Transcript for "From Attendees to Donors: Supercharge Your Events and Auctions with Raiser's Edge NXT and Trellis": So, before we get into introductions and things, I just want to quickly say, you know, why why are we here? Why do we do events? Right? Like, why do we spend all of this time and effort, getting everyone together? And it's really so we can build out the brands, build out the audience, and get donors. Turning attendees into donors. That's why you do all this hard work. That's why you bring it together. That's why you coordinate all these different things of events. So in today's session, I just wanna keep that top of mind. Because at the end of the day, what we're trying to do is turn these event attendees into long term donors, into supporters that you can count on for years and years and years, and really making sure that ROI on all your effort is very clear. So the outcomes for today's session, understanding how to engage attendees before, during, and after events, really looking at the donor funnel from an events perspective, and how we can turn those attendees into donors. Learn strategies to segment your audience for smarter fundraising. You know? And then we have some amazing individuals here that run some very powerful events, very large events, multiple events. I'm excited for you to just pick up a couple tidbits from them, strategies, tactics, from your peers here as well, and that's kind of the bulk of it. I'm gonna get out of the way so that can happen. And then at the end, we just wanna show you how to automate that donor conversion funnel, with Trellis and Raiser's Edge. So, really, no one talks about this part, but the reconciliation after the event, how do you turn that reconciliation from days and weeks into hours so you can automate a lot of that follow-up and cultivate the right attendees into donors? So we're gonna geek out a little bit at the end. So hopefully, there's something in it for everyone, and you're busy. This is event season. If you can take one or two things for the next forty five minutes to an hour, that's what our goal is. So definitely please put a box on your page where if you're typing notes, what are those one or two things you're gonna pull from this? Because I'd love to hear about what they are. But without further ado, I'm gonna introduce myself and Trellis quickly and then get right into it. So my name is Justin Goodhue. I'm from Kelowna, British Columbia, up in Canada on the West Coast. We are a fully integrated events fundraising platform with Raiser's Edge NXT. So what that means is you can not only do all your ticketing, silent auction, live auction, your raffles, your sponsorship, your items, your fund to need, your check-in, everything for that gala, that golf tournament, that that, fundraising event on Trellis, but then you can automatically have all that data go into Raiser's Edge in the way you want it. So that's that's really what we differentiate ourselves in. And we have some amazing experts here as well. So first, we're gonna hear from Heather. Heather is the manager of advancement op and operations and events. So that's down in Florida, and that's for the Jewish Family Services there. And she does some amazing events there. Lots of different events. So she has to manage her team in a different way than I've seen in that. I'm really excited for you to learn from her. And we also have Katie. She's a development officer of events at, Cambridge Hospital. And she's going to be talking about, her events, especially the gala and how she's segmented her donors and move them through in different segmentations as her events change and what she her ask change as well. And lastly, Kirk's gonna come in. He's our solutions consultant from Blackbaud, and he's gonna talk about how to take that data once it's moved from Trellis into Razor's Edge. And just a little bit on what you could do to automate some of those workflows and really focus on those segments. That's where it gets geeky. So hopefully, we have, you know, some events people, some data people. We can hit everyone with this different thing. Excuse me. So the agenda here. Alright. So the donor conversion funnel, I'm gonna quickly talk about that, and then we're gonna get into Heather's story from paper to digital in twelve months. It's incredible to hear. When I was listening to her story and we were working on this, I thought it was over three years. No. It was it was in twelve months. So make sure you have your pens and papers ready to take notes on that one. And then, with Katie, really talking about more of a disconnected technology strategy, moving it into more of a streamlined strategy, and then how you segment those donors after. So really excited to see these different points of views. And then just a little bit on the technology and strategy wrap up, and then, of course, as Michael already mentioned, the q and a. So there is a q and a section. Please put it in. I've already seen some questions come in just on what we're what people are looking for in the session. Please keep adding them. We're gonna try and get to it. And if we don't, we can hit it at the end. So I'm gonna quickly talk about this funnel. Pre event, during the event, after the event. So in the pre event, where are your supporters coming from? This is the most important work. If you're not gonna critically think about who you want in the seat, then you're not gonna get that ROI. So you have a lot of goal from past events. Maybe it's not as organized as you hope, but go and grab that information, whatever information you can of your past events. And I want you to put it in a spreadsheet. When you put it in that spreadsheet, then you're gonna start filtering it and analyzing that. And look at it from different ways. Look at it from who purchased the most. But also look at it from different other points that I'm gonna talk about because what you're gonna notice is about 20% of people make about 80% of your revenue. So what we wanna do is instead of focusing on getting that 100% of people there, really focus your efforts on that 20% that bring you 80% of the revenue. It's incredible how this happens and works. And with that, we're then