All right, welcome everyone to why donors are hanging up on phone-a-thons and what to do next. We're delighted to have you here today. Before we kick off, I just wanted to cover a couple of very brief housekeeping notes. This webinar is being recorded and you will all have access to that recording after the event. For those of you who like to follow along with the slides, those are already available on the event page where you found your link to join. I'll pop that link into the chat box in a moment, but once you are on that page, you will just need to navigate to the course tab and select the access button to download those. We will be taking questions as we are able throughout the webinar, so please use the Q&A box to submit those as you think of them. And if you want to share comments, you can use that chat box to do that. And with that, I will hand it over to our presenters, Josh Robertson and Frank Mumford. Thanks so much, Christy, and thanks everyone for joining today. Why donors are hanging up on phone-a-thons and what to do next is a topic that I think is very near and dear to our hearts and we'll explain a little bit why earlier. A little bit later in the presentation, but it's not about just why donors are hanging up on phone-a-thons. It's why we see more institutions and schools and organizations really questioning what they're doing there, why they're doing it. And I would say a bit perplexed on where they go next to accomplish the same type of goals that they historically used phone-a-thon for. So we're excited to be your co-host today. A little bit of background. Again, I'm Josh Robertson. I'm the vice president of product here at Gravity. I have been in the space for, let's just say, 20 plus years at this point. And I've probably worked with many of the institutions that are here on the call today. So excited to have you here. Frank, I'll let you introduce yourself. Yeah, absolutely. Super excited to be here as well. And like Josh, I come from the community. I was a past fundraiser prior to coming over to Gravity for the greater part of a decade. And now I've been here with the organization for three plus years and love every moment of getting to meet people and helping with solving some of the greatest issues we're all continuing to face as a sector. And so just super pumped to be able to be here and share today. Awesome. Good to have you here, Frank. All right. So we're going to kick it off by getting all of you engaged for a minute. And we're going to take probably no more than 30 seconds to do this. But using the chat feature that you should all have access to, tell us how you would describe your organization's phone-a-thon. And try to keep it to three words or less. We'll read out, without sharing any names, some of the responses and chat through that. And then we'll dive into today's presentation. So how would you describe your organization's phone-a-thon? Frank, this is always interesting to see what we see here. It looks like, Christy, the chat's disabled. But someone did say in the Q&A, sick, but not that yet. Yep, I'm adjusting the chat feature. Sorry about that, guys. If you want to read from the Q&A box, I just turned the chat box back on, too. Okay, perfect. Yeah, jump back in the chat box. I did see some things in the Q&A. Sick, but not dead yet. Lots of responses. Outdated, phased out, paper forms, ineffective, a waste of time and money. Outdated phone numbers. Don't currently have a phone-a-thon. Student-driven, looking to adapt. Doing pretty good. Expensive to do. A mess. Underperforming. Non-existent. Fun, but increasingly ineffective. Effective. Gone. Frank, any surprises? We did a session like this a couple weeks ago. Is there anything that sticks out here? No, not necessarily. I feel like if we had a percentage on here, it's looking like 80% to 90% are saying that ineffective or not working or kind of losing its functionality. I'm seeing some functioning in beneficial, which I agree. There's some definite benefits to phone-a-thon. I was a student caller. I was a student manager. I took and ran many successful phone-a-thons. But yeah, not a huge surprise on what we're seeing in the chat. Yeah, it's interesting. Someone made a comment that it's an affected non-donor acquisition tool. I think that we'll definitely touch on that a bit later as well in terms of as you think about evolving to other channels, what replaces that acquisition engine that phone-a-thon historically has been expensive but really good at. Thanks, everyone, for starting early with the participation. Don't hesitate to keep the comments coming through both the chat and the QA function. All right. What are we going to cover today? We're going to first talk a little bit about the pain points that got us here. Being a product guy, I spend most of my time focused on problems because it's really hard to build the right solutions, including where to go next if you don't understand what got us in this situation. And Frank's going to share some really interesting data and insights that we've seen. And then we're going to spend the back half of our session today really talking about what's next, right? If you want to take that plunge, if you're one of the organizations looking to evolve or struggling with effectiveness or you maybe got rid of your phone-a-thon and now it's how do we generate new donors or how do we optimize our retention, we'll share some different techniques and strategies of how you get there. Things like reimagining how you leverage student ambassadors, right? How you think of hyper-personalization as a way to really drive engagement and growth. How to become more selective with your approach versus what phone-a-thons have traditionally done with mass outreach. And then we'll wrap it up with a roadmap for success. So don't leave early. If you do, it will be recorded. But we'll share kind of the top five or six things that you really want to make sure you're doing as you're looking for here at the end. And then again, Frank shared this, but we do need to confess, we're both old phone-a-thon guys and Frank, I don't consider either of us old, but we're getting there. This is Frank back in the day. What university was this at, Frank? That was Northern Michigan University in the Upper Peninsula of Michigan. Nice. And I think this is the telegraph machine that I used back when I'm a bit older than Frank when I first started calling. Frank jokingly said when I couldn't find a picture of my phone-a-thon days that maybe they didn't have digital cameras back then, which I thought was a bit harsh, but he's not far from wrong. So anyway, we've both been in your shoes. If you're someone who's overseeing a phone-a-thon at any step of the way, we've been there at one point in time or the other. So before I turn it over to Frank to talk about all the problems that got us here, I think it's really important to level set on what was the original goal of phone-a-thon, right? Because I think as you're thinking about what's next, you should keep some of this in mind and determine if it's still relevant. One, it used to be the most personal outreach channel other than a gift officer reaching out. And back in the day, that gift officer was a major gift officer. You didn't see