Name: From Segments to Sweethearts: Targeted Outreach That Wins Donor Hearts
Uploaded: 2026-02-12T20:30:56.559Z
Duration: 51 min 2 s
Description: From Segments to Sweethearts: Targeted Outreach That Wins Donor Hearts

Transcript for "From Segments to Sweethearts: Targeted Outreach That Wins Donor Hearts": So welcome, everyone, to From Segments to Targeting Outreach That Wins Donor Hearts. My name is Ray Borkman. I am part of the marketing team here at Blackbaud, and I'll be introducing and interviewing the person who you really wanna hear from shortly, but I am a white person who identifies as male. I use he, him pronouns. I am 49 years old as of Monday this week. I have a no hair, but a graying beard. I am wearing a blue and pink striped shirt, and I am in the loft office of my home in Charleston, South Carolina, which is located on the native lands of the Edisto, Cuso, and Seaweed people. Alright. Now we've got all that out of the way. I wanna introduce my counterpart, which who is Henry, but I'm gonna give him a second. But first, I'm gonna kinda open up and describe our event event today. So before we dive into the strategies, I just wanna set the stage with a resource that maybe some of the organizations don't fully realize they have access to and what it is that Henry does that gives them this sort of insightfulness that I think is valuable to you, or they don't realize how transformative it can be. So what Henry is here representing is our Blackbaud advisory plus services. So advisory plus is about helping organizations get the absolute most out of their Blackbaud solution. So it goes far beyond, like, training. Right? This is strategic. It's personalized partnership. Advisory plus consultants that work directly inside an organization's own Razor's Edge NXT or other Blackbaud solution environment using real data to, like, streamline workflows, strengthen stewardship, and help teams build repeatable practices that drive measurable outcomes. So the insights you'll hear today about segmentation, personalization, and meaningful donor engagement are the same kinds of approaches that advisory plus uses every day to help nonprofits deepen relationships and elevate results. So, right, as we talk through the how, know that these are tried and true tactics across hundreds of organizations. And so with that, that brings me to the the guest today who I've pumped up. I'm thrilled to be joined by Henry, who is one of our advisory plus consultants who specializes in helping organizations turn scattered data donor rec data blah blah blah. Scattered donor data into thoughtful, human centered outreach strategies. Henry has worked with teams across a wide range of missions, helping them translate RE and XT lists, queries, and reports into high impact owner journeys that are both scalable and personal. Henry brings a unique blend of practical RE and XT experience and strategic fundraising insight. He's here today to share the kinds of real world achievable tactics that can immediately elevate how you communicate with donors. So, Henry, with that introduction, would you like to say something anything else about yourself? Absolutely. Thank you so much for that kind introduction, Ray. My name is Henry Wiencek. I'm located in the Silver Lake area of Los Angeles. I see a couple folks in Chad in LA, somebody from Pasadena, just up the road from me. Originally, I grew up in the East Coast Of The US in Central Virginia. I can see somebody from Richmond's there on the Chad as well, so I always love those Virginians out there. Just to say a bit about myself personally, before coming to Blackbaud, I was a teacher and an educator. And even though I'm not at a school or university at the moment, I still really feel like an educator at my core. Before coming to advisory plus, I was at Blackbaud University. Maybe some of you, took classes at BBU, and I was your instructor. I always loved teaching those large classes. But now I am an advisory plus consultant, which I like to think of as kind of like a one on one tutor. So it's a great opportunity to work with clients on a one on one basis and just solve some problems directly. Just a little bit more about me. I love Ray that you and I are both cat parents. I have our two boys, Harry and Lloyd. We have a third one we're fostering at the moment as well. So shout out to all of those cat people who are out there. But thanks so much for that intro, Ray, and, I'd love for you to continue with our conversation. Absolutely. Absolutely. Sorry about that. I I had a technical difficulty. I had to refresh my screen and didn't realize that it booted me off the the screen share here. So perfect. So here I am. Alright. And I am actually gonna pull down those slides so we can see each other a bit better and jump in. Alright. So I wanna kinda just start this out. I think, you know, the best place to start is at the beginning. Right? So if you were to advise, if a team could spend just one hour in RNXT this week, what are the top three segmentation moves using list, queries, reports that would create the fastest lift? Absolutely. I'm just gonna quickly share my screen. I think that's gonna be a very helpful resource during our conversation. I promise it's not gonna be too clicky. This is just gonna be a reference point so you know exactly what I'm talking about. And I'm guessing some people maybe are very advanced with NXT. Maybe some people are very new. So, Ray, your question is, if somebody just had an hour, what are some really quick wins that they could do, some quick resources they could use in NXT, for example, to find people that are not as engaged? I think always a really good starting point are the fundraising dashboards. Everybody has access to them. It's not an extra tool, and this is a really great web view, analytical tool. So the first place that I would probably go and by the way, all of these tabs that you're seeing, these are prebaked. These are part of the standard dashboards. And one of my favorites is the retention tab. So how many people gave a gift last fiscal year and you retained them? They're also giving this year. It used to be in the old database few days that if you wanted to know your retention numbers, you'd have to, like, build reports and merge queries and crunch those numbers yourself. Now it'll literally just generate it for you. How many people have we retained this year? In our sample environment, it says 42. Here's the revenue they've generated. And if you also wanna narrow that down by appeal, by constituency code, by campaign, you have those filters. And within this universe of