out direct mail and say, hey, let's not talk about that today. Most of the audience and the marketing teams that they're creating nonprofit, they're in the development team advancement, whatever they're calling it. Right? Could you share a strategy?        

00:03:50
            

Maybe it's just a principle that you've kind of taken to heart that's unique to you? Like, no, no, I really think this is the crux of how we, digital fundraising could be a specific campaign. Like, no, no, this strategy, they need to work could just share some little nugget from your experience that you think would be really helpful for the audience out there. Yeah, well, I mean, as simple as it sounds, just there are so many organizations and leaders I work with who are still afraid to lean into digital because it doesn't work. But it doesn't work because we haven't done anything with it.        

00:04:20
            

We haven't updated our tech stack for 15 years, and we're wondering why our CRM isn't giving us automated insights. Because it was built to run a direct mail campaign 20 years ago. So really it's just do it. But if for those organizations, duh, I'm doing it. Schwab my go to strategy, and I promise it's not a cop out.        

00:04:43
            

This is the best thing for you, is to run an integrated marketing program across as many channels as you can. Yep, absolutely. Tell the, tell the same story you're telling in direct mail, with your organic social, with your paid social, with your display ads, with your search ads, with your connected tv. If you can afford it like when you do that, your entire program lists, you'll acquire more donors, you'll retain more donors, you'll raise more money just by telling a cohesive story across channels and being invested in more than one place. So it's called omnichannel marketing.        

00:05:15
            

Surround sound fundraising. It goes by many different names, but really, it is a fundamental strategy that every fundraiser needs to be doing. Yeah, no, it's great. That's something that we're passionate about as well, which is just like, hey, we call a broad based donor programs. Right?        

00:05:32
            

Like it needs to be hitting every channel you possibly can. Well, hey there. Holy donuts. Listeners, ever feel like your nonprofit's donor experience is like a jelly filled donut with no jelly? Well, don't fret.        

00:05:44
            

We found the jelly. To your donut dilemma. Enter we give, the software tool that's like the cream filling to your eclair, or should I say the glaze to your donut. With we give, you're not just taking a donation, you're rolling out a red. Carpet for every person who gives to your organization.        

00:06:02
            

And with we give, you get an incredible donor. Portal, events, pledges, surveys, segmentation, on and on. We could go on the features and those checkouts, though, smoother than my attempt to make homemade doughnuts, which, let's just say, didn't quite rise to the occasion. See what I did there? With Wegib's innovative engagement tools, your donors won't just feel the love of, they'll be coming back for second, because nothing says thanks for your dough better than a world class experience.        

00:06:31
            

So if you want to sprinkle some extra special magic on your donor relationships, check out we give.com.        

00:06:40
            

Okay, I'm going to nerd out with you a little bit. Talk about some of the organizations listening. Right? So some people out there, they're non profits doing $500,000 a year, and they're like, okay, we're barely sure by, some of them out there are doing 500 million a year and they're like, dashbob, we get it. We're doing that.        

00:06:58
            

But like, what do you do when you know it's held one story across the board? Talk to us a little bit through, like, I know even like some of the ministries we work with, and you do have 10, 15, 20 different programs right under their umbrella. Can you help think, help us think through segmentation a little bit more. And like, how do you, how do you get those ministries telling a cohesive story or maybe separate stories and not stepping on each other's toes? For donors.        

00:07:25
            

There'S no right answer to this. And it is something a lot of organizations struggle with because like you said, they so many different ways. They change lives. Yeah. And each life change deserves to be a story told.        

00:07:39
            

But you can't tell all the stories well. So I think it really comes down to testing. Find out what story, what ministry, what service line resonates really well with the mass market. You've got to acquire donors and they don't have to know everything you do. If you are a global ministry and you fund children's relief and you do medical relief and you send missionaries and you deliver bibles and you have clean water projects, those are all great things.        

00:08:11
            

Donors don't need to know all of those things and understand all of those things. Before choosing to invest in your organization, lead with one and figure out what acquires the best audience. And chances are two or three of your services are going to be your best acquisition lines and there's going to be different segments in the market that are going to want to invest in different things that you do. And then you use, once you already have that invested relationship, use your own channels to educate. Hey, did donor, you leaned into our missionary sponsorship.        

00:08:42
            

Did you also know that we do x, Y and Z? Would you consider supporting those as a monthly donor? Right. That's a great way to turn a one time donor into a recurring giver when you can show the breadth of their impact once they're already in. But if you try to educate a donor on everything you do in every communication, you're just going to confuse people.        

00:09:01
            

Yeah, absolutely. Man, that's such good advice. And it's, I mean, you know, good kind of corporate language. Like your other programs are such beautiful cross sell opportunities and I would say their retention strategies. Right.        

00:09:12
            

I mean, like, it's literally, hey, how do we do retention? Well, don't try to give them everything. Use those extra programs as, hey, maybe they've shown propensity towards this one program that you've kind of just kind of thrown the cherry bomb in a little bit to see if they'd be interested. Okay. Now we know we can segment them out.        

00:09:28
            

So I love that, man. That's great advice. Let's go macro. Since we kind of zoomed in. Micro on the macro level for nonprofit, for ministries, what's a trend that's got you pretty excited about what's coming next and what's one that's got you a little bit concerned?        

00:09:44
            

Well, I'd say AI, but I think everyone is saying AI right now. So I'm not going to go that route because I'm sure you've had many good conversions about AI already. But I'm going to take a step broader. It's nonprofit technology.        

