Live Q&A - February 2023 - NonProfit Bootcamp

Live Q&A – February 2023

Sami Bedell-Mulhern 0:00
Well, we’re gonna get started. Welcome to our live q&a. We are I’m Sammy, I’m one of the cofounders of the boot camp here with Patrick Kirby. Want to say hi.

Patrick Kirby 0:14
Hi, the other founder boot camp. Yes.

Sami Bedell-Mulhern 0:16
So a little bit of housekeeping before we kind of kick this off. This recording with some timestamps for some key questions, comments will all be in your dashboard, probably within the next 24 to 48 hours. So make sure you check that out. If you have any questions throughout this time, pop them in the chat, we’re gonna do a little mini training here real quick. And then we’ll jump right into any q&a. Patrick. And I always have lots of questions for each other also from things that are happening in our world with our clients. So we’ll throw those out there. If to spark interest. If you don’t have other questions, I’m going to make you a co host, Patrick, just in case so you can let people in? Well, they’re popping in a little bit late. Um, it is a Wednesday, I don’t know, Wednesday mornings, I feel like hit or miss for me on life and schedules. But I am going to do a little quick training on 2023 marketing predictions that we’re seeing in the space. And this is true, I think industry wide. It doesn’t matter if you’re a nonprofit, if you’re a for profit, the ugly word recession is being thrown around kind of willy nilly and everywhere and getting people all sorts of stressed out. So the first lesson that I just kind of want to throw out to you is that mindset that perception is reality. So whatever people are perceiving or how people are feeling about things is their reality. And we need to just really take this time to meet people where they’re at, and have conversations with people where they’re at and make sure our marketing is hitting them where they’re at. And the number one thing that I will say that nonprofits have an advantage of right now is that during a time of recession, retention of existing customers, donors, insert, whoever you’re trying to target is critically important. Because that retention piece is what is going to help you. Just in general, with your with your growth, finding new donors is going to be so much harder right now, because people are putting their money and there’s money out there. People have money to spend. So don’t be don’t be scared by that. But you’re less likely to put your money in with a brand. You don’t trust a brand you don’t know or brand new thing that you haven’t tried, right? You’re going to be spending your dollars in the things that you’ve already been buying. And then the things that feel comfortable for you because it’s less risky. So why is that better news for donors? Well, retention rates? Patrick, I’m curious what number you’re seeing out there. But I have seen nonprofit retention rates be anywhere from 46% to 76% of people that give to an organization that do not give again.

Patrick Kirby 3:03
Yep, you’re 100%. Right. And in fact, if you’re sitting at 50%, you’re doing fine. Yeah, I’ve seen some really low numbers, though. And it’s really scary to Yeah,

Sami Bedell-Mulhern 3:15
but that’s why this is exciting, because you have a huge opportunity to pull in funds and money from people that are already in your network. Okay, and so gets even better. And this is where your marketing steps in. What I think is the number one thing that nonprofits can be doing right now is really developing a cohesive and a strong email marketing campaign. Because we want to take a look at how we communicate with our donors and how we mark it from the 8020 rule. So 80% of what you’re putting out there should be value add should be educational, should be setting you up as the industry expert. 20% of it is asking for donations, asking for sponsorships asking for contributions to whatever ticket sales, whatever. And just like you wouldn’t expect to not talk to anybody in offline fundraising, if I don’t talk to these people for six months. And then I call them up tomorrow and say, Hey, will you give us a donation? That’s nearly impossible, right? It doesn’t really work that well. The same is true with marketing, the things that we do to nurture our audience in our marketing today are going to make a ripple impact that’s going to continue to push out for 30 days, 90 days, a year from now, like people are going to see all of that stuff and be more likely to continue to give. And I think I don’t know the exact stat but if we can get people to give twice, right? They’re much more likely to then give again and again and again. So this is all positive news for nonprofits. nurture the audience you have if you can get them to give once or twice this year, then you are setting your organization up for huge success. So email marketing is my favorite tool for that and I highly recommend you sit down with your team and you Create a consistent strategy. Gone are the days of gigantic newsletters that just have everything in them that overwhelm our audience, which is also good news because you can take that giant newsletter that you’re used to creating and chunk it up into twice a month newsletters at a minimum, I want to see you emailing once a month. And these are just keeping people informed and keeping people updated. Here’s what we have going on. Here’s amazing impact stories. Patrick has something he wants to say.

Patrick Kirby 5:29
Well, I had a question too. How much is too much? Because I think a lot of either chambers or nonprofits think of them. So I don’t want to annoy everybody with all my stuff. And I think that the gut check is what? I’ll let you I’ll let you answer. But my response always to that is, if it’s annoying to you, or you think you’re doing it too much, it’s just being consumed by other people. If you think if you think it’s boring, because you’ve been saying the same thing over and over again, they’re just figuring you out. And they’re not mad about it, though. And though the one or two people like me meet with me all the time, they’re gonna get off your mailing list. And they’re, they’re not contributing anyway, or Yep, they back that they emailed you means they’re opening up your stuff and good job on you. It’s a win win. I like that super positivity today. Yeah,

Sami Bedell-Mulhern 6:19
yeah. Well, and I want to say to that is, if somebody’s emailing you and saying, Well, hey, you’re emailing me too much, or they’re like giving you a negative response. That’s an opportunity for a conversation. So like you said, it’s 100%. a win win, we have to switch that mindset as far as how much is too much. You have to 100% test with your audience. So I like to track very simple stats with my weekly, I send out emails weekly, I want to know what my open percentage rate is, I want to know what my click through rate is. And I want to know what my unsubscribe rate is, because unsubscribes are not bad. Why do we want to pay for people to be on our email list that are never going to engage with us anyway? So I’m looking at those three numbers. And I’m not looking at necessarily individually, I am looking at individually, how is each campaign performing, but it’s more so what are the trends over time. So if I’m emailing once a month, and these are what my average trends are, and then all of a sudden, like we’re gonna we’re gonna ramp it up. And we’re gonna do it twice a month. And then we do that for a few months. And then we see oh, well, our open rates are actually going up, and then you want to increase it or all of a sudden things have gone bonkers and haywire. Like, that’s how you make the adjustments. So how much is too much. I mean, when we’re in the middle of a promotional period, and we’re working with clients on events, and emails, we’re sending emails, sometimes two or three times a day, and our unsubscribe rates are going up. We expect that. But again, there’s a purpose. So the intent behind what you’re doing, and testing to see what your audience wants and how they handle that information is going to be critical. And it doesn’t have to be overcomplicated. You don’t need a bunch of analytics dashboards and widgets and, and crazy things just track those three things, open rate, click through rate, and unsubscribe rate just to see kind of how that’s trending over time. So email marketing is going to be critical. And again, across industry. It is the number one best way that you can digital marketing wise that you can generate revenue for your organization. So for every dollar spent, and this has been the step for like, I want to say we’re going on five years now, for every dollar you invest in your email marketing, it generates about $40 in income for your organization. So that is incredible ROI. You won’t see that with Facebook ads, you won’t see that with Google ads, you won’t see that with anything else. But again, we’re nurturing our existing audience. So I want to make sure we’re bringing everything is coming back to nurturing your audience

Patrick Kirby 8:43
that actually pose a question of like, what’s the call to action to make sure that they get an option to do that, right. So is are you asking them to do something every single email, are you? Right? So I because that’s always the thing I don’t want to ask them to do to give. That’s legit, right? You don’t want to ask them to give all the time. But you want them to do something. So are there some examples that you’ve used or that you suggest that people have within the email to encourage a click? Or a thing?

