Name: Text Messaging Giving Season Wrap Up & Key Learnings
Uploaded: 2025-03-04T20:31:08.915Z
Duration: 58 min 8 s
Description: Text Messaging Giving Season Wrap Up & Key Learnings

Transcript for "Text Messaging Giving Season Wrap Up & Key Learnings": Okay. We are gonna get started today. Welcome to our session, text messaging giving season wrap up and key learnings. My name is Mike Snusz. I'm excited to be with you here today. I am, on the Tatango customer success team and have been in online fundraising for twenty one years now. I've spent the last three years digging into nonprofit text messaging and before that I was on the Blackbaud services team working on the digital team with Luminate, Team Raiser, and other customers. So certainly know the the products that probably a lot of you use. So we'll have questions at the end that I'm happy to talk about, any integrations or just how Tatango works with those different Blackbaud products. But, excited to talk with you about about some of the key learnings that we've seen from text messaging from year end that you can apply to 2025. So what we're gonna cover today is I'll just give a quick intro on text messaging one zero one. We likely have some organizations that don't have a text messaging program or just started one. So So I'll give you some of the basics and things to know for text messaging. We'll then jump right into ten year end lessons from text messaging that we saw this past year, some of the data, some of the successful campaigns, some of the takeaways that really stood out in November and December that you can look to apply to 2025, and then we'll finish up with a look ahead. And before I I we we get into things, I'll just say that certainly we're all very aware of what's happening with federal funding at the moment. And at the end of my presentation, I'll share a few things that may be helpful in securing tools that you need to fundraise now to, to have a good year from an individual giving perspective. And certainly now more than ever, it's important not to wait until the giving season to get into tackling those fundraising goals. Alright. So let's jump in. Real quick, Tatango is a text messaging platform that is built for nonprofits and built for fundraising. Tatango Text have raised over $500,000,000 in donations, and we can send, not only SMS, which I'll I'll show you sort of the one sentence text, but multimedia text that have images, videos, animation, and those can go out to thousands or tens of thousands in a very short period. It works a lot like an email tour where we have advanced automation, segmentation, personalization, and we do integrate with Blackbaud products. Probably the one question you have with RE NXT, Luminate online, TeamRaiser, and others. So with that, before we jump in, I have a quick poll. I wanna find a little bit of who we have in the audience here. Wanna ask and ask you to answer the poll. Did you use text messaging for year end giving? K. You can take the poll that should be up on your there's a tab or or a a poll that you can answer it there. See a lot of chats in the answers in the chat. If you can use the poll tab, that'll give us a good idea of who's on the call. Okay. We'll give it another five, ten seconds. Okay. We will go continue on here then. So let's talk a little bit about text messaging one zero one, and some basics if you haven't used texting before. So as of about a year and a half, two years ago, four to five nonprofits either had a text messaging program or plan to start one. So I certainly see there's a lot of folks on the call that did have text messaging, some that did not. So perhaps you're either in the boat if you have a texting program or you're looking to start one, and that's part of the reason that you're at this webinar here today. So one of the reasons that text messaging has become so, popular and and such a, important channel for nonprofits is the engagement rate. As you know with your text, you probably have no unread text on your phone. Currently, if you were to look, texting has a 99% open rate. So almost everybody who receives a text message will open it. And for nonprofits and fundraising, the other stat that's really important is that they're open very quickly. 90% of texts get open within three minutes of being received. So at your important fundraising moments, especially around year end for Giving Tuesday, late December, and as you go throughout 2025 for Giving Days or match campaigns or other important moments that happen, texting is the one channel that you can get your message in front of your donors and your constituents very quickly as most people, after you send a text message, most people are going to see it and consume that content within just a few minutes. So how does texting compare to email? In terms of open rates, click through rates, revenue, when we look at open rates certainly, I I just mentioned 99% for text messaging. The last known reliable open rate for email was around 20%, twenty two %. That was from the M and R benchmark report several years ago before open rates became less reliable because of iOS updates, but about five times higher open rate texting versus email, about a 10 times higher click through rate than email. So 5% click through rate for texting versus email. And then last year's M and R benchmark report found that text messaging revenue increased 14% in 2023, white while email decreased 7% in 2023. So this certainly though does not mean that we need to, stop using email. It it it's quite the opposite. Email and text messaging go really, really well together. This is an example of a campaign where it was the last day of a match campaign, and I received the email in the morning. I received the text later in the afternoon and towards the evening. And when you