data, it's also gonna easily show you your LiveBund donors, folks who gave last year, but, unfortunately, they've not yet given this year. Very easy way to check-in and see what that number looks like. And in fact, if you click on this number, if you click on any number in the dashboard tool, it's gonna generate a list there on the right. That list, you can either save as a list in the web view, which is gonna be really critical if you wanna send out an email to those folks, which we'll talk about, I think, in our next question. Maybe if you wanna apply a workflow to them, take some sort of action. And if you wanna export them from that page, you can easily do that. And if you wanna take more individual actions, you can click on those bubbles, add some actions, add some notes, fundraisers, opportunities. But I also like to tell people, don't just focus on your live funds. Also, focus on your retained donors. Might be a good opportunity to reach out to those 42 people. Say, hey. Y'all are rock stars. Thank you for giving in 2026 just like 2025. Keep them engaged. Keep them happy. Maybe there's, like, a second gift they'd be willing to give. So that's the first thing that I would do. Take a look at that retention tab. By the way, the acquisition tab, the recapture tab, also some great data points right at your fingertips. The next thing that I would do is I'd probably go to the overview tab, which, as the name suggests, just gives you a really good bird's eye view of what giving has looked like in your org. And, of course, you can tweak the gift date range, the funds, the appeal. And, by the way, all of this, you can export. You can also schedule regular emails to go out to folks using that little clock icon. I wanna scroll down to the bottom of this page because there's one data point. Obviously, there's a lot of great stuff we could we could probably spend the next sixty minutes just talking about all the data points here. Donor life cycle, pardon me for highlighting that, it's a great way to find people who are at risk, lapsing, lapsed. And just like the previous data point I showed you, if you click on that graph, it'll generate a list of those people that you can either export or save as a list. So I think those are really easy data points that you can pull out. I also wanna quickly pivot over to the standard reporting tool as well. That's gonna give you some additional options if maybe you want more specific data points. So live ones, folks who are lapsing, easy to grab in dashboards, but I would definitely encourage you to take a look at the standard reports area in the web view, which is also in the analysis section. Go down to standard reports. If you're somebody who have used reports in the database view before, it's gonna be a lot of the same reports, but there's some extra functionality in the web view that's pretty new that I'm gonna talk you through. One of my favorite places to just grab really good data points and reports is in the analytical reports category. One in particular that I really like is the comparative report. What if you quickly want to identify people who have decreased their giving from one period of time to another? Who's decreased their giving from last quarter to this quarter? Whose increase they're giving from last year to this year. When you build one of these reports, you can choose what the criteria is. You can choose the date range, so maybe from last calendar year to this calendar year. And one thing that I always advise when you're running these reports, if you wanna take more action with these folks, generate an output query. So that means once you generate this report, you actually get two products. You'll not only get a PDF that'll show you all the people who who have decreased their giving from last year to this year, but you'll also get a query of those constituents. Maybe you wanna export them for a mailing. Maybe you wanna plug them into another report and analyze them further. That's a great way to get that information, get that PDF, but also have a query that you can use for further follow-up down the line. Let me just show you what a prebaked version of that report looks like. You can see the constituent name on the left. They're giving from last year to this year, and we can scroll down. So that will give you a sense of what kind of what kind of report you can build. Couple of other quick ones that I really like. If you wanna generate a CyBunt report, we talked about LiveBunt before, folks who gave a gift last year but not this year. Cybunts are folks who have given some years in the past. Maybe you wanna find people who gave a gift in 2021, 2019, 2018, but haven't given this year. So don't just focus on the people who haven't given since last year. It might be worth your time to go back a little bit further. For those folks who might wanna send out a different type of appeal, different type of messaging, but also a great opportunity to find folks who haven't given in a longer period of time. One more report that I wanna walk through that I really like is a new donors report. Just like the title suggests, it's a great way to generate a quick list of people who are new to your organization. And one way in which I would leverage this is use the schedule tool. This is something you can only do in the web view. Let's say once a month, you wanna have a fully baked version of this report that shows you all of the new donors that came into your database this month. All you have to do is hit that schedule button. You can choose the recurrence. Maybe it starts at the beginning of next month, and you can say it's gonna be every month. And then once you set this up in that shared with me area, a fully baked version of that report will be saved for you. And if you wanna share that with some of your colleagues, you can do that as well. The last thing that I would say, and I I don't I don't think we really have time to get into as much depth, is don't forget that list and query is gonna give you even more ability to customize a universe of people. Maybe I wanna be really hyperspecific. All the people who are board members, who live in a certain part of California, and haven't given since, like, 2021. If you wanna be really precise, you can always go to list and query, save it, and then use it for some other tools. So those are probably the starting points that I would do if somebody wanted to get some quick wins. Right? I love it. I love it. Thank you. And now moving bond beyond starting, I wanna dig a little deeper into the maybe some LiveBunt reactivation. So let me put it to you this