Speaker 1: Good afternoon everyone. Welcome, welcome, welcome. I'm so grateful that you are here with us today, uh, for this webinar on five for-profit marketing ideas that you can steal for your nonprofit fundraising. We're gonna give a few minutes here, four folks to be able to join. I know lots of folks are just wrapping up lunch or maybe coming out of a meeting and things like that. So we'll give another couple of minutes here for everyone to be able to join. And while we are waiting, [00:00:30] I would love for you to open the chat and then make sure it says, it doesn't say like, just send to me like the host and panelists, make sure it says to everyone so we can all see, jump in the chat and let us know who you are, what organization you are from, and where in the world are you zooming in from today. Speaker 1: As always, I just think it's really, really fun to see how far reaching this idea and cause and mission of growing generosity together is reaching. So let me know who you are and what organization you're from and where in the world are [00:01:00] you zooming in from. And I'll give some shout outs. I can't get to everyone because there's already 68 people in, uh, attending and that number just keeps going up like every second here. Uh, but let's see, right off the top, we got rj, we got Andy, we've got Richard from Hearts Need Art in San Antonio, Texas. We've got Jim Whitham from Vet to Track in Lansing, Michigan. Uh, let's see. I'll scroll down a little bit more. We've got Jeff with Forgotten Children worldwide, zooming in from Indiana. [00:01:30] Love it. Uh, some folks from San Francisco, a couple people from San Francisco, Pennsylvania, Utah. Speaker 1: I, I've always like looking through this to see like how who's the furthest away and who might actually be up at like two or 3:00 AM on the other side of the globe, uh, just to attend the webinar, cuz that happens pretty frequently, which is really fun, grateful that you all are here, uh, and making time out of your day, uh, to devote to learning and growing and trying to get new ideas that we can then use to grow giving and generosity together. [00:02:00] So it's not lost on me how much effort it takes to carve out time during the day for something like this. So hopefully we can make the most of it here today. If you've been on a next after webinar, before today's webinar might be a little bit different than what you're used to. And I think that's a good thing. I think there's a lot of good things to come from it. Speaker 1: Um, so go with Mihir as we we dive in A couple, uh, announcements and, and housekeeping items before we dive really into the content today. Uh, number one, the nonprofit Innovation and Optimization [00:02:30] Summit is coming way sooner than it may seem. It's September 19th through 21st, which feels like, oh, that's like after the summer, that's in the fall, but that's only really a few months away. Um, and especially if you're trying to find room in a budget and you're, you're making travel plans, the best time to get a ticket is right now. Uh, the Neos Summit is a ton of fun. This is the eighth year for it. Um, and really the focus of this event is how do we bring in new innovation to our space, to the fundraising nonprofit marketing space, um, where typically we [00:03:00] end up being a few years behind the times oftentimes, and we're trying to catch up. Speaker 1: We're trying to be, bring the best ideas from for-profit marketing, uh, many times to, to the fundraising space to inject some innovation cuz we think there's some really smart marketing innovators who have ideas that can really help change the game in terms of growing our ability to reach new people and, and grow our cause and ultimately grow generosity together. So you see this quote on your screen from Marissa at Coral Reef Alliance. Here's what she said after last year's summit. She said, Neo is obviously a good time. It's not only been [00:03:30] really valuable educationally, but it's also been a ton of fun. That's something that we pride ourselves on. We lean heavily into a theme this year's sh this year's show is all about game shows. It's called Come On Down and we're gonna have a ton , a ton of fun. Uh, Danielle sparked from Every nation. Speaker 1: He attended one of our pre-summit workshops last year, and he said this, there is so much information that was applicable. It won't just change the way that we approach our donors, but it will change our philosophy of why we're even talking to them in the first place. I, I've, I've have read this [00:04:00] so many times and it's really powerful. Every, even for me, every time I read it, uh, the philosophy of why we're talking to donors in the first place, uh, was, was challenged and, and changed at this event. So you are gonna find a, a ton of value from this event, both on the educational side for sure. It's also an incredible networking experience. As you even see from some of these pictures, we're gonna have a ton of fun together. You're gonna meet a lot of like-minded people in our space who are seeking after the same thing. Speaker 1: How do we find innovative ways to grow our cause and ultimately grow generosity together? [00:04:30] So there's my pitch for you. Check it out@niosummit.com. I will let you know, uh, that there is a deadline to get 600 bucks off your ticket. Uh, if you get your ticket before midnight tomorrow, so the clock's ticking on that, you can save 600 bucks. The price does go up, um, after midnight tomorrow. So go check that out. Um, a couple housekeeping items. The most commonly asked question is, is there gonna be a recording of this presentation? And the answer is always yes. We are recording this presentation, uh, tomorrow, [00:05:00] uh, maybe even this evening. If we, we get to it quick enough, we will send out a recording as well as slides, as well as links to anything, any featured resources that we mentioned throughout, um, our time together today. Speaker 1: So you will get all of this stuff in your inbox. Uh, and we should have some time for q and a towards the end of our, our session today. So if you have questions as we're going through today, as we look at some of these different ideas from different, uh, for-profit marketers, as we're, as we're going through today, drop your questions in the [00:05:30] q and a and we'll have some time to talk about those at the end. If you have other thoughts or comments or ideas along the way, just drop those in the chat as we go. I'll be watching those as well. Um, always helpful to share your thoughts and ideas so everyone can benefit from them as well. All right, let's dive into things. So today we're talking about five for-profit marketing. I i marketing ideas that you can steal for your nonprofit fundraising. Speaker 1: Now, e every year when we, we, we put together the, the speaker lineup for the Neo Summit, oftentimes [00:06:00] what we're really focused on is how do we go find new people that aren't commonly on a stage in the nonprofit world, but they have really, really meaningful, innovative, good ideas out in the for-profit marketing world that we think can really be translated to our space as fundraisers, as non-profit digital marketers. How do we bring some of that innovation into our world so we can reach more people so we can grow, giving, grow, generosity, have a greater impact, uh, with our cause? And so what, what I've done over the past couple of weeks is I've [00:06:30] been putting this together for you, is is going through some of the best of the best sessions from a Neo summits in the past, really seven years. And I've picked five speakers and pulled a clip from each one that I think have some really helpful ideas for us. Speaker 1: Some of them are pretty high level, which you're gonna see, uh, from our very first speaker here in a moment. Some of 'em are really high level ideas about how do we position our brand, which is a really big conversation. Some of them are incredibly tactical around how do we do some really meaningful [00:07:00] things to boost our, uh, search results, our search rank so we can actually grow organic traffic to our websites. We'll talk more about that. So you're gonna see kind of both ends of the spectrum here from really kind of high level thinking about our approach to even some really tactical things that you might be able to implement as soon as you know, this afternoon or, or tomorrow. So all of that said, I want to dive in. And the first clip we're gonna watch, uh, is from one of my favorite Neo Summit speakers of all time. His name is Marcus Collins, and he [00:07:30] has some incredible things to say to us about branding, about leading into our core beliefs and values and how we position our organization and our cause. So I'll pause and we're gonna listen to Marcus. Speaker 2: Well, I used to run digital strategy for, for this woman named Beyonce. I dunno if you've heard of her before. She sings a few songs. And my job, this is 2009, 2010, this is the, the I am Sasha Fierce Days, which is an amazing time to be in the Beyonce business, or this is never a bad time to be in the Beyonce business, be honest, . So I'm running deal traffic for Beyonce and my [00:08:00] job, a large part of my job is about taking her offline fan club and moving it online. Take all the engagement, all the zeal, all the enthusiasm that happens offline and bring it online for Beyonce. That's a part of the job. And we had this bright idea, let's call her fan club, her online fan club, the Entourage. It's a terrible name, I admit , but the show Entourage was big at the time. Speaker 2: It was a thing, but it was, that's a horrible name. So we set this thing up called the Entourage Terrible [00:08:30] name. We have all these bells and whistles, all these great things, these giveaways that we're doing to come be a part of Beyonce's fan club. And it was a party that no one showed up to, and we were bewildered What's going on? This is Beyonce. What's going on here? And as we start to look over the internet in the dark corners of the web, we found these groups of people that called themselves the beehive. These were ravenous fans [00:09:00] of Beyonce, not just Beyonce, the artist, but Beyonce, the person, Beyonce, the brand, the Beyonce that they've known since No, no, no, no, no. Since Survivor, since who runs the world, girls all the way to Formation, the Beyonce, whose conviction has always been rooted in female empowerment, woman's empowerment. Speaker 2: They were fans of that. That's what they subscribed their identity to. Not only that, but [00:09:30] they had their own language, they had their own behaviors, their own artifacts. They were a community with a driving culture. And we said to ourselves, well, what are we doing? Why we try to make a community that's a community right there. So we cut bait on the entourage, thankfully, and we partner with the beehive and made them our official fan club and use all our resources to facilitate their [00:10:00] interactions. And this is where things get really good, because not only have we activated this community called the the, the Beehive, I don't work with her anymore, but there's a church service in San Francisco and New York that's called the Beyonce Mass. Now, Beyonce's not the deity, but these people worship through the lens of women's empowerment. That's how strong her ideology is. Speaker 2: And you can look at that and say, [00:10:30] Marcus, that is so hyperbolic, perhaps. But neuroscientists have found that the part that when people, uh, that the part, the brand is activated when people interact with their favorite brands, same part of the brand is activated when we interact in our religious services. This is super powerful stuff here. What we're trying to get to is the emotional part of the brain, the part that's associated with all the gooey things that relationships are made of. [00:11:00] Because the function of our beliefs, our ideologies, is to drive us to take action. So here's what I leave for you today. Instead of going the traditional route of communicating your offering, communicating your organization, which typically is we have a brand, we do a particular theme, we communicate through some marketing communications, and hopefully we're gonna reach some people. Instead, I say, [00:11:30] tap into the network of people who see the world the way you do. People who believe the same things you do, people who subscribe to the same ideology that you do, you talk to them, you activate them by preaching your gospel, your why, your conviction. And those people not only consume from you, donate to volunteer with you, subscribe to you, but they'll go tell other people like themselves and [00:12:00] they'll tell other people and they'll tell other people, and so on and so on and so on. Speaker 1: I was on mute, I apologize. , that's Marcus Collins. His whole session was incredible. Um, and really moving, really impactful just as we think a as nonprofits specifically about how do we communicate, you know, core beliefs and core values through our brand. Not [00:12:30] just more of a transactional conversation about what your donation will lead to or what your donation will impact, but, but leaning into shared values, shared beliefs with donors and with ideal donors. And there's a really big conversation to have there, probably at your organization. We'll send you these clips and you can go dive deeper into the full talk. It's, it's worth the time. It's about 25 minutes, the full thing. Uh, it's worth spending the time. Um, but I wanna look at us a couple really specific applications so we can take some of the more [00:13:00] theoretical ideas around presenting your brand in a meaningful way and turn it into something very specific that you might even be able to do as soon as this week or or next week. Speaker 1: Um, this organization, we're gonna look at a few different experiments from them today. Uh, they're called CaringBridge. Uh, lemme know in the chat if you're familiar with CaringBridge. Uh, maybe some of you have used them before or interacted with them before. Um, incredible organization. Uh, they help produce, uh, these like health journal pages for people going through some sort of health crisis. Um, what it allows someone to do is stay connected [00:13:30] with their family and friends and loved ones. Um, one of the most, you know, practical things is I don't have to go text everybody kind of in my circle about all the different things, uh, going on in my health journey. I can post it here on the journal page and people can stay in touch and they can send encouraging messages and things like that. Um, incredible service. My c t R is familiar with them from webinars in the past. Speaker 1: They do a lot of testing and experimentation, which makes some great examples for all of us to learn from. So we'll, we'll look at a few different examples from them today to kind of stay on a, [00:14:00] a sort of a single track. Um, this first one is interesting. Uh, maybe you've seen it before too. I often talked about it during the year end season. And, and, and when we talk about differentiation and exclusivity in our value proposition, I think it's relevant here too as we talk about wanting to approach, uh, fundraising specifically and donations from this perspective of, of shared beliefs and even really focusing on true impact. Uh, not just sort of the transactional state of kind of what he said, we have a brand, [00:14:30] you should interact with us, come get this thing. But what's true, what's really behind it? What's the true meaning behind it? Speaker 1: So version A says this, make a wonderful tribute donation, honor Deborah with the tribute donation and help CaringBridge connect people with love and support when they need it most. Version B is a little different. I'm gonna highlight some differences. They're moving. Honor Deborah up into the headline says, honor Deborah with your tribute donation, you're not just making a wonderful tribute. I can make a wonderful tribute pretty much