a lot of LGOs. You didn't have discovery officers or DXOs or digital gift officers. It was pretty one-dimensional, and you didn't see the size teams that you have at some organizations today of people being able to do one-to-one outreach. For those in higher ed, and I would say those in the independent school space, it connected students with alumni in a way that really helped build engagement in their relationship, and that was seen as a positive. There's a long-held belief that this was the best way to upgrade donors, though I've worked with some really great annual giving leaders over the years that have just proven this with really good omni-channel marketing campaigns that they've executed that are very mindful on their gift arrays and ask strategies. It allowed you to really reach out to a large part of your institution space, and some people mentioned phone number challenges, data quality challenges. This has changed a lot over the years. When Frank and I did this, you could reach out to 80% of your population. That became 70% and 60%. In both the combination of data quality and budgets, that number has just continued to roll down the mountain over the years, which means you're just not able to get in front of the same size audience. It used to be that acquisition cost is always high. That's just a reality, but it used to be a lot lower when you could more easily get in touch with people, when pledge rates were higher and stronger in some areas, and that certainly shifted over time. If we rewind, this was why a lot of organizations originally implemented Phone-A-Thon and why they kept it for a long time was for these reasons. Now, Frank, why don't you share a little bit with us about what's changed, what has turned over the apple cart, so to speak? The biggest thing that we can all talk about is cell phones. With mass adoption, people dropping landlines, I think that was one of the biggest demise of what we're seeing is the cost to acquire or data appends. I remember doing a data append at North Dakota State University when I was the call center manager there, and it was expensive to purchase, and the numbers were not great. Outside of us actually asking people for cell phones, that was a huge issue. Then also, we have the other things that there's other channels that came out that were either just as effective, if not more. We saw this issue of people not answering, us having to do 20-plus outbounds to get a hold of a person, and then a lot of people, they don't pick up the phone as well. The effectiveness, the answer rates, everything continued to decline. Then you have donor preference. People want to watch something or see something. When they feel comfortable answering and doing it, there's this mental block that people put up. We saw that. I saw someone put in the chat, students don't know how to call or talk as well. I think there is an issue of maybe a generation change where using the phone isn't as normal of a thing for younger generations. With training, I hired many of those younger generations. With training, they're amazing. They're fantastic. They're empathetic, intuitive, curious, everything you want to be. It just takes a little more on the training side. I think it's also, Frank, it used to be one of the best jobs to prepare you for life after college. You want to go into sales. Is there a better job or marketing? Now, it's not necessarily a single channel that really prepares you for that. You end up with less students that really want to do that work in some cases, which also has no time. Absolutely. I remember doing a presentation, oh my goodness, back in 2008 on how to hire student callers. We were even struggling back then because people didn't like calling people. I was a weird one and I did, but there's so many people where it's just not as comfortable as it is anymore. Absolutely. Tell us a little bit more about this growing channel mix, Frank, and some of what we've seen just over the past 10, 15 years. Yeah. Going all the way back at the onset of a phone-a-thon when you had to pick up and maybe not a rotary phone, but you had to hand dial numbers through a Rolodex or a binder of numbers and then you had direct mail. Then, as we continue to move forward, if we look at 2012, I was there in the inception of Giving Tuesday. My goodness, I'm glad I don't have to live through that anymore. I apologize to everyone on this webinar, but that was a crazy time to start seeing the rise of e-solicitations. We saw Giving Tuesday. Then, things continued to progress. More channels, more opportunities for outreach, social media. Everyone was allowed to be on Facebook. Then, people moved to Instagram and to Twitter or X. There's just so many more ways that organizations are connecting and engaging with their donors and showing up. Then, as we're moving into 2020, we're seeing this mass hyper-personalization. It's happening in the for-profit space. We're really catching up in the non-profit space through the rise of the digital gift officer or the digital experience officer. We're seeing that as well. Then, on top of it, a cool new use case I came across a couple weeks ago. It's fresh off of a use case at a conference I saw. An organization is actually, if anyone's subscribed to Peacock, when you hit pause on Peacock, it is now popping up ads. Mostly, for me, I'm seeing Walmart. What they're doing is they're doing targeted ads as a non-profit on different shows. Shows that they know their demographics that are typical donors, like the shows they watch. What they're doing is when someone hits pause, their ad about their non-profit is popping up. They're actually able to scan a QR code. They're acquiring new donors that way. For heaven's sake, 20 years ago, would we be thinking this was going on? Would Netflix still sending disks in the mail? No. Every couple years, things are changing. Now, we have the mass adoption and the rapid growth of AI. The next six years are going to be even crazier. I think it's great, Frank. I had not heard that example until about three minutes before this webinar started. That's how fresh off the press it is. It's exciting to hear. I think for some of you, you may be wringing your hands a bit thinking, great, yet another channel. Because what hasn't really happened is institutions and mass haven't really given up completely anything they've done before. Phone-a-thons may be the first, but there's so much more with, candidly, not the staffing and sometimes expertise. If you want to be great at digital ads, on which platform? Where's your army of digital marketers to really help optimize that spend? What's your budget? How does it fit in with your other campaigns? It's becoming more and more complex. It's not lost on us as you're trying to navigate how you help your organization meet its goals, how you're thinking about replacing a phone-a-thon with new channels. It is complex. Nothing really seems to be going away. As we look and adapt, we have to try new things, but you also have to continue to look at what is working. I think, Josh, the last time we did this presentation, you talked about direct mail. That is still such a vibrant and solid channel of gifts coming in, but it's always going to be an and. Talking about the