way. Can you walk us through a simple LiveVunt play in RNXT? You know, how. would you build the list, pick a message angle, and and set success metrics, right, for the first thirty days? Absolutely. So let's say we were just in that retention tab. We identified our 114 LiveBund donors. We can quickly build and save a list right from here. What would you do with that list? I think the first thing that I would probably do is consider the email tool that we have in the web view. This is baked into the web view. It's not an extra tool. I know some people will use tools like Constant Contact or Letterbox that are extra subscriptions, but everybody's gonna have email. So if you ever used a tool like Mailchimp or something like that, it's a great way to generate one time emails to universes of people right from right from your NXT system. When you're ready to build a new email, you can do it here. I And wanna start with the the second half of your question. Right? How do you identify how successful those emails have been? Once you sent out a bunch of emails, when you go to this menu, you'll be able to see average email performance of all of your emails, open rate, click rate, and bounce rate. You can also go through individual emails. Obviously, this is a a fake database, so it's gonna look very faky here. You have this little honeycomb that'll show you open rate, click rate, transaction rate. That's gonna be a really critical tool if this email has an online donation form as part of it. So maybe you're sharing a link. Hey. Go to this form and make a donation. And if they do, that'll let you know very directly the money ROI of that email. You can also see number of clicks, number of transactions, and if there are any data points like number of opens, you can click on that number. Hopefully, you'll get more than one in your actual email, and you can save it as a list and see who clicked within that email. So that's a good way to check-in on the metrics after the email has been sent out. But now to the first part of your question. Right? What sort of email would I send out to those LiveBunt donors? Let's say I wanna just start with those a 114 people and design a message that could go out to all of them. This is an example of an email message that I could design. It's got lots of nice images. It's got our social media links you can put in your logo, and make sure that you're using this text tool to have text that engages people and gives them a very direct call to action. We can see there are merge fields. Hello, preferred names. So whatever their preferred name is, that'll be on the email, so it's not one size fits all. My, my high school uses NXT email, and I remember a few years ago, I got an email that said, dear and in brackets student, so somebody forgot to put in the merge field. Don't forget to do that when you're designing it. So we'll say, hello, preferred name. We hope that this year has been joyful for you and your family. We deeply appreciate your support. If you wanna put in a merge field of their most recent gift amount or date, that can be a nice way to quickly thank them for their last gift. And maybe you want this to be an opportunity to let them know well, pardon me. I just clicked inside that where shouldn't have. That's alright. To let them know what's going on at your organization and have a call to action where they can donate. So this is an example of a button that you can design. So I think it's very important to have a clear call to action and have language that addresses the fact that these are lie these are folks who have given previously. Now this is a bit more of a one size fits all LiveBun email, but maybe you wanna use a list to distinguish different types of LiveBuns. Maybe you wanna find people who are LiveBunds who are younger alums if you're a school or maybe folks who are older, live in certain places. So it doesn't have to be one size fits all. You can create different emails for different groups, or if you'd rather just go out to the whole universe of people, you can design an email that'll be applicable to all of those LiveBond donors. Also, one other quick thing that is one of my favorite things to talk about with folks at AdvisoryPlus is the workflow tool. The email tool is a great way to send out a onetime email once or maybe a couple of times. You can choose to do it as many as many times as you'd like, but the workflow tool is much more set it and forget it. It'll create a sequence of emails that'll go out. For example, a lot of people will use this to welcome first time donors. Hey. Anytime somebody makes their first time donation, and that would be in the criteria, then send out this email. Then a month later, send out the second email. And when you use workflows, maybe it's gonna be a sequence of emails. Maybe it's gonna be a sequence of actions that you can use to remind your fundraisers. Maybe it's gonna be both. This is just a hypothetical example of a workflow that you might wanna build for your LiveBunds. Here are all the folks that we wanna contact. First thing that happens is that LiveBunt email automatically goes out to all of those people. And then after a month, maybe an action record gets created to all of the fundraisers who are assigned to those LiveBond folks. Send out a mailing to those people reminding them to come back into our organization. And then once that action is complete and two months have passed, another action record is created for those fundraisers, maybe time for a phone call. This is just one theoretical example of a workflow you can build. There's so many ways in which you can use this. And once you activate it, it's set it and forget it. One last thing I wanna show you that I really like about workflow. For those of you who have worked with lists before, lists are gonna be automatically dynamic, and they're gonna automatically refresh. Let's say that I build a list of all the people who are alums in California. If I want that workflow activate anytime a new alum moves to California, I can apply workflow to new constituents added to this list. So that means a month from now, if a new alum moves out here to California, this workflow will automatically be added to them, and I don't need to do anything. So I really like talking about workflows. It doesn't mean you have to use it for every appeal, but it can be a great way to standardize different types of follow-up you have. And I think this has been a huge time saver for a lot of folks who I've worked with. Absolutely. Alright. I love that. And now you can see a theme here. I'm gonna dig a little bit. We're