Simple Tactics: How Reminder Emails & Upgrade Links Boosted Giving with Fundraise Up

With all of that said, by now we know that monthly giving has the power to transform nonprofit revenue. But here's the thing. Growth doesn't just happen. You need the right tools and the strategies to make it accessible. And so that's why we're starting out with this panel today that proves how small but yet strategic tweaks powered by the right tech and in this case, Fundraise up, can lead to big results. They are one of my favorite donation platforms, truly built to optimize recurring giving. Fundraise up, this session is going to unpack two game changing donor engagement strategies, reminder emails and upgrade links that helped the Boys and Girls Clubs of America and Greater Good Charities increase recurring giving. Moderating this conversation is Sah from Fundraise up and Salvatore Sal Petro, Chief community officer at Fundraise up alongside Kim McGordy from Greater Good Charities and Rupert Schultz from Boys and Girls Club of America. If you are ready, please give them some love in the chat to learn how these simple strategic changes, like the right email at the right time, a frictionless donor event experience, can really drive recurring giving growth. So, Sal, say hell. Rubert, Kim, welcome to the stage. Stage is yours.

We're here.

Awesome. Hi everyone, I'm Sahel. Thank you, Dana, so much for having me. The monthly giving summit has been amazing. So today we're going to talk about two simple tactics, how reminder emails and upgrade links. Visit Giving for Board, Boys and Girls Club of America and Greater Good Charities. So the goal for this session is to show you how e commerce tactics can be translated to nonprofits and the incredible results that are achieved when doing so. So we have our lovely speakers, we have Kim from Greater Good Charities, Rupert from Boys and Girls Clubs of America and Sal from Fundraiser. So here we have two E commerce standards that I'm sure all of you as consumers, not as donors, but as consumers have run into. So on the left you will see the Abed in cart email. So let's say I'm on my phone, I'm hungry and I am going to order some McDonald's. And so I'm on the McDonald's apple. I add a burger, some fries and you know, going to check out and maybe I get a phone call, something distracts me. So I am not on the checkout process anymore. And what McDonald's is going to do is they're going to send me an email that says, hey, you know, you forgot about us. Come back in, you know, order your burger, order your fries, right? So this sends the consumer back to their checkout model to actually complete their order. So I'm sure this is something that all of you guys have run into. So definitely leave in the chat if you've seen this recently while you're online shopping or ordering something. And you know where you've experienced this on the right side, the second E commerce standard we have is a suggested add on, right? So looks like I'm ordering a pair or ordering a HomePod mini and it might say, hey, why don't you add AppleCare plus for another $15? Or it might even say, hey, people who order HomePod minis also get the AirPod Pros. It looks like in this case I'm getting free delivery. But I'm sure all of you have seen when we're shopping online that it'll say, hey, you spend, you know, you have $49 in your cart. You spend 50 bucks, you'll get free shipping. So these are some of the common E commerce standards that we've seen that grows, you know, their revenue. So how does this translate into the non profit space? So over here we have, this is a fundraise up form and we see the remind me later feature. So I'm on the donation form and let's say I'm trying to leave is going to say, hey, want to leave your email address? And this way the donor will receive an email that will remind them essentially come back and complete their donation. So the upsell equivalent in the nonprofit space is the upgrade link when you ask your donors, hey, would you like to add to your existing monthly donation to boost your impact? So this is a one click that has their payment method already saved. And by using AI, it's going to suggest some amounts that they may want to increase. They'll give. So now we're going to dive into some firsthand case studies so you can really see these stats that we're talking about and the results that our nonprofit customers have seen by using these e commerce tactics in the nonprofit world. So I'll go ahead and I'll hand it off to Kim who is at the amazing organization Greater Good Charities and she'll go exactly into the results they've seen with the upgrade links.

