Video: Preparing for Your Annual Appeal | Duration: 1948s | Summary: Preparing for Your Annual Appeal

Transcript for "Preparing for Your Annual Appeal": Alright. I see people joining in the chat and saying hello. So thank you to all for joining us today for the next installment in our arts and cultural webinar series. This is preparing for your annual appeal. Please go ahead and introduce yourselves in the chat, and we will go ahead and get started. And throughout the presentation, if you have any tips or tricks or anything relevant to that section of our discussion, please pop it in the chat and let your, let your colleagues know. Alright. My name is Lexi Trempe, and I am a senior customer success manager here at Blackbaud. And prior to joining Blackbaud, I worked in development and marketing at a children's museum, shout out to my friends at Callidium, and a nonprofit with house museums in focused on historic preservation. And at both organizations, one of my primary responsibilities was managing our organization's annual appeal, including design, recipient management, incoming donations, and reporting. I was a daily Altru user at both organizations and also managed an RE 7 to Altru Convergent. I live in Charleston, South Carolina with my husband, our 2 kiddos, a dog, and 2 cats, and today is my birthday. Alright. A little housekeeping before we get started. The webinar audio is broadcast through your computer speakers. If you encounter any audio or technical issues like frozen slides or any any funniness with the, sound coming through, usually a quick browser refresh is the best way to get everything working again. And worst case scenario, log out, log back in, and that should fix things. Chat and q and a are located on the right hand side of the screen and, there's also if we if we don't get to your questions during the session, we will follow-up via email, but we have a time for questions at the end. Next to chat, you should see Documents. If you click on that, you'll see a number of links and resources that you may want to reference throughout the presentation or bookmark and save for future reference. At the bottom of the screen, you'll see a little cogwheel at the bottom of the event space. You can use that cogwheel to adjust any of your settings. And along the top of the screen, you'll also see tabs for meeting the speakers and agenda. So sometimes slides in Goldcast get a little bit squashed looking. If that's happening, hover over the right hand corner of the display and you can click that box to expand your slides. So, now that we are most of the way through August, believe it or not, it is time to start planning for your annual appeal. At many organizations, the launch date for the year end appeal is typically gonna be somewhere late October, early November, maybe even earlier. To make sure you give yourself adequate time to get your appeal out the door, you should work backward from your ideal launch date to create a timeline with a series of milestones to to guide your, the creation of your appeal. So, for example, if you want your appeal to be hitting mailboxes on November 1st, you might wanna start pulling your initial work list and working on that design in August. So if your launch date is November 1, what's a week backwards from that? That's when you're gonna wake make sure your, letters are with the mail house going through the mail. A couple days prior to that, you wanna be able to have your board of trustees, your director, everybody signing letters. A couple days before that, time for them to print, a month before that for design, like that. So you work back from that launch date to get your timeline. We'll run through a typical appeal process start to finish to give you an overall idea of important steps and milestones. I wanna give a plug for my colleague Jessica Pierce's recent webinar for Altru on managing patron communications. This is a great way to get an overview of all the communications features in Altru, and a really holistic sense of all the things that Altru can do for you, for marketing. So if you haven't done so already, go back and watch that. We have a link to that included under documents. Alright. So first things first. Before beginning your annual appeal or any campaign for that matter, you want to ensure that your organization is maintaining your database and adhering to best practices for managing donor data. This is a year round effort and will make a huge difference in the success of your constituent outreach. The information in your system is only as good as what you're putting into it. Bad data in, bad data out. Make sure you're running the duplicate merge process on a regular basis. I'd recommend monthly at a minimum, but weekly if possible. If you've never run the duplicate merge process before, reach out to your customer success manager. We can provide you with some helpful resources to get started. If you've never run it, you open it up, there's a 1,000,000 duplicates in there, it can feel a little overwhelming. But don't worry, you can merge multiple constituents at once, and once you're over that initial batch of constituents, it gets much, much easier to maintain. We'd also recommend using Address Finder and Deceased Record Finder features, which are available under Data Tune Up to manage your constituent updates. Address Finder utilizes the USPSNCOA or National Change of Address database to look for updated address information. If you've ever moved and completed a forward of address with the United States Postal Service, that's where we get that information. So USPS updates the NCUA database 4 times per year. Deceased