combine text messaging with an existing email program, M and R found that there's a 30%, rev increase in revenue raised per person, that that can increase 30% when you add texting to an existing email fundraising program. So they work really well together hand in hand, and it's it's not that you should replace email with texting. You certainly absolutely still need email, but when you can have them work hand in hand and combine both channels, we find that's really effective for organizations. And oftentimes, they will use the content in the email to create the text message. You see how in this example the image, a lot of the content looks the same from the email to the text message. Alright. So another text one zero one is there's a couple of different types of messages you can send to your donors and to your constituents. SMS on the left is a 50 characters. It's about a sentence that you can include. You can include a link in there, but there is not any formatting or emojis or any images or anything like that. MMS looks a lot like an email. You can have up to 5,000 characters, so really unlimited space. And you may you may laugh and say, well, nobody would ever send 5,000 characters, and that's true. But we have seen organizations send 1,700, 18 hundred, two thousand characters in text messages that were very high performers. So as long as the content is good and interesting and it's worth scrolling, you can you can include a longer content in text messages at times and have them be high performers. The other thing with MMS is that you can include images, you can have animation, and you can include videos that if you're using a five or six digit number, that video can be up to thirty seconds long, which is a pretty decent sized video that would play directly within the text message itself. They wouldn't have to click on a link to go to a web page to view it where you lose a lot of people. Okay. Another difference in how you send texting, and this is if if you perhaps don't have a text messaging program but you're thinking of starting one, you can send either from a 10 digit number, which is called a long code, or you can send from a five or six digit number, which is called a short code. A 10 digit number, there's some differences with that. One of them, if I go back to MMS versus MMS, is that it's harder to send MMS and multimedia text at scale because you can only send 60, MMS text per minute. Whereas if you're using a short code, you can send up to a 20,000 text per minute that are MMS. So we typically see medium to larger nonprofits using short codes for their text messaging program. There's also some other benefits of having better deliverability. There's more trustworthiness because when you apply for a short code, the phone carriers vet your organization and review your application for four to six weeks. So it's really hard for bad actors and scammers to get a short code to send from there, so it is more trustworthy. There's also better deliverability as as because the phone carriers have reviewed your organization, you kind of have the easy pass to get into the inbox for text messages and are delivered right away. Alright. So that's one. And before we get into the key lessons, the last is there's a couple different ways that when you send the text that you can either send it peer to peer or broadcast text. And peer to peer texting simply is just one to one texting where if you want to send to a hundred people, you would hit a button and click a hundred times to send to a hundred people. Broadcast texting is different where you can click a button and send one to many. So you click a button much like email and it can go out to hundreds or thousands or tens of thousands of people with one click. There's a little bit of a difference with consent requirements. So with peer to peer texting, there is no consent required. If you have somebody's phone number or you find somebody's phone number or you rent a list, you can do peer to peer texting to them. They don't have to consent or give you their phone number. You can reach out to anybody. So as we came off the political season just a few months ago, you may have been getting texts that people candidates you never heard from, packs you never heard from. Those were likely peer to peer text if you never gave your phone number to that organization or to that person. Whereas broadcast texting, you can only text to people who've given you their phone number previously. You can no not go out and rent a list or do a phone append. You have to have, the the permission of the person by them giving you their phone number to be able to reach out to that person. Alright. So with that, and I'm sure we have some questions through this first section. I'm gonna take questions at the end. I'm flying solo here today, so I will get to these questions at the end of our presentation. So our 10 key learnings from year end. Let's jump right into this. And the first one may not be that surprising because with all channels, the volume of email, the volume of social ads, digital ads, social media posts, those all increase at year end. And text messaging, much like other channels, the volume increased at year end. But what you might find interesting is how many texts were sent. It's a common question we get. Sometimes organizations have started a text messaging program, but they've only sent maybe three or four texts per year. Others have more robust programs that have texting as an ongoing communication channel. So back over the summer, Tatango created the nonprofit industry's first text messaging, insight reports that gave us some data and some metrics to go off of. And what we found in that report is that on average, 46 texts are sent by nonprofits annually. So it is very much an ongoing communication