Thanks, Sahal. I'd like to start off with just a little bit more about greater good charities. We are a global nonprofit that is all about amplifying the good. So we work to help people, pets and the planet by mobilizing in response to need. And as an organization, one of our main goals is to continue acquiring and retaining monthly donors. It's a Top priority across all of our teams. The high lifetime value of these donors and their consistent, reliable income stream is key for us to be able to expand our programs. With that said, a big part of our retention strategy includes these upgrade links. So as you can see our results here, we've seen amazing results by simply asking our monthly donors to increase their gift amount. So we had 831 donors open our upgrade link and 456 of them increased their giving, which is incredible. That's a 54.8% of opened. It chose to up their amount. And when we first started utilizing this, we didn't know what the response would be, but the results are very telling. When asked, donors will upgrade and the zero friction link just makes it so easy and possible for them to do it. And that's not even the best part. So when we looked at the numbers and we looked at the average increase amount, it was $8, which is a 47% increase over our monthly average gift size of $17. So when you're looking at this increase in dollars on a monthly basis and when you're looking at it over the course of a year, this is a huge difference for your revenue stream. And next up, I'm going to share just a few ways that we utilize our upgrade links. First off, we serve our donors a hard ask to increase their gift amount. You can do this as part of an existing campaign, a giving day or a holiday. Segment out your monthly donors based on how long they've been giving to you and ask them to increase. Depending on your program, you could list out some tangible examples of what an extra $5 a month or $10 a month can do. You know your donor base, so think about what methods will work best for your people. Or you can go the route of asking donors to increase once they reach a certain number of gift installments. This creates a more personalized journey for your donor and we find really great success doing it this way because it allows us to time out the ask based on how long they've been giving to us. And next up, let's talk about a soft ask and monthly gift installment receipts because these emails that the donors are getting every month are transactional. You can reach people who are not even signed up for your marketing emails. And the really cool thing is that FunraiseUp uses their AI functionality to serve monthly donors a soft increase ask at the bottom of the installment receipts. So next up, there is example here. So we treat our installment receipts as mini impact updates. Each month we swap out the image and the impact story doesn't have to be time consuming, but it allows the donor to see fresh content every month. And over time we see that donors expect it and they look forward to seeing it. And eventually hopefully they'll feel compelled to click that upgrade button and in the email. Just a low hanging fruit way to reach more of your people and ultimately get them to increase. So you've done all this, you start upgrading now you have this really amazing bucket of donors and these are your super engaged donors. They increase. So thank them, thank them right away, put them on a track to receive special content and stewardship for the year. These are people who are more likely to give in other ways like one time gifts through donor advised funds or even estate planning. So the possibilities here are endless and big takeaway. Ask and they will increase. And this upgrade link function just makes it so easy for them to do it.