Sami Bedell-Mulhern 9:13
Yes, we always want it to be a synopsis. Like, hey, here is some great amazing quotes or some talk talk talkable teachable highlights of something right? Like let’s say the impact or let’s say, let’s say you have a YouTube video on your website, that’s this beautiful story of a family that you’ve impacted in your organization. In the email, you’re sharing a handful of like amazing snippets, things that have happened things that are great things that are going to encourage people and excite them to want to know more than your call to action is watch the full or read watch or read the full story here with a link to your blog. It might be you you hit this incredible milestone maybe you served. Maybe you save like a million gallons of water from I don’t know. Now I’m always I was blank when I have to come up with Use examples. Maybe you cleaned 1000 Or a million gallons of water, you save 1000 bottles from going into the plastic bottles from going into rivers, whatever it is like maybe you have a milestone or something, then it’s, Hey, help us celebrate, share this with your friends on social media or share this email with a friend. So it could be something that’s totally unrelatable. It could be an email that’s talking about an upcoming event. And it’s like, hey, check out our volunteer opportunities. It could be that you’re, you know, dropping breadcrumbs, it could be dropping breadcrumbs for an upcoming campaign. So you want to get people ready that something is coming, and that you’re going to be asking them for money, people like to know what’s coming. And just to your point, we need to say things multiple times for them to really hear it. So it could be like, we’d love your feedback on last year’s event, as you’re gearing up for the next year’s event, right. So it can be a whole host of things. But yes, every email should have a call to action. The last thing I want to mention about email, and then we’re going to go on to kind of my last thing is the beauty of it also is the automation piece. So again, is we’re talking about nurturing our audience, email is a great way to have automated sequences that are already ready to go. So what that looks like is, you know, Patrick donates to your organization, yes, he automatically gets the tax receipt from your CRM, or whomever, your CFO, whatever, then they get an email right away. That’s, you know, giving them some more information on what your organization does. Then a few days later, they’re getting another email that’s on an impact story than a few days later, they’re getting another email from a board member about why they’ve, you know, this is what they choose to do and what their passion is. And then they’re getting another email a few days later that saying, like, Hey, here’s how you can expect to hear from us, let’s set these expectations. This is what you’re going to, you’re going to get from us, we’d love any feedback, make sure you’re following us on all the social media channels, blah, blah, blah, all of that is automated. So then they’re getting all of these nurture sequences, and they’re getting all of this, they care about us. They want to share more with us, oh, my gosh, how incredible is this organization. And you don’t have to lift a finger. And of course, I always recommend in our digital marketing practices to incorporate offline fundraising efforts and that as well. So depending on what your organization is, you want to intersperse a personal phone call a card, all of those things as well, we don’t want to fully automate this process. But that is like step one, and really making sure that you’re nurturing your donors as soon as they come in the door. Now, I think in the workbook, I was going to check this before and I got distracted, I’m pretty sure in the workbook, there’s a sample email automation sequence. So you can take a look at that. And there is training in the boot camp. If you want more of that you can always ask us questions about that as we go. But the third thing I want to talk about, I know, Patrick is very passionate about this as well, the trend you’re gonna see, which is everywhere, right now in digital marketing is AI and AI writing. And so I’m not going to go through a whole host of tools. I know Patrick has a blog, I don’t know, if you want to pop that in the chat. We’ll link that up in the resources for this video as well. But Patrick has a blog post that he did all about AI. Basically, what it is, is robot generated content. And if you’ll bear with me, I can actually show you one example. And the tool that I’m going to share with you is Canva. And the reason why is because it’s easy to get started with it. And as a nonprofit, you can get Canva Pro for free. So this is a great way for you to if you’re like okay, well, great. She’s talking about email, I have no idea how to or what to write in an email, I don’t know how to write a campaign appeal, I don’t know how to write these things, or do these things or I’m stuck on ideas, or social media posts. These are great resources for you to be able to kind of create the core of the content, and then take it, tweak it make it your own. We are not copy pasting, AI generated copy. We are not doing that. But let me just show you this really quick. And then I’ll let Patrick chime in on this because I know he’s obsessed. But this is Canva. And I basically just gone for my homescreen I’ve chosen a doc. So you have to have a doc, I’m going to click the plus sign. I’m going to click magic, right. And I’m going to say write me an outline for a blog post about pet adoption. And it’s going to take a minute, you have to be patient, it’s going to spin but then it’s going to just give me all of this information that I can then take to write a blog post. Right so it’s giving me this so we’re going to do an introduction for introduce the topic and why it’s important. We’re going to give the benefits we’re gonna give the steps for adopting how to prepare for your pet challenges conclusion is writing it out for me so I don’t have to think anymore. You have all this knowledge in your head and you can spit out all of this stuff. super easily. But with tools like this, it gives you the opportunity to not have to think, quite so hard, because this is pulling from search results. This is pulling from, like all of the content on the interwebs to do things like that. So you can literally this could be, I don’t know, this could be five different blog posts, that you could just flush each one of these out even. Right, maybe I want to write a year and campaign under, let’s say, fundraising. appeal. Oops, I haven’t tried this yet. So let’s just see what happens. And Patrick, while this is loading, because I know you talked about Chuck GPT is, is obviously kind of like the beast of the world right now. But it’s also sometimes super hard to get into because it is so overloaded. So that’s why I like this as a tool. But yes, here’s a core form letter that now you’ve already got written for you that you can just tweak and add in your own impact statements, because I find it’s easier to edit something and kind of write once I have a baseline than it is to start from scratch. So Patrick, I know the biggest thing with some of these AI tools is the way it’s like Google searching rates, like the way with which you ask for what you need. So I’d love your thoughts and input on how you’ve been playing with that a little bit.

Patrick Kirby 16:21
Right? So yeah, click on the blog. So Chad UBT, it’s a it’s a whole thing from open AI, which is this wonderful startup that uses the entire universe of words, and writing. And it collects it. So Google does that. But they lead you to websites, chat. UBT does exactly kind of what semi Google’s

Sami Bedell-Mulhern 16:41
developing their own. So that’s what I mean, you’re gonna see them everywhere.

Patrick Kirby 16:45
They’re gonna be everywhere, right? So but what I love most about the the wars here is that it allows you then to have so many more resources to lighten your load to create. Now, it doesn’t mean you just copy paste, because they say that was such a waste. And I say because you have to put your own spin on it be personal, like you sound like you write. So you want it to sound like your organization or whatever. But it’s basically you have to learn how to prompt each one of these particular API’s. And what that means is that the way that you ask the question, so instead of saying write me five blog, write me a blog post about why nonprofits should join a chamber, which by the way, you can do it will give you this delightful little satellite relation join for this, this this. From that, read it and put it into your own voice. Why should you join your Weiser rural chambers important? Why are it nonprofits? What are the benefits of learning how to network better than anything else, or however you want to spin your pitch? So that’s super important. But then you can get into deeper questions, which is something like a prompt would be, act like an expert. Yeah, act like an expert of a Chamber of Commerce. That’s your prompt, and tell me why a nonprofit would benefit by it. So now it’s using the brain of every single thing that ever has been produced by any chamber leader that’s ever been published in the entire universe. And I’m not making this up. I’m not like, over exactly, no, yes, no, you’re not using the words. And it will then act as if it is a chamber leader, or a chamber expert to give you those things, and the response would be different. And playing around with that is super important. Traci PD just came out with a membership site. So it’s like 30 bucks a month to get access immediately, which means you don’t have to wait to see if it opens up. Because it’s always busy. People are using it a lot, right. The really interesting thing that has that will change the game forever. Is that Bing? Nobody uses Bing because it’s the Microsoft search engine, Bing just integrated AI chat GPT into its search engine. So not only Yeah,

Sami Bedell-Mulhern 19:07
no, I think that’s sorry, I totally interrupted. But I think that’s critically important. And I think nonprofits need to pay more attention to Bing into Microsoft in general, also, because Microsoft also has an Ad grant for ads on their platform. So like you like paying attention to all of that is important. And when we build websites, we always put Bing Webmaster Tools on there as well, because you’re still getting search intent and all of that stuff, even though it’s a smaller, smaller audience. Sorry.