channel much like email, where texting is not only used for fundraising appeals, but it's used for cultivation examples like you see here. It's used for stewardship and engagement. And how that breaks out, and we we added this within the report as well, is January through October, there's about three and a half texts that are sent per month. But that number increases to five in November and five and a half in December. So a little bit of a bump up. When we looked at the the data and we dug in further to this, it was about a fifty fifty split January through October of fundraising versus non fundraising text. And then when we got into November and December, it was about a three to one ratio of fundraising to non fundraising text during those couple of months. Okay. Our next key lesson is that text messaging revenue increases at year end. So, again, not a shock. You probably would have guessed this if I would have asked, do you think text messaging revenue increases at year end? Yes. It does. So but but I think what is interesting is as we look at some of the data, how much revenue comes in from text messaging? That's probably more of what you're looking for, what you're looking to benchmark your text messaging program against or what you're looking for if you're looking to start a text messaging program. How much can we expect to raise in text messaging annually? So I can make the case. I can go to our finance team or leadership. What we found in the nonprofit text messaging insight report, and I'll give you a QR code at the end of the presentation where you can download that, is that 4.5% of online revenue that is raised came from text messaging annually. And and this report looked at over 200,000,000 text messages sent. It looked at over 5,400,000 raised in 2023 and four point five percent of online revenue raised was raised from text messaging annually. So you can kinda get an idea if you don't have a text messaging program or even if you do, what you raise online annually, what's four and a half percent of that, that's what you can set as a goal or at least have an initial benchmark to shoot for with your texting program. At year end, though, that amount increased. So Mission WIRED came out in January with their end of year twenty twenty four digital fundraising final report. And what they found is that on average, when they looked at their customers, total, of of 41,900,000.0 was raised across all channels, digital channels. And out of that, 4,000,000 was raised via text messaging, also known as SMS. So at year end, 9% of revenue was raised from text messaging, whereas throughout the entire year, it's about four and a half percent of online revenue is raised from text messaging. Okay. So volume goes up, revenue goes up at year end, two of the trends that we saw with year end text messaging. The third key lesson is that texting can directly convert, but it can also lift other channels. And we we have had an organization that dug into the data, not only on direct conversions, but then once they started texting, how that lifted email and other digital channels. And so this was an organization that had started their text messaging program in December. And a little more to come on how organizations who launch or are have new programs at year end, how they perform towards the end of the presentation. But, this organization for their December text, they saw a good ROI on their first text messaging campaign after launching their text messaging program in December. But when Holt International dug into their other channels and they looked at email, they saw that email engagement lifted, the email open rates, email click through rates. And then when they looked at revenue, whereas for GivingTuesday that year, they their online revenue had been down. For December of that year, their online revenue had been down. But when they started sending fundraising text on December, it increased the overall online revenue when much of their year end campaign was rinse and repeat, was a similar campaign to the previous year. So as they dug into the data, they saw that it started to lift email and other digital channels where their revenue shot up the last few days of the year. They ended up making their year end fundraising goal after being down for a good part of the year end online giving season. Next up, key lesson number four is that indirect donation asks can convert well. So I've certainly seen this with, before year end giving, I've seen this with advocacy organizations were not asking for a donation, but instead asking somebody to complete a survey, take a poll, sign a card. That sort of indirect donation ask that after they take that action, they're then asked to make a donation. I've seen that work well for advocacy organizations and at at times advocacy organizations will lead with an indirect ask at important giving moments. But at year end, we saw that traditional nonprofits and non advocacy organizations that it can work well for as well. This is an example of Boys Town, and one of the texts they sent at year end was to send an ecard. And this was a text that mixed in with their direct fundraising text where they asked directly for donations. And this was not a direct ask. This was send an e card, and then after somebody sent an e card, they were taken to a page where they were asked to make a donation. And what they found is that this was their fourth highest revenue generating text, of the year just from asking people to send an ecard and not having a direct ask within there, but having it after they took the action. So this is encouraging for nonprofits with texting. We see when nonprofits send stewardship text and cultivation text and they have a link to a story, we often see that the organization will get some donations