Finder is a service that can screen your existing constituents and are submitted through a Social Security death index database and other sources. By using Address Finder and Decease Finder, these are 2 great easy to use resources to ensure that you have clean and up to date information and avoid some of those embarrassing solicitation errors. Next, I'd like to talk a little bit about training and onboarding. So when you onboard staff who are new to Altru or even who are just new to Altru at your organization, it is vital to help them understand that Altru is an interconnected system. And what I mean by that is information entered by one team, let's say, at your front desk by a ticket seller, for example, can impact the data that's extracted by another team. On the other side of that ticket seller, you might have a development officer who's trying to pull information on new visitors. Inaccurate information can lead to mistakes that could impact a supporter's opinion of the organization. For example, sending mailings to a deceased person or even just make outreach more difficult in general. Like you have, inaccurate contact information like the wrong email address, phone number, those sorts of things. All organizations have access to free basic courses in Blackbaud University for an introduction to all things Altru. If you have a training subscription, make sure that your staff members are taking advantage of it, And you'll know you have a subscription, it's called like Altru Learn, Altru Learn More. You can ask your Customer Success Manager to help you access your organizational transcript through Blackbaud University. Excuse me. I've also included a link to the Blackbaud University support request form under the documents tab. The Blackbaud University team will be able to help with course recommendations, pulling those transcripts, just give you a little bit of detail, on different courses that might be relevant to your situation or particular topics that you're interested in. Your organization should also spend some time as a team putting together your own best practices guidelines to outline how you want information entered into the system for consistency. For example, do you abbreviate streets, or how do you handle addressing letters to spouses? Do you like to use titles for everyone, or are you a more informal name style organization? You know your constituents and their preferences best. Creating a data entry guide for your organization helps streamline the information you're putting into the system and will cut down on the amount of cleanup you have to do later on. Some important fields to pay attention to in your data cleanup efforts include name formats, addresses, and solicitation codes. Your organization may have constituents with very specific needs or preferences. I had someone once who wanted their name in all under case letters. We knew that ahead of time. We always made sure that that person's letters read exactly as they wanted them to be. By defining best practices specific to your organization ahead of time, you can help create consistency for both your supporters and staff. So, next, let's talk about goals. Before you before you start to craft your appeal, you need to sit down with your team and lay out your goals for the campaign. Who will you be asking? What will we be asking for? Are you going to be raising funds for a specific project, or are you trying to reach a new segment of donors? Maybe you're just trying to increase engagement across the board. It's also important to ask yourself, who makes up your core donor base? Are you looking to bring in donors from a new group? You could also consider using different types of campaigns for different groups or segmenting your outreach. If your organization has different affinity groups, planned giving societies, or groups for high level donors, you might want to consider special outreach to those segments. Next is your what. Define what success looks like for your organization and this appeal. Maybe you're raising $1,000,000 for a new exhibit or you're trying to attract 500 new 500 new members. Is your appeal going to be cause based or is it for general operating? Maybe it's a combination of both. You could also consider offering a friend raising campaign to share more information about your organization with constituents who may not be ready to join as full blown supporters just yet. Defining what you are hoping to get out of your appeal will help you determine how it needs to be executed. Once you've answered the who and the what, you can move on to the how. To meet your goals, when does your campaign need to go out? For many donors, the period between Thanksgiving and New Year's is when they plan to give their annual gifts. Does your organization tend to receive most donations at year end or maybe you have a bump earlier in the year around a specific event or something that's important to your organization? Do you have supporters who only give once their appeal has come in with that little return envelope? You will also want to decide if your organization should be the first appeal your donors see, or maybe you want to be at the end of the pack. You'll also need to decide how many touches you're going to include in your appeal. For a lot of organizations, the annual appeal is a simple single piece mailer for all donors. For others, they may have a multistage campaign. Maybe they soft launch in a newsletter a couple months ahead of that ahead of that mail piece, or they follow-up with social media posts, or even they have a second outreach to donors who've not made a donation by a set date. These are all