anywhere I can give a gift anywhere. And it might be wonderful. I can only honor Deborah [00:15:00] with the tribute donation here. And you move further down. And we're not just connecting people with love and support. Most or any organization could say something like that. I can connect people with love and support. Probably 80% of organizations could put that copy on their donation page justifiably. Version B says, make a gift to CaringBridge in honor of Deborah. Speaker 1: So repeating the headline to make sure that the website that brings them joy on a daily basis stays up and running this holiday season. So this is a very practical example of the copy on the page leaning [00:15:30] just a touch more. This isn't a total rewrite of the copy, that's not a fundamental shift in the brand, but it's leaning into what really is behind, uh, the motivation of the potential donor. What is that shared belief or that shared value that we both collectively want to impact as you, the donor and us, the organization or me, the fundraiser. We're trying to make a meaningful impact on a specific person and bring them joy on a daily basis when they're going through some [00:16:00] type of crisis. And they need that level of support. We're not just connecting people with love and support. We're not just keeping websites online. Speaker 1: It's this combination of what's the gift doing and, and, and how is it actually impacting the human being. Just this little bit of a shift led to an 86% increase in donations. That's a, that's a small shift to lead to a pretty big jump in performance. I wanna look at one other example. It's a little bit more narrow and, and focused on, on this specific organization and, and, and really [00:16:30] their core beliefs. Now I will say you may not share these core beliefs, however, there's lots of people that don't share the core beliefs of your organization either. And this is why it's so important to lean into who we are as an organization and what you believe and what are those values that you share with a donor. So ver version a of this donation page is really focused around, it's a Catholic organization, um, and it's really focused around the different giving levels. Speaker 1: I can give, um, $5 to $49 and I'll become this guardian angel kind of, it's [00:17:00] not a membership, but I'll, I'll, I'll be given that title as a donor. If I give $50 to $249, I become part of the St. Gabriel unit. And then, uh, the next year is the St. Raphael court. It's all about, you know, what's the giving level that I can hit and what are the benefits that I get in return for my level of giving? And if we look at the, the page that they tested, it looks a little different. It still has those different giving levels. I'll highlight some of the things here for you as well to to see. You've got all these giving [00:17:30] levels on the left, those are still present on the right, but now they have a lot more copy that's not just focused on what's the thing that you get. Speaker 1: But now it's focused on what are the shared beliefs that this organization and their, their Catholic followers are going to share. And so instead of just sign up now, like it says in version A in the headline, version B says, heal and restore the church today. So a part of their core beliefs and part of their shared values, uh, that would cause someone to meaningfully engage. [00:18:00] We won't read all the copy, but it touches on some things that might be meaningful to this ideal donor. The world continues to turn towards. Um, you know, it says secular teaching away from, uh, the truth in our faith. And so then they move on to talk about, um, how your donation is gonna impact the number of people who are discerning a call to the priesthood. Again, things that are really important to them and to their shared donors. Speaker 1: Uh, you can produce more resources for you and other members of the, of the lady or of the church as well as the spiritually poor around the world who are searching for fullness [00:18:30] of truth. And so they're, they're really leaning, again, into their shared beliefs and their core values. Not just focusing on kind of the transactional stuff, but really what are the things that are gonna stick? What, who are my people and what's the community that we're building and what's the impact that we're trying to have on the world? So just a couple little examples there as to how you can start to lean more into those shared and core beliefs. And in this case, this led to an 812% increase in donations. So really significant jump by leaning into [00:19:00] some of what Marcus is talking about, which is what are these shared beliefs that I have with my ideal donors? Speaker 1: So a lot more we could unpack there. We're gonna jump to the next clip, which is from, uh, David JP Phillips who spoke at Neo a few years ago, actually back to 2018, I believe was the year. Um, he has some incredible, uh, sessions to share. He has some incredible lessons to learn. This is a short clip from him about the power and the impact of storytelling. Something we talk about in our space all the time. [00:19:30] But the way he presents it, I think is really impactful. So let's give the floor to, uh, David JP Phillips here. Speaker 3: And there's no single skill which holds a greater power than storytelling. The year was 2009, a man, a journalist by the name Rob Walker. He was quite intrigued by the idea of storytelling and he decided to do an experiment to study. So he walked over to his computer, [00:20:00] he logged into eBay and he purchased 200 items, just random items for a dollar each. And then he called an author up and he said, Hey, I wanna launch this study. I want to call it the Significant Object study. And I was wondering, would you mind writing a story for one of the objects that I've purchased? And the author said, absolutely, I'd be thrilled. [00:20:30] And in this particular case that author wrote a story about this beautiful horse's head isn't essential. Speaker 3: The story was about a woman whose father had lived these amazing escapades in Paris while studying there. So this horse's head had been left in the louver over the night. It's been in a drunken cell, it's been dropped down from the AEL tower, it's got all these amazing stories. And then he called [00:21:00] 199 authors and he said the same thing, I've got an object. Can you write me a story? So he had 200 objects, 200 stories, and the day came when it was time to publish it on eBay again. And I assume that it was with nail biting and anticipation that he walks over to his computer and he publishes these 200 objects. Cuz the question is, will there be a difference? Do you think there was a difference? That particular horse's [00:21:30] head cost 99 cents and was sold for $62.95? And for you who are quick on maths, you understand that the, we're talking about 6258% in increased value. Now tell me, can you imagine anything that can increase the value of an object to that extent, but magic? So the question is then, but maybe, maybe, maybe, maybe there was something special with [00:22:00] this particular horse that said maybe what happened without their 199 objects. What happened was this, he purchased the 200 objects for $129 and sold them for a staggering $8,000. The study's been replicated five times with the same kind of results. Isn't this mind boggling? The only difference was a story attached to the object [00:22:30] and it increased in monetary value. Speaker 1: Isn't that crazy? Isn't that incredible? You can see a 6000% increase in value of a horse head, a model horse head just by writing a story about it. That's, uh, I'm continually blown away by that. And obviously in our space we talk about storytelling all the time. I I see there's a question, was this story true? Yeah, the story's true. Um, and, and we see, I can't say [00:23:00] a 6000% increase in, in donations, but we'll look at a specific experiment where we see the power of story and narrative at work. I I do wanna