Digital First Fundraising Building a Compelling User Experience for Donors

All set. Fantastic. Okay, everyone. So thank you for joining today. You know, we're going to talk about digital first fundraising. It's always strange on a webinar. There's a hundred people, you know, listening, but I'm talking to myself. So I'm going to ask a few questions throughout and I hope you put your answer and use them as an exercise in the chat. Right. So we just want to stoke some thinking as we go through this. So we're going to talk about digital first fundraising and building a compelling user experience for donors. Fundraise up is a platform for online giving. We're used by Greenpeace Canada. Sandra Schmurler, oceanwise, Pacific Wild. A lot of Canadian nonprofits. So I know the Canada market is limited in choices often, but we do have a platform that's compliant CRA and so on. So everything that you're seeing here would be possible in the Canada context. So let's dig in and start talking a bit about digital first and what a good user experience looks like. So a donor experience. What is a donor experience? What are the things that make that up? Think about a good restaurant or dining experience. What's in that? Right? You have to have not a long wait to get to the table. Your food's got to be good, your waiter has to be on point. They've got to remember your name when they come back to the table. Bonus points, right. If they do so. A donor experience similarly is built from advanced personalization, right? So personalization me as a donor, when I come to your donation experience, do I feel like you see me, know me? And that can be done in some very direct ways or some more subtle ways. And secondly, friction. How hard do I have to work to make this donation, right? Are you giving me error messages that are clear? Are you making me type my entire address or can. Would it be possible to autocomplete as I type? Like everything else in my, my consumer life. And then thirdly, and this is more applicable to the nonprofit space, but also in the for profit space, the feeling, the feeling I get, right, it's all, all we have to sell as nonprofits is feeling, right? How do I feel? Do I feel included? Do I feel like I contributed? Do I, do I feel seen? We don't have a pepperoni pizza that's going to arrive at their door, right? So there is no other product than the feeling of being included and seen. So this chart here looks at Canadian and US nonprofits in a study by NextAfter 2021 fundraiser participated in helping with some of the questions, but this was independently exercised and researched. So this took about 100 points of friction in donation forms, and it measured where do nonprofits score on that? And nonprofits are getting a D plus. Okay, so we're getting a D plus at 68% being the average grade. And this is over a large number of nonprofits. This is over 643 nonprofits that were looked at. We said, how many things are friction for a nonprofit? So that's just an indicator of where we are as a nonprofit space. Get those typing fingers ready. Right. So donor experience, you know, just some thoughts, if you might have them for the chat. What does a good or a bad donor experience look like? What does that include? If you have any thoughts, please do drop them into the chat. It's not just for me. It's for others to think about that. And while you're. You're putting those thoughts together, maybe what's the state of most nonprofits in their consumer. In. In. In their experience comparing to a consumer expectation? And why do I keep going back to this consumer expectation? The same person, the person that is buying on Apple Pay or Google Pay or Tap to pay in the store, it's the same person. So the delta between my experience at the coffee shop or on Uber eats compared to the experience making a donation. Right. How. What is that gap? A consumer doesn't expect a gap. They expect excellence. Right. So we want to talk about how we can close that. So looking at those consumer brands again, right, you know, Zappos, Zipcar, Those are easy. The experience is known for being easy. I tap my phone to the windshield of a car that I see on the street, and I take a Zipcar or Netflix, the king of personalization. Netflix is knowing who I am, what I like, do. I like short shows, long shows, dramas, comedies, whatever. It might be timely, quick, Uber, Google, Amazon, they're all based on speed, intentional, that are looking at specific markets like Airbnb, the Adventure, or Nike the athlete, Ritz Carlton, the luxury consumer, and so on. So these are brands that are going all in on experience and defining that. Are we doing that as nonprofits? And where can we start doing that? So again, back to closing the gap, right? We have nonprofits with a 68% average grade getting a D plus. We've got consumer brands that are famous for their experience. And there's a river between the two, maybe an ocean. Right. Depending on different factors. So how do we close that gap? There's a few ways that we can work to close the gap. And deliver a better digital experience. And one side point, all of us here do a lot of work to get a campaign out. Emails, writing the copy, setting up the ads. If we're doing social, paid social or paid search, building the campaigns, deciding the subject line, and so on. All of this work we do, which is a lot, is only going to be as effective as your destination or that digital giving experience. So if that experience at your donation giving point lacks or creates obstacles, donors will leave. They will. They have less incentive to power through a less than spectacular experience with a donation than they do with, say, buying a pair of shoes. If I'm buying shoes, I really want those shoes. I'm going to do everything I can to make this purchase work. I'm going to get my extra credit card, I'm going to go get my PayPal login. Whatever I got to do, I'm going to make it happen. But for a donation, that threshold and that tolerance level is a lot lower. So one thing and you're more likely to lose a donor than in a different experience, which puts the impetus on us to be even more responsible in delivering a good experience. So let's talk about closing the gap. So, AB testing. I don't know if many of us are doing AB testing here, but we should do AB testing. AB testing tells us what works and what doesn't. What is AB testing? It's taking one set or circumstance and another variable of that, sending them both, both out and seeing what performs better. So for example, if you are going to AB test an email, you want one subject line that says support our cause and one that says give to our cause and you're going to send them out half and half, see which one gets more opens on the subject line. You're only measuring the open rate and then the content of that email. You might have two sets of content that are going to have different copy or different words and one is going to perform better than the other, hands down, regardless. It will. And a B testing allows us to iteratively make changes. What we're seeing here on the right of this screen is how fundraise up AB tests against other donation forms. So we'll look at these metrics, we'll send all the donors to one donation form against another and we'll see which one is performing better in experience. AB testing is not necessarily fun unless you are a data analyst and you enjoy that kind of stuff. I do. It's kind of like going to the gym, right? It's boring, it takes a lot of effort but if you do it, you get a lot of results, right? So that's kind of how I like to think about AB testing. It's, it's, it's a bit annoying to get, get your head around and do it, but once you do it, you start seeing the results on it. Here's an example of a B testing and some pitfalls to avoid. For example, and think about an example. If you've done a B testing or if you've seen it, what's the most impactful results you've seen from AB testing? Okay, here's an example. And this comes again from a NextAfter Experiment number 11696. You can Google that little phrase NextAfter Experiment 11696. You'll see the whole article on this. But I want you to think adding a video to our donation page sounds amazing, right? Everything says video. Video is content that's valuable. And you might have a loud voice, it might be yours in the organization that is saying we should have video on that donation page because we want to tell the story. What do we think? And you can just make a mental note. If the chat isn't a chatty chat, more of a question chat, that's fine. But what do you think the impact of adding video to that donation page would be? Are we going to get more donations or fewer?