going to be things that are specific to your needs as an organization, your capacity as a team, and your donors' expectations. Setting your campaign schedule will also depend on your appeal format. Maybe your organization is, has made a move to entirely electronic communications only. Maybe going green and having 0 mail is, very important. Or maybe your supporters expect that hard copy mailer and will not give without it. Your organizational needs will help you decide on whether a campaign should be digital, physical, or maybe it's a combo. And then last but not least, will your organization participate in Giving Tuesday? That is a great way to tap into a nationwide effort at a time when people are feeling a lot of gratitude, and maybe they have a higher, propensity to give or spend money at that time of year. Alright. So once you've defined who, what, when, where, and why, you can then move on to designing your campaign. If you choose a campaign with multiple mailers or email and social media tie ins, you're going to want to define whether you want each piece to look like one suite of outreach or if you want stand alone pieces. Maybe, they're all tied together by a common thread, like you're highlighting, specific individuals or features of your organizations. You can also consider your social media and overall communications calendar. If you're choosing to do a Giving Tuesday donation push, we'd recommend that you craft those posts ahead of time and maybe pick out some unique pieces of your mission or things that people are particularly excited about. Opportunities for funding to highlight, like, maybe $10 provides free admission for a school child to visit your museum, or $100 feeds one of your elephants at the zoo for 10 minutes. Design is your opportunity to pull donors in and show them the good work that your organization is doing, show them why they should be spending their hard earned dollars with you and your organization. Next, I'd like to talk about building an appeal in Altru. There are 2 components to running your appeal in Altru. The first is the appeal and the second is appeal mailings. You can create multiple mailings or letters for each appeal within the appealing mailing appeal mailing configuration window. This is helpful if you're segmenting your recipients. If you created multiple letters, you can define which letter a constituent should receive by setting a specific order under the letters section under part 2 of the configuration window. It should be labeled finish up when you're adding an appeal mailing. More specific groups like board members, volunteers, affinity groups, etcetera should be ranked higher over your general solicitation. Altru will determine which mailing a constituent should receive based on your ranking of those letters and will generate only one mailing per recipient. Running a running an appeal in Altru will tag your constituent's record to indicate that they have received that outreach. This will be very helpful later on when you're receiving donations to actually measure the success of your appeal and can also help prevent reaching out to the same constituent too many times. In Altru, appeal mailings can be used to generate letters or emails to be run actually through Altru, or lists sent to a mail house, or lists to be mail merged with a letter in house. So that could be if you like to, pull your list and then merge it through, through word or something like that. Using an appeal mailing to generate lists versus using query will help you cut down on deduping, help you specify outreach preferences, and will also provide that tag on the constituent's record. If you have a query that captures all of the recipients you want to include in an appeal, you can actually use that query to make a selection. In the appeal mailing, you can then use that selection to define which constituents should receive the mailing. This can be helpful if you have a pre built list, maybe like you had an event a couple of months ago and you want to then pull that into your appeal. If you choose to build and process your letter in Altru, you can also use merge fields to create a more personalized appeal. So you can specify maybe the informal salutation or something like that. By using appeals rather than a simple query, you can add in address processing options, name formats, and include or exclude customers based on their recent activity. So if you're using that, include or exclude, you could say, I want to eliminate anybody who's made a gift within a specific date range, like in the last 4 months, or live bunts or scibunts. You can also, knock people out if they have gifts over a certain value. Maybe you prefer to reach out to those high level donors, on a more one to one basis. While you could use query to find all of that information as well as well, it is much easier and faster to do so in appeals. After you've built your letters and hit save, you'll be directed to the appeal mailing page where you can see all of your letters, get an expected recipient count, and actually run your mailing. Once you've run the mailing, any letters associated with revenue cannot be deleted. When you click run mailing, you will see the number of recipients for all letters and create a selection of appeal recipients to be used later on for easier querying and reporting. If your organization uses calendar features in Altru, you can also add your appeal to the organization calendar to keep other team members up to date on your communications plan. This can be helpful for team members working in other departments, like, for example, somebody at the front desk, is talking to