waning effectiveness of phone-a-thon as a channel, I remember back when I had my budget for my phone-a-thon, we were spending about $150,000 per year. That included all replies, pledge reminders, all of this. Looking at the phone-a-thon strategy here, we're starting to lose donors and we're starting to lose its effectiveness. The cost to raise a dollar was always pretty much one-to-one or maybe we were at a loss at the original onset, but what we've seen is people are doing pre-qualification before phone calls. You're doing direct mail. You're doing outreach. What it's doing is it's allowing you to be a little more effective as well. The other thing is shifting budgets, shifting and moving things around and getting a little more hyper-focused and hyper-personalized and targeted within the phone-a-thon. Do you think it's a bad thing, Josh? Yeah, I don't think it's a bad thing at all. I don't want anyone to look at this slide and think we would ever suggest you should be a phone-a-thon first, but what's really important when we're talking about the why you've seen a decline, this is a somewhat old-school example, but if you just simply move direct mail and email to the same audience before you make phone calls, you're going to probably raise far more and be more effective to Frank's point from an ROI standpoint, and kudos to you. That's what you should do, but when you're sitting here thinking, why am I struggling with my phone-a-thon? You're siphoning off the best donors first. You're still putting almost the same amount of labor toward that phone-a-thon effort, and you're getting diminishing returns, which means that how you think of that channel being used has to shift. It probably has to shrink quite a bit to still make fiscal sense for your organization. Frank, you talked about donor preference a minute ago, and every time you talk about this, I feel like my head just continually nods like a Bobblehead almost doll because it's like, yes, yes, yes. Can you share with everyone some of the trends that we've seen both through our data and through some other industry research? Yeah, so everyone take a quick moment. Normally, this isn't a good thing to do live on a webinar, but look at your phone, and when you look at your phone, tell me how many unread text messages you have, and I would say it's probably one or zero, and that is very typical, and so that's why we're seeing as a really good preference is setting via text. Gen Z, millennials, past millennial, whatever you want to say here, we prefer text message because it is not invasive. We can answer on our time. Millennials are the generation of Nextel, if you remember that, the walkie-talkie on a cell phone. We loved it because you could just beep someone, and you didn't have to have this long, ongoing conversation. I miss Nextel. It was great, but then it went away, so fair enough. But 75% of Gen Z and millennials would rather text than talk on their phone, and then if we also look at the rapid increase of how quickly people are looking at it, I was at a conference, and then I was actually sitting watching my daughter do gymnastics the other day, and I heard one woman at the conference. She said, I get about 30 emails a day from organizations asking me for stuff for all of this, and then I heard this other woman when I was watching my daughter's gymnastics. She's had 300 emails in her inbox because she was out the week before. And so imagine the channels of email versus the text message and how quickly people are seeing it within Deliberate. And then, uh, you look at the, you know, just text in general, that's what we're seeing and then same with video, um, one minute of video is worth 1.8 million words and people retain 95% of what they read versus 10% of, uh, 95% of what they watch versus 10% of what they read. So one minute of sending a video is going to be more impactful than anything you could write, and then you have the whole death by committee. And so that's really where the shift of preference where it's not an or it's an and so still do some of this other stuff and start to adopt new ways to of doing it and delivering those messages. Yeah. And I'd be curious to hear from the audience. I know a couple of people said they were doing a lot more with, with texting now, but who's using text and video and what you're seeing, feel free to, uh, feel free to share, I can tell you from a survey that we did a gravity, um, earlier last fall, and we saw about just under 50% of organizations are actually using text and video. And so if you're, if you're one of those organizations and you're thinking about where I go next and you're looking at these trends, it's not a nice to have anymore. It's not a, maybe we should test this and see how it works. It's a, you should be leveraging this as, as really part of your outreach strategy. If you're trying to engage your audience in a way that they want to be engaged with, right. And it may not work for everyone. That's fine. But, um, you know, this is, this is part of the road map for success. Yeah. And in couple, uh, questions in the Q and a, uh, one was, so what's the recommendation to send mail, email, then call or to remove calling altogether because mail and email generate better responses. I'm an and person, not an or. So it is to, and we'll, we'll get to this later on, but it is around, um, using effective channels and then allowing, if you're keeping phone us on to being a little more targeted, so you have a better adoption with it and you're a little more efficient. And then another question came in. We tried texting with our phone-a-thon, but it was awkward to ask people to engage and we did not get many responses. How is texting being best utilized? And, um, I'll share some of them. It looks like Josh has some insight as well, but, uh, imagine you're have to go to the dentist or you have an auto appointment, you get a reminder for that. Uh, there's context behind that text message. You just made a gift. You have a large announcement. Um, maybe it is your giving day tomorrow. There's context behind, because those awkward texts where you just send someone, we get those all the time. Those are spam texts. Like, Hey, is this Jenny? Like, no, this is Frank. Like I know you're trying to scam me. And so the idea here is there's context behind it. Plus, you know, having some trust and consistency of where it's coming from, what it looks like, all of that is important, but I'll let you share more Josh. No, I, I love what you shared, Frank. I think the biggest thing I would add, I would compare it to, you know, we're, we're on the anniversary, I think of, of moving to from Colorado to North Carolina, and, uh, I'm reminded of this with great neighbors and, uh, I've helped them move a lot of heavy stuff over the years, but I just imagine if my first interaction with them was them asking me to move a dresser, uh, or a desk or something like that, um, I'd happily do it, but I'd be a different relationship started on day one. And I think for organizations, the parallel is, um, don't take a new channel and I'm going to use the word demonize it by starting out by the first thing you do is solicitation. And I'm not going to stand up here and tell you that, you know, do seven engagement