Hey everyone, I'm excited to be here. Great job Kim. My name is Rupert, I'm here with the Boys and Girls Club of America. A little bit about our mission. Our mission is to enable all young people to reach their full potential as productive, caring, responsible citizens. We do that through mentorships, Safe spaces life changing program to over 3.6 million young people annually at over 5,000 club sites. All right, so let's jump into the abandoned cart email feature as we think about this. Great job on the setup. We've all seen this on E Commerce. I like to think of this as our last defense. Our first defense to get the donation is to make it as streamless as possible, remove any barriers, any frictions, have modern payment options, all those things. Only time we want to add a little bit of friction is to do a monthly donor upgrade. Because we know the value from the summit of a monthly donor and it actually does not add as much friction as you think. But if for whatever reason your donor is not ready to make that commitment yet, whether they need to learn more information, whether they get distracted because their child is crying, they got a teams message from their boss, there's a delivery person at the front door, you got tagged in an Instagram post. Whatever causes the person to think I can't donate at this moment, it seems like too much. When they go to exit out, they will be prompted to give their email which is a little small. Ask that about 4% of our audience is taking on that nugget that it seems just doable. Not ready at this point. Let me go ahead and give you my email address. And one of the cool things we're actually Seeing we run a lot of paid digital media across channels, asking folks to donate, go to donation page. Of course they may not have been paying attention and we're ready to donate when they click out. We're actually using it as a lead gen. I know, I saw in the comments a little bit talking about budget. Cool thing about this feature, it is built into Fundraise up and a lot of other donation platforms. It's free no matter your size. There is no hard setup. And that list of 3,500 emails, you can download and update it manually. It does not require a huge technical lift to get this up, up and running. So diving into the numbers a little bit, these are folks who just received the number. And we'll do a deeper dive of the email itself, but we can look back and say, hey, did Kim leave her email address? Did she end up giving at some point after she got the reminder email? And we're seeing really great stats. We're seeing about 10% of our new recurring donors received a reminder email and about 2.5% of online donations come this way. As I said, this is not directly from the email. This is more of a cultivation piece. We are dropping that seed that says, hey Sal, you didn't finish your donation. Do you mean to donate? A lot of donors at that point will say, oh, I'll do it later. And the real magic sometimes comes when you have a match, when you have a critical call to action, or when there's a deadlight at midnight that that donor feels like, oh, I need to donate now. Because there's urgency, they will actually come in and donate. But we've already planted that seed that you haven't donated already. And we see success with this with it. We call it a gift adversary. We send on your one year anniversary mark, Happy gift anniversary. That email does all right. But the next month and the month afterwards, we have planted that nugget that says it's time to give again. We can go to the next slide. And here's the metric from the email itself that comes out of the donation platform. Automated it is. We're seeing about 0.4% of one time revenue coming from here. About 20% of people who receive that email donate through that automated email. The other 80% come through our other channels. The really cool thing about it is we are seeing about 1.82% of a recurring monthly donor revenue stream come from that channel, which sounds little, but I will take a 2% win any day of the week. And then the other really nice thing is if someone gives you that email address in that abandoned cart, they are 3.5% more likely to become a monthly donor. That as a digital fundraiser, I like to see that is such a great marker that says this person wants to establish a relationship with us. They gave us our email steps and then they are more likely to give the ultimate relationship and become a monthly donor. And now pass it over to Sal to tell you how it works.

Awesome. Thanks Rupert. Thanks, Kim and Sahal. For me, the big numbers that I saw that grabbed my eye were greater. Good. Seeing a 40 some percent lift in average over average gift when they asked for it. Right. That's like just ask for it kind of thing. So that's great. By the way, just checking this. My video is working. Okay. We're okay. We can hear me. Okay. All right. Yeah, ask for it. And then Rupert, I saw yours. Those that got the email, we're three and a half times more likely to become monthly donors. Like that's it. That's what the monthly giving summit's all about. It's huge. Let's go ahead and look at the next screen here. So I'm going to walk through a little bit for everyone asking questions here. How does it work? How does it do it? So let's look at the reminder email first. So if I've entered my email address in the donation fields or leave before I have will ask them either way. That's considered a transactional email, the one that is sent afterward with the reminder. And that transactional email can contain anything that you want it to. You can edit it in the fundraiser dashboard or however you're sending your emails. And that doesn't need marketing opt in. Right. You don't need marketing permission because it's related to a transaction that was started. So that is the legalese on that part. So after they enter their email address sometime later, it will send the email reminding them that is also automated and used determined by AI about regarding when that sends. We're going to look at device and location and time of day and when's the most ideal time to send that email. And then from that email, as Rupert was sharing, they'll either click the button in the email, which was only about 20% of people, and and then go and give it from that or they will give some other time in the future via some other channel. So the reminder email is, is a powerful feature. And Rupert, like you said, 2% wins all day. Stack them up, stack them up. And you're at 20, 30, 50, 80% pretty quickly. So that's the reminder abandoned cart E commerce equivalent. Now let's look at the upgrade links that Kim was talking about there. So this is, it takes a couple more steps to execute and get, get up and running, but it's not difficult. So you're going to get from our dashboard, you see here on this first step, the link for the upgrade, right. So that's going to be a secret key hashed magic link for all of your monthly donors that you're going to export. That's going to then get imported into your email delivery system. Mailchimp, your CRM1, whatever. You're going to create a new column that says fundraise up upgrade link. And then you're gonna have email address and the link and you're gonna upload that into your system. Then when you build your email like you see here in the middle, we're gonna build the email, make a button that says one click, increase your generosity or something like that. Carla? Yes, Canada all day. Canadian Red Cross uses us and a number of others. Sorry, just seeing the chat catches my eye a little bit. So you're going to build your email and on that button you're going to put the link via merge tag on that button so that every donor is getting a unique link. Right. And that link is going to be zero friction, zero click, zero login, zero payment method. It's just going to remember who they are, it's secure, it's secure to their email if it's can only be open from the email address and has a timeout and so on. So it won't, there's no risk there. And you can't access financial information from that link. It can only increase the generosity, which I don't think there's too many malicious actors out there that are like I'm gonna hack everybody and increase their generosity in the world. I don't know why all hackers are sound like pirates, but that's, that's neither here nor there. So they're gonna get the link, they're gonna click it and that screen there on the third column is gonna pop up and it's going to have some amounts that are generated by AI based on the original gift size based on their IP address and local economy. Right. Someone in Manhattan will be able to give a different amount than somebody in Detroit or Nebraska, etc. So it's, it's very smart and intelligent in the way that works. Okay, they're going to click one of those buttons if they haven't covered fees already. It's Going to ask them to cover fees. If they are already covering fees, we're going to present options for them to increase their generosity. And as Kim showed us, like, just ask. They'll do like 50% of them did it. Over 50%. So that's amazing. So that's how reminder works and the upgrade links work. Sahal, I don't know if you have any remaining comments that you want to share with everyone as we wrap up the session and maybe if there's any questions in the chat that we want to answer live if we have a couple minutes. Dana, Julie Team hi.