in. But this is this is great to see outside of advocacy organizations that when you mix up your types of messages, which you wanna do, you wanna have a mix of fundraising and non fundraising, and when you send these non fundraising engagement type text, certain ones like sign a card or polls or surveys can lead to donations as well, and in this case, was one of the highest revenue generating text that Boys Town had set. Alright. Next up is that other channel segments work within texting as well. So we get this question a lot. How should we segment? How does texting work in terms of our typical segmentation? Because nonprofits typically send to when they send direct mail, they may send to their recent donors. And then some direct mail appeals, they may send to lapsed donors. They they may branch out to non donors at times. And so what we have found with text messaging is that what works with other channels with your segmentation works really well with text messaging also. So I'm showing this example from the March of Dimes. March of Dimes has had a text messaging program for about three years ago. They switched over to a broadcast text messaging program. They were previously using peer to peer texting, and they've they've had a good program over the past three years. And in 2024, they really zeroed in on their segmentation strategy, and they really tested out different audiences and different strategies. And where they landed and what they found is that when they sent to their recent donors more often, the folks who had given within the past couple of years, that that was their highest performing audience. And and so that's not a surprise that that's typically the audience that performs well on other channels also. And at certain times of the year, they would branch out to their lapsed donors, and they would go back maybe four years sending to past donors. And at certain times of the year, like their giving day or even at year end once in a while, They will send to their full file. They will send to non donors as well. They may exclude March for Babies participants. But what they found through really sending more and prioritizing their active donors, not only sending them more fundraising appeals, but sending them more cultivation text as well that reported back in the impact of gifts, sending them more engagement text that would let people know about the release of a report card or a a video to watch or something else that had happened that was either breaking news or just new information that they wanted to share with their donors and constituents. They found when they they sort of found the sweet spot with their segmentation that they had a fantastic year in 2024. So despite having a texting program for, broadcast program for a few years and and, peer to peer texting program a couple years before that, they they're still, generating a lot of momentum and a lot of revenue with their text messaging programs. So in 2024, they increased text revenue year over year 46%. They increased and or they exceeded their 2024 texting goal by 71%. So a lot of that was due to, reaching out to their active recent donors, much like they do with other channels, and prioritizing them a bit more. The text here that was sent was the December 31 text to let people know that time was running out. They sent that one of those text to a larger file, and but but they also sent multiple text on December 31 like a lot of nonprofits do. This is the example of their segmentation within Tatango where they sent to donors from the past two years for one of those texts, so they prioritize them. And they also excluded donors from the past fourteen days. So anybody who had given that second half of December, they did exclude them from their year end appeal. They wanted to let people know they were paying attention, so they excluded re their very recent donors, but they prioritize donors from the past couple of years. And that has really been the sweet spot. I've seen that with other nonprofits as well, where the audiences that perform well in direct mail, in paid digital, in social advertising, in search, those audiences perform well in text messaging as well. It very much carries over your segmentation to this channel. Key lesson number six is that it's important to mix message types. I've alluded to this a little bit, but from our nonprofit text messaging insight report, we found that about half of the text sent in 2023 of those 200,000,000 text messages were not fundraising text. About half of them were cultivation or engagement text, like this example here where it is see your impact. By the way, International Medical Corps, if you're looking for a program to to learn from, they run a fantastic program where they launch their text messaging program with the goal of wanting to add value to their donors and to report back on the impact of gifts, steward them, cultivate them, because they knew that when you send those communications via email, with only 20% of people opening up an email and sometimes emails staying in the junk folder or not getting delivered or just not getting opened, if you send this sort of report back message to your donors via email, a lot of times that's not gonna get seen. And you can't send a direct mail piece every time you wanna report back and the impact of gifts. Certainly, you use direct mail to send a thank you, but it's tougher to get these report back communications in front of your donors. And we know what the way that retention rates have been the last six, seven years as retention rates have continued to decline in our industry that if if you get somebody to donate, then it's important to thank them right away. And then after that, it's important to report back on the impact of gift before you ask them to make a gift again. And