Right.

It turns out traffic is the same and we see a 77.4% decrease in conversion rate. So 77% fewer donors finish and a 16% decrease in the average gift size in this experiment. So overall about an 81% decrease in revenue. This is why it's important to not go on gut feelings and say, let's just throw that video up there and then be upset why we're not getting those donations through. So these are some of those things where a lot of people will think, let's do that. And if we don't test it properly, we can see that it's not a good practice. So you know when you're at the Apple Store and, and you're in line to pay for that new iPad or whatever it might be, right? They're not showing you videos while you're waiting in line to convince you. You're convinced you're in the, you're in the checkout, you're ready, you're ready to give. You're ready to give your money. The videos are happening in the display in the marketing section. So we want to make sure our message and our video is happening prior to them getting to our giving point. Right. So these are some correlations we can draw. So that's some power of AB testing. And we'll talk about at the end of this some direct ways you can apply AB testing in light measures. Want to talk now about express and mobile wallets? This is key for the digital first fundraising movement. And I say movement because since the pandemic, digital giving has exploded. A lot of direct mail giving ends up going through online as well. So, you know, digital is where things converge and it's only growing in that direction, especially as demographics change. And so on the chart on the left is showing us Apple Pay adoption, right? So all those bars by country. So 22% of Canadians have Apple Pay and are using it. That's just about a quarter of your donor base. That's huge. And Apple Pay is an easy way to give. That's why they have it. It's an easy way to pay for things. And if we make that available to them, we're going to see an increase not only in our revenue. So we're gonna, we're gonna take care of some of the friction in that experience. Right. I don't have to type out my card number. I can just face id, tap my phone and I'm done. If we have Apple Pay on our donor checkout, but you're also tapping into personalization using a platform like Fundraise up, you know, we're going to see that the donor's on an iPhone and show them Apple Pay as a principal way to give. But if we don't detect an iPhone, we're going to show it. So we're not going to show that. Right. Your platform may or may not be able to do something similar. So we will want to tap into some personalization by showing that donor. We see you, we see that you are using your iPhone and use Apple Pay. We want to facilitate that transaction and make that experience a little better for you, more aligned with your expectations. PayPal, we may not love it as organizations donors love it. We see about 20% of donations going through PayPal when it's offered. And when PayPal is offered, we see about a 10% increase in revenue. It's not nothing, right? That means about half of the people that give on PayPal or through PayPal to your organization would not have otherwise given if it were not available. So you have a 20% of transactions going through PayPal and a 10% conversion lift when PayPal is simply present. Cut that in half. About half of them are not giving if PayPal isn't available. So it increases the likelihood because PayPal's market penetration runs deep. Most people on planet Earth have a PayPal account in some capacity and if they don't have their credit card on them, they do have their PayPal login. So that's just some talking about express and mobile wallets and why they are important in the personalization and friction component and ultimately increasing the revenue to your mission. But nonprofits are typically offering only credit card or worse. Download this PDF if you'd like to make a pre authorized debit, fill out these fields, email it back to us. You know, there's a reason the fastest growing companies don't take checks or doing things over PDF. There's a scalability and there's an experience factor when it is simplified. So nonprofits are behind as an industry in what consumers expect and see in other spheres of their daily life. But why do you feel most nonprofits are significantly behind the e commerce world in meeting donor experience expectations regarding the mobile and express wallets? Again, a question for you to answer yourself. You know, why in, you know, widely in my customer life, when you're wearing your customer hat, are you seeing it easy to pay for things? But nine times out of 10 with a nonprofit, we're making that as to difficult as, as as possible really in some cases where by only offering just one static payment method, by offering those other ones, we're going to see significant lift in many metrics in an organization. So that covers mobile wallets and express wallets a bit. Really wanting to highlight the importance of looking into ways to add modern payment methods that speak to younger demographics and demographics. Shifting to mobile and digital personalization is another key part of having a great donor experience. Those can be things like using their name in the emails you send them, right? It can be things like when you make a financial ask, right? You know, can you give $100? Well, $100 for one person may be a week of groceries, while for another person it's a lunch in a fancy restaurant. So if we can adjust what we're asking based on what we might know about that donor, we're