gonna get a little bit more granular. So, you know, if you were I wanna pick your brain on which two or three data points in RNXT you would say most reliably improve response when used for personalization, you know, beyond first name or. beyond, insert first name here. I can't remember what. And how do you fold them into email and forms? Absolutely. So when you're building things like lists, you can build a list that's pretty broad. Maybe I wanna build a list of all the people who are alums, maybe all the people who have a certain giving history. But there's so many fields that you can use that'll really help you identify very specific pools of people. Maybe you've got a custom fields that you've built attributes as they're known in the database view based on someone's interests, maybe based on what they like to give to, what they don't like to give to. It sounds counterintuitive, but a lot of times I like to tell clients, don't forget what people don't like as well. That can be very helpful when you're segmenting people when you know, hey. Ray loves to give to this type of initiative, but Ray hates to give to that type of initiative. So using custom fields, prospect status, what they will give to gifts to other organizations, those are gonna be really great tools when you're building lists and queries of people. But you also ask in practice, once I have those different buckets of people, how can I reach out to them in different ways? And I think that's where online donation forms can really come in handy. To give you one clear example, let's say that you are a university. It probably doesn't make sense to reach out to all of your alums in the same way. It can make a lot of sense to reach out to them in different ways. Literally, just this week, my alma mater, Haverford College, sent me out a text message saying, hey, Henry's Screenshare. Do wanna give x amount of dollars for the class of 2008? I think it really makes sense to make those appeals and asks catered to those different segments. Here's an example of an optimized donation form that I quickly built in our donation forms area. One of the great things about an optimized form is that it's super visual. We've got this nice image. So let's say that this is gonna be sent out maybe via email to the class of 2004. It not only includes this image. It's also got this really handy text. One thing that I've noticed a lot of colleges like to do is when you're designing the ask amounts and the goals, be clever. If this is the class of 2004, maybe we're trying to raise $20,004. Maybe the suggested ask amounts are, like, 24 and 2,004, things like that. Here, we can see some a message that's very relatable to the people that are that are gonna be receiving it. We can see how much has been raised so far. And one thing that you don't even have to do to set up when you're using standard donation forms is there's two tools calls recurring gift upsell and intelligent ask. What intelligent ask will do is based off of information about the person who has accessed this link, it'll actually increase the amount of suggested amounts that's on that screen. So if I open up that same form, it'll probably recommend, hey, Henry's Screenshare. Would you give us $50? If Bill Gates opens up that same link, it'll say, hey, Bill. Would you give us $5,000? So that's a nice automatic way to have those suggested ask amounts reflect who the person is, and you don't need to do anything other than set it up. Recurring gift upsell is a nice opportunity to tell the donor, hey. Rather than giving us a $100 now, would you rather give us $30 a month? And if just a few of those people end up clicking yes, you've got a nice recurring gift as opposed to just a onetime donation. So I would definitely use these nice visual optimized donation forms. You can send them out via email or social media to different groups of people, and I would also take a look at those options that I mentioned in your standard donation forms. This is a little bit more niche, and it's database view only. But one thing I also like to tell people for appeals is that if you use the export tool down in the database view, you can choose what outputs you want that you can plug into a mailer. And one really cool thing you can do in database view export is let's say that you wanna take the total amount or the amount of the last gift that somebody gave last year, but increase it by 25%. So I can say, hey, Ray. Thanks for that last gift you gave of a thousand dollars. Would you now consider giving $1,250? I think that's 25%. I'm not a math person. So that's something you can do in export that's really cool. You can take one figure and then increase it by x percentage or x amount. That is database view only, so I don't want us to get too far on the weeds. But I like telling people about that option as well. Really great for appeals and mailings. Excellent. Excellent. I was an English major theater minor myself, so I don't know how to make the maths math either. So alright, now let's sort of now we've sort of seen some of the the the practical stuff. I wanna kinda back up and talk a little bit about advisory plus then if we can. So when you're kicking off an advisory plus engagement for RE and XT, which baseline metrics do you capture, and which leading indicators tell you that you're on track? Like, what are you sort of looking. for? I think every client is different. Right? No two customers are the same. A lot of times, I have a kickoff call with people, and they have a very specific outline of some of the things they wanna do. We want to clean up our data. We wanna get rid of duplicates. We want to increase the number of recurring donors that we have. We want to make decisions about what to do with old inactive constituents, whether to keep them, whether to delete them, and how to reactivate them. Some people are coming into NXT extremely new and really don't really know where to start. So I'm helping them really get a sense of the lay of the land, where everything is, and how to optimize the tool. But, Ray, I also get a lot of people who are sort of in the middle who don't know what they don't know. Maybe they've used it for a few years, but they feel like they're not really using it to the fullest capacity. I had a client just a few weeks ago. I'm gonna mess up this analogy, but it was like they said they bought a Cadillac, but they're using it like a horse horse driven cart or something like that. But you get the idea of what I'm trying. to say. Some people. have this tool, but they don't have a sense of the full capacity of it. And it's