Patrick Kirby 19:35
Yeah, no, it’s super great. So anyway, but the reason that I mentioned that is because now everything that you have at your disposal that are free, will have some sort of AI element to it. And that will help you create the bulk of stuff, right. So if you have a newsletter to write or blog to write or something to write, it’s just going to take a lot of time. I would much rather have every one of you as chamber leaders or as nonprofits going out and talking to potential sponsors, donors members, or whatever that is, this will save you time because you get to actually click it, edit. And it’s a lot easier and quicker to edit from something rather than start from whole cloth. And that’s what gives you really a good advantage of this. Well,

Sami Bedell-Mulhern 20:15
here’s another great use. And I have one last marketing tip. But let’s say you’re in a conversation with a donor and a donor gives you like a really kind of different objection than maybe what you’ve heard about, you can also go to these tools and be like, what would be a response to this type of objection, and it will then give you some other things. So like, even as leaders, when you’re kind of feeling like you’re in a silo, and you don’t have people to support you with like, this is also a great tool to go to for some of those responses, or to almost kind of brainstorm just as much as it is to kind of write it can be used in all those ways. So really think outside the box. And like Patrick said, just try typing things in and see what happens because the more you use it, it’s a muscle, you’re going to have to learn and train and it will become amazing, but it is everywhere. I also want to just reference that from an SEO perspective. And from a search perspective. If you are copy pasting, the search engines are starting to crawl that and they’re starting to understand that and they will know and it will affect you in a negative way. So that’s the other reason to make sure that it’s still written in your voice, it still has your information, and it’s still you because your users will see the difference and will pick up on it, and search engines will pick up on it. And both of that will negatively hurt your brand. Yes, um, the last thing and then I’m gonna wrap this up, and we can talk about other things. But the last thing that I want to just reiterate is that video is not dead video is in fact, even more critically important. And one of the conversations that we’re having all the time, as well as is with younger millennials and the older Gen Zers. They are really only engaging with video. And you might say, why do I care, I don’t need to talk to those people yet. You need to talk to those people. Now, so that doesn’t mean you need to like all of a sudden be doing all of this content and like change do all this video. But I do want to challenge you to start doing it because it’s so easy. It’s not highly produced. It’s literally just with your phone, like you want to dumb it, I say dumb it down. But you want to make it simple. So one of the things that I gave as a challenge to one of my clients was when you guys were in the office, have a dedicated time. So you’re not walking into your CEO, like when they’re got their mouthful of sandwich or something. But, um, have a list of questions and create a series that’s just like, you know, I’m working with George, who’s their social media manager, I said, George, just pick five questions that you know, you get asked all the time and just create a series and you walk in and you say, Hey, Mark, so and so wants to know this about foster adoption care? Like how would what would you like to tell them, he gives a 15 second response, done, you pop it into Instagram, you pop it into in shot you to just get the quick captions, which generates for you. And now you can post that quick video to Instagram, Facebook, to YouTube shorts. Even if you don’t have a YouTube channel, to Pinterest, even if you don’t have a Pinterest account, like you can use these videos everywhere. And I bet it will take you it’ll take you longer to just plan the topics than it will for you to record and throw those captions on top. So we maybe should do like a real challenge in this group at some point. So I challenge you to add it to use video with purpose. But use it don’t stress out about it being produced or perfect, be real. And that’s going to help you continue to do like I said, build that ripple effect, start to grow your audience. So as we’re coming out of the recession, and you maybe shift a little bit more into out, like new donor search, you’ve already got all these people who have been seeing and hearing you and seeing all the lovely things that you’ve been doing. And those conversations become a whole lot easier. Because that’s what marketing the purpose of marketing is to make your fundraising job easier, because people are already seeing all of the amazing things that you’re doing. So retention of donors, email, use AI tools to help you make your writing and planning easier. You could put it hey, give me five reels topics or ideas to talk about pet adoption, right? Like could generate those and then start to integrate video into your marketing. Those are the trends that we’re seeing across the board. My last caveat will be do one thing well, that you can do consistently, and then layer from there. You do not need to do all of these things just because I threw them out to you in this moment.

Patrick Kirby 24:47
If you were to rank the three things that you just mentioned, what’s the what’s the what is one, two and three? If like everyone listening says okay, this sounds great. I can’t do all that. What’s what is the first step

Sami Bedell-Mulhern 25:00
I would say the first step is to pull a report from your CRM, and see how many people donated and 20. Or how many people didn’t donate in 2022, from the last three to five years, and see what your number is, that’s not going to give you a true retention number. You can Google the formula for how you find your retention rate. I don’t know maybe you know that off the top of your head, Patrick, it’s not that complicated, but me and math, um, but take a look at like pull list. So maybe it’s like I’ve got now I have this list of like 300 people that I haven’t talked to in a long time and game plan with your team, what that nurture strategy looks like, I would say, that’s step one. Email marketing is always my thing. You can’t control what happens on social media, you can’t control. Like who’s like who’s coming to your website, you can’t always see that information. Once you get them on your email list, you know who they are, you know, a little bit about their behavior. And so I think that’s critically important, and you own that list. So if Facebook crashes tomorrow, and you can’t do anything, you know, you have an email list, and you have a way to still get in touch and contact people. So that email list to me is critical. Um, then I would say I don’t know. I mean, I would say like, you can kind of just play like, check the chat, GPS and AIS of the world are just going to help you hopefully inspire all of the things. Whether that’s a blog, whether that’s more video, whether that’s whatever, because I think it will help you get out of your head. In the blocks of well, we don’t have time, and we don’t know what to talk about. And all of the excuses that we hear all the time for why people don’t produce their own content.

Patrick Kirby 26:48
And what it takes away the excuse of I don’t know how to do this, or I don’t know what to talk about. So what what I love about open AI, and I love about chat, GPT and all these other new resources that are coming about knowledge is now for everybody. It doesn’t matter how many years you went to school, it doesn’t matter how many doctorate degrees you have, unless you’re talking about like how to do a medical procedure itself, which by the way, you can probably get, you know everything. Right? So if you’re so if you’re in an industry, and this is really interesting, too. So if you’re a chamber or you’re a nonprofit, this actually works well for you is if you have a cement company in your area that you want, either as a member of the chamber or you want as a donor, but you don’t know anything about the cement industry, you don’t even know how cement is made. I don’t know how cement is made. Ask it. Ask how was cement made? And why is cement important? And what’s the difference between cement and concrete? What’s the like you can go

Sami Bedell-Mulhern 27:48
you can as you’re prepping? Yeah. As your prep.