gonna use these findings to then increase your ROI on your marketing, and then also planning ahead. So when you launch the event, what are some little things you can do to make sure you get that learning for next time as well. So with that, I'm just gonna jump to the next slide here. So the eighty twenty rule for high potential donor indicators. So just gonna go through this list here. There's some some big indicators for people that are going to donate further. If you look at table purchasers, those are the people buying the tables, buying the foursome at the golf tournament. They're the ones bringing in their friends. So they're not only bringing in high dollars by paying for that table or the foursome, they're also bringing their friends to pay you as well, to give you that money. So you want to segment out the table purchasers. And further from that, you want to then see other people that maybe you don't know of or other high purchasers that didn't purchase a table. Which table were they sitting at? Right? Because John Doe, who bought table a, brought, you know, four people that also made a bunch of donations. So John Doe as an influencer is huge. So you really want to to start tracking that correlation. Big bidders, winners and losers. Georgian Bay General Hospital Foundation, they actually got two long term donors by just looking at the highest losing bids. So when you look at your bids, look at who are the biggest losers. Some people bid $5,000, and then they left the event buying one drink. They spent $20. So they were willing to spend 5,000. So they that's someone you wanna follow-up with. So those are the data you wanna look at from your past events, and make sure you're inviting those people back. Multi purchasers. So anyone that purchased multiple times. Upsells. So there's upsells at checkout that you should be having. So if they did do any upsells or just did a donation, that means they really care. They didn't need anything in return. Or donate your bid. So this is a a fun feature that we actually have at Trellis. And what it is is when you make a bid, you have the opportunity to donate that bid if you lose. So now you have the winning bidder for, let's say, $300. And then as this screenshot is, you have someone who donated their bid as well, then second or third place maybe, for 245. So, a, you make a lot of money right away, but, b, they're telling you, hey. I just care about your cause. I didn't even need to win the item. So these are the indicators you're looking for to build out that 20%, to get you to that 80% of revenue. And then above threshold donors, you should set a threshold, whatever that is for your organization. You know, 1,000, 10,000, 20,000, whatever that threshold is. Anyone above that, you probably wanna put into a segment. And sorry, just the last piece on the pre event. There's two other things is for when you set up ticket sales on your software, asking a custom question of how did you hear about this event. And if it's referral from a friend, you put the name they can put the name in. Or maybe it was a group, something like that, and also using affiliate links. What you're gonna get is better data. So then next year when you do this, you can say, oh, like this person who spent all this money heard about us from, you know, John or heard about us from a radio ad or whatever that is. So then you can start using your marketing in a better way. So, you know, look up affiliate marketing. We have, you know, affiliate links within your ticketing system should be good a good thing to have. And also just asking the question at checkout, how did you hear about us, really informs your marketing. And then make sure your integration is set up before you start selling tickets. So your software should be integrated with your CRM so that the data is flowing right into it. And you've set that up in advance so that you don't have to worry about it after the event. It's already there. You know, if someone buys this this type of ticket that they are gonna be put into this fund, and then they can be marketed to and emailed this way. So that's something that you can set up before the event. Alright. And now we're getting into the day of. We're gonna keep it simple on the day of. I think a lot of people talk about the day of. That's where a lot of people focus, so I'm not gonna touch on it too much because I really wanna give you something different. And what I all I'll say is all in one. So one place for them to go to do everything, and upsell, upsell, upsell. And I'm not trying to do that so you make a lot more money. It's really just to so you can identify the people that wanna spend more money. Identify the ones that wanna donate their bid, that want to, you know, do a fund in need, that want to participate in the silent auction. Those people really care. Right? So it's if you offer them the opportunities, then they're telling you that they care about your cause and they have money. So just offering them that opportunity in an easy way will get you some really great data to then follow-up. And then lastly is after the event. So we're gonna talk about this. Katie has some great things on how she's been segmenting her donors after the event, and, also, Kirk's gonna go in a little bit on this. But what I will touch on is, again, make sure your data is integrated. Make sure it's right into the CRM. Let's turn the event reconciliation from days and weeks to hours. Right? And let's segment your data beforehand, you know, and then maybe and definitely take that retro after and analyze the data after and make sure there's that time and space to do that and adding in specific workflows for those table purchasers so that there's a task set up for your fundraising team to go and follow-up and call them and find out how the event went for them and their their, their the people that went to the table with them, for example. So you wanna have all those pieces in place if you can beforehand, for that after event. And again, analyzing, you know, you know, look at who were high purchasers and how did they hear about the event. And then make sure you note down that for next year so you spend more on this marketing channel