a donor and the donor mentions the mailer or something like that. They need to look it up for some reason. Or maybe your events team is planning something, and they want to see, when your appeal is dropping so they don't conflict with that. When you add an appeal mailing from the calendar, you're entering only general information like name, mail date, appeal, and tasks. All of that detail work is going to actually come through in the appeal configuration process. As mentioned earlier, clean data is essential to the success of your campaign. When you're crafting this, pay special attention to spousal relationships, preferred name formats, solicitation codes, and deceased status to ensure that you're reaching the right constituents when and how they want to be contacted. Next, we'll talk about ask ladders. I don't know if y'all are familiar with this. They're not used by everybody, but they're a great tool to have in your back pocket, especially for something like a campaign. They can take a lot of time off your plate, and you can see some results that you might not get without asking. So ask ladders are used to recommend and prompt donation amounts to recipients. An ask ladder is a set of requested donation amounts based on a constituent's giving history, and they can be either fixed or multiplied with a specific scale. The ask ladder is going to assign different requested amounts to different segments of donors based on their giving history. So for an example, if a donor's last gift was $50, the don't the ask ladder may recommend that they give either 75, a 100, or a $125. In the screenshots that you see here, I have donors with a giving history of $50 to 99.99 receiving a set ask increase of $100, while donors of a $100 or more are receiving a requested percentage increase. So you can see that donor over a $100, maybe the first ask is 125, the next is 1.50, etcetera. If you want to add an ask ladder, you're going to go to marketing and communications and then configuration. And once you've built the ask ladder and saved it, you're then able to add it to your appeal mailing in the configuration window. This will allow you to include that information when you're building those letters. You can actually add it into the letter that you're preparing in Altru or extract it to be run through a mail house or in house. Next, let's talk a little bit about donation forms. So, constituents are now able to indicate which appeal they are donating to through web forms. To add an appeal to your web forms, you're going to go to Web, Manage Donation Form, Options, and you'll add it in under Source. By adding appeals to your donation forms, you can understand why your donor is giving their funds and how they've found you, how they found that appeal. You can gauge the success of an appeal or initiative using this. When a donor gives through the form and does not choose a specific designation, the default appeal designation is automatically added. You can also display the appeal designation as a field on the donation form and make it required so that your donors have to choose a designation before submitting their donation. Additionally, you can create custom URLs for your donation form that include specific appeal designations. When a donor is using that URL to give, the designated appeal will be automatically added to their donation. Alright. Let's talk a little bit about actually receiving those donations. So it's also important to consider how your donors are going to be making that gift. Are they going to be mailing it to you? Are they going to be sending it online? How do those funds actually make their way to you? Some donors will not make their gift without receiving that little return envelope with a hard copy mailer. This is a great example of knowing your constituents and knowing your constituents and knowing your base and how they like to give. I once had a donation come in with a 10 year old return envelope. I had to check the date on it. I couldn't believe it. Others might not even have a checkbook and will only donate online. It's important to make the actual process of donating as easy as possible for your constituents. Meet them where they are and remove any barriers to giving. Consider adding a QR code to hard copy mailers to lead donors directly to your donation form. You can also add options for recurring gifts to both web forms and hard copy return envelopes. This could encourage your donors to consider making a recurring gift, making an ongoing commitment to your organization. If you are receiving credit card information in a hard copy return envelope, make sure that you are getting that into the system as quickly as possible and disposing of that, hard copy return envelope with credit card information responsibly by shredding it or some other means to make sure that it's destroyed and unable to be accessed by other people. If you receive donated funds in the mail, make sure your team has a consistent gift entry process, especially if you have multiple people entering those donations. Remember to add your appeal to the gifts you enter in the back office, so that those back office donations are reflected in your appeal performance metrics. And you can add an appeal to a gift that you're entering from a constituent record by selecting the marketing tab at the bottom of the add payment screen, and that's that screenshot above here. Alright. So, now, on to reporting. We've got those gifts coming in the door, and you're getting asked how the appeal is performing. So Ultra reporting options are going to include both queries and our pre built reports within the system. Pre built