Paola Espinosa:

Welcome to The Doing Good Lab podcast brought to you by Digizent International. We are here to explore practical ideas and strategies with you to help your nonprofit reach its fundraising goals and grow. And we’re here to help you lead well as you do more good in a hurting world. I am Paola, and I am here with Jim Killion, our CEO, Aaron Sandoval, our Chief Creative Officer, and Danna Arnold, SVP of Strategic Services here at Digizent International. We are focusing on a topic that many nonprofit fundraisers are asking right now. What are effective nonprofit leaders and fundraisers thinking and doing in Q1? The start of a new year often comes with momentum, both positive and negative, and with pressure. Maybe you’re coming off a strong year end, maybe you’re still catching your breath. Either way, Q1 sets the tone for everything that follows.

How to plan, what you prioritize, and where you focus your energy in these early months really matters. In this episode, we’ll be discussing what effective nonprofit leaders are paying attention to right now, from campaign planning and donor relationship strategy to reviewing what worked, what didn’t, and how to build healthy momentum for this year. Let’s get started with our discussion. Our first topic relates to assessing the past year with this year in mind. Aaron, would you like to get us started?

Aaron Sandoval:

Absolutely. Paola, it’s so good to be with you. Jim. Danna as well. I love this time of the year. It’s kind of like you get past the starting flag and you do a couple laps around the track and you’re getting comfortable, and suddenly the looming question of okay, and now where are we headed? Starts to pop up. And, you know, we get a lot of questions from nonprofits. It’s kind of the same question, but on different ends of the spectrum. For some, it’s, wow, we had an amazing year, maybe our record year. Everything seemed to go really well. So where do we go with this now? How do we manage this in the right way? What’s the beginning of the year looking like for us? And then the same question phrase from the other side. Man, that was a rough year.

We struggled last year. It was very difficult. How do we regroup? And for many, there’s this sense one way or another. Fantastic. It was difficult. I guess really a great place to start is looking at data, because we can feel one way or another, but data’s gonna tell us what really worked, what really connected. So whether you’re just catching your breath from the beginning, from the end of last year to starting out, now is the right time to pause, reflect and take a look at that data. Danna. Jim, what are some thoughts that come to your mind when you think about data as a great starting point for assessing what worked, what didn’t work? Where do you go from here?

Danna Arnold:

Yeah, absolutely. So, you know, one of the biggest things that we look at coming into the new year is did you have a good year? If you did, don’t coast on that. Try to build on that momentum. Look at what channels, what donor segments worked and maybe why they worked. Now’s the time to fine tune and don’t overcomplicate it so you can repeat your success and even scale it into a larger scale. And then, you know, if you had a tough year, don’t panic. Start looking into where did things stall, where did things fall off? Start doing a deep dive. You know, whether it’s month by month or certain donor segments that maybe aren’t responding the way you thought they would, now’s the time to test. Q1 is still a strong fundraising time of year.

And so you can’t fix everything all at once, but you can start testing and seeing what works.

Jim Killion:

And I think Danna and Aaron, to build on that. Nothing is more important than understanding your data. If you are not responding out of specific knowledge, you’re pretty likely to do the wrong thing. So I think we’re going to talk a little bit more about that as this session goes on. But I cannot underscore enough. You need to know your data. You need to know it in great detail. And like I say, I think we’ll talk about that in a minute. But underscoring all of the things that the two of you have suggested needs to be data analysis.

Aaron Sandoval:

And, you know, Jim, one of the things that jumps out at me is that some organizations have wonderful data access, right? They’re either a centralized data point where they have everything at their fingertips, and others might not have a centralized location, you know, but the data’s there. You just need to go. And it might be isolated, it might be different systems, but everybody should have some form of data to look through, even if it’s not one clear picture. There’s certainly some sources that you can tap into to begin looking for that data.