if that report back step is not received and actually read by your donors, then they go from giving to being thanked to being asked to give again, and I think that hurts part of the retention that we see in the industry and why retention rates have been falling. So I think text messaging is a very underutilized channel for stewardship and cultivation communications to help increase retention rates. So one example was an organization that launched their text messaging program towards the end of twenty twenty three, Boys Town, and 2024 was their first full year using texting. And they do a great job of mixing up appeals with non fundraising texts like surveys and cultivation texts that you see here. And so they really throughout the year find opportunities. Certainly, I I think if you're starting your texting program, it's good to start planning out your calendar with what your appeals are throughout the year. Your giving day, your giving Tuesday, your year end, other big match campaigns or fundraising campaigns that you have throughout the year. And then in between those, you can fill in slower times where you don't have messaging going out or campaigns going on. With cultivation, with stewardship, those sort of type of non fundraising texts can be good fillers. So you're reaching out to folks at least a couple times per month. You're getting in front of them with both fundraising and non fundraising texts. So Boys Town did that. They had a really good mix of fundraising and non fundraising texts throughout 2024. And then when they went to send their text for year end, they saw really strong performance. This was one of their late December text where it had a point six eight conversion rate. One in a 47 people donated to this text, and it was a sizable group that they had reached out to. What they found in their year one of texting was that when you take this approach of using this channel that immediately gets in front of your donors, where every message nearly gets open, if you use that for both stewardship, cultivation, engagement, and appeals, that that is a good formula to have success with. And what they their results in the first year was that it was their highest conversion rate among all of their channels that they sent to. So top conversion rate among their different channels. And in terms of revenue, it was the number seven channel in driving revenue in their first year of using text messaging. So if you're just getting started with text messaging, if you're going to start a text messaging program, I think this is a really good blueprint to to to follow throughout the year so that when you get to your key giving moments in November, December, and other times, that your donors are really going to respond because they've been getting value and they've been hearing, about different ways that they've impacted the organization, how their donation has made an impact, other ways that they can be involved and engaged, and that leads to better results when you do send fundraising text to them through this very personal and immediate channel. Okay. Key lesson number seven is that we have seen consistently that evenings have the highest conversion rate. So when we looked at the 200,000,000 text messages studied in 2023, we found that there was a 37% higher conversion rate when fundraising texts were sent after 6PM. So it it makes sense in that a lot of campaigns online may have a match component to it or a deadline for a number of donors or it may be a a giving day or an awareness day where there's natural deadlines built in. And the closer that you can reach people to that deadline, the higher the conversion rate, the more money that we see is raised. And you wanna make sure that you don't send too far into the evening because there's some states that after 9PM, you shouldn't text your donors in those states. So you wanna make sure that you're following those rules and those regulations and and in some cases, it's just sort of bad. I I think, donor donor stewardship, to send too late in the evening and for people to be getting text at ten, ten thirty, eleven o'clock at night. But what we looked at when we looked into the data closer is that between that six to 9PM window, eight to 9PM had the highest conversion rate of any time frame throughout the day. So when you can reach your donors very close to the deadline but not too late into the evening, we saw the conversion rate go up. We also interestingly saw the opt out rate go down between that eight to 9PM period. So if your couple couple thoughts or or notes in this. One is if you're using a peer to peer texting program where people have to click send to send out the text one at a time. Oftentimes, it's not possible for folks, volunteer staff, to be sending those in the evening and clicking send. So peer to peer text often gets sent out earlier in the day, and that may not necessarily be the best time to convert your donors and reach them when they have more time after work, when they're relaxing, when they have their phone nearby, and they're more apt to make a donation. The other piece is that it's it's good to use a, have the ability to to reach people in their local time zones. So we want everybody to get this text at 08:05PM this evening. If I'm in New York, we want New York people to reach it to get that text at 805. We want the West Coast folks to get it at 08:05. So a lot of times, you can base their location off their ZIP code, if you have the ZIP code of the donor, and that can target their time zone. If you don't have that, you can use the area code, but sometimes area codes are not as reliable as people may move from one time zone to another. But using the ZIP code can be pretty pretty reliable to make sure you deliver the text during the right time frame in