Yes. Okay, so that was amazing. Thank you all so much. The chat was on fire. I was like trying to scroll back up to like copy paste over some questions.

I gave up. I couldn't keep up with it.

Okay, so one question was, and you talked about this a little bit with the link, but what do you mean by zero friction link?

I mean that when they're clicking it, they're not having to log in, they're not having to prove who they are. It's, it's, it's a, it's called hash secret key in the URL that's generated and that basically says we know this was sent to your email. We know who you are already. Click this and literally they'll come, they'll click the link, maybe they'll face ID and it's done. There's nothing else to do.

Cool. Okay, perfect. Second question on the upgrade link and maybe Kim, I'll toss this question to you. Best time of the year for an upgrade ask. Sure.

So we see end of year time as our biggest time to ask. Along with January and February into springtime is also a good time to ask. But you know, you can pair it with, you know, successful campaigns that you already have and test, you know, test it out, see, see how it goes with different, different times and different campaigns.

Absolutely. You all have different unique things going on that are culturally relevant to your organizations or campaigns going on. So I think we always have this kind of mentality about year end, but I would say create your own year end moments at any time of the year that might work specifically for this group. Rupert, anything you wanted to add to that?

No, I agree. I was like we will see a little bit success in the beginning of the year asking people to start the year off. Right. But usually people are checking their donations end a year to kind of figure out where they give them for the year and it's a good time to upgrade.

Okay, perfect. The one of the questions around the abandoned cart reminder emails was what platform are you using to send them out? And the answer to that I think Sal answers it's automatic. It's going out in fundraise up.

Correct. It's automatic out of fundraise up that you can change the custom. It doesn't take any coding. It is subject line, image choice, copy link and it will pull in if you entered your first name and abandon later and put your email will pull in your first name. That it is completely behind the scenes is not a lift.

Perfect, thank you. There are so many questions flying in here. One came in also Rupert, for you. Is there any segmentation status for people that choose not to do a sustainer nudge.

To do a sustainer nudge?

So basically, and I don't think this is anybody who doesn't choose to give the email. Is there a way to segment those people?