say, you know, not every email and not every piece of communication should be woven into a, like a direct narrative or story. But there are times in places where it can be really, really powerful as a means of building trust and helping someone, you know, really welcoming them into the true impact that a donation can have. Speaker 1: [00:23:30] So we're gonna look at one of these experiments here. It's not a 6000% increase, but it's . It is a significant increase in giving. Um, this is another example from CaringBridge, again, just kind of stay on a single track with that as we're following their, their, their own narrative and their own story as they're optimizing their towards greater donations and giving, um, version A of the appeal that they sent out through email. Looks like this. Uh, version B is a whole lot longer. What's actually the difference? There's actually a lot of similarities in the copy. The way that it starts [00:24:00] and the way that it ends is almost exactly the same. I'll highlight sort of the, the primary portion of, of version a's value proposition. The reason to give it's present in both version A and in version B, it's talking about what are the specific things that your donation is going to do. Speaker 1: It says CaringBridge is free to use, but it's not free to run. We have a team of developers, quality assurance technicians, business analysts and coordinators who make sure anyone in need can create new free sites while maintaining the hundreds of thousands of existing [00:24:30] sites for as long as they are needed. The need for connection and coordination through CaringBridge has only grown over the last few years. Version A then moves immediately into the call to action. It's talking about an opportunity to have your gift matched so you can make basically double the impact. Your gift can be doubled if you give right now. Version B has all that same call to action messaging at the very end. But there's a very significant difference in these two appeals. And it's not just about the length of the copy, it's about how it's presented. Because version B then goes from [00:25:00] telling you about the specific things your gift is gonna go to. Speaker 1: And then it says, let me tell you what your gift will do. And then it goes into a narrative and a story from someone who has benefited from the work of CaringBridge. Um, told, basically got from her perspective with different pull quotes and things. Lemme tell you what your gift will do. Courtney was diagnosed with breast cancer at age 37. She went through chemo, radiation, multiple surgeries right before the pandemic began. She ended up with long covid and that [00:25:30] was all before she was furloughed from her job thanks to the pandemic. Huge problem that it's articulating here. While Courtney worried about her future, her family stepped up to take care of the present. Her family took care of her three boys made sure that her house was full of food and even accompanied Courtney to doctor's offices to take notes about her treatment. She says, I knew my kids were always somewhere safe with someone who loved them. Speaker 1: It took such a load off my mind. Courtney made a choice about the kind of example she wanted to set for her boys. [00:26:00] She decided to face her health journey with optimism and positivity. She shared that attitude with everyone who read her Caring Bridge journal. Courtney said, if I had let it weigh me down, I may not have had the same outcome. I tend to think that people who don't have support or the ability to stay positive and remain hopeful, they have a harder time making it through. And then it moves into the call to action. Just like Courtney's friends were an encouragement to her to pursuit or her pursuit of positivity. I hope this matching grant encourages [00:26:30] you to be generous with a gift today, the ultimate incentives and calls to action. The and, and really the core value proposition are still the same except version B unpacks it with a story and with a narrative. Speaker 1: And again, it's not a 6000% increase in giving, but it is a 42% increase in donations. And this is not on small volume. This is a, a very significant, uh, increase in performance. Again, not every piece of communication that you send out [00:27:00] should be woven into a nice story and narrative, but we can't overlook the impact that bringing someone into the story of the impact of a donation can have on giving. So consider this the next time you're writing an appeal, especially if you're, you know, building out a campaign around the end of a fiscal year or coming up on year end in a, in a honestly a few short months that's gonna be here before we know it. Weave some of these narrative driven appeals into your communication plans because the potential impact they [00:27:30] have is really, really significant. It can be powerful in terms of building trust with someone and actually again, bring them into this story of how the gift is going to be used. Speaker 1: So consider that in your next appeal. All right, let's jump to Amy Harrison. Amy is like one of the MVPs of the Neo summit. She, I believe has spoken at five of them. Uh, always has incredible insights to share, uh, specifically around copywriting. And, uh, this session from just last year was, was really, [00:28:00] really impactful. Really good, very funny. And we're just gonna watch a little clip of it. There's a whole bunch more we could unpack, but I'm gonna give the floor to Amy to talk about how enthusiasm in our copy is not enough to win a donation. So here we go. Speaker 4: The second lesson is that enthusiasm is not enough. We're often very excited about what we do and we want people to get on board with that. But quite often you can be more persuasive if you share the experience of what someone might [00:28:30] be. Someone might get. And I this lesson from the other significant relationship in my life, which is my dog banjo, yes, I married a banjo player who's a banjo maker. We have a dog called Banjo. I'm just two banjo kids, short of my life being completely ridiculous. . Now banjo, bless him, he's not that bright Speaker 5: , Speaker 4: [00:29:00] But he is very fast. So we have to be careful when we are taking him out for exercise if we ever let him off the lead. Because what happens is my enthusiasm for him to come back to me is not enough for him to come back to me. What often happens is he'll be out, I might let him off the leash and he might see a dead squirrel. It doesn't matter how enthusiastically I wave my arms around, plead, implore, give a big smile, a come, come, come. Cuz he's [00:29:30] gonna look at me and go, Hmm, I'm not a hundred percent sure what's gonna happen when I get to Amy . Is she gonna put my lead on me? Will I get a treat? Will it be a good treat? I didn't see what treat she packed. However, what I do know is that this is a dead squirrel. Speaker 4: I can roll in that and stink all day long, . So if it's all right with you, Amy, I'm just gonna go with what I know and what we're learning cuz it's definitely not a not finished. Uh, but what we're learning [00:30:00] is we have to share more of the experience of what it's like to come to us so that he can see, and he can imagine that when he comes to us, it's a positive experience. So how do we share a compelling experience in copywriting? Well, if you've got an offer or a download, this is something really simple that I get my clients to do, is focus on writing about what people can do with that thing rather than what they have or what they will get. Because do is always more interesting than have or get. So this was a project that I worked on this year [00:30:30] and we had some free resources that we were running ads to. Speaker 4: We wanted people to download them. And the first video that promoted these, it would focus very much on what they got. So we said these were free resources, they were aimed, aimed at people who were interested in being Scrum masters. And we said, these are free resources