always really fun having those relationships because I get the opportunity to show people how to do things that they weren't aware of that become a big time saver. For example, just a few weeks ago, I had a client who really wanted the ability to group prospects in different ways because, you know, they don't wanna take actions globally with everybody. They wanna be able to take very targeted actions with different groups of prospects, maybe people in that initial ID phase, maybe people in that stewardship phase. And they weren't really familiar with things like prospect status and prospect classification and financial info. And I walked them through that, and that really unlocks their ability to say, alright. Now here's all the people who are the high touch stewardship donors. Let's create some actions for them. Let's create a workflow for them. But here are the people in that sort of early qualification phase so we can take different sorts of actions with them. So it became this really great tool to help them segment different types of prospects in different ways. And they weren't new to NXT. They just didn't really know how to maximize that tool. So it really runs the gamut. You have people that know exactly what they want. They have people who are really a blank slate, and you have people in the middle who just feel like they don't know what they don't know. Alright. So then digging even more down that direction, you know, where do organizations most often stumble when they first try targeted outreach in our next tier? Like, what guardrails do you try and set during an advisory plus engagement to to keep momentum, maintain momentum? Absolutely. You know, one thing that I'm guessing a lot of folks in this call have heard before, garbage in, garbage out. So you definitely encounter people who wanna start with the high end stuff. They wanna use online donation forms. They wanna use emails and dashboards, but they look at it and they can tell that the numbers and the data aren't very good. So you have to have a good foundation to have a nice house. Right? So if you wanna use a lot of these more elaborate tools, you've gotta make sure you've got clean data. So one of the things that I very often emphasize with people are cleaning up things like constituent duplicates. We can use the duplicate management tool in NXT to identify and merge duplicates. If they've got thousands and thousands and thousands, we can use mass merge, which is much more efficient than just going two by two if you've got, like, 10,000 duplicates in your system, which, unfortunately, some people do. Also, cleaning up contact info, maximizing tools like address finder. That's a great way for every 90, Razor's Edge to update contact info based on USPS change of address database. So that's a really nice way to make sure you've got clean, up to date address info. In addition, email finder is a nice way to add some addition additional emails to folks so we can really leverage those email tools. That's And a good example of garbage in, garbage out. If you don't really have any decent emails and you're trying to send out the email tool, you're gonna get a lot of emails that look like this. Right? You're gonna get a high bounce rate and a lot of people that actually don't get the message. I So wanna make sure that you got good, clean data before we actually do the more advanced outreach and analysis and analysis work. Another really great tool that we do in advisory plus that helps give people a sense of how clean their data is is what we like to call a PSA report, which is a a process and solution assessment. It's this really nifty Power BI tool that we have access to, and what it'll do is generate a whole PDF or report that'll give us an overview of what their data looks like. It starts with pretty simple data points. How many constituents do you have? How close are you to hitting your constituent data band, which can be very useful for a lot of people? Also, Mhmm. it'll let you know information like year over year giving. What what what your number of donors look like in 2019 versus 2026? It's also a really great way to get a look at your code tables. Do you have a bunch of phone types that you should get rid of? Do you have a bunch of constituent codes you never use anymore? So that always is a really good reference point, and that's also a really great conversation where a lot of people will say, wow. I didn't realize we had all these old address types. Let's go through those. Let's delete those. Great opportunity just to clear out some old stuff that people don't need. So I think garbage in, garbage out is a really important phrase. And one last thing I'll say is I always emphasize that for every organization, it's critical to have a good policies and procedures guide. That's a document that your organization can build and not only build, maintain year over year. That's gonna give everybody on your team clear guidance for how you do data entry, what the steps are, who's responsible for what. It's also a great resource in case you have a new hire that you need to onboard. So I really like to emphasize data cleanliness because if that's not in a good state, it's really hard to do all these these things that we've talked about today. Yeah. Henry, I I love that. And as I was, like, sort of listening you talk through that, like, this sort of analogy popped into my popped into my head a little bit. Like, sort of envisioning, like, a razor's edge NXT is like it's like the gym. Right? You can you can go to the gym. You can get a workout on your own. You can get in shape. You can do you know, if you you know what you're doing, you can certainly do the weights that you're familiar with. You can do the exercises you're familiar with. Working with you, though, that's sort of like that's the that's the hiring a personal trainer is what it feels like to me. Like, now there's somebody who has some expertise in areas that you may not be familiar with, can show you things, can I don't know? Can you I that that's sort of what was running through my head. Maybe can you run with that analogy a little bit? Absolutely. I mean, if you're like me, whenever I've gone to the gym in the past, I'm not doing things very efficiently. Maybe I'm doing the wrong stuff. But when you're with a private trainer, it's accountability. They give you a schedule, Right. or they can help you come up with a schedule. And you're exactly right, Ray. It can help you get a sense of, oh, yeah. I didn't realize that I could try this. I've never heard of this exercise. I didn't realize that was the best