touches before you solicit, you know, that that's probably not realistic if you're adopting a new channel, but don't start the strategy by trying to ask them for something, start using the channel by trying to deliver value to them. And so a couple of examples I'll give, if you've got a recently graduating class, you're uploading the data in your CRM, hopefully soon, um, think about what that first touch is going to be. Maybe you're driving them towards your alumni community, uh, for resources or career center or something else. Maybe it's just a touch base call to see how things are going post-graduation fighting there to be a mentor. Uh, we've seen people have success with happy birthday text messages. And some of these things, even though they're not a direct ask, they actually are attributable to leading to an increase in donations in a relatively short period of time. Right. And so think about some of those other touches you could do versus jumping in and saying, wow, we sent out 10,000 text solicitations and we ended up with four direct gifts. Um, the other thing is we'll talk about this later is don't measure success in a vacuum, right? Uh, I would even say this with phone-a-thon, right? If someone talked to you for seven minutes, um, and they were a no pledge, they talked to you for seven minutes, unless they're really angry and upset, they've got some affinity toward the organization. Maybe that plays dividends down the road. And so make sure you're looking at engagement with channels, um, in terms of how that's leading to fundraising success also a bit later down the road. So those are just a couple of things, but that's probably a webinar in and of itself, right? Uh, yeah, absolutely. And we'll, we'll share our info after too. So if anyone has questions beyond this or wants to see how we engage in, um, some of our great resources, happy to do that. And, and so we love to talk about perception versus reality. And, um, one of the perceptions, especially when it comes back to texting is we don't have cell numbers for most of our alumni, even if they did, they wouldn't answer their phone on their cell. Like, and I talked to a major donor just last week that said he never answers his cell from people he doesn't know. And most people don't like me, but here's the thing. We I've called thousands of people. Uh, I've, you know, all the people I've texted people, I was a major gift officer, qualified, uh, donors. And honestly, it's just a matter of time and the one-on-one connections. And when we do use other channels, it's just another way to gather data. And how people want to communicate with us as an organization. So don't make assumptions, um, test it for yourself and don't let one off ruin it for everything else. Yeah. Could have said it better myself. So great, great background on all the challenges have got us here, right? And we could take these same challenges. And if we make the wrong decisions, again, we could be in the same place for video and texts in five years. And I think that's why we have to be such good stewards of new channels, new strategies that we're bringing in to make sure that one, we need to deliver on the fundraising success, right. For your organizations, but equally as important, you're delivering an engaging experience, your audience wants to have, um, and, and that's a, that's a mix of, of both fundraising and engagement strategy that needs to happen. Year round. Um, so as we get into the kind of what's next, anyone who is sitting there where, where we have the biggest gaps, if we make a major shift, um, how do we make up the difference, um, would invite you to take, uh, take part in a brief survey, I think it's 12 questions, right? Is that right? Um, we promise they're pretty easy to answer, uh, but it helps give us a sense of kind of what you're experiencing today. And, um, um, and then we're happy to take a look at that combined with a summary Um, and then we're happy to take a look at that combined with a summary of your results. We've got a form you can fill out, or you can just send us some, some raw data. We'll take a look. We'll analyze it and we'll just provide you, you know, four to five recommendations on really where you can go that this data driven and we'll set up a 30 minute session to really review with you and your teams. And so, um, you know, this is a passion topic for, uh, for Frank and I, and so we're happy to help in any way possible. All right. Frank, should we, should we dive in the first one? So exciting to me, right? You got to start by identifying the problem that you want to solve for, and it may be different. It may be different than what you were using phone for. And so, um, you always ask anyone I work with in an organization, this question of what's your primary goal. And when I say primary, I mean, the number one, and it can be what a one B one C what is the primary thing you're trying to do? And, you know, increasingly we hear organizations talk about building pipeline and I always drill down on that and say, what does pipeline mean? Uh, are you building leadership gift pipeline? Are you trying to, um, uh, solicit and convert a lot of new leadership giving donors, are you building major gift pipeline? Um, are you qualified as part of that pipeline? Are you expecting them to do so? So be specific within the core problem you're trying to solve. But this drives, frankly, a lot of the other things that Frank and I will talk about related to the strategy. Um, once you've picked it, you know, I have to call out, remember, you've got to engage people in a relevant and relatable way. And so as we talk about the channels you select in a minute, it's really important if you say it's acquired new donors, all right, that might be a slightly different strategy than if you're trying to just build a pipeline for leadership giving, or you're just trying to go into ROI mode. And that means you get very strategic about who you're focused on. So again, we'll, we'll talk more about some of the specifics, but it's really important and you, you figure out what the, what the goal is, the North star metric is, and, uh, and stick to it. I've also seen organizations a halfway through the year. It's like, ah, it used to be that we're not going to hit our alumni participation goals. Now we're going to focus on dollars. How do we optimize? And it's like, well, you can't, you spent six months of the year doing something very, very different. Right. And so if you have a goal, make sure you're sticking with that for, for at least a follow-up period. Um, selecting the right channels. So Frank showed some data, data in this data and industry insights. If I can talk, um, and you can take some of that, you can take some of your own data, if you have easy access and can synthesize it, but use that and start to build a hypothesis of, you know, what the, what the new world looks like for you. Um, I'll show an example of this in a minute that Frank and I put together and I'm going to be really honest. We didn't spend more than what Frank 15, 20 minutes on it. But, you know, if I was an organization, a document like this really provides, you know, everyone with a clear expectation of what we're going to get out of this life after