for Scrum masters. We think they're the kind of free resources that every scrum master should know and have. And then we thought, what if we switch open instead? What if we lead with some due statements? And so [00:31:00] we then changed it to say, with these free resources, you can talk about Scrum with confidence, even on the first day, you can run a daily scrum that keeps people engaged and you can deal with people who don't turn up to key meetings. And what we found is that by focusing and leading on what people could do and getting them to imagine that increased our conversion rate from 1% of people who downloaded them to almost 10%. So it's a significant change. Speaker 1: Okay? It's really easy, [00:31:30] I think for us as you know, nonprofits and specifically if, if you are a fundraiser, you got your fundraising hat on most of the time to kind of miss like, how does this apply to, to me? Or talking about making an impact with a donation. How do I focus less on, um, you know, what you're gonna get versus what you're gonna do? Maybe some, sometimes it's hard to translate if you have a lot of like e-commerce kind of products that you're, you're selling as a means of raising funds. Maybe that it, it translates a little bit more directly. But I wanna look at an experiment that I think is really helpful in understanding how to apply this [00:32:00] in, in our context as, as fundraisers. Um, because y uh, her comment about, um, it being more powerful to talk about what the thing does I think is, is actually really helpful as we think about not just functionally what is a gift going to accomplish, but what's it gonna do to a real per, like who's the, who's the person that's gonna impact on the other end? Speaker 1: What's it truly going to do? What's like the deepest level of impact that the gift can make? And so we're gonna look at another experiment [00:32:30] here that I, I think helps clarify this somewhat, uh, version A reads like this. It says, again, this is following the same kind of thread through CaringBridge Honor, Caden Callan with a donation to CaringBridge, you make Cade and Callen's website possible. You gotta donate button there on the right side of the screen. That's the control. That's what they started with. They wondered what if we reverse the order of the elements? Maybe if we kind of change the order in how someone's processing the call to action and the value proposition, maybe that changes how likely they are to give. So now it says, [00:33:00] Kate's CaringBridge site is supported by generous donors. Like you make a donation to CaringBridge in honor of Kate. Speaker 1: So it still has that same kind of, you know, central focus around honoring the person with a gift and your, your gift makes the website possible, but now you're sort of just inverting the order of the, of the elements. Okay, we'll see what that does. Treatment number two focuses more on the impact of the site. Now it says help c stay connected to family and friends like functionally, that's what [00:33:30] it's doing. Make a donation to CaringBridge to keep Cade's site up and running. So we're, we're keeping the servers up so that Cade can stay connected. That's like the functional impact of the site. And then treatment three, they wondered maybe we could even lean further in to really the emotional impact that this might have on the person. Now it's, it, this is still just two short lines of copy. You're not unpacking a a whole giant narrative like we talked about in the previous example, but [00:34:00] it says show your love and support for Cade. Speaker 1: You're not just connecting him to family and friends. You're showing love and support. Make a donation to CaringBridge to keep Cade, keep Cade's sight up and running. So you have a mix of the functional, what the gift is functionally gonna do. It's gonna keep, keep the servers alive, keep the side up. But why? Because it's going to show love and support. Here's what's interesting version A, if you will. The treatment number one led to a little bit of an uptick [00:34:30] in giving, but not at a, uh, a high statistical level of significance. Treatment. Number two, same sort of thing. A little bit of a bump in in giving. I see Erin in the comments wondering if treatment two was the winner, a little bit of an increase, but, but not a significant increase. Not way off, Erin. It still was a little bit of an increase you, so you're good there. Speaker 1: But this is also why we test. We, you can't just assume that we know the answers or that our gut fundraising feeling about it is gonna lead us towards the path of, of biggest growth. We [00:35:00] gotta put it to the test. And what they found was that treatment three, leaning into that ultimate impact of not just connecting to people, not just keeping the site up and running, but showing love and support for this person that you care about. 67% increase in donations. We're not just talking about the function, but we're talking about the person or the ultimate impact leading to the 67% increase in donations. What's particularly interesting for me about this experiment is that there was [00:35:30] no significant difference in the people that were clicking through any of these treatments, but what it changed was the alignment of the motivation with the ultimate donation at the end. Speaker 1: So similar amount of people clicking through and visiting the donation page, but treatment three aligned with the right motivation to get someone to actually move all the way through the process and give this generous donation. So that's one way that we might apply some of Amy's teaching here, is not just focusing on functionally what's the impact? Like what's the gift gonna do, but [00:36:00] who's it impacting? What's the ultimate impact that it's having? What are really more of the heartstrings? Not just, uh, not just, uh, providing a meal, but what does that meal provide? Maybe that meal provides a sense of safety and security and maybe belonging. So we have to think, think beyond just what does the dollar go to, but what does the dollar really mean to someone? All right, this is a bit more of a, you know, kind of down to earth, very tactical, uh, [00:36:30] explanation of a way that you can start to improve your organic search results. So to, uh, steering a little bit away from just copywriting and now into more web, digital digital marketing tactics. Well, I'll explain in a little bit why I think this is really relevant to us as fundraisers. But again, I'm gonna give the floor over to Andy Crestodina, um, to share this really interesting and really practical, helpful insight around s e o. Speaker 6: What phrases are you currently ranking for? There's a report in analytics that answers this question in just [00:37:00] a few clicks. It's acquisition search console queries, the acquisition search console queries report shows you all the phrases that you rank for and it shows you how high you rank. It's amazing data, right? You can just look at this and see what's working and what's not. Now you can filter this report, like you can filter any report. And when you save something in that little filter box up there with the magnifying glass, it filters this for anything in the first column. But I'm gonna show you how to filter this report for something other than that first [00:37:30] column and find your lowest hanging SEO fruit, your, your, the cheese with the greatest potential. Okay, it looks like this. Click on advanced and it pops down this little box. Speaker 6: And I'm gonna create a, a filter that will answer this question for me. What phrases do I rank for high on page two, the set up this filter in this report and Google will simply give you all the phrases for which you already rank high on page two. That's amazing data, [00:38:00] right? As soon as you know this, you are poised to get the greatest impact from the smallest outcome. You can seriously create more. It's, it's about a 10 minute exercise, not even, right? We're only like 10 clicks