going to have more success. And that feels personal to me. A donor, right. Someone in Saskatchewan may be asked for less than someone in downtown Toronto and so on. Payment methods are a way to personalize delivering content in their language. Check out your Google Analytics and in there you can see the percentage of your base or visitors that are using browsers in other languages. My typical recommendation is if that number is more than 2015, 20% in any specific one, you probably should give some attention to that base. Right. If you have a lot of Spanish speaking folks visiting your website, or French, maybe you can't tap into ways to cater to them. Maybe it's one page on your website that is in their language. Right. As a starting point with our fundraise up checkout, for example, we can enable languages and regardless of your website content, if we detect their browser in Arabic, we can show the checkout in Arabic. Right. That might be more comfortable for them. Even if they are not living in a country where that is spoken, they might be living in Canada and that might be their language of choice and they might feel more comfortable making a transaction. So those are just some ways we can start leveraging personalization. So here are some applications of it. So for example, in the first one there on the left we see that we are showing payment methods that are applicable to that donor. So I have Google Pay showing here, I'm on a Google Chrome device and I see Google Pay, I don't see Apple Pay. And further, we can personalize by showing a currency that's more relatable to that donor. He might be a Canadian organization, but my donor might be a Canadian that moved to Florida and is wanting to give in US dollars now. So we can personalize that experience for them, making sure all parties are being seen in the middle, we see just an acknowledgement email here where we're using their name. Thank you, Julia. Right, so including some personalization, the content, I'm sure many of us are doing this, many are not. I, I've given too many donations where I get a very black and white text only static confirmation that has very little feeling in it. And it might have my name in it as in contribution, donor name, you know, semicolon name, but it doesn't feel personal. So speaking in a, in a personal way, mentioning their name is going to a long way. And then as I mentioned on the far right by, by showing a checkout that might be applicable to their language and currency for that donor, that's something you can do as well. Depending again on your technology that you're using, you can do that. So those are just some, some ways of personalization. And the exercise for the group here is to think about what are other ways that we can do purse, you know, inject personalization into the experience of a donor. And keeping in mind that personalization does not just mean use their name, means do things that might be more subtle, that make me feel more welcome. Our ultimate objective is to increase lifetime value Of a nonprofit, sorry, of a donor and everything. We talked about testing to find out what works best. Express wallets and mobile payment methods. Personalizing the experience to a capacity that's possible. All of that is going to factor in that lifetime value of the customer that we're looking to increase. For example, if I have Apple Pay, actually, let me step back one step on that. If I'm a nonprofit and I send my email out and let's say 15% of my list are millennials, let's say they're 22 to 28 years old or 30 years old. If I send them to a donation form that only has a credit card entry field, I'm two to three times more likely to not give. If I show up on your donation page and I see Apple Pay there and I'm on the way to grab the Metro and I can give, that non profit suddenly feels cool to me. Right? It feels relevant to me. It feels like, oh, this is a nonprofit, I can get behind. And what you're doing is you're getting more lifetime value because you're getting more lifetime with that donor. Right. You're starting at an earlier age. And sure, while their pockets may not be as deep now you're starting the relationship and you're giving longevity and sustainability to your organization by attracting new audiences. We have one flagship nonprofit customer that came to us and said we only advertise and do paid social and search for 45 years old enough because that's the only ones that give. Those the only donors that give and they have deeper pockets. And we said, well, sure, have you seen your donation form? I don't think any 30 year old is going to power through that legacy feeling experience. And when they switched to our platform or if you're switching to any platform that's going to make a market difference, the 25 to 45 is now their largest giving segment because they're offering PayPal, Apple Pay, Google pay, things that are relevant to a younger demographic. So while their larger, previously larger giving demographic increased, the 25 to 40, 45 went up exponentially. And that's now their main giving base, which is great for them because now they're, they have a, a donor portfolio and a base of donors that are much younger that are likely to stick through that with that organization for a longer time. So it's a bit long tail. But the implications of a donor experience being exceptional are concrete. Right. And that better experience contributes directly to a longer lifetime value and a higher lifetime value of that donor. Okay, so really, in A nutshell, experience matters really across the board from