follow-up, um, and making sure you understand how you're going to measure success, not after the fact, but at the outset and communicating that so critically important. Um, I use this quote all the time. It's a product management quote that your opinion while interesting is irrelevant. And I see people for a lot of times when I share this, I'm not interested and you shouldn't be interested in everyone's opinion on, I don't think people are going to want to get a text or, um, uh, I'm not sure that we should have students record videos. Okay. That's interesting. Uh, thanks for sharing. We're going to do some testing and see what's really working because here's what we're trying to drive to. And I would just encourage everyone to remember this. I've been on lots of campuses where there's always someone who wants to debate whether or not you should try something new, there's very, very little harm in trying something new. Um, hardly ever. All right. So what does this look like in practice? Um, again, about 15 minutes to build. I'm going to read the hypothesis and I usually hate people reading to be in webinars, but it's important. So the hypothesis we came up with is by strategically reinvesting our budget. On text and video while reducing our calling hours and associated spend by 75%, we'll engage 15% more donors and build pipeline identifying 500 donors for gift officers, a 50% increase over last year. Now, some of you might say like, well, that's overkill. We might just say that we want to, um, you know, have a 50% increase in building pipeline. Okay. At the end of the year, what are the metrics that people are going to hold you accountable for? In this case, you've got a few that you could be a winner around. One is decreasing your spend and budget by 75%. Two is engaging 15% more donors. And three is a real tangible fundraising goal, uh, around building more pipeline for your gift officers. And so again, um, this is hard to do and you can be an analysis for mode, but this is where putting pen to paper, making sure the rest of your organization, or at least your team is aligned around this so critically important, because then you don't have to guess after the fact, if you're on the right path or if you're not. From there, we look at individual channels, right? And these may not be right for your organization, uh, in terms of measure success or strategy. It's simply an example that Frank and I put together. And so, you know, you'll, you'll have these in the deck, so I'm not going to read all of them to you except for one of the measures of success. So, you know, we got questions about, about text earlier. We talked a lot about video, but you see in there that the bullet point, uh, we're going to measure giving rate for those that responded to a text, regardless of how they gave. And we expect to see a 10% higher by donor type, uh, response rate for those that, uh, responded versus us not to a text, right? That's measurable. Um, that speaks to an omni-channel impact versus direct attribution of we, we don't think anyone gave through text or we sent this video and no, no one clicked on the link and gave, so what if 50% of people clicked and watched to the end and they did make a gift right now, but they made a gift in the next 35 days, that's definitely attributable, right? And so be intentional about not bucketing some of these channels and the silos and putting yourself in a situation where it's hard to rationalize the success. Um, we call it crowdfunding at the bottom because again, it's another great channel along with giving days to help generate a lot of new donors. A lot of people mentioned acquisition as being a core focus of fun with Don. That's great. We get that things like crowdfunding, things like giving days, they become your new donor engine in many cases, but again, set realistic goals around that. And then you build back from there. How many campaigns do I need to have to get to X number of new donors? Uh, right. Do I care if they're alumni donors or going to be donors that are parents, friends, faculty members, right? What are you really trying to accomplish? Um, and so we hope this provides a kind of helpful blueprint. Um, and feel free to, uh, well, I took to copy and borrow this, uh, as needed. Frank, anything you would add? No, I honestly, like we've spent a lot of time focusing on acquisition and like purpose of phone-a-thon. And I think sometimes we've, you know, forget to take care of the water in the well, which is our current donor base. And those are really the people that a lot of what you just honestly talked about is, is those, um, that we should continue to focus on. Awesome. One last thing. And then Frank, I'm going to turn it back over to you, I think to talk a little bit about narrowing the focus of hyper-personalization, but, um, you know, pull together a sample business case and, you know, I think internally gravity, people would say, I probably over-engineered this, but to me, this, the, the data points I would look at, um, it, you know, if you're going to reduce your calling hours by 75%, right. What's the impact on that going to be? And again, don't spend more than I'll see an hour on this one. Um, but look at the data, see what it tells you, figure out where you're figure out where you're really losing from an ROI standpoint, maybe with your phone with on strategy. Then how do you reinvest some of that? You don't have to reinvest all of it, but how do you reinvest some of that budget to help you actually grow, um, and achieve your goals? Um, you know, keep it simple, document the plan and share this out, right? I love, you know, I do this from a product standpoint when we're doing new things to say, this is why we should spend money here, right? There's the, the qualitative side of it. People are asking for it. Here's how we think about the value, but part of the value is that the dollars and cents, and I would just encourage all of you again, feel free to copy and use this template or others. Um, but, but do this because it will really ground you and help you become a better fundraising leader in terms of, of, of impacting both the budget, um, and impacting innovation are a pretty big way. And the other thing I would add to is like, don't, I remember some underperforming direct mail pieces as well. That I was just like, why do we keep doing this every year? And like, what's the true intent behind it? And then are we able to repurpose some of, some of that budget around? And I think the other thing too, is like AB testing. Um, if we text and send a video to this group versus only do an email to this group, you can start to see what the differences in trends, as far as when you build a business case, cause I used to review all our direct mail, uh, and look to see which pieces perform the best. And then I'd repurpose them every couple of years and we'd see great results or we'd see nothing and not do it again. Just and when you, and when you drew it's so critical, Frank, I think, you know, you, if you're at a larger organization where, you know, you're sending a high volume, those can be places, especially where there can be real cost savings. I worked with one school where, you know, there were 60,000 people that were part of a