and less on this one. So that was kind of the the the crash course of the event funnel. I will be doing a much larger presentation at BBCON in October in Philadelphia if you would like to join on all of those pieces, and I have, like, some great examples from charities that have done this. But without further ado, to the heart of the presentation, we're gonna start, with Heather, and her journey from paper to digital. So, Heather, I'm gonna pass it off to you. Great. Thank you. I hope everybody can hear me. So I'm Heather Kirsten, and I have been running events and operations and logistics for over twenty years about I did the math earlier. About twenty five years. I started in the sports industry, which is super heavy detail oriented, and then moved progressively into much more of a nonprofit front from a university to a standardized nonprofit to now this nonprofit. And our organization is a social services organization that covers it's set it's set up as very similar to, a university in terms of, many areas of restricted funding and so forth. So in our events, it's one of our main fundraising drivers, our signature events. When I got here, we were in a program called DonorPerfect for our CRM. And from an event perspective, everything I call, I've since created a rule called the no post it note rule because of this, but everything was on paper, in a binder, on post it notes, from registration forms to you name it, it was in this binder. And it was 500 to a thousand pages deep per event. We have four, now five, signature events that run through this organization starting November, then December, then February, March, and then May. So, I mean, it is it is they're heavy. And our events are 400 people in November, 400 people in December, 700 people in February, and then a golf tournament of a 180 players in March, three weeks after that 700 person event, and then the smaller scale men's event. So imagine a binder prevent a thousand pages long. So when I came in, we migrated in I started in April 2024. We migrated by myself, DonorPerfect into Raiser's Edge. That migration started in July. In July, at that very same time, we contracted with Trellis to create a digital platform, you know, symbiotic relationship with Raiser's Edge for our events. And, we were up and running and fully migrated by December. So imagine that six months of going, like, in from, like, the first step of migrating into Raiser's Edge and and uploading and getting Trellis to be talking and everybody learning. All of our people had never done anything online. They had never registered online. They had never signed up for their for their events online. And it was an it was a learning process for all of them. I mean, we pushed our our silent auction online, to our cash call and everything where we can monitor through the Trellis program. So, I'm gonna you know, I'm I'm here to talk about the event side a little bit, so I'm gonna I'm gonna say, let's go to the next slide, and, I'll tell you how we start to build out our events. Because our events are our our largest fundraisers. We leverage our we we leverage these events through committees. So we start with four event chairs. We start with four event chairs. We create what they what you would call, what I call from my sports days, a playbook, which is your game day playbook where it will have all the information. So if I get hit by a bus tomorrow or I win the lottery, somebody can pick it up and start running with it, and everybody knows what's happening all the time. This is the only piece of paper that you will find, but it is also digital on people's phones as a PDF, in relation to my events. We also for part of our committees, we presale. We allow our committees early access to tickets for some of our high priority events. We have an event coming up called Not Your Mother's Dean Night, and that event, anybody that was on the host committee had an opportunity to buy their table early because that event sells out. And we dropped digitally the invitation today, and I've already had a 100 emails. And it's a 400% event. You know, a 100. The it dropped at nine. So this this is our process. Each event has four event shares. They receive monthly updates. We are asking them that our event shares have to they're the leaders. They're your lay leaders. So they have monthly meetings. They have a a greater financial buy in. So whether it's a foursome, a table, a sponsorship. Those are you know, that's their commitment. And they all our letters, everything serves as a mouthpiece from our adventure. So the welcome to our you know, the invitation so hi. Justin Goodhue is my event chair. He is going to send me, Heather Person, an invitation to join the host committee. Well, what does the host committee do? Well, the host committee gets listed on the invitation. The host committee is asked to support the event. The host committee is asked to only attend one pre event Zoom. They're asked, hey. Spread the word. It's like an easy lift. Can you help us secure one auction item or one raffle item? Everybody knows somebody that can get them a a gift certificate to a restaurant or what have you. So we ask very middle of them to attend because you were gonna attend anyway. Help us get an auction item. Help us get a raffle item. And then post event, our fundraisers so we have four in this office, and we divide up the group. Some of them are already assigned to some of these donors. We ask, hey. Your fundraiser is gonna reach out to you to ask you to introduce them to the new people you brought to the event. And then we have a fundraiser assigned to those new people, you know, as well. So we're trying to, like, work the system in a very soft sell format. And, we're able to monitor all of this through that integration that happens. As people sign up, it's automatically uploaded in the Raiser's Edge, and everybody can constantly look at the event in Raiser's Edge and say, oh, this is what's happening. And from an operation side on my end that watches the money and the logistics and, hey. Are we full? I'm getting all of the the details as well from Trellis. So I'm I'm getting all the information I need all the time at my fingertips