practice. So it's a good opportunity for us to learn together. It doesn't mean that I'm always gonna have the answers, and it doesn't mean you always have to follow exactly what I say. But I think it just makes the process of optimizing ANSI a lot easier when you've got that kind of accountability buddy who can help you and just give some advice and provide some knowledge that maybe they weren't aware of before. Yeah. And it and it's and it's sort of similarly outcomes focused. Right? Like, let's we have these goals that we've come up with together, and now we're gonna you know, what we're seeking is to get there together. Alright. I got one last one for you then, wrapping, hopefully, up with a bow, and then we'll see what kind of questions we might have. Sure. But I was hoping maybe you could share some kind of, like, before or after story. Like, no knee no names needed, Mhmm. but just where, like, some segment specific outreach or some other, projects, turned casual supporters into true sweethearts in the theme of Valentine's Day of the mission that you've you've participated in. Absolutely. I'll use a different holiday as an example. Christmas, just this past. year. I had a client who hadn't sent out a holiday card for years because so much of their data of their key major donors was not in NXT. It was in a spreadsheet. And they knew that a lot of those people were only in the spreadsheet but not in Razor's Edge. They knew that some of the people were in both. So the data was so messy, they didn't feel confident in exporting from NXT to actually send out a letter. So and just to step back and contextualize this with advisory plus, we'll come up with four tracks that are four macro goals that I'm gonna help you accomplish over twelve months. A lot of times, those tracks are very broad that could be applicable to any organization. We wanna do prospect management better. You wanna do reporting and analysis better. Sometimes it's highly specific to one org and one particular task. So we created a track for that org that was literally just, okay. We're gonna import this new data for those spreadsheets, and we're gonna make sure that the contact info and address info that we enter in is also clean and consistent and correct. Then we're gonna segment that information correctly into queries and exports. And then from there, you'll be able to actually send out those letters. So we spent, I think, a good two months importing data, merging data, making sure it was clean and correct. And by the end of it, I think in late November, they sent out their first holiday card in x number of years. So for them, that was a pretty big win. That was a great opportunity to get all that data that they knew that they need that they needed, but put it in one place where they can actually access it. So I think that's the first thing that comes to mind. And holiday related, not Valentine's Day, but I think still applicable to what you're talking about. Absolutely. Absolutely. I like it. So we will jump into q and a at this point, which I think we have, so far. I just have, I believe, one from Ashley, but. I will buy this opportunity for other folks to drop any into the q and a that you have there. Henry, I'm gonna go ahead and share this one on the screen Sure. so that you can see it, so that everyone else can see it from Ashley, where there'll eventually be more filters to customize workflows. Great question. So let me go into this workflow. One question that I get a lot and, Ashley, feel free to jump into chat if if this is what you're referring to. One question I get a lot about workflows is, will there be a branching option? So, for example, if there's a workflow, maybe there is an initial action and there's a particular response to it that's good or bad or whatever. And then depending on the response, maybe it'll go to one side of the workflow or a different side of it. We're not there yet. I'm told that that is something that they're working on in terms of building out different branching options. Beyond that, I'm sure that they could build out more of these. Let me quickly show you some of these different options. We could choose a different list. Pardon me. Get it. That's right. I wanna go back here. So select criteria right now is just based off of giving history. I'm guessing in the future, this will probably expand to have other options. List, obviously, is gonna be very flexible. You can put in any kind of list you'd like. In terms of branching, I know that that's something that they're working on. I've not heard any particular road maps for when that's gonna be available. So I hope that helps, Ashley. Let me know if you have follow ups, and let me know if there's other questions that folks have. Got a couple more here. So she said. that was helpful. So I'm gonna share the next one. Great. And I'm not sure that I quite understand the question, so I'm hoping that you do. The new donor who donates at the major gift level, well, the different segmentation tools can put automatically then to label them. So, John, let me give you an example. Let me know if this is helpful for you. So I think, let's say, for example, I go to your website, whatever organization you're in, and I give you $10,000. You wanna easily be able to say, hey. That's a major donor. So the answer is yes and no, John. Now when you build an online donation form and I don't wanna be too clicky here. I'll just I'll just tell you rather than showing you. One of the things that you can do in an online donation form is to automatically apply an appeal or a constituent code to that donor. So, for example, you could build an online donation form that you can put on your website, and anytime a new constituent makes a donation via that form, a constituent code will apply to them. Now, John, theoretically, maybe this is a form that you use to target major donors where the recommended amount is above $10,000. So that could be a way of grouping potential major donors. And on that form, you could automatically apply major donor. There's no way to say, alright. If somebody gives below $5,000, call them a donor. If somebody gives above $10,000, call them a major donor. What I would say is, also, when somebody donates via form, they're gonna go into the system in batch, and you definitely could have the ability when you're reviewing that batch before you approve it. Hey. Here's all the donors who gave $10,000. I'm gonna give them the constituency code of major donor. Here are all the people who gave $50. I'm just gonna give them the constituency code of donor. So doing a little bit of data