reports are a great way to easily and quickly pull information at a very consistent format with no cleanup required. Queries are going to give you more control over the information you're including and can be formatted according to your preferences. You can also use OData to pull your query into Excel. Once your workbook in Excel is formatted to your liking and that OData link is established, you can simply refresh the spreadsheet without having to pull your query from Altru again. OData can be a little bit of a learning curve. If you haven't heard of it before, this is another case where you can reach out to your customer success manager, and we can give you some additional information. We're wishing you all the best with your year end appeals. I can't believe we're already at that time of year, but it's a very exciting time and it's a great opportunity to do some major major fundraising and friend raising for your organization. Blackbaud has just released our updated toolkit for year end planning. This the link to it is included on the documents tab. The doc it's, the toolkit is all new this year, has been completely revamped and refreshed. There's some great templates in there, calendars, interactive planning guidelines, a lot of information for Giving Tuesday. It's a really great resource, and can be a good jumping off point to help you, get some new fresh ideas. And I also want to plug, my colleague Evan who is working in the chat for us today. Evan is going to be doing the next installment of our Altru webinar series on making changes to your membership program, so make sure to sign up for that. That will be September 19th. And then shortly after that, we have bbcon coming up. So bbcon will be in Seattle, Washington this year. If you're going in person, I'm very, very jealous. Seattle is wonderful. And if you are not able to attend in person, you can also register to attend virtually, and virtual registration is free, so even better. There will also be a number of Altru specific, sessions for bbcon. And I also wanted to share a couple additional resources that are great to bookmark. As we discussed before, Blackbaud University is our training resource, that has a lot of live classes, on demand classes for all Blackbaud products, not just Altru. The Blackbaud support form is in the documents tab if you need help getting in touch with the BBU training team. Then we also have our wonderful customer support team. They're going to be your first stop for techno, technical issues, click here functionality, those types of things. Then we have knowledge base, which is our internal version of Google. That's where you're going to find articles, product guidelines, help topics, all those specific things. And then last, we have the Blackbaud Community. So this is a wonderful place to engage with your peers at other organizations that are using Altru or other Blackbaud products that you might have. You can get some best practices, find out how other people are using the systems, new innovative ideas, and that's a great place to connect with those groups as well. So next, we will open it up for questions. Does anybody have any questions? If so, you can pop those into the Q and A tab also if you haven't already asked in chat. And if we don't have any questions or you think of something at a later date, you can, of course, email me. My information is on the next slide here, or you can reach out to your customer success manager, as mentioned before. So I'll leave it for a second, and then if not, we will go ahead and log off for the day. So thank you all so much for attending. Oh, the Streamline okay. We do have a question. The Streamline Communications webinar, yes, that was our July installment of the Altru webinar series. So we have the links to that in Docs, and then I can also drop that in the chat here too. But we so we have a June installment, which was on tracking for, tracking grants in major giving. Our July installment of the UltraTrue webinar series was patron communications, and then we have this one, of course, on appeals, and then the next one is membership in September. Let's see here. The document tab is right next to chat. It's just to the right of chat if that hasn't been answered. Sorry. Just reading back here. When is the most ideal time to push out an annual appeal? For most organizations, that's typically going to go out at the very end of October or very early November. I always was I would always set a personal deadline of November 1st to get mine out the door. I like to be sort of on the front end of things. I'd say probably as long as you're out by December 1st, you're okay. But you wanna make sure that you're giving that appeal time to make its way through the mail to your supporters. Give them time to leave it on their coffee table for a week before they remember to do it. Just give yourself adequate time to get those donations in before December 31st. You are very welcome. Evan, do you see any that I've missed here that you haven't answered already? Oh, yes. Elizabeth, for, the web webinars that have already happened, you're going to register for it. It will send you a notification that looks like it's going to add it to your calendar, and then you'll be able to access the recording that way. The toolkit is under the documents tab. There's a bunch of different it's the ultimate guide to year end planning, so you can click that one to open it. There's a bunch of other links in there as well. Alrighty. With that, I think we will call it. And, like I said, here's my email if you have any follow-up questions, and thank you all so much for attending today. Bye bye.