without having to flip through a binder. Oh, did someone get their tickets? Oh, did this happen? And people are getting instant gratification. They sign up for the event. They, automatically get their receipt, their tax information. My job is done. Like, I don't have to go back and do thank you letters and and all of those recognition letters that you generally would need to do when you're in a paper system. So that's that's an here is an example of our playbook slide. Now some of the stuff is proprietary, so I couldn't include certain elements. But this book is soup to nuts. So you'll see on the right side of this slide, it says a timeline. It literally gives a full run of show. It says how many attendees, who the who the head fundraiser, if it's specific to one free fundraiser, who it is, what the attire is, what the location is, time. And then it says when you look at it, it says, okay. This is starting at 9AM. This is starting at 11AM. Eleven o it's down to the minute. This document is fluid in terms of, like, an event timeline and the activities, but generally speaking, it gives people a guideline. So no matter what happens, somebody can say, what is happening at six a 6PM? Oh, we're starting the event speeches or the speaker number one's supposed to go someone can always come and pick up the ball if something else happens to myself or my coordinator. There there is someone that always can pick up the production element, the operations element. It also lists and not include on this. It'll have a picture of every donor and what their, annual giving is, where we're at, specialty notes. Hey. That's John Smith. His kid just got just got accepted to Harvard, and you need to make sure my CEO needs to make sure that she goes over to John Smith and says, I'm so excited that your kid got to Harvard. Oh, I heard he's focusing in on Jewish history. Whatever it may be. It'll have very specific details in regards to the donors. And then in case of, like, a 400 person event, we'll do it by head table. So we'll say, John Smith is the head of this table. This is the information about him. He's the lead giver. He's participated in these auctions, and then these are all the people at his at his table. And if there's any key details about them, we'll include it. But to create a book with 400 people is not always reasonable, but you can load you can load it in by head table and their picture. So you always know who they are and what you're looking at. And within that book, you'll have a vendor section, and then you'll have a full floor plan on what it will look like. It literally is a guide. I stole this idea from the NCAA championships, person taking rounds back in 02/2009, And I live and breathe by it for every big or small, every single moment we have has a playbook. So in regards to go the journey from digital, you know, from paper to digital, it was it was an interesting one. So one of the things is is as you can see, the chart is data integrity. We were so many things. We had so many dupes. We had so many people, like, names not correct, emails not correct. And that that starts especially from the event level, it's the easiest thing to fix at the event level when people are registering. What is your email? What is your name? You know, like, what are your phone numbers? So making sure that everything from the start is clean. So we had to clean it up on the back end too. It was a data dump. I went from 17,000, constituent records to 13,000. That's, you know, like, that when I did that migration over, that's what we had to clean up. And we did, you know, making sure who's the husband, who's the wife, who's married to who. Then you eliminate all of your dupes, and then you start to educate your donors that this is how we're doing this. One of the big struggles they came across with, like, a paper heavy organization was it was like, well, this is how it was always done. We always did it on paper. No one's gonna wanna do the digital. No one's gonna wanna go online. No one's gonna wanna scan the QR code. You would be surprised what our older generation is capable of doing. You know, you would be you know, this this generation is growing, and they are excited to learn new things. They're excited to have their iPhones. Yes. Are certain people just they're just not having it. They're gonna call you up, and you're gonna go ahead, and you're gonna do it online for them. You're not gonna write it down on a piece of paper. You're gonna say, give me a minute. I'm gonna go online to our event platform. I will enter it in online for you, and you ask them the questions that you need from them and and it all works out. You stick and and commit to the digital platform. You know, you you you wanna try to avoid having, like, writing it down and then going to the digital platform. You know, you really wanna stick to one system. You know? And for us, not only do we have to reteach our donors, we have to teach our staff. Our staff was very push well, no. No. No. This is what they've always done. It's easier for us to. I recognize that maybe writing somebody's phone number down is easier for you. But when they're checking in and it says, do you wanna update the phone number to the proper phone number? The answer is yes. The answer is yes. So it's it's a it's a process. It's a marathon, and that's what I tell my team all the time. We've moved through this marathon pretty quickly, but it is a marathon nonetheless. I think I think that's what I have. I'd like to take it over to Katie. Wonderful. Thank you so much, Heather. So my name is Katie McMullen. I'm the development officer of events here at the Cambridge Memorial Hospital Foundation, and I've been here since May 2023. So it's funny that our our timelines kind of match up there. In terms of my experience, I have about thirteen years of event planning, experience, and most of that's a not for profit, but I've also worked, for pharma and government as well as higher ed. And my current role, which I really love, combines sponsorship sales and event planning. So I'm not ready to commit to either one, but as you can imagine, that keeps me, quite busy. So anything I can do to work smarter, not harder, I am