entry on the batch before you approve it could give you some back end touches to segment those people. So it's nothing like totally automatic, but I would recommend some of those options. I hope that addresses your question, John. Let me know if that if that's helpful, if you have follow ups. Excellent. And I'm gonna put up the next one, but I'm gonna preempt it a little bit because I'm gonna ask you a question because I was actually inspired from the prior question because it made me think think of something, Henry. So I wonder a little thought experiment here. How often, like, when you're in a conversation with a client, they have a particular let's call it a workflow that they want to accomplish. And it's because they're trying to reach some end. Mhmm. And the workflow itself, the way they envision it or the way they prefer to do it or maybe the way they've always done it, doesn't really exist, but you can still get to the end that they're looking to. Does. that make sense what I'm saying? So how often do you discover that, like, by approaching the problem with your knowledge of the solution and what's possible, you're able to kind of get them where they wanted to be even if it's not the way they thought you were gonna get there. Absolutely. I think the analogy that I like to use is Raiser's Edge has a lot of tools in the toolbox, and sometimes they're gonna give you the same outcome. Query is a good example. And, Tina, I see your question about, you know, lists and and workflows and such. Sometimes there's multiple tools in Query that would give you the same outcome. You could merge a query or maybe use query options to put queries together. That's a little technical, but that's one example for you. I mean, just recently, I had somebody who is interested in sending out an email to try to encourage people to send out send in updated contact info, which is great. You could definitely send out an email and say, hey, alums. Can you send in up to date contact info? But I also let also let them know about the NXT portal tool, which is a literal portal that you can link into your website that allows people to log in and update their contact info. So to your point, right, these could be two different options that would essentially have the same outcome. Portal might even be a little bit better because that'll directly update that constituent record. So, yeah, a lot of times, there's multiple ways you can achieve the same outcome. It's all about the best fit. And Tina asked a good question. Are there plans to use queries instead of list for workflows and emails? Tina, I'm not aware of any specific timeline for having queries be used instead of lists. Maybe you're aware of this, but let's say you have a query that you built that's a little bit more elaborate. Because at the end of the day, query is always gonna give you greater ability to be more specific and more micro in the universes that you're building. But you wanna apply a workflow to them. You wanna send out an email to them. All you have to do is make sure that that query is saved as a static query. You can always change that formatting between dynamic and static. And then once it's a static query, you can go to the list tool and grab it and then save it as a list and then use it. And then you can always go back to that query and switch it back to dynamic. Now it's still not ideal. Right? It's still not something that where you can easily grab a dynamic query into lists and workflows. Hopefully, that'll be functionality that'll be available in the future. I'm not aware of any particular plans for that. And this is a little bit parallel to this team, and maybe this helps, maybe this doesn't. One cool thing you you can do as of right now is if you've got a list and you wanna add a dynamic query to that list, if you go to add exclude, you can also choose a query, and those don't have to be static queries. Those those can be dynamic queries. So maybe that's a little different from what you're asking, Tina, but that can be a nice way to merge a list with a dynamic query. Now you've got a list you can use for a workflow or for an email. Excellent. So I've got a couple of question. I'm gonna share something really quickly here, Shoot. because there have been a couple of questions about the and I shared this in the chat as well about, like, some feature releases. Is this coming out? Are you working on this? So the first thing that I've put in the chat and scrolled across the bottom here is our product update briefings. These happen twice a year, and they are this stock the. where we present, yeah, we present a road map for you of what is new and upcoming. So, you know, I would encourage you as if your appraiser's Edge NXT to to keep these on your radar, to attend these, at least register so you can watch the on demand recording. The link that I've provided, which you can click on that ticker, it will take you there as well as the one in the chat, you can watch the recordings of previous as well. And then I'm gonna spin up the next question for Henry, but I'm gonna put up in the chat and another ticker here in a second a link to in the Blackbaud community where you can put suggestions for features that you would like to see. And the and that is something that we really, really do pay attention to, our development team. So I saw some suggestions of some things you'd like, So I'm gonna share that link as well. But I wanted to go ahead and pass the next question to Henry so he can start And, working, don't forget. about the what's new tile on the home page of your constituent rec or or your your NXT site. That's a great place to see some recent. features that are rolling out. Sometimes I log into our sample environment, look at what's new and say, oh, I didn't realize that was coming up. So I would definitely have that on your radar. That's a good way to keep an eye on changes as well. And this is the new question from Dawn. Great. And Don's question as far as segmentation, best practice for marketing donors is only wanting to receive once a year thank you for tax purposes. Awesome question, Don. I would say there's generally two fields on a constituent record that are really good for communication preferences. Solicit code, which I'm gonna talk to in just a second, and consents. I think solicit code is the best way to group people based on different types of preferences, whether and that's a good example of one. Right? They just wanna receive receive a once a year thank you for tax purposes. They don't wanna get one receipt for every donation that they give. So if that is something