broader mailing that in three years time, I think 14 people made a direct mail gift and the ROI was so completely negative and, you know, we got into a healthy debate around. Yes, but you know, we want everyone to get a direct mail piece. I'm like, great. You also want great fundraising results. And when, when you've got to figure out how to shift your budget around, you have to look at areas like that and say, all right, we'll take half of them and don't mail them and let's try that new strategy. Let's try texting a video or maybe one, one group just gets texts or one group just gets video and let's see. And then we can make some broader changes following year. It's such a good call out. Yeah. And then before I jump into this, there's a question I want to answer about texting and opt-in. Uh, so with texting and opt-ins before you do text, just, I would first defer to your university policy. Uh, that's always what I say. Number two, I'm not a lawyer. I'm not giving you any legal advice at this point, but according to certain laws and legislation. Uh, if you are a nonprofit, it's different versus a for-profit business. So if you're a nonprofit and someone willingly and openly provides their phone number to you, they technically are opted in, but if the, if you're a for-profit business, you, they have to opt in and, and, um, agree to that. And then the other thing to look at is make sure that people are can spam compliant, that the text stop reply, all of that, but most works are. And this is an area, Frank, where when people talk about emulating commercial businesses and, you know, I, I I'm starting to hate the phrase, like we're trying to emulate the Amazon experience yet, everyone's been trying to do that for years. Right. Um, and we're not really there in this space yet, but some of the great things we can take away is both Amazon, a lot of other companies. When it comes to collecting information, they're really good at making it easy, right? So you go think about your digital giving form today. Do you have a checkbox when they're providing their mobile number where you're saying that you're gonna communicate with them, right? And give them the opportunity to opt in or opt out. Those are examples of just opportunities every day that are happening within your organization, especially on a giving day when you have so many people giving, where you can make sure that you're getting that permission and feel really good about it. Yeah, absolutely. And in the U.S., we're, for the most part, an opt-out state. In Canada, if any of my neighbors to the north, if you're on here, you're an opt-in. So in Canada, everyone has to opt-in for communication. So it's just a little different there. But so one of the big things we like to talk about is narrowing your focus, is number one, step one, looking at a data quality audit. I talked to someone an hour ago, they were like, we just migrated CRMs. I was like, how was that? They're like, it was terrible. And we didn't clean up our data before we did it. I was like, oh goodness, this is not great. And it is very common where if we ask someone, what's your CRM like? Or what does your data look like in your CRM? And they're like, it's horrible. But yet people say that and no one's really doing anything about it. And so that's really where you can come in and do an audit on the quality of data, how many phone numbers you have, emails, like good addresses, stuff like that. And then you take it a step further and you do an engagement screen. Of all this data you have, how are people looking at your stuff, not looking at your stuff, where are they at? And then utilizing predictive modeling to take this data and look at your goals in mind in what are the potential outcomes of engaging with these individuals. Anything to add here, Josh, or? Yeah, I would add, when you think about engagement screen, CASE has done such an amazing job with the CASE metrics over the past few years and a lot of you contribute your numbers, which is amazing. I think when it comes to engagement, you don't have to have it all to make an impact here, right? And so if you think about life after phone-a-thon or life after an evolution of what outreach from student ambassadors is, you sit on a mountain of data. Don't need all of it. But if I know that someone hasn't answered the phone in three plus years, but you've attempted them X number of times, or they've answered and they consistently hang up on you, guess what? They move further down the list in terms of, if you're gonna keep calling, in terms of what I do. They'd probably also, especially those that hang up, they'd move down the list of people that I would do outreach to through other channels in the future. If there's gonna be some type of per user, per message cost associated with it. It just allows you to take 100,000 people down to a much more finite number in a very short period. Yeah, absolutely. And so what we look at when narrowing our focus is it's about working smarter, not harder, doing a lot more with a lot less. And as teams, we all face that. We're facing staffing turnover, we're facing staffing issues, disconnected applications or platforms that you're using for outreach, for giving days, all of that. And so what we look at is how can you be more highly targeted as well as more personalized? And so, take this situation, you have 25,000 people you could reach out to to solicit. Maybe they're lapsed or long lapsed orders. Not my most favorite time of the night when I would call and because you don't get a lot of gifts from them. Maybe you'll get some reactivation, but it's a little more difficult. And so then what we do is we pare it down. Of all those people, do they have valid emails and valid phone numbers? And then of those valid emails and phone numbers, maybe you are texting. Are they opening? Are they responding? Are they clicking? Are they engaging? And at what level are they engaging? And then you're able to take a lot of this predictive modeling, or you're able to just look at the data yourself and say, of all these people, these are our core that we know they're engaged. Maybe they're giving or their potential to give and they're there and they're ready. And so that's really where we look at it with organizations as well as we pare things down, especially with a lot of our stuff with both with video as well as texting and our AI components, we're able to help synthesize a lot better and get you to the right people at the right time. And a lot of this comes down as well as the hyper-personalization. We talk about the for-profit sector. They're already doing this. I mean, there's some legislation I'm sure is gonna be in place here. I think Google's getting pinged up for this and the cookies fiasco, whatever, but hyper-personalization is key in Clutch. So a couple stats on this is 44% of people would give 10% more and 60% of millennials would give more if their communication was personalized. So that right there should tell you the closer we can get to one-to-one, the more likely someone is to give and give again. And then another good stat is from Penelope Burke, 93% of donors would give or probably give again if they received a prompt and personal thank you. Once again, personalization continues