Patrick Kirby 27:51
So again, one of the things that we talk about all the time is like be real interested, generally interested in the people that you’re going to go and reach out to and just and pay a little bit more attention, then please give me money. Ask some really important questions. Hey, I I kind of know the difference between cement and concrete. I don’t know what the difference is. Could you kind of explain that? Because I, I don’t know. And I’d love to explain this to members, right? And love to explain this to somebody else. And I am always curious, right? So now you’re engaging them in something that they’re experts at, and you’re going to learn something about it and you can tell somebody else, which means if you’re going to bump into somebody who’s like, I’m trying to pour a concrete slab, you’re like you should use cement, or I don’t know, I don’t know, at least right, at least you are, you’re using all of these items as a way to formulate a better relationship long term, and that you can now be not an expert, but you can know enough to be dangerous about anything in real time. And that’s so super helpful and purposeful and meaningful. So it’s just such a wonderful tool at your disposal that you don’t have to do a research paper on or go down 700 rabbit holes of 28 different links in order to find something that’s and here’s the best part about it, too. So let’s just say you asked ask Chad GPT the difference between cement and concrete and it still doesn’t make sense. You can then take the prompt of like, explain the difference between it as if I am a five year old. Yeah. And now it will actually explain it to you again, to your point. Same it’s not dumbing things down just making simpler, simple explanations of it. If you want, I don’t recommend this because it’s a rabbit hole from which you will not return but like explain, explain, interdimensional whatever, in a Metaverse or whatever. And it’ll explain to you scientific theories as a five year old.

Sami Bedell-Mulhern 29:42
Yeah. Well, I think the whole point of everything that we’re seeing right now is is and I think as we go into 2023, or as we continue to through 2023 is we need to be hyper focused on intent, like the more that we can be more focused on into And so why are we so we have so many students and clients that come to it, I want to do social media better, I want to do this, I want to do that, like, Oh, I’m supposed to be on Tiktok, you have a board member that comes to you and says we should do this. And we do it because we’re like, we don’t really, okay, everybody else is doing it. So in order for us to be successful, we must do this. But we don’t ask why. Why do we need to do this? Why do we need to continue to do this fundraising event if it taxes our team, and we only raised $5,000 from it, and that’s not really going to help us move the needle? Why are we not instead spending that time on having one on one conversations with 50 of our donors that we know we could build a better relationship with? Like, what’s the intent behind what we’re doing? I think we just get into these habits. So I think always asking yourself, Why am I doing this marketing activity? Is it going to get me to where we’re trying to go? Why am I doing this fundraising activity? Why am I spinning my wheels writing this grant for a project that’s kind of adjacent to what we do, but it’s actually going to create more work for our team, you know, like all of these things that we rationalize in our heads? So I think what you’re saying how we use these AI tools, how we show up in our business, what marketing strategies do we do? It all has to come from intent.

Patrick Kirby 31:15
Yep. It’s perfect. I love it.

Sami Bedell-Mulhern 31:17
So ah, no, I’m out of breath. I don’t like wasting.

Patrick Kirby 31:25
Well, I know you have any. I know, we don’t have any questions in there. But again, plop them into, you know, send a note, plug it into, you know, our little, our little widgets, I had a question about this will lead you to trainings that have all the stuff that was sent me was talking about, especially some of the fundraising stuff that is that’s really purpose driven, communications, purpose driven, asks that kind of thing. Those, those items are always useful. They’re always up online, they’re always available. And then we probably have some of the guest experts that we have already pre recorded that has a lot to do with this as well, there’s a couple that have to do with this too. So there’s an

Sami Bedell-Mulhern 32:06
email marketing training that’s in there. That’s fantastic. If you’re working on a campaign or like an event, it was specific for giving Tuesday, but works for any larger campaign. I can’t remember, I know our first slide that we did, you and I both talked about how to add value into your marketing and conversation. So that’s a great one. I do have a question for you, though, Patrick. Like so? Because this question came to me from someone and we handled it from a marketing perspective. But I’m curious from a offline fundraising perspective, I have a client who is a nonprofit organization that has been very focused on a local community, serving local community, and they are now they basically train churches, community agencies and schools to be able to support foster kinship and adoptive families, from an individualized standpoint. So how do they support the caregivers? How do they support the teams? How do they support the kiddos were their app to heal and thrive and kind of have everything that they need. So they’re training more agencies now across the country, to be able to provide the support to their local community on a regular basis? So they’re struggling now with how do we pay attention to our local donors that we’ve been fostering and nurturing for the last 10 years? And go out and create new donors because it feels very overwhelming in the locations that they’re going to?

Patrick Kirby 33:29
Write? Hmm, that’s a really good question. Um, I put them into buckets. So you almost could have a like, forever champions or like a Champions club that you have that’s specifically designed for people who have given from the start? Yep, you’ve got a new donor acquisition strategy. That is really the outreach and your communication is really transparent to both right? So you go to the ones who have been doing this the longest and say, We don’t want you to shoulder the burden of everything going forward. So we are going to actively pursue new donors, new supporters so that we can we can grow the program without asking you to do the heavy lifting all the time. And instantaneously, like, Oh, heck, yeah, I want to do that. How can I support you? And then actually, what you can do is double down on their generosity and say, Are there individuals, like you who would love this idea? Who may not live in this area, but maybe have roots or ties back to the community in which we’re serving? Yeah, so you’ve got to, you’ve got a group who’s recruiting for you, you are being open and honest about how you’re gonna go out and about and get new donors, but you’re letting them know that the purpose of this is so that you don’t have to go back to the well, 100 times.

Sami Bedell-Mulhern 34:44
That’s genius. And it gives more like, confidence in the organization as a whole that like you’re, you’re, you know, really trying to do things right and trying to build a stable base of funders, and actually

Patrick Kirby 34:58
even Don’t even double down on your, the way that you kind of think about things in the in the marketing realm is, if you provided your current donors with a list of talking points and almost the idea of who’s the perfect donor like themselves, you could give it to them and they could do some talking on your behalf or ambassadors almost. We love you so much. Because you know what we do? You’ve been around with us forever. We’d love to bestow you the title of ambassador for good or whatever. And here’s some talking points. Do you bump into people, you get a spot to talk in a church or a local community group? This is what I would pass along to them. If you have any questions, let us know when we’ll sweep in and do this with you. Love them. Easy peasy. Yes. Yeah. Seeing no more questions. It’s a quiet group today. That’s not a problem at all. That’s okay. Hope. I hope this was good semi great stuff, by the way.

Sami Bedell-Mulhern 35:54
Thank you. i Oh, yeah. And we we will have, we will have the new dashboard up and running early next week. I that was what I was working on this morning when I got sidetracked and forgot to look at the workbook to see if the email sequence isn’t there, I’m pretty sure it is. But the new dashboard will be up next week. And that will make things so much easier for you because you will see the calendar of events right there. So you’ll know when everything is coming up. And it will just be a little bit of a cleaner look. So you can have access to everything at your fingertips without the emails that come from us as well. So

Patrick Kirby 36:29
I mean Awesome. Thanks me for taking the lead today and you’re brilliant. As always, I’ve taken several notes that I will have to transcribe as as quickly as you are going through that. Again, the replays are in your dashboard, they’ll be there very quickly so you can go back and listen to those because again, the rapid fire brilliant genius mentions on all things marketing in really how to get your mailing list which I’m going to go back and re listen to again. Super important. So thank you as always thanks everybody for stopping by. And thanks to those who are watching in the replay. We’ll see you next time here on our Ask us anything.