your messaging all the way through to the technology that is closing the deal for you. Your donation form is really your pinch hitter, bottom of the knife. That's the one that needs to bring it all home. Right? Everyone else contributed in the copywriting, the ads, the targeting, the email campaign, the thoughtfulness, the creativity. But it's all going to crux and really excel based on how much that end digital experience is working for you. Right? If you get a 50% lift in revenue through a better optimized giving experience, you're getting a 50% ROI lift on everything prior to in that campaign that you did. Look at some results of this that we've, some organizations we've worked with and these are the ones that I had ready to share. The Lus Garden foundation, you know, when they moved to our experience or you know, and for everyone here, you know, any experience that you can get that is modern and a better digital experience, you're going to see some sort of lift. The lusgarden foundation saw 104% increase in number of donors, double 96% growth in the number of donations, 83% more online revenue. Right. So that is just core metrics ab testing one against the other. Boys and Girls Clubs of America, 22% increase in revenue, 32% in search engine marketing revenue increase and 43% increase in the revenue from email marketing. That means every dollar they spent on email marketing previously was almost half as effective. Right? The ROI was half. So these, these, these are compounding metrics from when you get the experience. Right in the transactional and going backwards, greater good charities, very large organization here, doing some amazing things. Side statistic that's not on here and I still haven't figured out why. This organization has about 50% of their donations going through PayPal. 50% of their donor base is choosing PayPal to give. I'm not privy to the reason why, but good thing they have PayPal, right? That would have been maybe a 25 to 40% loss in revenue if they didn't moving their experience to something that's more modern. They are able to see a 161% lift in online revenue, almost, you know, two and a half times more monthly donors and conversion rate lift of their donation page of 69%. Okay, and if these are still being questions as, as I'm going through some of this, feel free to ask them in the, in the platform. So I want to tie this up with things that are actionable for the audience here. The 120 of us or so listening in here are some easy action items. And I put an asterisk next to easy because I too was in the nonprofit space. And I know little is easy in the nonprofit space. But these suggestions are as good as it gets, my friends. So if you can do these, please do so. Run a simple A B test, just a simple one. Your tech should be able to do this. Send two copies of the email with different subject lines or two copies of the email with the same subject line. But the call to action in the email is worded differently, right? One will perform better than the other. But the important thing is test one thing at a time. Otherwise you don't know which was the improvement. Okay, number two again, I know reconciliation and some things with PayPal may not be dreamy, but if you can add PayPal to your donation form, please do. You're going to see a revenue lift. I promise you. You will see more revenue coming through Merge Tags to personalize so in your email communications, using their first name goes a long way. Do it if you can, right? That's a simple way to start personalizing copy and text. But those are some things that you can do right out of the gate to start tapping into that mindset. Really. If you do not have tech that allows these action items, you must review your tech platform choices in order to compete. And I underlined strategically because they popped out on the screen at me after I wrote this. You must compete. You have to. The dollars are going to go to a E commerce platform or a for profit company or they're going to go to your organization. And every bit of friction or lack of a compelling and engaging digital experience is shifting some of those funds away from your organization and going elsewhere. And that is what I wanted to share here in this presentation. So if some of these things are things your organization would like to do, you can go to fundraiseup.comtechsoup and we will get in touch with you. That's a specific link that we had made just for this event. You know, we can do all of those things that you see in the presentation. We can help you get those really next day. And we, and we don't. We do that with no cost to your organization. But if not, and you have the platform you have, apply what you can and ask them to apply some of these tactics or functionalities to your platform. It's important really end to end, you know. And I'm sure you have a CRM and looking for integrations and things that don't make more work for you. It's always important. You know, our platform will integrate with all of the CRMs that are out there, so we'll just plug in and send data. But it is important to evaluate the lift, you know, versus the outcome. Right. So basically try to avoid a tail wags dog scenario where we might not want to do X because it creates a little more work over here, but that little more work could empower your organization to collect tens of thousands, if not hundreds of thousands of dollars more. So that's all I really wanted to share about that. With that, I'd love to answer some questions and talk about anything here that folks may want to chat about.