to be key. You can only do so much with staff. That's where technology and stuff can come in to help. Be a little more efficient in your outreach, be a little more personalized, but really, this is extremely important, but we only have so much time in the day. And so do what you can do, but get as close as you can. And so here's some good ideas on hyper-personalized campaigns and Josh, add anything in that I miss here, but you know, gift anniversaries, automating some of that communication to say, you typically give on this time of year. We just wanna share our sincere appreciation. Feel free to click the link to renew your support again. This is what it's done. This is what we're gonna do this next year. Happy birthdays. The reason I love the happy birthday messages is it has nothing really to do with the organization, but everything to do with that individual, because sometimes it's always about us, us, us. And every so often it's nice to say like you, celebrate you. And it's just one of those special days. It's unexpected. But I mean, I've got a text message from like my dentist on my birthday, pretty crazy. So others are doing it. Let's get on board. A special event invite, post event outreach. Someone gave at your events. You sent a text message ahead of time saying, hey, here's what to expect at the event. We're excited to have you here. It's just taking this time, these moments where you actually can connect and do it in an authentic way. Mentoring and community opportunities. Asking people to get involved. It's not about the money. Asking about involvement, which translates to money. Enrollment ask, and then doing survey. Asking for people's input or insight and their feedback. Anything to add here, Josh? Yeah, just a couple of quick notes. One on the survey side. You know, I think every organization does a lot of surveys and it's sometimes that data goes to die shortly after it's looked at. And there's a couple of key things. One, be mindful about the win for your surveys, right? Don't ask, it's not a hundred questions census. It's five to 10 questions, more than 15 that really get at what you want to accomplish. Use opportunities like right after someone makes a gift. You know, we see so many people, a lot of our clients integrate our video solution with our giving day solution. And so they have automated videos that are going out that are, you know, either one to many or one to one, which is great, but we always stress with them. I know Frank preaches this a lot of, all right, well, what's your CTA, right? They just gave, awesome, amazing. You just thanked them in a personalized way, kudos to you, and now what? And it's one of those things, if you look at what some nonprofit organizations do really well, is they're thinking about that next step. Right? Thanks so much for making a gift. It's going to make such a difference. Tell us the top three ways you'd like to stay engaged with the institution, right? Option one, two, three, we'd love to connect with someone at the institution, probably get an officer and have a conversation, right? Would love to look at volunteer opportunities, would like to be a mentor for current students or recent graduates, right? Think about your broader university or school community and how you can leverage alumni and get engaged in a deeper way. I think that's just a missed opportunity. So many people have it, they can be taken advantage of today. And again, getting back to this idea that, yes, you're trying to fundraise, that's super important, right? That's the forefront, but you've got to layer on some of these engagement pieces to hyper-personalize. The other thing I'd share, Frank, is just don't obsess about the data you don't have, right? It's like, ah, if only we had club information and could go back and add some of that to our CRM, or we don't have birthdays for everyone, we only have it for 10% of our alumni, awesome. Then send the happy birthday text to the 10% of your alumni and figure out that if that's a data point, you've got a good shot at capturing everyone else. So use what you have to start and it will help you make progress so much faster than trying to do a massive project to bring in new data. Yeah, and don't be scared to ask. So Kyle, thank you so much for sharing that. Like I've done that where you'll tease out to say we'd love to give you text updates on your gifts. Please share your cell phone or opt in to receive those. And I was in Dallas, I was at a Korean barbecue place when I went to check out and used their little tablet that asked me for a tip. It asked me for my cell phone because they wanted to send me specials every so often. And of course, like I'm going to be back in Dallas. I live in Minnesota, but I was going to be back there. I was like, cool, I'll get 10% off the next time I show up. And so they gave me a reason why. So give people reasons why to share their birthday, share their cell phone or share their info, but you have to ask. Like once again, you have to ask. And if you ask, you will get it, but you miss 99% of the shots. You don't take Michael Scott, Wayne Gretzky. We've got a, I love it. We've got a client in England that, he's at an independent school and he finds pictures of some of his more distinguished alumni and he sends them pictures and messages that he sends to the platform as a way to hyper personalize. And that probably makes many of you cringe at the thought. Not very scalable, but think about relevant examples where you can scale. I'm a University of Georgia grad. Back in the day when I was there, widespread panic, did a free concert. It was crazy. Tens of thousands of more people showed up than the town was expecting. And it was all over the student newspapers. Everyone remembers it. And every year on that anniversary, someone I know from the University of Georgia that I'm connected with online, post a picture, right? And we're all like, where were you in that picture? Look for opportunities like that. It's not a video. I'm like, hey, not sure. I know you were here during these years. Were you at the event, right? You may not want to do that with a total stranger, but maybe someone in a portfolio, maybe someone who's a consistent donor who's already engaged. And so look for those opportunities to do some of that at scale. All right, we're in the last eight minutes. So think about taking your program from being static, meaning it's an annual giving calendar and you're gonna execute X and then Y and then Z in this timeframe. Don't blow it all up, but blow part of it up. And what I mean by that, Frank and I talk about this a lot, look for opportunities to take how they're engaging with you. So back to our conversation a minute ago and build off of that versus everything is according to your calendar. Again, you still have calendar year end, fiscal year end, and these times of the year where you wanna do certain types of outreach, that's okay, right? But look for opportunities to build something like a journey, right? And this is an example, right? Every organization is different with certain audiences, but if you send out a personalized happy anniversary of your last gift video, well, if they don't make a gift within five days, what do you do next, right? So think