Sami Bedell-Mulhern 37:08
Ask us anything. Yeah. Thanks everybody. You got

Live Q&A - February 2023

Sami Bedell-Mulhern 0:00
Well, we're gonna get started. Welcome to our live q&a. We are I'm Sammy, I'm one of the cofounders of the boot camp here with Patrick Kirby. Want to say hi.

Patrick Kirby 0:14
Hi, the other founder boot camp. Yes.

Sami Bedell-Mulhern 0:16
So a little bit of housekeeping before we kind of kick this off. This recording with some timestamps for some key questions, comments will all be in your dashboard, probably within the next 24 to 48 hours. So make sure you check that out. If you have any questions throughout this time, pop them in the chat, we're gonna do a little mini training here real quick. And then we'll jump right into any q&a. Patrick. And I always have lots of questions for each other also from things that are happening in our world with our clients. So we'll throw those out there. If to spark interest. If you don't have other questions, I'm going to make you a co host, Patrick, just in case so you can let people in? Well, they're popping in a little bit late. Um, it is a Wednesday, I don't know, Wednesday mornings, I feel like hit or miss for me on life and schedules. But I am going to do a little quick training on 2023 marketing predictions that we're seeing in the space. And this is true, I think industry wide. It doesn't matter if you're a nonprofit, if you're a for profit, the ugly word recession is being thrown around kind of willy nilly and everywhere and getting people all sorts of stressed out. So the first lesson that I just kind of want to throw out to you is that mindset that perception is reality. So whatever people are perceiving or how people are feeling about things is their reality. And we need to just really take this time to meet people where they're at, and have conversations with people where they're at and make sure our marketing is hitting them where they're at. And the number one thing that I will say that nonprofits have an advantage of right now is that during a time of recession, retention of existing customers, donors, insert, whoever you're trying to target is critically important. Because that retention piece is what is going to help you. Just in general, with your with your growth, finding new donors is going to be so much harder right now, because people are putting their money and there's money out there. People have money to spend. So don't be don't be scared by that. But you're less likely to put your money in with a brand. You don't trust a brand you don't know or brand new thing that you haven't tried, right? You're going to be spending your dollars in the things that you've already been buying. And then the things that feel comfortable for you because it's less risky. So why is that better news for donors? Well, retention rates? Patrick, I'm curious what number you're seeing out there. But I have seen nonprofit retention rates be anywhere from 46% to 76% of people that give to an organization that do not give again.

Patrick Kirby 3:03
Yep, you're 100%. Right. And in fact, if you're sitting at 50%, you're doing fine. Yeah, I've seen some really low numbers, though. And it's really scary to Yeah,

Sami Bedell-Mulhern 3:15
but that's why this is exciting, because you have a huge opportunity to pull in funds and money from people that are already in your network. Okay, and so gets even better. And this is where your marketing steps in. What I think is the number one thing that nonprofits can be doing right now is really developing a cohesive and a strong email marketing campaign. Because we want to take a look at how we communicate with our donors and how we mark it from the 8020 rule. So 80% of what you're putting out there should be value add should be educational, should be setting you up as the industry expert. 20% of it is asking for donations, asking for sponsorships asking for contributions to whatever ticket sales, whatever. And just like you wouldn't expect to not talk to anybody in offline fundraising, if I don't talk to these people for six months. And then I call them up tomorrow and say, Hey, will you give us a donation? That's nearly impossible, right? It doesn't really work that well. The same is true with marketing, the things that we do to nurture our audience in our marketing today are going to make a ripple impact that's going to continue to push out for 30 days, 90 days, a year from now, like people are going to see all of that stuff and be more likely to continue to give. And I think I don't know the exact stat but if we can get people to give twice, right? They're much more likely to then give again and again and again. So this is all positive news for nonprofits. nurture the audience you have if you can get them to give once or twice this year, then you are setting your organization up for huge success. So email marketing is my favorite tool for that and I highly recommend you sit down with your team and you Create a consistent strategy. Gone are the days of gigantic newsletters that just have everything in them that overwhelm our audience, which is also good news because you can take that giant newsletter that you're used to creating and chunk it up into twice a month newsletters at a minimum, I want to see you emailing once a month. And these are just keeping people informed and keeping people updated. Here's what we have going on. Here's amazing impact stories. Patrick has something he wants to say.

Patrick Kirby 5:29
Well, I had a question too. How much is too much? Because I think a lot of either chambers or nonprofits think of them. So I don't want to annoy everybody with all my stuff. And I think that the gut check is what? I'll let you I'll let you answer. But my response always to that is, if it's annoying to you, or you think you're doing it too much, it's just being consumed by other people. If you think if you think it's boring, because you've been saying the same thing over and over again, they're just figuring you out. And they're not mad about it, though. And though the one or two people like me meet with me all the time, they're gonna get off your mailing list. And they're, they're not contributing anyway, or Yep, they back that they emailed you means they're opening up your stuff and good job on you. It's a win win. I like that super positivity today. Yeah,

Sami Bedell-Mulhern 6:19
yeah. Well, and I want to say to that is, if somebody's emailing you and saying, Well, hey, you're emailing me too much, or they're like giving you a negative response. That's an opportunity for a conversation. So like you said, it's 100%. a win win, we have to switch that mindset as far as how much is too much. You have to 100% test with your audience. So I like to track very simple stats with my weekly, I send out emails weekly, I want to know what my open percentage rate is, I want to know what my click through rate is. And I want to know what my unsubscribe rate is, because unsubscribes are not bad. Why do we want to pay for people to be on our email list that are never going to engage with us anyway? So I'm looking at those three numbers. And I'm not looking at necessarily individually, I am looking at individually, how is each campaign performing, but it's more so what are the trends over time. So if I'm emailing once a month, and these are what my average trends are, and then all of a sudden, like we're gonna we're gonna ramp it up. And we're gonna do it twice a month. And then we do that for a few months. And then we see oh, well, our open rates are actually going up, and then you want to increase it or all of a sudden things have gone bonkers and haywire. Like, that's how you make the adjustments. So how much is too much. I mean, when we're in the middle of a promotional period, and we're working with clients on events, and emails, we're sending emails, sometimes two or three times a day, and our unsubscribe rates are going up. We expect that. But again, there's a purpose. So the intent behind what you're doing, and testing to see what your audience wants and how they handle that information is going to be critical. And it doesn't have to be overcomplicated. You don't need a bunch of analytics dashboards and widgets and, and crazy things just track those three things, open rate, click through rate, and unsubscribe rate just to see kind of how that's trending over time. So email marketing is going to be critical. And again, across industry. It is the number one best way that you can digital marketing wise that you can generate revenue for your organization. So for every dollar spent, and this has been the step for like, I want to say we're going on five years now, for every dollar you invest in your email marketing, it generates about $40 in income for your organization. So that is incredible ROI. You won't see that with Facebook ads, you won't see that with Google ads, you won't see that with anything else. But again, we're nurturing our existing audience. So I want to make sure we're bringing everything is coming back to nurturing your audience

Patrick Kirby 8:43
that actually pose a question of like, what's the call to action to make sure that they get an option to do that, right. So is are you asking them to do something every single email, are you? Right? So I because that's always the thing I don't want to ask them to do to give. That's legit, right? You don't want to ask them to give all the time. But you want them to do something. So are there some examples that you've used or that you suggest that people have within the email to encourage a click? Or a thing?