that you wanna set up for a constituent, I would really recommend making that a solicit code. You can customize these solicit codes in the table section of Raiser's Edge. And so, for example, right here, we've got an option end of year mailing only. So that can be a really easy way for you to group all of the people that just wanna get end of year mailing. And then once you've got that list, perfect. Now I can go into the giving statements tool, plug in that list. Hey. Let's send out a giving statement to all of those people with that solicit code. Consent is a little bit more like I've opted in to email newsletter. I've opted out to SMS. It's a bit more of a binary option, but I think solicit code is the best way to capture that. Then it's really easy to grab that solicit code and list and queries, and then you can use it for your mailings, for reports, whatever you need. So I think that's what I would go with, Don. Alright. Excellent. I'm can see a picture of me there in. my sample environment. Nice. Nice. And I'm gonna share another. Lindsay, great question. So what Lindsay is referring to is there are tags that NXT will generate automatically based on particular circumstances. So it looks like this constituent has a recent gift, an overdue pledge, registered for events. Nobody's had a meeting with them in a while. Lindsay, I the short answer is I think there are. I don't think it's anything in the immediate future, but I did see I can't remember where it was. I don't know if it was in one of our pubs, but there is there's chatter about it. I think that's something that is on their radar that they do wanna build out in the future. I don't think it's anything that's coming in the immediate future, but stay tuned, Lindsay. I I do think that being able to customize tags is something that will be on the horizon at some point. Alright. Excellent. Absolutely. Let's just very. quickly, in addition to that, don't forget, you know, if if for now there's something you really do wanna customize, you can always build a custom field. Right? Perfect. Maybe that'll serve your purposes. But, eventually, Lindsay, I think we're gonna see that functionality come into NXT. Dawn says, thanks. Confirms we're doing it right. I think we almost switched. She said, I actually moved pushed it aside before I actually saw it. So here comes another one. Great. Yeah. Communicating with different segments of list. Can have various emails and outreach and out Outreach messages be sent out to segments list, but all tied to the same campaign. So in terms of setting up a a list that goes out to the same campaign, so I wanna see I wanna make sure that that we're addressing the the right question there for John. So let's say, hypothetically, there's various emails in Outreach, but it's also tied to the campaign. What you could do is you could let me think about it this way. I mean, the short answer is yes. Maybe you could have an appeal that's something like direct mail. Right? And let me know if I'm on track here with what you're looking for, John. Let's say that you've got an appeal that's like email appeal or direct mail, and that's gonna be a broad outreach campaign. But then within that appeal, you can have different packages. Right? Because you wanna send out maybe one type of letter to a different segment of alums and, like, a different type of letter or email to a different groups group of people. So I would say probably the best way to do that, John, is to use appeals and packages. And I can very quickly show you. And maybe you're familiar with this. That's the first thing that comes to mind. You generate appeals, you can link it to packages. I don't wanna click too much, but I should be able to show you an example of that. Just open up an appeal. So this would be the overarching appeal. Maybe it's email, direct mail. And then within it, we can have packages. There's none here. And then all of those little individual packages can have their own individual goals, and that can establish the different segments. So that's what I would probably do, John, for email. The other thing that I would note in the mail tool and the database view, there's a segment tool. And this is a little bit in the weeds, but I'm just gonna very quickly show you, then we can move on. There's the segment tab whenever you create a mail in, and that allows you to have one letter campaign. But you can have different queries, and they'll have and they'll have different appeals or different packages applied to them. So that's a good way to have one letter campaign, but you can apply different appeals and packages to it. So that's probably where I would start. I hope that's helpful, John. Feel free if there's time to send a follow-up. Those are my initial thoughts. Alright. And it looks like we have one left, and it's and I'm gonna answer it. So so this one's for me. Mary, are there copies of the road maps available for viewing other than through the pubs? Sort of. If you follow that link to the pub, you go to the solution, Razer's Edge NXT. You click on the link for the most recent one. When you get there, there's a companion doc that essentially spells out what the pub video speaks through, the bullet points So if that's if you're kinda looking for a written version of it, you can find that just in the same place where the pub is. And I believe, Henry, we have gone through all of the things. So deal. I wanna say thank you to you, Henry, for all this wonderful information. I wanna say thank you to everyone for joining. I also wanna say if you're frantically typing the question right now, don't give up. Never fear. We will still receive it, and we can email you with the answer afterwards. So no problem. I also wanna reiterate something that I said at the beginning, which is that you will get an email in about twenty four hours with an on demand link to today's presentation. Opportunity to schedule a call with Ali if you'd like. Maybe you wanna have Henry come and work with you for a little while and help you achieve your goals more quickly and more efficiently. And, also, we all have some links to some additional resources in that email as well. So thank you for your time. Henry, you wanna send us home? No. Ray Borkman, thank you for being our emcee today, and it's always a pleasure getting to interact with lots of awesome Blackbaud clients and addressing questions. No. I appreciate your time, and I appreciate everybody's time who joined today. Excellent. Well, thank you very much. And, everyone, have a great rest of your day. Have a great rest of your week. Take care, everyone.