I say if they didn't give their email we wouldn't have that data. I think they meant from the maybe the monthly upsell beforehand. Sal, what are your thoughts?

Maybe Dana, the one way that you would be able to do that is if you're using an on website pixel that's tracking them anonymously. And we do have all of the data that we can send to pixels like HubSpot or any other kind of marketing pixel. But that collecting information about donors that haven't given information is a next level kind of implementation, I think.

Okay, got it. Erica. Hi Erica, it's so good to see you. Is there a thank you when a donor upgrades?

Absolutely, yeah. So they get an automated email when they adjust their monthly gift amount. But I actually have set up in my fundraise up account to receive a notification anytime anyone adjusts their giving amount. So I can see in real time, you know, if someone goes from A$5 a month to A$50 a month, I'm. I'm marking them and I'm going to thank them, you know, as soon as I can with a personalized thank you. So can't hurt to thank them too much.

Yes, always. Always. Another question, Kim, for you from Beth. How many emails did you send out to get those 834 responses or is it just one push?

That was over a time frame for 2024. So it was a mix of targeted email campaign and also the how I was talking about the asking donors when they reach a certain gift installment. So it's kind of a trickling method to asking them. So that was over a course of time.

Okay, perfect. Thank you. Okay. I think this might Be one of my favorite questions because it is so easy to set up from Amy is asking how tech savvy do I need to be to implement these things? I don't know. Say Hill, Sal Rubert Kim, if you all want to like jump in.

I'll save myself for last. Rupert Kim like how difficult was it?

That is the beauty of the platform and getting a platform technology especially on the nonprofit level should be universal. You should need a huge skill set to get the best products that it really is just a quick switch on the back end and you're ready to go that the monthly donor receipts will have the upgrade links automatically in it. Though I might get the abandoned cart emails the next level is not that much harder. You can download the magic links and send them through your own email provider. You can download the email minute leads and put it in your own email platform. Again a simple download and then upload in the other platform if it's not being integrated through your CRM but not a heavy lift. The two automated features is switch it on and you are done.

Yeah I was going to add to that the the abandoned card emails. There's zero. I mean the tech that you lovely need is click a toggle on that's, that's really, that's really all you got to do there the upgrade links like I explained in the in the walkthrough it's an export. It's an import support and into your email marketing and like Rupert said, you.

Know, although what is cool in the abandoned cart is you can customize what that email is on the back end which is really nice and so you can make it feel completely in your brand voice. It doesn't feel like an E commerce very straightforward. You didn't purchase this product must get the like no you can make it feel very fun and friendly and real and impactful and so but that is literally like the easiest thing of a slide button.

I want to pull out an Easter egg that Kim shared that I've been talking about for like five years that I've not seen many do which is on the monthly receipt is include a mini impact report like hey in the last 30 days we helped x many people this many animals just give me three bullets like and you know I think someone in the chat said what if they don't open the email? I said what if they do?

What if they do?

Right, yeah like, like sure. Like 80% are not going to open it. 20% will. And those are probably the 20% that are most interested most tied to your organization and they're probably going to open it. If they're on the fence about should they continue giving Right when I'm at that point of like, I don't know, is this still the work for me? Let me go check that last email I got from them. They're going to open it and they're going to see. Oh, all right. They did help some people in the last 30 days. Let me keep it going.

This has been incredible. I could continue to ask all of you questions forever. If you have more questions, please go over to the Fundraise Up Expo booth. Reach out to we have in the chat right now. We'll have everybody linked. If you scroll down, I think you'll see access to all the speakers. You can reach out on their LinkedIn on their websites. Like, I'm so grateful. Thank you so much to all of you for your time, your experience, Fundraise up team, for challenging what should be possible and what can be possible in the nonprofit space when it comes to technology. And so really grateful that platforms like yours exist and Kim and Rupert are here to share the strategies of how it's all possible. So thank you all so much. Greatly appreciate your time for being.