Jim Killion:

Well, and again, it’s important to be granular. You need to know what segments are performing which are not. And that’s a real simple summary statement. But there’s lots behind that, I think. Unfortunately, even though in this digital era, data is more available and more comprehensive, it tends to be vastly underutilized, and that’s guaranteed to reduce the effectiveness of your program.

Paola Espinosa:

So, Aaron, when it comes to planning, what are some practical steps you would suggest fundraisers think about at the beginning of the year?

Aaron Sandoval:

Wow. There’s so much to think about at these early stages of the year. For some of us, the key one’s already in motion. Right. We’ve already put plans together for certain opportunities for certain campaigns, but it’s never too late to optimize. There’s always a good opportunity to start thinking, what can we do now to optimize the campaigns we’re already running or the ones that we’re preparing? Jim, you really talked a lot about donor segmentation. So looking into who are we talking to is an important part of this whole process. And really thinking through how to engage these different segments, these different donor levels. One that I love in this part of the year is really donor recognition and appreciation.

It’s an opportunity to, especially if you’ve gone through a really intense year end communication cycle, taking the time to thank donors, to show your appreciation, to let them know how their gift made an impact in this part of the year goes a long way in solidifying the relationship, in cementing their understanding of what I do makes an impact on the ground and I’m being recognized for it. So that’s a great opportunity to really enhance that communication. I think clarity of objectives and goals and things that a donor can be a part of. This year is a great time right now to do that. So optimize your communication and looking for. These are clear ways to communicate the difference, the impact that you can have donor in what we’re trying to accomplish. And really it’s also an opportunity to engage in monthly giving. Right?

Start building that relationship and that ask for a monthly giving that then goes through a full year of impact for donors.

Danna Arnold:

And along with thanking them, Aaron, now is a great time to tell the stories of your big wins and highlights through the year. It’s a great time to kind of go back and re emphasize all the differences that they’ve made. You know, maybe even do some spotlight stories of people they’ve helped or, you know, how they’ve made a difference. Now’s the time to kind of reemphasize that difference that they’re making. Like you said, in addition, you know, looking at the donor segments, as Jim mentioned, how are our donor renewal rates? How are we reactivating lapsed donors? How are we upgrading donors? There’s so many different segments within your file and they each need to be talked to differently. If you look back at some of your communications Maybe they don’t touch every specific segment. And so you’re response rate is lower.

So you might want to start testing. Speaking specifically to where each donor is, we found a lot of great success with, you know, just personalizing in that way. If they have a specific interest, you know, they came in on the file because of a specific interest. Talk to them about that while you’re also educating them on maybe different areas of your organization, different programs. But, and like you said, now it’s the time to try to get that first monthly gift and have it go through the whole cycle.

Jim Killion:

I think that often what is most needed is right in front of us and we miss it. What do I mean by that? We want to speak as clearly and directly and relevantly and personally to every donor and prospect on our file. Well, obviously you can’t have 100,000 voices, but you can. Through your back to data analysis and looking at your groups, you can make some very actionable decisions. You need to know your lapse rate, you need to know your renewal rate, you need to know your reactivation rate. Some of those things you talked about, Donna, and you need especially to communicate with those who have lapsed, who have in the past been meaningful donors. There’s a simple rule that I can’t remember even who taught me this many years ago, but I’ve seen it play out again and again.

Any significant change in behavior, we’re talking donor behavior now, you can apply this to your family and friends. Needs to be recognized. There’s nothing like someone doing extra special, something wonderful, and you treat them as if they did nothing. A donor gives you a steady $300 every year and a handful of gifts and then suddenly gives you $25,000. And they get the same acknowledgment. What do they think they’re convinced? Well, it didn’t make a difference. At the same time, one of those changes in behavior can be a donor stopping to give. And that really begs attention, especially for those in whatever your category of major donors is. If they’re major in your eyes, you need to know who in that category is lapsing.