Wonderful. Thank you so much, Salvatore. That was such a great presentation and such compelling insights. Really captivating. You had me glued to the screen the entire time. Yes, as Salvatore mentioned, we do have some time now for Q&As, so if you haven't already entered your questions, feel free to do so now. You can use the question box on the control panel, but we did receive some as you went along in the presentation. So I'll start us off with a question that fits quite nicely with your last recommendations. So when it comes to A B testing, you could say that in a way there's some friction there already for many that are new to it or to the concept and it may seem intimidated to figure out exactly how to get started or to learn more. So would you say, is it always a matter of like getting started by hiring an expert or are there ways to even learn how to test in house? Maybe like getting better acquainted with these communications platforms.

Sure, sure, you can start easy. So if you're using email marketing software to send out your emails, almost all of them have an A B test feature built in. You might have to uncover it, you might have to search the documentation and see. But doing a simple subject line AB test, which is why I recommended this, you can probably do this with the software you have right now, right? Google mailchimp AB test subject line. You'll find the way to do it or whatever the platform might be if you're going to get into bigger AB testing. Yes. You know, an agency can help you with that, a consultant. But content. A B testing is very easy in email and social posts. Right. You just want to put different versions out and see which one performs better. I think it's important to choose what your success metric is. Right. What are you looking for? More clicks, more donations, more opens and test on that. Does that answer that question?