in, and I think my colleagues, would say the same thing about that. So in terms of our current revenue generating events, our main ones are our golf classic, which happens in June. We don't have the luxury in Southwestern Ontario like Heather does of having a golf tournament in March. That would be absolutely miserable. But we do host our gala, the February. So, our golf tournament's been one of our signature event events for almost twenty years. Our gala, we kicked off in January 2020, which was a fun time, to start an event that would have to quickly take a hiatus. So our golf tournament raises about $65,000. It's a very limited, targeted tournament for our hospital vendors, and our gala has pretty significant year over year growth. And last year, we raised just over $680,000 at that event. Between these two events, we've used every single revenue driver that Trellis has except for the raffle, and we have plans to use that in 2026. Because we've been taking on some new technology, not just for our events portfolio, but for our other programs as well. We're exploring what other signature event we could add on to our docket. So we're still playing around with what that might look like or how this might support our third party community events as well, which is quite robust at our our hospital. We have some generous, community partners there. So I am lucky that we have a small but mighty data team that's really on board to leverage. If we're collecting this data, how can we use it the best? So whether that's Trellis, which I'll be talking about today, or other, other things you're using for data collection, donation, participation, I think this will be helpful to you regardless of where you're at right now. So in terms of my approach to automation, I'll go over a few things here. So the first one is the importance of integrated technology. So for a small team like ours, where we're only about 10, full time staff or any team really of any size, Integrated technology is really a need to have, not a nice to have anymore. Like Heather had mentioned, you can't rely on paper binders or, kind of a varied process there. So how can you save that time without cutting corners? It's my ultimate, work smarter, not harder hack. The second point I'm gonna dive into is some of my data driven strategies. So what's the point in collecting all of this data if you really aren't going to leverage it and get the most out of it? You might as well go back to that, paper binder and stop, convincing your colleagues it's time to change systems. And then the third thing I'll go over is the benefits to your organization. So really the silhouette of why change. And for me, a lot of that is appreciation of my data colleagues being able to do some of the things in NXT that I'm not trained to do or I'm a bit rusty now that I've been pretty events focused. How I can leverage those KPIs to benefit my program and my colleagues' programs and elevating our corporate sponsorship as a primary revenue driver at CMH. So, hopefully, we'll cover a few things that are of interest to you guys. So when I had started at CMH, we were using several different methods for registration. So a lot of it was through, email and NXT, Excel sheets, job form, OLX. It was kind of unclear why we were choosing each form of registration, and kind of who was responsible for that within our team in terms of, like, setup, maintenance, getting that data into the database. And for me, we were really looking for an integrated solution for ticketing, auctions, donor engagement, all of that. We have a few part time staff. We have the regular turnover that I think every organization sees. And like Heather said, I'm glad that she corrected herself with the hit by the bus mentality to win the lottery. That's something I've been mindfully doing as well, but the show must go on. So how can you do that if someone, suddenly has to step out of a role for whatever reason that may be? Our main driver for this change was the launch of our CMH reveal gala in, January 2020, and this precedes my time. But we hired the wonderful Lane, the auctionista, which many of you might be familiar with, who does a wonderful live auction and fund a need moment. So one of the requirements from Lane is that there's something to facilitate and track the fund a need moment. So that kind of jump started our our journey here with Trellis. And, we adopted it because it it's really user friendly for both the event planner perspective in terms of setup as well as our guest journey as well. If you I'm dating myself a bit, but if you have ever coded your MySpace profile page, you'll definitely be able to set up your your Trellis page. So very easy. I'm not that tech savvy, and I do most of our most of our setup there. We also really loved that it integrated into Razor's Edge for some of the things I mentioned earlier. Getting registrations by email or other forms still meant there was a staff member manually entering each guest into our events module there. So, that took that whole whole part out of there. So the other thing that I really love about Trellis is that it really improves our ability to collect data more streamlined. So through a lot of these tools, we were still asking the right questions and collecting the right data, but to get it into the database in a way that was able to uniformly pull and be useful to us was very staff it was a big staff burden for our data team. So asking how they heard about an event, that's great, but someone was still manually entering that in as an attribute or another field within razor's edge. I won't pretend where they put that, but, it's it really just means that it's not of any use because it can't be pulled out. So we're capturing it. We're asking it, but we're not able to use it. So we love, Trellis for that. It's really helped me be able to build custom stewardship opportunities for our for our folks as well. And moving on to some of our data driven strategies, this is my favorite part because I won't pretend to be a data nerd in the sense of, like, cleaning up the data or making sure it goes in alright. I have a wonderful colleague, that kind of organizes my chaos for me. But I love