Sami Bedell-Mulhern 9:13
Yes, we always want it to be a synopsis. Like, hey, here is some great amazing quotes or some talk talk talkable teachable highlights of something right? Like let's say the impact or let's say, let's say you have a YouTube video on your website, that's this beautiful story of a family that you've impacted in your organization. In the email, you're sharing a handful of like amazing snippets, things that have happened things that are great things that are going to encourage people and excite them to want to know more than your call to action is watch the full or read watch or read the full story here with a link to your blog. It might be you you hit this incredible milestone maybe you served. Maybe you save like a million gallons of water from I don't know. Now I'm always I was blank when I have to come up with Use examples. Maybe you cleaned 1000 Or a million gallons of water, you save 1000 bottles from going into the plastic bottles from going into rivers, whatever it is like maybe you have a milestone or something, then it's, Hey, help us celebrate, share this with your friends on social media or share this email with a friend. So it could be something that's totally unrelatable. It could be an email that's talking about an upcoming event. And it's like, hey, check out our volunteer opportunities. It could be that you're, you know, dropping breadcrumbs, it could be dropping breadcrumbs for an upcoming campaign. So you want to get people ready that something is coming, and that you're going to be asking them for money, people like to know what's coming. And just to your point, we need to say things multiple times for them to really hear it. So it could be like, we'd love your feedback on last year's event, as you're gearing up for the next year's event, right. So it can be a whole host of things. But yes, every email should have a call to action. The last thing I want to mention about email, and then we're going to go on to kind of my last thing is the beauty of it also is the automation piece. So again, is we're talking about nurturing our audience, email is a great way to have automated sequences that are already ready to go. So what that looks like is, you know, Patrick donates to your organization, yes, he automatically gets the tax receipt from your CRM, or whomever, your CFO, whatever, then they get an email right away. That's, you know, giving them some more information on what your organization does. Then a few days later, they're getting another email that's on an impact story than a few days later, they're getting another email from a board member about why they've, you know, this is what they choose to do and what their passion is. And then they're getting another email a few days later that saying, like, Hey, here's how you can expect to hear from us, let's set these expectations. This is what you're going to, you're going to get from us, we'd love any feedback, make sure you're following us on all the social media channels, blah, blah, blah, all of that is automated. So then they're getting all of these nurture sequences, and they're getting all of this, they care about us. They want to share more with us, oh, my gosh, how incredible is this organization. And you don't have to lift a finger. And of course, I always recommend in our digital marketing practices to incorporate offline fundraising efforts and that as well. So depending on what your organization is, you want to intersperse a personal phone call a card, all of those things as well, we don't want to fully automate this process. But that is like step one, and really making sure that you're nurturing your donors as soon as they come in the door. Now, I think in the workbook, I was going to check this before and I got distracted, I'm pretty sure in the workbook, there's a sample email automation sequence. So you can take a look at that. And there is training in the boot camp. If you want more of that you can always ask us questions about that as we go. But the third thing I want to talk about, I know, Patrick is very passionate about this as well, the trend you're gonna see, which is everywhere, right now in digital marketing is AI and AI writing. And so I'm not going to go through a whole host of tools. I know Patrick has a blog, I don't know, if you want to pop that in the chat. We'll link that up in the resources for this video as well. But Patrick has a blog post that he did all about AI. Basically, what it is, is robot generated content. And if you'll bear with me, I can actually show you one example. And the tool that I'm going to share with you is Canva. And the reason why is because it's easy to get started with it. And as a nonprofit, you can get Canva Pro for free. So this is a great way for you to if you're like okay, well, great. She's talking about email, I have no idea how to or what to write in an email, I don't know how to write a campaign appeal, I don't know how to write these things, or do these things or I'm stuck on ideas, or social media posts. These are great resources for you to be able to kind of create the core of the content, and then take it, tweak it make it your own. We are not copy pasting, AI generated copy. We are not doing that. But let me just show you this really quick. And then I'll let Patrick chime in on this because I know he's obsessed. But this is Canva. And I basically just gone for my homescreen I've chosen a doc. So you have to have a doc, I'm going to click the plus sign. I'm going to click magic, right. And I'm going to say write me an outline for a blog post about pet adoption. And it's going to take a minute, you have to be patient, it's going to spin but then it's going to just give me all of this information that I can then take to write a blog post. Right so it's giving me this so we're going to do an introduction for introduce the topic and why it's important. We're going to give the benefits we're gonna give the steps for adopting how to prepare for your pet challenges conclusion is writing it out for me so I don't have to think anymore. You have all this knowledge in your head and you can spit out all of this stuff. super easily. But with tools like this, it gives you the opportunity to not have to think, quite so hard, because this is pulling from search results. This is pulling from, like all of the content on the interwebs to do things like that. So you can literally this could be, I don't know, this could be five different blog posts, that you could just flush each one of these out even. Right, maybe I want to write a year and campaign under, let's say, fundraising. appeal. Oops, I haven't tried this yet. So let's just see what happens. And Patrick, while this is loading, because I know you talked about Chuck GPT is, is obviously kind of like the beast of the world right now. But it's also sometimes super hard to get into because it is so overloaded. So that's why I like this as a tool. But yes, here's a core form letter that now you've already got written for you that you can just tweak and add in your own impact statements, because I find it's easier to edit something and kind of write once I have a baseline than it is to start from scratch. So Patrick, I know the biggest thing with some of these AI tools is the way it's like Google searching rates, like the way with which you ask for what you need. So I'd love your thoughts and input on how you've been playing with that a little bit.

Patrick Kirby 16:21
Right? So yeah, click on the blog. So Chad UBT, it's a it's a whole thing from open AI, which is this wonderful startup that uses the entire universe of words, and writing. And it collects it. So Google does that. But they lead you to websites, chat. UBT does exactly kind of what semi Google's

Sami Bedell-Mulhern 16:41
developing their own. So that's what I mean, you're gonna see them everywhere.

Patrick Kirby 16:45
They're gonna be everywhere, right? So but what I love most about the the wars here is that it allows you then to have so many more resources to lighten your load to create. Now, it doesn't mean you just copy paste, because they say that was such a waste. And I say because you have to put your own spin on it be personal, like you sound like you write. So you want it to sound like your organization or whatever. But it's basically you have to learn how to prompt each one of these particular API's. And what that means is that the way that you ask the question, so instead of saying write me five blog, write me a blog post about why nonprofits should join a chamber, which by the way, you can do it will give you this delightful little satellite relation join for this, this this. From that, read it and put it into your own voice. Why should you join your Weiser rural chambers important? Why are it nonprofits? What are the benefits of learning how to network better than anything else, or however you want to spin your pitch? So that's super important. But then you can get into deeper questions, which is something like a prompt would be, act like an expert. Yeah, act like an expert of a Chamber of Commerce. That's your prompt, and tell me why a nonprofit would benefit by it. So now it's using the brain of every single thing that ever has been produced by any chamber leader that's ever been published in the entire universe. And I'm not making this up. I'm not like, over exactly, no, yes, no, you're not using the words. And it will then act as if it is a chamber leader, or a chamber expert to give you those things, and the response would be different. And playing around with that is super important. Traci PD just came out with a membership site. So it's like 30 bucks a month to get access immediately, which means you don't have to wait to see if it opens up. Because it's always busy. People are using it a lot, right. The really interesting thing that has that will change the game forever. Is that Bing? Nobody uses Bing because it's the Microsoft search engine, Bing just integrated AI chat GPT into its search engine. So not only Yeah,

Sami Bedell-Mulhern 19:07
no, I think that's sorry, I totally interrupted. But I think that's critically important. And I think nonprofits need to pay more attention to Bing into Microsoft in general, also, because Microsoft also has an Ad grant for ads on their platform. So like you like paying attention to all of that is important. And when we build websites, we always put Bing Webmaster Tools on there as well, because you're still getting search intent and all of that stuff, even though it's a smaller, smaller audience. Sorry.