Yes, Absolutely. And building on that, it's helpful for those who are just getting started to maybe think of a few keywords that they could put into Google or search even on YouTube, often a few pages your platform's name, say Mailchimp. With tutorials or a B testing, you'll be able to find video tutorials or online guides. And there's quite a few on TechSoup Canada as well. So maybe it's worth spending, you know, that hour in your day getting to learn a bit more or working with a colleague to refine your skills. But there's certainly lots of information out there, and I think it's way less intimidating than it sounds when you get started.

Absolutely, absolutely. And for testing even landing pages, this is an easy one as well. So if you have just two versions of an email and you want to test two different landing pages on your website, you can make create your first copy, duplicate it, and then edit the second one and send out an AB test of the email. So you can test the landing pages, keep the call to action the same, but send them to two different destinations. One's going to get more donations per click than the other.

Thank you for that. So we received a comment from one of our participants and I'm building on the comment to ask a question. So it's an observation about, you know, often there's less money in the budget to invest in new technology for organizations or, and, or resistance to change or innovation from leadership. So how would you start working around these challenges to maybe try to get more of the organization on board with transitioning to these strategies or a digital first approach approach?

I've got two answers. One is the whitewashed and one is the more gritty one. The gritty one is ask for forgiveness, not permission. That's what I did in my career. So I just did stuff. And then I said, hey, look at the numbers. And typically, you know, if my hunch was right, I'd go with amazing numbers. Say, hey, I did this. We have 75% more X. Are we good to move forward this going forward based on my test, that may or may not work for your organization or your personal style. The other way is when you're engaging with leadership, always go with data or data however you prefer saying it. Show them X percent of millennials are doing this or show them research that says PayPal is going to make this kind of a lift. And that usually gets them on board, at least for you to do an experiment and test so you can show results for wider adoption. As far as Budget. You know, the fundraise up solution doesn't require budget. So we are purely aligned to our performance. We would love to explain that to you, how that works. So this is a no budget solution to increasing your donor experience and improving that. But in cases where you don't have that, that model available to you, you have to really run the math and see, well, if I can get a conservative 20% lift in revenue and that's going to bring me X in donations, is this $5,000 investment in this other piece of software worth it? That's one way to do that. So we talked about budget, we talked about leadership and change management. I'm sorry, I have no solutions for that. Change management is just a tough one, especially in this space.

Yeah, I think it goes hand in hand with culture change as well, both in society, but within the organization. And that is a slower moving piece, but certainly worth being persistent and keeping an eye on trends and just keep making the arguments, I suppose. Yeah, there's no magic bullet there, but yeah, you spent quite a bit of time also mentioning friction and personalization and how to remove some of these barriers. And I believe that there's still the perception somehow that personalization is time consuming, if not even costly in terms of the resources of an organization, maybe a staff member's time or whatnot. So thinking about the concept that you introduced us to of lifetime value, how would you address at least the perception of that resource cost or burden as a potential barrier to getting started in forging these relationships along a longer period with donors? How do we get to speak to them in terms of that personalization piece?

So in a nutshell, we're saying how do we justify investing in personalization and what impact will that have on the lifetime value and that relationship?

Overall.