looking at the donor journey at an event to enhance their long term engagement, which I think Justin touched on a bit at the beginning. So I love using the data to identify new sponsors and new donor prospects through things like unsuccessful auction bids. So the ability to follow-up on someone, you know, that could be a new donor to us that didn't end up giving that person that bid $5,000 and then walked away only purchasing a drink or even just gauging interest or capacity in our organization. I love looking at unsolicited spending. So, things like upsell where they're either giving a donation at the event through our fund in need or giving a donation at the time of the ticket sales that kind of shows their engagement there as well. And, also, where else is like going with this? Oh, yeah. And who is above who is engaged enough to give above and beyond their ticket price? So there are some natural segments here that help you when you're targeting your other events, but also may help your other programs as well. So similar to Heather, we have development officers on-site who are really trying to cultivate and make those connections at our events, which is one of the main points of having them. But seeing who is participating in these live is wonderful. I love using the spend at event as an indication of their interest versus their capacity, especially at our gala. Galas are not something that is kind of a universally attended event. We have many free or lower cost events that our our donors can go to. But if you're going to a gala where it's ticketed at $350, $400 or up, They obviously have at least a bit of capacity there. So I love seeing what is worthwhile spending their money on. So some of those folks that are bidding on, auction items would be perfect fit for our lottery program, and I may add them into those segments. And we do quite a bit of segmenting in our holiday, giving campaign as well. So I know my colleague kind of slices and dices that as well to fit who's getting what. And then how these data trends can benefit your other programs. So I love looking at the overall event and kind of who is where. I think I've already touched on that a little bit in terms of interest versus capacity. But it builds the pipeline both ways that make sure that everyone is getting an ask that's an easy yes. So if you're looking at folks that are from, maybe a corporation bought two or four tickets, that could be an easy yes to a lower tier sponsorship level. If you're looking at who is bidding on specific auction packages, you might be able to build more offerings of that kind knowing that you have the market in the room to to give those a bid and win some money that way. So lots of cool things you can do with the data. And having used Trellis now for a full year, I'm excited to see how we can keep building on some of that that pipeline strategy. And, moving on to kind of the silhouette or organizational benefits. So I have a way better understanding of the work of my colleagues in operations and finance. One, onboarding a new system and seeing kind of how that works with our current financial process and how we use NXT. I feel like the beauty of both Trellis NXT and really any CRM is that, there's no right or wrong way to use it, but trying to figure out how these two things meet in the middle to get us everything that we need. My second point, I really like that we can do more targeted and timely follow ups and stewardships. So right within Trellis, you can segment kind of participant types and thank them appropriately, send the text messages, and I love how customizable the emails are within Trellis. I often send duplicate emails from both NXT and Trellis and love that I can make them look the same, and it really makes sure that every single attendee is getting an email to thank them. For elevating our corporate sponsorships as a core fundraising strategy, I think sponsorships offer a unique opportunity, for any organization because most corporations see philanthropic giving and sponsorships as two separate buckets. So how can you really leverage that marketing spend? And a good portion of that success at CMH is being able to report on our KPIs, who's in the room, what they're spending money on, who they're bringing with them. We can collect a lot of that information through, Trellis, and I also really, love utilizing post event surveys. So asking blanket information, even what industry do you work in, your age range, those kinds of demographics, reporting back to your sponsors is really appreciated. And I love tracked and measurable KPIs for future opportunities and growth. So if I am trying to work towards very specific and optimistic revenue targets, I need to be able to track those to know what my growth is. So being able to track revenue drivers, ticketing, our our gala has 350 people. It will usually always have 350 people. So how can I leverage our other revenue drivers to make this event continue to grow year over year and there? And also kind of how to deepen our sponsorship discussion with those people and those KPIs. So if there's someone that sponsored our gala now four years in a row and they see that we are not only tracking this information, but reporting it back to them in a way that's useful to their, decision makers, it is the best way to get an easy yes. So, hopefully, this helped a little bit here, but that's kind of how we are starting to use our data from Trellis. Awesome. Thank you, Katie, and thank you, Heather. I'm definitely not advocating for anyone to get hit by a bus, but if they do win the lottery, I'd love this playbook idea. And, I also just love Heather's talking about leveraging kind of champion donors and getting, you know, four committee chairs and then a big, you know, 20 person committee for each event. Because when I was looking at how much events she does for her staff, I'm like, how do you do that? And that's how, and having that playbook that's very detailed. So setting up people for success is just such a huge, factor. And then when Katie was touching on, you know, the auction bidders, there's a, you know, a subset of auction bidders that are only bidding up to a certain