into Google Analytics. Now if you sort that by the average position, you can see these are all the phrases for which I rank 10 or rank 11 or or lower. If you rank 11, where do you rank Page two of Google. And you've heard this, right? Where's the best place to hide a dead body? Page two of Google. Speaker 6: [00:38:30] No one's going there, right? No. Have you ever clicked on it? I think there is a second page. I don't know where it's down there somewhere. So this is typically the lowest hanging fruit in search, right? I did this on Monday with a friend. She called me. I like to do it. It's like a sport for me. Some people like sports ball. Like I I I occasionally call it sports ball. I know it's got other names. I don't really do that thing at all. I know that people like that. For me, this is the sport I play and it's, it's a, it's a lot of fun cuz it's a big scoreboard. So it works like this. A friend calls, she says, this is my phone. Hey Andy, [00:39:00] can you help me? You know, I've got this new job. I'm a cmo, it's a CRM company. Speaker 6: We're trying to rank a little higher. No problem. Let's do this. So we log in and within one minute, maybe two minutes, I find out that she ranks on hi on page two for this phrase CRM tips. Did she know? Nope, she had no idea. It's an accidental ranking. All of you have these, exactly these kinds of things on your sites, right? You're gonna find this on in your analytics in just a few minutes. So then we go to look at the page, and I'm gonna show you my second favorite SEO tool. It's called control F, [00:39:30] like find on your browser. Like as if you're in Word, just hit control F and search that page for the phrase that it ranks for CRM tips. Oh, zero times the phrase appears zero times on this, on this page. It's not indicating relevance, it's an accidental ranking. Speaker 6: It's super low hanging fruit. All she has to do is make the page better aligned with the phrase that it's already kind of ranking for. And moving up the, the, the rankings a little bit increases the traffic a lot because that's a big tipping point. Page two to page one, [00:40:00] right? We're gonna get triple the traffic, quadruple the traffic in just a few minutes by improving the relevance for that phrase. Now, it's not surprising that crm, right? This page is all about customer relationship management. And Google knows that CRM means customer relationship management. But what about the other phrase, just tips. Tips appears three times on this page. Control f type in the word tips. It appears three times. Where does it appear? It appears once in the header, the H one top of the page, and then it appears twice over here on the sides. Speaker 6: What is this? Over here on the sides. Those are links [00:40:30] to other articles, but links don't indicate the relevance of the page that they're on. The key phrase within a link indicates the relevance of the page that they link to, right? That's a sign pointed to some other website. So the key phrase, frequency, how many times it appears for the header is one, and for the body text is zero. The word tips does not appear even once in the body text. So our job now is to go back to the page, crack open your CMS and indicate the relevance. We're gonna indicate relevance. Now, this is the part of SEO that I find a lot [00:41:00] of people who are kind of like anticlimactic. You know, I'm expecting some fancy tricks. There's no fancy tricks here. . Google has 2000 math PhDs on staff, and I'm not gonna, I'm not gonna trick them. I'm gonna work with them to help them help people find this page by simply indicating relevance. Okay? So we're gonna do it by using the, the target key phrase in the title, in the header, in the body text, and in the meta description that's seo. Speaker 1: So Andy Cristina is, is basically my like SEO [00:41:30] content marketing hero. He's in incredible. And for those of you that have spent any time, you know, trying to learn more about s e o and how you grow, uh, organic traffic to your website, sometimes it can really feel like this sort of like black box or like dark art sort of thing. Um, it's really nebulous and vague oftentimes when it's explained. And he has this way of just making it really, really practical, giving really specific tips that you can just go do right now. Uh, and, and find little ways [00:42:00] to boost. Uh, things like moving from page two to page one. Some of you are, are probably watching this and say, and I don't understand any of this stuff and this is new to me. And, uh, maybe we'll get there someday and, and I hope you will get there someday. Speaker 1: I think there's a tremendous value in spending time figuring out how do we answer the, the, the most important questions of people who would be ideal donors to our organization, uh, and capture some of that organic search traffic so that you can grow, uh, giving in the long run. Others of you are like right [00:42:30] here with me, like locked in. How do I go do this? And maybe you're asking this question that I asked after I I just kind of rewatched this last week, which is, well, Watson is changing with Google Analytics and we're moving to GA four. If you didn't know, Google Analytics three or Universal Analytics is basically being turned off on July one. You've gotta be set up on Google Analytics four or else you won't have any more of the historical data, uh, to, to reference. So you wanna get that running and make sure you're trained up on it. Speaker 1: We've got a course on it, I can send you a link for that. But [00:43:00] I had this moment of, oh, does this report actually exist in GA four? I didn't know, so I spent some time trying to research it. I've got it linked up with Search console. Some of you know what that means. Some of you don't. That's okay. You can always find this report in Google Search Console. So if you go just search for Google Search Console, make sure you have that set up on your website. You can go find the same report even moving from GA three or Universal to GA four. Here's what that looks like. Um, here's how to translate. Basically what Andy has just taught [00:43:30] us into, uh, a search console report. It's really actually, actually simple. This, these reports might look scary to, to some of you. They're really simple. Speaker 1: They're, they're really not gonna give you really helpful. If you go to Search Console, you click on search results here on in the left column, it's gonna pull up a page that looks something like this and you can turn on average position here. So just hit that little checkbox. It's gonna turn orange and it's gonna add on, if you see it in the bottom right side of your screen, this little position column that's showing the average page position [00:44:00] of this specific search query that you're ranking for, uh, you can filter by that position. You can add an additional filter to basically say, you know what, just show me everything that's page two and beyond. So if you set this filter to say, position is greater than 10, it's gonna show you every query you're ranking for on page two and beyond. Then you can sort to look, uh, from like greatest placement to lowest placement and you'll see some of your top results. Speaker 1: So I just did this for our own website and this was just last week. And there's some really [00:44:30] simple kind of off the top learnings that you can grab. You know, not everything might be super relevant. Uh, you can see up there at the top. We probably don't want to rank intentionally for Caring Bridge donations. We clearly have lots of experiments around how Caring Bridge has grown donations, but we're not trying to get more people who are interested in donating to Caring Bridge to come to our website. But it might be helpful if we spend some time focusing on this, this post that's re uh, ranking high for donor acquisition mailings or marketing tools for nonprofits or online fundraising [00:45:00] agency. There might be some small tweaks that we can make to bump that page