And you need to call them, you need to perhaps visit them, you need to at least send them a special letter or if it’s email only, something that is targeted to them, that speaks into we’ve missed you in a tactful way, especially on a phone call, is everything okay? And then even tiptoeing in have we offended you in any way? Now, you don’t do that in writing. You can only get that out of a personal visit and a phone call. What happens with some of your upper segments is they may get wooed away by other causes, they may go on to a lower income level, they may be retiring, all of those things. But again, if you’re connecting and listening, you can encourage them.

And many donors who are retiring and are no longer making the income that allows for significant gifts are ready to make the biggest gift of their lifetime through legacy giving. But you’re not going to know that if you don’t talk to them, if you don’t listen to them. So there’s lots of opportunities. But if we just look at our file by numbers, that’s what it stays. It stays a file. It doesn’t become relationships.

Paola Espinosa:

Yes. And make it a habit to say thank you well and often.

Jim Killion:

Absolutely,  That’s so important.

Paola Espinosa:

Because gratitude deepens relationships in ways strategy alone can’t.

Digizent:

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Paola Espinosa:

Danna, what are some of the tangible steps you recommend for this time of the year?

Danna Arnold:

Yeah, so you know it’s beginning of the year. We like to get organized, get regrouping, take it. Take a look at your email list Health. How’s your deliverability looking? Are some of your segments or there’s some outdated filters? You know, we kind of set up some of these queries to run with every single mailing or email send. And you know, it might be time to update some of those filters and some of the segmentation we’re looking at. So check your email list health, see if there needs to be some cleanup there. And then another thing is reviewing all your automated series, even simple things like dates that might need to be updated with a change of the new year. Look at all your welcome flows, your nurturing series. Do you have elapsed engagement series?

Do all the emails in Those series still align with your goals for that year. Are there new programs that you might want to talk about? Are new content offers you want to work in? You know, obviously you don’t want to have all the same content there, especially if, you know somebody might be receiving something a second time, if, you know they lapse and go back and forth on different lists. So you might want to just kind of take a look at all of those items, make sure the logic is still sound and make sure the messaging is still sound. You know, checking for broken integrations. Sometimes updates are made and something breaks along the system, especially with the new year.

I think this is the time to make sure all the pieces and the backend pieces are talking to each other because sometimes it’ll go to March and we realize, oh, this automation has been broken for quite some time. So if you proactively go in and look at those things, you can kind of get ahead of your planning for the year.

Aaron Sandoval:

Danna, that sounds an awful lot like spring cleaning to me. This is a wonderful time. I look at my kids like it’s time to jump in deep into your closet. And it’s amazing the things you find, right? Same thing in our programs, in our digital inventory. We have so many things and I promise you, every one of us has something that we just added to cover some quick emergency that we had. And this is a great time to come out and clean it. Let’s take a look at what’s on your homepage. This is the most important space for a nonprofit to have. Where people are connecting and they’re reading what’s going on, they’re finding the buttons, what’s in there that’s getting in the way. It’s a fantastic time to take a look at what are some complications that don’t need to be there.

What is your donation form look like? They really tend to get complicated over time because we just add one more field for one thing. This is a wonderful time to just do some cleaning of that process of that form. Evergreen Landing Pages is there something that we are saying differently? So everything from forms to gift acknowledging messaging. Danna, you’re talking about that. Are we saying things that we probably want to speak into a little more clearly now? This is a fantastic time to be thinking about that spring cleaning in your interface, in your messaging and all those kinds of things. Jim, I’m sure there’s a couple that you can think of too.

Jim Killion:

Well, I think those are fabulous points, Aaron. And just to do a subtext on that before expanding on it, one of the things I encourage our account leaders to do is to do a thorough review, clicking through the key links E offers on the client website. At least every two weeks, you say, well, that’s awfully often. Well, even on a static website, things can change, things can get broken, and hopefully you’re doing some updating. Yeah. Or, oh, my goodness, that whole image and what we’re asking people to give to that campaign ended. Or, or. And so it starts with those. Those basics and try to pretend shift your mindset into, I don’t work here, I don’t live here, I’m a donor or potential donor, and I don’t know much about you. If I come with minimal knowledge, does this make sense?