I think it's pretty evident when we compare against a consumer experience. And I'll wrap this up in just a second into the nonprofit part. But we all have made purchases with some brands that we feel loyal to and we have made purchases with on some. I won't even say brands. I'll just say online stores where it's purely transactional. We don't feel like we belong to that. Right. The confirmation email is very static. You know, there isn't any sense of belonging to. When I had my daughter was born, we used honest and they sent me an email when on her third month birthday they sent one. On the sixth month they sent one. When she turned one year old, they knew me. That was personal. Right. If you have information about your donor base Maybe it's their birthday, maybe it's just where they live, maybe you might know the state, maybe there's a specific holiday or event that happens where they're located. An email that just has no hard ask and just maybe a button at the bottom that says, you know, please support us. But the rest of the content is not selling, just saying, you know, happy birthday or, you know, happy best deal there, whatever it might be. Right. So you want to send an email that speaks to them in that way and that's how we can find an equivalent in the nonprofit space to what they're seeing with the brands they love in the for profit space. And all of that trickles down. Because now for honest, for the diapers that I spent a lot of money on there, I recommend honest to everyone and I have a relationship and am I to have another child with my wife? I'm going to go to honest again. Right. That's lifetime value of the customer. We're going to respond and forge relationships with those organizations that are doing that. And that undoubtedly is going to have a positive impact on lifetime value.

That's a great point actually, because we do encounter many of these strategies and these personalized communications in our day to day life and because they're often, when done well, so frictionless, we may not even fully register that that's happened and that we've been sort of targeted, quote unquote, that way. And so also for us as members of the social impact center sphere or nonprofit world, it's also a matter of maybe reflecting a bit on what worked for us in our personal life, in our community, and getting inspired by that, maybe using that as a launchpad for creatively brainstorming ways that we can bring that.

Absolutely, absolutely. Because in the nonprofit space, we're in a bit of an echo chamber.

Right.

We hear each other's and we see each other's websites and that's what we're comparing ourselves against. Our donors are not doing that. They're not going to this website and then that one and saying, well, you know, that nonprofit is better than this one. They're comparing us to their other experiences in when they're giving their money away. So it's critical, it's important.

Yeah, I feel like from our end there has to be a lot of nuance, but from the consumer end, it's all one experience in a way. It's all online and similar ways to check out know all that sort of thing. So following that, what would you say is a good way to start a relationship? With a donor from an earlier age, A lot of the time, we're hearing the landscape of giving is changing. Gen Z millennials, they don't give the way that the boomer generation gives, and there's some declines across generations and then some increases in others. So also understanding that a generational shift is really important, but in terms of acquiring a more diversified pool of donors or community of donors, how would you start expanding that audience reach? Is it doing such a good job on your digital first strategies that you go through word of mouth or targeting specific demographics that you see are lacking in your donor databases, for example? Like, what is a good way to get started? Because we often hear change of technology and you'll attract more donations. But for a lot of nonprofits, I think a lot of the time is also having a better sense of what kind of communities are starting with or what they're working with.

First thing I'll say is do not start down that path of trying to attract new demographics or particularly younger demographics until you have that digital experience, right? Otherwise, you are diminishing the ROI of your efforts and your investments, right? So having that digital experience and that giving experience, you know, don't do it before. You have certainly PayPal, if you can get Apple Pay and Google Pay and these things where that demographic is transacting into your experience, you're going to get a better relationship and forge more relationships and attract more younger demographics. So again, starting with your destination, get that up to par and then work backwards and say, okay, now that that's ready, right? It's like, you know, I'm drawing a blank on a comparison, but, you know, you want it to be a place that's inviting for them. And that's going to depend on what that experience at the end looks like. And then from there, once that's right, then you can work back and start targeting demographics in certain interest groups on social media. You can, you know, start having messaging and campaigns that speak to different demographics, maybe are a bit more youthful, fun, engaging, use hashtags, you know, things like that that speak to them. I'm sure you're millennials and your, and your, your Gen Z's, and they're going to respond to a hashtag more than someone who's in that 45 plus range. So that's the advice I would have there is get that destination right before you invest in it, and then look at the gaps in your demographics and say, okay, we have very few in this. And then sit back and go, let me, let me relive that experience as that demographic let me even find somebody internally or externally. Even better to go through that journey and have them feed back to me what doesn't or does. Click and have them be brutally honest. Right. And feedback to you and then work that into your journey of that donor.