amount. They're gonna be great for, like, a a raffle or smaller campaign, so that's a great segment. And then the ones that maybe did the big bids that lost, you know, putting them up in a different segment and slicing and dicing in different ways that you see. Again, it's it's pretty great once you can actually see that data and and use it, and it's really neat to see that coming through. But I think the key point that I took away from Katie's is just a small point she made. It's about bringing the team together. I spend all of my day chatting to individuals like yourselves, whether you're a fundraiser, you're an event planner, or you're on the data side and finance side as well. And I see sometimes there's a lot of silos and on teams. But now that we're talking about the event in terms of not just the day of, but the before and the prep, looking at the data, getting the right people, the day of, of course, is where the event team shines. But then after working the development team and the data team as well, it's really bringing that team together, finally in an integrated way. So I just really wanted to highlight that, and it's really great to hear Katie talk about that and how she's appreciating her team more, and they're closer and they're better at what they do together, which makes a lot of sense. So on that note, I'm gonna bring up Kirk here. So I'm gonna get him to jump on stage. And Kirk's gonna just dive in quickly into what you can do with that data on Blackbaud Raiser's Edge, and then we're gonna have a little wrap up to answer some of the the questions, and then we can give you some time back. So, Kirk, I'll let you take it away. Yeah. So this is the beginning of the the nerding out section you promised, I assume. So let's, let's start nerding out. So a couple things, of course, up here on the screen, talking about with Blackbaud Raiser's Edge, segmentation. It's come up a lot today. Very powerful segmentation tools in Blackbaud Raiser's Edge with your lists and your queries. The nice thing about Trello is sending that information into an event record in Blackbaud Raiser's Edge is that you can use that participant section. They haven't played in that participant section. It's worth going and just kinda clicking on the work with participants in one of your events. And when that table comes up, click the filter. You'll notice the funnel there, the filters there are participant specific. So you can really hone and get the exact group that you want. And then, of course, once you have that group, you can use it in a plethora of tools. The next one on our slide is the workflows. The workflow designer in Raised Edge, if you haven't used it much, can send out those automated emails to anybody in a group. So you've already got your group, pull it into that workflow designer. The other thing that workflows can do is automate some of those internal processes. Both Heather and Katie talked about their team and working with the team and keeping them informed. That workflow could say, hey. Two weeks post event, put a thing on Kirk's, notice that or in his, work center. Say, hey. Don't get to do a follow-up with our auction winners or, you know, whatever it might be. So those workflows can not only send out those automatic emails to the folks who attended or or whichever segment you're sending it to, can also make sure your internal team stays on top of those stewardship tasks and and following up, with those folks who came to the event. Next, of course, the reporting. Those segments can be pulled into those reports. Raised Edge has lots of reporting. There are also the dashboards built into Raised Edge. The other nice piece of the reporting is maybe this isn't about the people. It's about the gifts. Well, you can go to a dashboard, and if you designated that event as a campaign of fund appeal, depending on what level you put in that, you go to that appeals dashboard and filter for your specific events so you can track them, see how they do you year over year, you know, that kind of reporting. So, again, you can see the success. And, of course, when you're starting to plan next year's gala, you've got that data to kinda follow-up with. There's one more thing I want to mention here, and Justin and I were were also nerding out the other day. And I just wanna quickly remind you about the prospect insights tool. Now while you might have pulled over a segment of your large, bidders for your auction and you're gonna send them those special appeals, some of those folks who, in the example we heard earlier, you know, bought a a drink and left and only spent $20, Prospect Insights is still gonna analyze that individual, and they might help flag some potential major donors that you just know. They came to the event, they attended, but they didn't really get involved. Well, Prospect Insights is still gonna surface up and say, hey. This individual has the potential to give more. So really useful tools always helping you analyze and potentially get more giving out of, the supporters and event attendees, that came to your event. Justin, if there's anything else you wanna talk about or if you wanna continue to nerd out or we can nerd out together, let me know. And, of course, folks, you have your account executives. You can always reach out to them, for more, information on resources as well. Awesome. Thanks, Kirk. No. That's great. I I learned some things when we were chatting for sure, and I think, and Katie called it out in the chat as well. Just around, like, especially the the the simplicity of the workflows. Right? Like, you have a a purchaser that purchases a ticket, then that because they purchased a specific ticket, they're tagged as a certain individual. They're on a fund, a campaign, or appeal, and then you can use that to then build out a workflow for them. Right? So make sure that your event is on a Saturday night. You're not spending Sunday doing anything. Right? You're enjoying, hopefully, some well earned rest and even Monday, hopefully, and your team is already reaching back out to people on the Monday or the Tuesday, whatever cadence they feel is best, but they're already set up for that success. Because, you know, right