Is it clear to me I want to help? Do I understand how I can help, where I can help, what my choices are? All of those things are really basic, but too often, honestly, we flunk them. And it starts with a donation form. I’ve said before, and I’ll say it again here, before we move on to some other aspects of first quarter, the dirty secret of online fundraising is donation form abandonment. It’s scandalously high.

Aaron Sandoval:

Oh, my goodness. Yeah.

Jim Killion:

And if we don’t address that, we are literally walking away from more money than we’re collecting online. And again and again, for organization after organization, more online donations come through the homepage than any other avenue. Even though we have links and buttons and emails and other places, they still tend to gravitate. Yeah. And so if we got the wrong message, if, heaven forbid, a link is broken or we get to a form and it’s just way too complex, it’s outdated or it’s confusing, or again, heaven forbid, something isn’t working, then donors won’t come back. And in fact, if again and again, research shows that a bad online experience not only keeps people from coming back, but they tend to be negative evangelists. They tell their friends about the bad experience they had at XYZ Nonprofit, and guess what?

Their friends tend to be like them. And their friends are either donors or potential donors. So these basics are critical. And honestly, that’s why Digizent International, what, seven years ago, created Flex Forms.  We saw all this abandonment, and it was way too hard to make an efficient form. So we came up with a huge variety of forms that are simple. So if you’re listening and you’re not using Flex Forms, then get back to us. We’d love to do a free evaluation of your current form and show you how it can better or what your options are.

Paola Espinosa:

Thank you. Jim, that’s a great point. So how can our listeners set the table for the year? Aaron, what do you think?

Aaron Sandoval:

I’m always passionate about one thing that should be done at the beginning of the year. We’ve gone through a whole season of intensity. And as fundraisers, you might be burning doubt, you might be struggling with, okay, I’ve said a lot. Messaging gets confusing. You got so many things ahead of you that you lose the focus on what really matters, right? And so pasting the vision is really important. That can get lost over time, that can get lost over complexity, over, you know what, I know exactly what we’re supposed to be about. But that message sometimes gets a little muddled when we get too involved in other areas. So my recommendation is really recast that vision. Why do you exist as a nonprofit?

Can you whittle it down to the important thing of this is what we do and then share that vision first of all with your team, right? Make sure your team is on board with it with the same passion, with the same understanding, the clarity. And then the second thing is share it with your donors. Are your donors clear on why you exist and why they’re a part of this, how they make a difference? And so really focusing in on vision is really an important part of me to, as you said, set the table for this new year, you know, and.

Jim Killion:

It’S really simple, Aaron, to do what you’re talking about here. What is the problem your organization is solving or what is the need your organization is meeting? You say, well, we do a lot of things well at the core for your generic offer, you need that simple clarity. The clarity is there is a great need for this and your gift can help make a great difference. Just being simple and clear about problem solving, needs met will go a long way.

Danna Arnold:

And along with that, I’m going to go into the planning, you know, have your plan for the year rolled up. You know, hopefully by now you’ve, towards the end of the prior year, you’ve gotten your plan together for at least the first six months. I like to have a 12 month master plan to kind of outline my year. And once I do, it’s pick two of the two to three things that work well and roll your sleeves up, build from your strengths. So know what segments are working, know what channels are working, know what your most compelling stories, your most compelling offers and use those as your building blocks to test, to go to new audiences, to go to old audiences who have maybe fallen off.

So this is the time you know, Build from the things that worked from last year and make them stronger and scale them into other areas. You know, if you. Something works very well in mail, it could also work very well in digital with just a twist. And so, you know, try to think out of the box, but using the tools you already have.