So if I were to summarize it, I'm tempted to say if you build it, they will come and then try to understand. Pretty much, yeah, that.

Excuse me.

Absolutely. So building on that, you gave us some recommendations for how to get started. We've looked at personalization through merge tags, we've looked at a B testing. So suppose we are on our way, we're changing, we're getting things done. What would be some metrics or data points to watch out for to know that we're on the right track, that these strategies are working? You did give us some examples of success stories, but in this, are there maybe two or three places to pay attention to?

Sure. The first thing is you're going to, when you're doing the A B testing is look at your numbers in performance and mentioned before, it's critical to establish what is your success measurement. Right. If you're testing your emails and your personalization in the subject line. Right. You know, you know, Jamie comma, you know, we need you exclamation point as your subject line. What are you looking to do with that? Are you looking to get open rates so that you're going to get more open rates on that overall going through the journey, you're going to want to. I mean cash is king, right? So donations that come in, the more revenue you have coming in is really your ultimate metric that you want to gauge. And depending on the kind of campaign you're running, is it one time gifts, is it regular giving, monthly, you know, measuring what that mix is. We see a lot of times where many one time gifts will come in, but because they've adopted some new technologies or some ways of giving that are advanced or more aligned with your demographic and what their experience expectations are that monthly giving goes way up. I mean we see this in Greater Good, right. 230%. So 2.3x increase in regular giving because now it's available to them in a way that's compatible to them. So to summarize, I guess cash is king. Look how many donations are going through and then in each of your steps of the journey, establish what metric is important to you and look at that metric to make sure it's increasing.

Yeah, very clear. Thank you for that. I'd also like to spend a little bit of time on PayPal, which was another very actionable next step that you recommended. And we received a question from one of our participants is asking, how do you make PayPal available for donations? So the plain and simple act of getting started and building on that, do you think that people will be giving more through PayPal as opposed to credit card because of the increased credit card fees? Is there a correlation you've noticed there?

No, the donors don't care about the fees. Typically, the nonprofit cares most about the fees. However, I know our platform does. Many do this where it gives the donor an opportunity to cover transaction costs. We see by giving them an elevated experience that's very frictionless and caters to your elderly demographic as well as your younger demographic. We see about 90% of donors opting to cover all costs. Right. So the cost isn't something that they're put off by. They are more than willing to pay those costs and more if the experience is meeting their expectations. We don't see people opting for credit card over PayPal because of that. Our stats are about, like I said, about 20% of people choosing PayPal when it's offered, with about 10% of people not giving if it's not offered. So that is really the reasoning there. And it's simply because of the convenience. Right. PayPal has, you know, my username and password, I can just do it on my phone. I can face ID in or whatever. While credit card, I may not have it, or the one I want to use is upstairs. It's in my desk. I got to go find it. It's not home, you know, my family member took it, whatever it might be. So the credit card is just has more dependencies tied onto to add PayPal. Typically in your donation platform or whatever's powering your donation page, you should be able to just go in there and just say, connect my PayPal account and add PayPal. So. So check to see if that's available. If you can avoid having donate here for everything except PayPal, donate here. Avoid that if you can. Right. It's like going into a store and them saying, you know, all payment methods except American Express, go here, but if you're American, go, go on that line. That's not a pleasant experience. So if you want, if you can keep it consolidated into one experience, but you should be able to just add it to your platform. And if you want to offer PayPal again, we can help you with that and have that done pretty quickly.

Absolutely. And this may be another instance where googling, you know, the right keywords, maybe your donations platform's name plus PayPal integration and tutorial can really help you. So yes, absolutely. So I think we've had a really fascinating discussion and very energizing, very actionable, with lots of really good information to digest and keep thinking about and maybe bringing back to our teams or leadership at work. I feel like you've been super clear and so I'm not seeing any last minute rapid fire questions come in, which means that we've been so frictionless that we're going to be able to finish even before the full time is up. But I do want to thank you again so much, Salvatore, for sharing all this knowledge with us. And I'd like to thank everyone for taking time out of your day to join.