about this kind of triggered flow, try to use platforms that are integrated with it all possible to help you make this infinitely easier, otherwise it's a real pain. And then you just, you follow the trail. And then you know, at the end of that, that you've really done everything you can within budget and reason to try to re-engage, steward, solicit this person effectively. And so, build a journey like this, build a few journeys like this for your organization and start to put them in practice, make sure you've got the automation. And then, because Frank and I were in these shoes once before, you got your student ambassadors. And so, some of the questions for those of you who are here because you're wondering where to go next with your phone-a-thon, ask yourself, do you need a physical calling center? Is that really what you need? Because that can be an expensive cost. Re-imagine how many student ambassadors you need. So if you're doing outreach, it's more scalable and more personalized, and you don't have to dial someone 20 times to get them to pick up, amazing. You probably need far fewer students. So this challenge around sometimes recruiting and turnover becomes less of an issue, hopefully, for your organization. That's certainly what we've seen for some of our clients that have pivoted to this strategy. You may be able to hire different students with different backgrounds than what you've traditionally been able to find. You should ask yourself, should they own a portfolio? So, get rid of your calling pools and segments, set aside kind of how phone-a-thon has traditionally worked, and think differently about if you really wanna create great outreach, do you connect one-to-one at scale? And that's where we see a lot of our clients thinking about, and then how do they draw this connection to their mid-level giving or leadership giving team so that it's not like we're generating fundraising outcomes and someone in a few months, a prospect researcher, will figure out if someone maybe should end up in a portfolio next year. That should be more real-time, right? And so, making sure you've got a tight feedback loop around that, and you can easily have people that are qualifying for the next level of engagement. And again, think about if this helps you actually build a stronger pipeline of new LGOs or gift officers for your organization, which is what phone-a-thon used to be really, really good at and many of you probably were there too. So, what does it look like in the future? Hire a smaller team that's super talented. Again, our recommendation is that you assign them portfolios, but you also give them the tools to be successful. So, if you're gonna assign them portfolios and you're gonna call people and then do some follow-up channels, probably not gonna be great, right? So, flip the script on the channel bits and the journey. Set follow-up tasks. Really think about how you make sure that this isn't about churning and burning through your constituents. It's about engaging them. It's about trying to get them to philanthropically support the institution, but do it in a way that really creates a great donor experience for them. And then again, think about using this. In our opinion, this should be generating pipeline, right? If you're an annual giving in some way, shape or form, I'm sure pipeline is probably one of your goals. And so, make sure that you've got a mechanism in which you could measure that, quantify the goals around it and that you're training your teams on how to really effectively do that. All right, so what happens to Phonothyme? Few things. You still have calling. It's still a channel. When people say that they're not calling anymore, I bet your gift officers are still calling prospects. I bet they're not only just texting and emailing, right? But calling just becomes a channel and you just have to get far more strategic then about how you use it, when you use it and with which audiences. And then, ask yourself, do you really need a separate platform just for phone? Is that really what you want to accomplish or is there a cheaper, better way to do that? And then, Frank, let's tag team it. So, I'll take the first three and I'll let you wrap it up. But if we think about how to be successful and appreciate those of you who stayed for the whole session, take action. Frank and I were on with a cloud of ours that we know very well earlier this week and they're testing some new things with video and solicitations. And the thing that I love the most about that conversation, it's like, there's no reason we shouldn't be able to do this in 30 days, right? And Frank and I are like, correct. Like, great, let's do it now and look at what the results are and then we can make some changes before the new fiscal year. I love that and think about ways you can take action now, not next fiscal year, not maybe next spring. Think about ways you can start to incorporate some of this today. Make sure you're engaging, not soliciting. I think I've probably said this over and over but so, so important to make sure you're not gonna limit channel effectiveness by over soliciting. And then Frank talked about hyper-personalization but this can really pay some dividends for you, right? And some of this is quantitative and some of it is the qualitative stories you can tell to others at your organizations as you start to see responses from your dollars. Yeah, and then like over the past, I remember how many times people say, well, that's just how we do it. Well, honestly, if you hear that, you say, well, maybe we shouldn't do it that way anymore. And so, these unneeded complexities and schedule-bound outreach doesn't fit within platforms. So let go of some of the past and continue to adopt new tools, new technology and new ideas. Omni-channel, donors don't say I'm a direct mail donor, I'm a email donor, I'm a donor advised fund donor, they're a donor. And so reaching them where they're at versus where you think they're at is a very good approach. And then make sure you keep it as that team sport. You don't know what drives what. And then streamline your technology through stuff like what we offer. But yeah, so last, Q&A and our QR code. So another plug here for the pipeline or the review of your phone with the audit. Awesome, we've had a lot of questions as we've gone along. I can't thank everyone enough for your participation. If you have questions, feel free to throw them out in the Q&A in the next few seconds. But otherwise, we'll be sharing this webinar. I believe it's already available, which is amazing. But if Frank and I can help in any ways, if you have any questions, don't hesitate to reach out to us on LinkedIn. Feel free to take our phone-a-thon audit and we look forward to seeing you at another webinar soon. All right, I'm not seeing any questions populate, so I think we'll go ahead and end. And I will put your contact information up on the event page if people wanna reach out to you guys later. So thank you so much for joining us. Thank you, Josh and Frank, for a great presentation. Thank you very much. Thank you.

phone-a-thon fundraising

challenges

decline

donors

text messages

video communication

hyper-personalized approach

automation tools

data quality audits