Jim Killion:

You know, it’s a little embarrassing to admit, but some of the appeals that I liked most in my years doing this were the biggest failures in terms of response.

And it’s shocking. You feel like there’s everything working right in this. People should understand and respond, and they don’t. Well, maybe you repeat it once, but if you keep doing that’s the fundraiser’s definition of insanity. It’s not going to change. It may be noble, it may be good, it may be wise, but it’s not resonating. So to your point, Danna, look at those gaps. We tend to repeat whatever we do in May, the next May, and that’s fine as long as it’s freshened and working. But maybe your March appeal has just been an underperformer and you’ve done the same topic for three years.

That should shout, change the March topic test into something new. Don’t just repeat failures and then make the excuse. Well, you know, March really isn’t a good fundraising month. There is no bad fundraising month. Every organization has a bad fundraising month, but it’s not the same month across the nonprofit community. It’s the. The bad month is more about you than it is about the time of the year.

Paola Espinosa:

That is really good stuff, Jim. Agree with you wholeheartedly.

That’s super interesting. Let’s try to wrap up. So what are your thoughts of decision, Aaron?

Aaron Sandoval:

Yeah, you know, I don’t think anything stops momentum more than lack of intentionality. Right. Whether that momentum is, hey, we’re going great, let’s keep this up, or I don’t know where we’re headed. Let’s just keep things where we are. Lack of intentionality is not going to lead you to a good place. You need to be intentional about what you do. So, Danna, I love what you said about planning. I love that we talked about, of looking intentionally at the topics. We’re talking about intentionality on cleaning up some things. And so that’s my thought for this beginning of the year. Be incredibly intentional about where you want to go. And here’s what’s going to. What’s going to happen. It’s going to reduce your stress. It’s going to help restore clarity in Your messaging, it’s going to help your team move forward more effectively.

Just be incredibly intentional about that.

Danna Arnold:

On top of that, I’m going to go right back into just really having a solid plan, a well conceived fundraising strategy for the year, a roadmap. It’s a roadmap for your entire team. You know, obviously you’re not doing, hopefully not doing all of this on your own and you have a team of support and, you know, nothing sets you up better for success than having that roadmap. When we’re raising money for what programs, to what individuals, all of those things really need to be very well defined from the beginning so that execution can happen timely, flawlessly. And you’re not kind of scrambling from appeal to appeal. Oh, no, you know, here comes March. What do we do here? We break the plan out and everything is done ahead of time.

I like to work three to four months, sometimes even longer than that ahead of time. So if something changes, it’s not a scramble. And we all know things happen. There’s natural disasters, other things that have to get worked in. But we can shift easily if we have a plan set out. And just to keep in mind, having a good fundraising strategy is an act of stewardship. It honors your team, your donors, and the mission that you’re called to fund. So it all starts with the plan.

Jim Killion:

It’s sometimes referred to as a cliche. I prefer to think of it as a truism. Failing to plan is planning to fail. And everybody became silent.

Aaron Sandoval:

Well, that’s it. That’s, that’s.

Danna Arnold:

We’re done.

Paola Espinosa:

We can enter it.

Danna Arnold:

We can drop. The mic and walk out.

Paola Espinosa:

Well, thank you. This was a terrific conversation. I hope you enjoyed the time and that we have been stimulating your thinking and planning for this year. Whether you’re deep into Q1 or still recovery calibrating after a busy year end, this is a great moment to develop and implement a great fundraising communication strategy for this year. A few thoughtful steps now can still shape the momentum of year in a big way. If you’d like support reviewing your past campaigns or shaping a strategy for the road ahead, Digizent is here to help. Visit digizent.com to reach out. Out. We’d love to walk with you. That’s spelled D I G I Z E N T dot com. We’d love to help you do good better.

Thank you Jim, Danna and Aaron for the wisdom you shared and thank you for listening to The Doing Good Lab podcast we’ll see you next time.

Digizent:

For more information and resources. Please visit digizent.com/podcast.