over to page one and actually start seeing some traction. Um, some of you may be asking this question, which is, how on earth is this related to fundraising? Speaker 1: This sounds really technical, this sounds like something maybe for the, the it, uh, department or for, uh, you know, the marketing department or something like that. But not for me, the fundraiser. It's, it's really critical for you as a fundraiser to at least know about some of these things [00:45:30] and these tactics and how it can impact fundraising results. We've got a brand new course coming to your inbox on Monday, taught by Jeff gis, who's the president here at next after, um, called, called How to Grow a digital fundraising program. And in this course it's about an hour in length. He breaks down the three key metrics that we typically point to as as the three main levers that you can pull to try to increase revenue. The three, the three levers are traffic, conversion rate, and average gift. That's the t c and A. And those three metrics [00:46:00] together tell you what your online revenue is. Speaker 1: And this focus on trying to grow, uh, improve search ranking and improve your SEO is really a play to get more people to show up, to get more of the right people to show up on your website, which gives you a chance to provide value to them, to cultivate them, to welcome them in. And, and by building more of that traffic base, you have a greater opportunity to convert them into a donor. There's different types of traffic. Jeff spends a lot [00:46:30] of time in this course talking about push traffic, which is basically people that you can go send like an email out to on a moment's notice or maybe pay for their retention. Organic search is, is really in this category of poll traffic. You're slowly pulling these people into your organization because they have some sort of, you know, innate or inner motivation to move towards the content that you are creating. Speaker 1: So a lot more to come that come there. We'll send you the link to that full course to unpack it a little bit more, uh, early next week. [00:47:00] The last speaker session I have for you is from, uh, my friend Dana, Dana Snyder. Uh, you may know her. Uh, she's not necessarily a a for-profit focused marketer. She certainly runs her own business and does does marketing for that. She's, she's also a really great just non-profit consultant. Really smart and intelligent around the, the world of, uh, social media and how to activate your followers through different social media channels. So we're gonna watch a short clip from Dana talking about how to contextualize [00:47:30] and, and create unique content specific for different channels. So I'll give the floor Speaker 7: To Dana, man, Google Analytics is your bff a it's free who doesn't look free front, but it tells you really great data like this. You can look at what are your top social media channels that are bringing people to your website. Now, I don't want you to look at here the amount of users coming to my site. I want you to look at [00:48:00] all the way on the right hand side, what's the average session duration? Where are my quality people coming from? And I looked at this. Facebook's naturally higher because I run Facebook ads, but there was, LinkedIn was at a minute and 20. And this is before I was doing a lot of work on LinkedIn and YouTube. Four minutes and six seconds. The average duration, I was like, shoot, I need to be focusing on YouTube. [00:48:30] This is where quality people are coming to on my website. So now I've been slowly working up a YouTube strategy, but this gives us some direction. Instead of saying I need to be on Facebook and Twitter, I need to be no pick. If there's one thing that you hear today, pick one to two primary social media channels, one to two, get some data and research behind it and knock those out of the park. Be creating platform specific content. And these [00:49:00] are the content that are working the best on these platforms right now. Speaker 1: So Dana has this cheat sheet that you can see on your screen. I'm talking about some of the major, uh, social media platforms. Uh, we'll send this out so you can look at it even even deeper. But you can see the different recommendations of what's working on these different platforms to get more visibility. You know, the point of engaging people on social media is not necessarily to go get a donation from them right here and right now, but it's to cultivate an audience. Ideally, interactions there [00:49:30] are ultimately driving towards people trusting you and building trust in you, engaging over time. They hopefully become email subscribers. You can convert those people into donors. Um, and so her tips here I think are really helpful to just understand this concept that, uh, we can't just copy and paste one message and one piece of creative into every single digital channel that we have. Speaker 1: We need to contextualize it for the channel, for the motivation of the people on the channel, as well as what those different platforms are prioritizing in their own algorithms. Cuz each [00:50:00] one is kind of different. I wanna show you a couple things that are working right now. Not so much on the organic side of Facebook, but on the, the Facebook ad side of things. So paid placements on, on Facebook. Lots of donor acquisition strategies are really based in paid advertising, specific Facebook advertising. So I have four different experiments to show you of a couple things that are working right now on the Facebook platform, specifically to get more people to convert. I will say some of these things change over [00:50:30] time, so we have some intentions even in the next 90 days or so to retest some of the things that we, we have held onto as being really powerful on Facebook. Speaker 1: We wanna retest them now as we're kind of post covid post pandemic. Also post iOS 14.5, which was the big change on Facebook that kind of changed privacy and tracking across apps. Lots of things have changed in terms of what works and what Facebook prioritizes. So, um, we always need to be testing these things on these platforms to see what's really working. Here's some [00:51:00] things that are working right now. Uh, version A of this Facebook ad. Looks like a pretty typical Facebook ad. Um, you certainly see things like this in your own feed, probably often if you're on Facebook that's got a decent amount of copy. You've got four short little paragraphs there. It's got this nice square image says, get your free cookbook today. You can say Learn more. You go sign up to get this free cookbook from North Carolina Public Radio. Awesome. They ran this test. Speaker 1: That's a little bit different. You probably see posts like this in your feed [00:51:30] as well, but typically they're not ads, typically they're posts from just somebody that you're following. And so the idea here was can we create something that looks more like the organic content that's, that's getting lots of eyeballs and shares on Facebook already. So now it just plainly says in the text, overlaid on top of this just green block, we have partnered with the People's Pharmacy podcast to create a brand new digital cookbook. Get your free digital cookbook today, and would you believe it if I told you that this led to a 19% [00:52:00] decrease in cost per click? So oftentimes when we're trying to optimize things like our Facebook ads, we're not just looking at conversion rates and click rates. We're looking at what does it cost us to get the result that we want? Speaker 1: And it was 19% cheaper in order to get click throughs on this ad by using this more organic approach to the creative. So this is something you might test. Uh, this was not just one single experiment. Uh, we see this in this experiment as well. Version attics, that same original format, uh, four [00:52:30] short little paragraphs or stanzas describing the offer, uh, square image with a picture of the offer, version B blue background text right on top that says, check up my brand new free course. Activate your free course today. 