Patrick Kirby 19:35
Yeah, no, it's super great. So anyway, but the reason that I mentioned that is because now everything that you have at your disposal that are free, will have some sort of AI element to it. And that will help you create the bulk of stuff, right. So if you have a newsletter to write or blog to write or something to write, it's just going to take a lot of time. I would much rather have every one of you as chamber leaders or as nonprofits going out and talking to potential sponsors, donors members, or whatever that is, this will save you time because you get to actually click it, edit. And it's a lot easier and quicker to edit from something rather than start from whole cloth. And that's what gives you really a good advantage of this. Well,

Sami Bedell-Mulhern 20:15
here's another great use. And I have one last marketing tip. But let's say you're in a conversation with a donor and a donor gives you like a really kind of different objection than maybe what you've heard about, you can also go to these tools and be like, what would be a response to this type of objection, and it will then give you some other things. So like, even as leaders, when you're kind of feeling like you're in a silo, and you don't have people to support you with like, this is also a great tool to go to for some of those responses, or to almost kind of brainstorm just as much as it is to kind of write it can be used in all those ways. So really think outside the box. And like Patrick said, just try typing things in and see what happens because the more you use it, it's a muscle, you're going to have to learn and train and it will become amazing, but it is everywhere. I also want to just reference that from an SEO perspective. And from a search perspective. If you are copy pasting, the search engines are starting to crawl that and they're starting to understand that and they will know and it will affect you in a negative way. So that's the other reason to make sure that it's still written in your voice, it still has your information, and it's still you because your users will see the difference and will pick up on it, and search engines will pick up on it. And both of that will negatively hurt your brand. Yes, um, the last thing and then I'm gonna wrap this up, and we can talk about other things. But the last thing that I want to just reiterate is that video is not dead video is in fact, even more critically important. And one of the conversations that we're having all the time, as well as is with younger millennials and the older Gen Zers. They are really only engaging with video. And you might say, why do I care, I don't need to talk to those people yet. You need to talk to those people. Now, so that doesn't mean you need to like all of a sudden be doing all of this content and like change do all this video. But I do want to challenge you to start doing it because it's so easy. It's not highly produced. It's literally just with your phone, like you want to dumb it, I say dumb it down. But you want to make it simple. So one of the things that I gave as a challenge to one of my clients was when you guys were in the office, have a dedicated time. So you're not walking into your CEO, like when they're got their mouthful of sandwich or something. But, um, have a list of questions and create a series that's just like, you know, I'm working with George, who's their social media manager, I said, George, just pick five questions that you know, you get asked all the time and just create a series and you walk in and you say, Hey, Mark, so and so wants to know this about foster adoption care? Like how would what would you like to tell them, he gives a 15 second response, done, you pop it into Instagram, you pop it into in shot you to just get the quick captions, which generates for you. And now you can post that quick video to Instagram, Facebook, to YouTube shorts. Even if you don't have a YouTube channel, to Pinterest, even if you don't have a Pinterest account, like you can use these videos everywhere. And I bet it will take you it'll take you longer to just plan the topics than it will for you to record and throw those captions on top. So we maybe should do like a real challenge in this group at some point. So I challenge you to add it to use video with purpose. But use it don't stress out about it being produced or perfect, be real. And that's going to help you continue to do like I said, build that ripple effect, start to grow your audience. So as we're coming out of the recession, and you maybe shift a little bit more into out, like new donor search, you've already got all these people who have been seeing and hearing you and seeing all the lovely things that you've been doing. And those conversations become a whole lot easier. Because that's what marketing the purpose of marketing is to make your fundraising job easier, because people are already seeing all of the amazing things that you're doing. So retention of donors, email, use AI tools to help you make your writing and planning easier. You could put it hey, give me five reels topics or ideas to talk about pet adoption, right? Like could generate those and then start to integrate video into your marketing. Those are the trends that we're seeing across the board. My last caveat will be do one thing well, that you can do consistently, and then layer from there. You do not need to do all of these things just because I threw them out to you in this moment.

Patrick Kirby 24:47
If you were to rank the three things that you just mentioned, what's the what's the what is one, two and three? If like everyone listening says okay, this sounds great. I can't do all that. What's what is the first step

Sami Bedell-Mulhern 25:00
I would say the first step is to pull a report from your CRM, and see how many people donated and 20. Or how many people didn't donate in 2022, from the last three to five years, and see what your number is, that's not going to give you a true retention number. You can Google the formula for how you find your retention rate. I don't know maybe you know that off the top of your head, Patrick, it's not that complicated, but me and math, um, but take a look at like pull list. So maybe it's like I've got now I have this list of like 300 people that I haven't talked to in a long time and game plan with your team, what that nurture strategy looks like, I would say, that's step one. Email marketing is always my thing. You can't control what happens on social media, you can't control. Like who's like who's coming to your website, you can't always see that information. Once you get them on your email list, you know who they are, you know, a little bit about their behavior. And so I think that's critically important, and you own that list. So if Facebook crashes tomorrow, and you can't do anything, you know, you have an email list, and you have a way to still get in touch and contact people. So that email list to me is critical. Um, then I would say I don't know. I mean, I would say like, you can kind of just play like, check the chat, GPS and AIS of the world are just going to help you hopefully inspire all of the things. Whether that's a blog, whether that's more video, whether that's whatever, because I think it will help you get out of your head. In the blocks of well, we don't have time, and we don't know what to talk about. And all of the excuses that we hear all the time for why people don't produce their own content.

Patrick Kirby 26:48
And what it takes away the excuse of I don't know how to do this, or I don't know what to talk about. So what what I love about open AI, and I love about chat, GPT and all these other new resources that are coming about knowledge is now for everybody. It doesn't matter how many years you went to school, it doesn't matter how many doctorate degrees you have, unless you're talking about like how to do a medical procedure itself, which by the way, you can probably get, you know everything. Right? So if you're so if you're in an industry, and this is really interesting, too. So if you're a chamber or you're a nonprofit, this actually works well for you is if you have a cement company in your area that you want, either as a member of the chamber or you want as a donor, but you don't know anything about the cement industry, you don't even know how cement is made. I don't know how cement is made. Ask it. Ask how was cement made? And why is cement important? And what's the difference between cement and concrete? What's the like you can go

Sami Bedell-Mulhern 27:48
you can as you're prepping? Yeah. As your prep.