00:10:00
            

Ten years ago, even five years ago, when I came back to the sector, your choices were two or three, eh, products or go get something from the corporate world. Now there is an entire industry of custom built, freaking awesome nonprofit technology designed specifically for what you're trying to do. You don't have to go get a commercial platform. That's pardon my language, but dumbed down for us. Yeah, you can go get something equally as good, if not better, built specifically for fundraisers and what you're doing on the front lines of fundraising.        

00:10:39
            

And that's not just CRM, that's CRM. Marketing automation, fundraising platform, websites, CMS, every sticky thing you need to solve as a fundraiser, there is technology built for you. And that's what makes me real excited. And there's competition. 510 years ago, there was no competition.        

00:10:55
            

So you were, you paid for Salesforce or you paid for Blackbot. That was the choice.        

00:11:03
            

Now there's competition. Right. And competition ends benefiting the market.        

00:11:11
            

Yeah, absolutely. It's huge. And we even see this with some clients where they're, it's kind of a shift in this custom legacy software they built in house. Right. And so one I can pick up specifically complete custom built on Oracle takes a full dev team to continue to make updates.        

00:11:29
            

I mean, they're spending millions of dollars a year on custom built software. The problem is that was their best option. 1718 years ago. Yep. But now we've had to come in and say, hey, you're spending all this money.        

00:11:44
            

You can get a better product than what you have custom built in house for fractions of the cost. And that's almost a difficult switch. Like mentally, that's a hard switch to make. Wait, so you're saying we've been wasting money? It's like, no, no, you weren't wasting money.        

00:11:58
            

The market is just caught up in terms of competition and quality of technology. So, yeah, man, see that all the time. Absolutely love that. Is the tech side something that has you concerned as well, or is there something else that has you concerned? What has me concerned is donor retention rates.        

00:12:13
            

It's not, it's not necessarily a strategy or a tactic or a thing. It is donor retention rates and the fact that they keep going down.        

00:12:23
            

It's a hard time to be a fundraiser, period. Right. The market's tough, the inflation's up. We all see the headlines, we all share the headlines. We all know what's going on.        

00:12:37
            

We all feel it. We all see it in our results. If we're lucky, we're flat year over year. Yeah, that's what. That's what concerns me.        

00:12:46
            

Not in a. Concerns me. We can't do anything about it, but concerns me that we aren't doing anything about it. Yeah. Yeah.        

00:12:53
            

That's great, man. So let's camp out on retention for just a minute because I was with a client last week and we walked through their retention strategy, and it was essentially the same thing that they've been. I mean, it was good. It was like best practices from ten to 15 years ago. Right.        

00:13:11
            

It's, hey, we're going to send out, you know, we have this. You know, I think it was like a quarterly, like, thank you letter. Like handwritten notes. Right. I think it was twice a year, handwritten notes, and then two quarterly thank you letters that were, like, printed and, like, signed off on.        

00:13:23
            

Right. And then the occasional call. Use a call center to make the occasional call thank you voicemail drop. Not even really that. It was like, literally call center calls.        

00:13:31
            

And that was the extent of it. And that's like, that's how we do retention, which is better than what most organizations are doing, but it still seems like it's 15 years in the past. Anything that you'd recommend that you're seeing that works or that might be, hey, some things to try or test out that is not that kind of old school model video use. Like, we all have better cameras in our pocket than the best production studio had 15 years ago. Yeah.        

00:14:00
            

Grab your phone, do a literally like this forward facing video from your CEO or your exec director. Record two minutes of talking about a story or thanking donors, or tell something that just happened in one of your programs and send it via email, send it via text message. Put it on your website, put it onto, like, it ultimately comes down to delivering content that builds relationships in the way people want to engage with content. And the people, the way people want to engage with content is video, period. I'm sorry.        

00:14:32
            

That's great, man. That's great. Okay, let's move a little bit into as we have a few more minutes left here. Yeah. Always like to ask, what resources do you recommend for folks out there in nonprofit land?        

00:14:44
            

Could be your own if you had some stuff that you're working on or just generally with that. Blogs, conferences, books, articles, journals, anything like that. Yeah, I mean, man, we could probably spend a whole podcast talking about this. There's so many resources, but my favorite right now podcast marketing against the grain by the HubSpot Zapier cmos. If you haven't listened to it, listen to it.        

00:15:06
            

They're talking about all everything with AI. Any good idea I have has probably come from that podcast over the last couple months, so that one's a great one. I highly recommend it. We all know him, but nextafter always has great resources for digital testing optimization strategies. We talked, we've talked about a couple things.        

00:15:26
            

Our mutual friend Andrew Olson, he's always putting out great content, specifically about leadership. Right now is his focus. And that one, his podcast and his newsletter have been really helpful for me. And then if you want to connect with me, follow me. On LinkedIn, I'm always talking about new things, about digital fundraising, things that are, I'm surfacing.        

00:15:47
            

Like, hey, I talked with my I've had four or five different organizations ask me about this this week. Let's brain dump mind share. I'm always trying to add at least some perspective to what's happening in the industry. Sometimes people like them, sometimes people don't, but it's there. Awesome, man, awesome.        

00:16:05
            

If people want to connect with you, is LinkedIn the best place to connect with you? LinkedIn. And then if you want to have a conversation, I'm always happy to chat. You can reach me via email. David three agency I'm sure we'll link it in the show notes, absolutely.        

00:16:20
            

But LinkedIn, email, those are the two places and most of my time these days. Awesome. David Schwab, president chief strategist at three marketing thank you so much for the time, man. Super helpful as always. You're just a wizard with this kind of stuff and really appreciate your time.        

00:16:34
            

Yeah, thank you. It was great to be here.        

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