now, we're talking about how do we, you know, help people make the auction a little less painful by, you know, automatically sending them their digital items so that you don't have to be delivering auction items or or sending it and things like that. But it goes so much further than just helping, you know, the the follow-up on the auction. It's the follow-up on the whole piece in that funnel. And I think the the tool is powerful in in getting the data in the right place. So with that, I just had, just wanted to make sure there was a couple questions in the chat. It looks like they got covered. Mary had one just about the donor information, and I know that, Heather answered that there. But please follow-up, Mary, if you have any more questions around that. But it's it's really just, again, trying to get that data all in the one spot. It looks like Heather uses a lot of different sources to collect that data. And then we had one on, just our upsells actually that important. Like, you know, is a $20 upsell really that important? And I'll just give you a metaphor. So when you go oh, sorry. Here's Heather, to jump on. Heather, if you wanted to expand on that at all, please feel free. No. I apologize. I was a little late to the game and putting up on stage. So, honestly, the data mining and gathering information into this book is quite frankly quite creepy. You'd be surprised what people put on the Internet. So our fundraisers are responsible for putting in all their notes from their meetings respectfully when they meet with these donors. But I provide the piece that's the personal element. So very often, I'm data mining through it. If I know something is important that we wanna get to know, there is nothing better than a donor that they don't know you, but you know who they are, and you can say, hi, mister Smith. I'm so happy you're here before they even walk through you know, like, as they're walking up to you. Mister Smith, let me give you your table right away. So we so I I look I search for pictures. I look for, notes about kids. Facebook is an amazing thing. You know, LinkedIn profiles. Hey. This person worked at Baptist Hospital before they went, you know, and did whatever. So it's it's a little stalker like, but that's it's it's what I've done for years, and you I used to do it for the president of the university that I worked for. I do it now on our donors. So you can add that personal feel. It's not just about the money. It's made me feel like you they you know who who they are before they get there. And that's what that book that that playbook helps you do because the future is already there. And then then the fundraisers are set up for success when they're reaching out to people or when they're going up to tables and so forth. Awesome. Thanks, Heather. Yeah. And I think it's not all 400. It's, you know, it it's the top 20%. It's the people that bought those tables. So if you're like, I don't do any of that. I don't think you have to start by doing everyone. It's, you know, find out take thirty minutes even and say, okay. Here are the top five and just go do it for them. And, Mary, we have multiple we have four fundraisers. And our fundraisers are set up by a chief philanthropy officer who's doing people that give a 100,000 or more, 50,000 or more. Then we have your major gifts, officer. We have a corporate sponsor, you know, donor fundraiser, and then we have new donors. You know, those volunteers that are becoming donors. And so those those those brand new people, like, maybe only bought a $100 ticket to game night, we're not quite sure what their capacity is. Brenna is one of our she comes in like a champ. Everybody loves her, and and she introduces them to the organization beyond the event level. Awesome. Thanks for that. And then just yeah. The other the other question on the upsells here, and then we can give some time back unless, there's any more that come in. But, yeah, the the upsells I I like to when people ask, like, is it really that important? And what I what I like to kinda compare it to is just think about the people that upgrade on an airline. Think about the people, you know, think about the business practices around, you know, would you like to combo that? Would you like to add this to it? The people that say yes to that, are the same people that usually spend more money. So it's just giving you that extra data point. Yes. If you're if it's a $300 ticket to a gala and it's only a $20 additional donation, it's not that much money, but it's that data. And you'd be surprised though if you have a bigger ask. There's always one person that is gonna put the thousand dollars donation in there. We see it kind of spike up, and and there's always one. So, you might as well ask people are ready in to give, and if not, they can easily skip that. But that is mostly it here, and I'm just gonna take a peek at the chat. Okay. And that looks like that's it. So, thank you very much. I just wanna thank you thank, both of our speakers, Heather and Katie, who are both planning events right now, of course, as well, and they took time out of their busy schedules in September to do this. I wanna thank, Kirk for coming in, also for Michael. And I think, Michael, you can just jump on stage if you wanna close it off as at at all. And just thank you to everyone who showed up. I know it's busy. I know that you're planning events, and it's a fundraising season. So I really hope that you wrote down one or two things that you can take and actually apply. And if you would be so kind as to, tell me what those were at some point, my email's right there. And if you didn't, also, please let me know. And, let me know, and then we can work on to see what those those pieces are. So with that, I'll pass it back to Michael, and thank you so much for your time and consideration today. Thanks, Justin. And thanks again to Katie and Heather and Kirk for, joining as well. And thanks to all of you for your attention. And if you have any questions, feel free to reach out to your account executive. And, again, this webinar is recorded, and you will receive it in your email within about a day or two. And, have a great day, and, we'll see you next time.