Patrick Kirby 27:51
So again, one of the things that we talk about all the time is like be real interested, generally interested in the people that you're going to go and reach out to and just and pay a little bit more attention, then please give me money. Ask some really important questions. Hey, I I kind of know the difference between cement and concrete. I don't know what the difference is. Could you kind of explain that? Because I, I don't know. And I'd love to explain this to members, right? And love to explain this to somebody else. And I am always curious, right? So now you're engaging them in something that they're experts at, and you're going to learn something about it and you can tell somebody else, which means if you're going to bump into somebody who's like, I'm trying to pour a concrete slab, you're like you should use cement, or I don't know, I don't know, at least right, at least you are, you're using all of these items as a way to formulate a better relationship long term, and that you can now be not an expert, but you can know enough to be dangerous about anything in real time. And that's so super helpful and purposeful and meaningful. So it's just such a wonderful tool at your disposal that you don't have to do a research paper on or go down 700 rabbit holes of 28 different links in order to find something that's and here's the best part about it, too. So let's just say you asked ask Chad GPT the difference between cement and concrete and it still doesn't make sense. You can then take the prompt of like, explain the difference between it as if I am a five year old. Yeah. And now it will actually explain it to you again, to your point. Same it's not dumbing things down just making simpler, simple explanations of it. If you want, I don't recommend this because it's a rabbit hole from which you will not return but like explain, explain, interdimensional whatever, in a Metaverse or whatever. And it'll explain to you scientific theories as a five year old.

Sami Bedell-Mulhern 29:42
Yeah. Well, I think the whole point of everything that we're seeing right now is is and I think as we go into 2023, or as we continue to through 2023 is we need to be hyper focused on intent, like the more that we can be more focused on into And so why are we so we have so many students and clients that come to it, I want to do social media better, I want to do this, I want to do that, like, Oh, I'm supposed to be on Tiktok, you have a board member that comes to you and says we should do this. And we do it because we're like, we don't really, okay, everybody else is doing it. So in order for us to be successful, we must do this. But we don't ask why. Why do we need to do this? Why do we need to continue to do this fundraising event if it taxes our team, and we only raised $5,000 from it, and that's not really going to help us move the needle? Why are we not instead spending that time on having one on one conversations with 50 of our donors that we know we could build a better relationship with? Like, what's the intent behind what we're doing? I think we just get into these habits. So I think always asking yourself, Why am I doing this marketing activity? Is it going to get me to where we're trying to go? Why am I doing this fundraising activity? Why am I spinning my wheels writing this grant for a project that's kind of adjacent to what we do, but it's actually going to create more work for our team, you know, like all of these things that we rationalize in our heads? So I think what you're saying how we use these AI tools, how we show up in our business, what marketing strategies do we do? It all has to come from intent.

Patrick Kirby 31:15
Yep. It's perfect. I love it.

Sami Bedell-Mulhern 31:17
So ah, no, I'm out of breath. I don't like wasting.

Patrick Kirby 31:25
Well, I know you have any. I know, we don't have any questions in there. But again, plop them into, you know, send a note, plug it into, you know, our little, our little widgets, I had a question about this will lead you to trainings that have all the stuff that was sent me was talking about, especially some of the fundraising stuff that is that's really purpose driven, communications, purpose driven, asks that kind of thing. Those, those items are always useful. They're always up online, they're always available. And then we probably have some of the guest experts that we have already pre recorded that has a lot to do with this as well, there's a couple that have to do with this too. So there's an

Sami Bedell-Mulhern 32:06
email marketing training that's in there. That's fantastic. If you're working on a campaign or like an event, it was specific for giving Tuesday, but works for any larger campaign. I can't remember, I know our first slide that we did, you and I both talked about how to add value into your marketing and conversation. So that's a great one. I do have a question for you, though, Patrick. Like so? Because this question came to me from someone and we handled it from a marketing perspective. But I'm curious from a offline fundraising perspective, I have a client who is a nonprofit organization that has been very focused on a local community, serving local community, and they are now they basically train churches, community agencies and schools to be able to support foster kinship and adoptive families, from an individualized standpoint. So how do they support the caregivers? How do they support the teams? How do they support the kiddos were their app to heal and thrive and kind of have everything that they need. So they're training more agencies now across the country, to be able to provide the support to their local community on a regular basis? So they're struggling now with how do we pay attention to our local donors that we've been fostering and nurturing for the last 10 years? And go out and create new donors because it feels very overwhelming in the locations that they're going to?

Patrick Kirby 33:29
Write? Hmm, that's a really good question. Um, I put them into buckets. So you almost could have a like, forever champions or like a Champions club that you have that's specifically designed for people who have given from the start? Yep, you've got a new donor acquisition strategy. That is really the outreach and your communication is really transparent to both right? So you go to the ones who have been doing this the longest and say, We don't want you to shoulder the burden of everything going forward. So we are going to actively pursue new donors, new supporters so that we can we can grow the program without asking you to do the heavy lifting all the time. And instantaneously, like, Oh, heck, yeah, I want to do that. How can I support you? And then actually, what you can do is double down on their generosity and say, Are there individuals, like you who would love this idea? Who may not live in this area, but maybe have roots or ties back to the community in which we're serving? Yeah, so you've got to, you've got a group who's recruiting for you, you are being open and honest about how you're gonna go out and about and get new donors, but you're letting them know that the purpose of this is so that you don't have to go back to the well, 100 times.

Sami Bedell-Mulhern 34:44
That's genius. And it gives more like, confidence in the organization as a whole that like you're, you're, you know, really trying to do things right and trying to build a stable base of funders, and actually

Patrick Kirby 34:58
even Don't even double down on your, the way that you kind of think about things in the in the marketing realm is, if you provided your current donors with a list of talking points and almost the idea of who's the perfect donor like themselves, you could give it to them and they could do some talking on your behalf or ambassadors almost. We love you so much. Because you know what we do? You've been around with us forever. We'd love to bestow you the title of ambassador for good or whatever. And here's some talking points. Do you bump into people, you get a spot to talk in a church or a local community group? This is what I would pass along to them. If you have any questions, let us know when we'll sweep in and do this with you. Love them. Easy peasy. Yes. Yeah. Seeing no more questions. It's a quiet group today. That's not a problem at all. That's okay. Hope. I hope this was good semi great stuff, by the way.

Sami Bedell-Mulhern 35:54
Thank you. i Oh, yeah. And we we will have, we will have the new dashboard up and running early next week. I that was what I was working on this morning when I got sidetracked and forgot to look at the workbook to see if the email sequence isn't there, I'm pretty sure it is. But the new dashboard will be up next week. And that will make things so much easier for you because you will see the calendar of events right there. So you'll know when everything is coming up. And it will just be a little bit of a cleaner look. So you can have access to everything at your fingertips without the emails that come from us as well. So

Patrick Kirby 36:29
I mean Awesome. Thanks me for taking the lead today and you're brilliant. As always, I've taken several notes that I will have to transcribe as as quickly as you are going through that. Again, the replays are in your dashboard, they'll be there very quickly so you can go back and listen to those because again, the rapid fire brilliant genius mentions on all things marketing in really how to get your mailing list which I'm going to go back and re listen to again. Super important. So thank you as always thanks everybody for stopping by. And thanks to those who are watching in the replay. We'll see you next time here on our Ask us anything.

Sami Bedell-Mulhern 37:08
Ask us anything. Yeah. Thanks everybody. You got

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