64% decrease in cost per registration. So not just click throughs, but actually people signing up for the course. So this might be something that you test, uh, both in organic posts and in your ad creative as well, is making your post look more just like [00:53:00] native organic content on Facebook and maybe a little less like the typical marketing that we often put out because this is what people are currently engaging with according to our testing. Speaker 1: Here's another tactic, and this has been, you know, one that we continually test with Facebook often, which is, is it better to run more static images or to use more videos? Uh, this organization, uh, ran this really interesting experiment where version A looks like this. This is over the holiday season. It says, hunger never takes a holiday. [00:53:30] $1 equals four meals that's crossed out and it says eight meals, so you can like increase your impact significantly. A little bit of copy about why you might give it has a donate now call to action version B. Similar add, same call action, same copy. But the difference was the creative. They now have a short little video talking about why you should give, and this led to a 212% increase in clicks. Now, if you've been on other training from us, you've probably seen that putting a video or something like that on a donation page often [00:54:00] actually hurts conversion rates. Speaker 1: In this case, in the Facebook ad, Facebook was giving a greater priority of the placement to these videos. And sometimes the thing that is, that is it, it's not necessarily about what's gonna lead to the most, uh, the best click through rate. It's about what's gonna get us the cheapest clicks or get us the cheapest conversions because Facebook is just giving it more priority and it costs less to reach more people. That's what's happening in this case. Uh, this is a very similar experiment. Uh, version A has [00:54:30] some copy and a big static image says Access your free online course right now. Version B instead uses a video of someone teaching the course. And so you can kind of get a little preview and feel for what the course is going to be like that's getting higher prioritization and placement on Facebook leading to a 93% increase in clicks. Speaker 1: And so these are things we have to continually be testing to know what works. That's a little window into a couple ideas that are working on Facebook right now. We have covered a lot of ground today [00:55:00] pretty wide ranging everything from brand marketing to specifics of narrative and copywriting to seo o to social media placements and creative. There's a whole wide world of areas you can dive into in the digital front. Uh, and, and so I wanna just recap five of these kind of key takeaways. Number one, build your brand based on core beliefs and shared values. And you can test into this in the copy on your donation pages like we saw early on. Secondly, test using strong narrative [00:55:30] in your appeals. You, you'll build trust by telling someone about the impact they can make by sharing it through story. So test that out. Speaker 1: Third, focus your appeals on the meaningful impact and the most meaningful impact, not just functionally what does the gift do, but who is it impacting? How is it impacting them? What does it really do to the person that's the recipient on the other end? Fourth, grow your organic traffic. Cause you gotta get more people in the door if you're trying to grow, giving, grow [00:56:00] your organic traffic by using that simple little hack from Andy. Moving from page two to page one with those little ways to kind of move the dials, understand what's, what's the low hanging fruit to get to page one. And then finally, as Dana has just shared with us, create content and ads that are uniquely designed for the channel and test your way into what's actually gonna work to grow conversions and results. That's all I have for you today. If you have specific questions that you want us to chat about, I see we have one, I've got a little one notification in my q and a panel, [00:56:30] I'll pull that up. Speaker 1: If you have additional questions you'd like for us to chat through over the next, looks like we have four minutes left here, drop 'em in the q and a, I'd love to see 'em and we can chat through them. Um, and, and while you're adding those questions, if you have them, I again just want to encourage you and point you towards, um, if you wanna dive deeper into getting more of these kind of innovative ideas to build into your digital fundraising, uh, and into your non-profit marketing, I'd love for you to join us at Neo Summit. You can go to neos summit.com, scan that code. Uh, you can get $600 off your ticket [00:57:00] until tomorrow at midnight. So start that conversation with your team or with your boss or whoever you need to talk to. Uh, make sure you're on the same page and then get those tickets purchased. Speaker 1: This money that you save there basically would help pay for any, any travel needs and, and things that you have to actually get to Dallas to join us at the summit. So make sure you take advantage of that. All right, I'm opening the q and a tool. I see one kind of quick comment in there about, uh, getting a copy of the transcript. Um, I again will share the whole video recording [00:57:30] and slides with you, um, hopefully later this evening, if not first thing tomorrow morning. So be on the lookout for that. Uh, so thank you f forward for that question. Uh, we've got one from Tatiana. How does it change donations when the copy is adjacent to the donation info? How does this affect mobile view? I'm sorry, I skipped over your question earlier, Tatiana. I, I saw it'd come through right after I had, uh, moved on, but the question, uh, I think your original question too is about what does that page, the donation page look like on [00:58:00] mobile that had, as you're saying, the information, uh, on the left and the form on the, on the right now, typically what would happen is that all of that information would be stacked on top of each other, specifically on mobile. Speaker 1: Oftentimes we're, we're staying away from having this like multi column approach normally on desktop and on mobile. That's the really, the, the primary donation page test or template that we've tested into is a single column format. The, and the reason for that is that if you put a form [00:58:30] higher up on the page, uh, next to copy or, or maybe the copy even goes lower than the form, you might see that sometimes if I, uh, if, if the form is high up on the page, you're basically asking me to make the gift before I've read through the information about why I should give it. And so we often will stack the copy on top and the form below so that you read through the full value proposition. Why should I give to you rather than to some other organization or even at all? And that question is fully answered by the time you [00:59:00] get to the form and to the call to action. Speaker 1: So that's typically how I would structure a page. And on mobile, it's okay for it to be, oh, a long page. People are used to scrolling. We've often actually seen that your copy can sometimes be even more impactful for a mobile user because it's right there in this tiny view port and it's really hard for me to miss it. So stacking on top of each other, really focus on dialing in that copy. Great question, Taana. Okay, those are all the questions that I see in [00:59:30] the q and a. I'll jump to the chat once more and see if there's anything else hanging out in there. Um, I see some comments saying thanks, and I, I appreciate you all being here and making an hour in your day to spend learning a few new tactics and ideas that hopefully can move the needle for you in terms of growing digital fundraising and, and your overall fundraising results. So thank you so much for joining us. Uh, again, we'll send out record.