the right time zone at these key moments when we see people are more likely to give. An example of that, this was outside of year end, so I think this is one of those trends that you can use even outside of year end giving is San Diego Humane Society had sent a text previously for their giving day in June. They had sent it in the afternoon previously, and they had seen good results, I think, two or three times ROI on the text messaging send. This past year, they sent it in the evening at 06:46PM to their 23,000 donors. They had an incredible 1.16 conversion rate over $41,000 raised from a text to 23,000 people. And certainly, there's more that goes into a Giving Day than just sending a text message and raising a lot of money. They did a fantastic job promoting their giving day throughout all of the channels and communicating it ahead of time. But just a little bit of a a a tweak to the send time can sometimes make a big difference with ROI. We've certainly seen this in late December for some organizations where we had one organization where their December 31 text that was sent in the evening raised 20% of the text revenue for the entire year. So if you're sending fundraising text, I would try an upcoming campaign to send it in the evening and see what kind of results you get. Certainly, every organization is unique, but I think this is one of those trends and data points that is certainly worth testing into to see if you do get a lift in conversion rate and or amount raised. Alright. Three more key lessons to go. This was one of the most interesting ones I found from the report. I I really love talking about this because I think it's super, applicable to a lot of different campaigns. We found that the day after Giving Tuesday converts nearly as well as Giving Tuesday with your fundraising text. So when we dug into the data from the nonprofit text messaging insight report, we saw naturally GivingTuesday had a high conversion rate. But what was interesting is that the day after GivingTuesday had nearly the same conversion rate as GivingTuesday for fundraising text. And in fact, it had a six times higher conversion rate the day after Giving Tuesday than the day before Giving Tuesday. So with texting, it's almost better to wait until the deadline or this data is telling us even after the deadline to reach out to people, whether that's thanking your donors for giving and and having a link for anybody who hasn't donated yet to give, or if you're letting people know that your match campaign has been extended and they there's still time to give to their Giving Tuesday campaign, we've seen that higher conversion rates after a deadline than leading up to a deadline. And outside of Giving Tuesday, we've seen this trend with some one off giving days where if an organization reaches out too far in advance via text messaging about the Giving Day where they're saying our giving day is in a week or giving day is a few days away, mark your calendar, get ready to give, that doesn't seem to work as well as saving those extra text for the giving day or the day after giving Tuesday. So another trend that either you don't have to wait until giving Tuesday to try this out. If you have a match campaign where you're gonna extend the deadline, you can try it there to send a text not only on the last day, but on the next day as well to see how the conversion rate is. That being said, this is these data points, like all insights, reports, are a good starting point, but it's good to test this out with your organization. Brady United, these examples here from Giving Tuesday, what they found is that before Giving Tuesday actually converted as well as after Giving Tuesday for them. So these are examples of before Giving Tuesday on the left and after Giving Tuesday on the right. So certainly take this data, test into it, see if it resonates with your donors and your organization, to see if it it holds up or not, but at least it gives you a starting point of some different AB tests that you can run. Okay. Key lesson number nine is that sending a cultivation text before an appeal text can lift average gift amount. So you may use this with direct mail. You may use this with email. We found there was a 54% increase in average gift amount when a cultivation text preceded a fundraising text. So thinking about year end, probably a lot of you may send an email in early November or maybe a direct mail piece, Something to warm up your donors and let them know the impact of past donations before asking for a gift again. We found when that was done via text that it didn't necessarily increase the conversion rate, but it did increase the average gift amount by 54%. And even if you're just gonna send this cultivation tax to your recent donors and your active donors instead of your full file or your full donor file, I I think that's worthwhile to do, to test and do if we just send a cultivation text maybe to donors from the past year ahead of our next fundraising text campaign and then we send our fundraising text to them. Does that increase conversion rate? Does that increase average gift amount? It's a good practice because, again, not every person who makes a donation, hears back on how their gift made an impact and how it was used, especially if some channels like email are being relied on where they may or may not see that communication. Okay. Finally, our last key lesson is that new texting programs were high performers in 2024. So some of you may have read the reports that MissionWired, that Moore, that M and R put out in January after their year end giving seasons with their customers. And so just to share some of the feedback from those reports, mission wired specifically from their end of year '20 '20 '4 digital fundraising final report, they found that nonprofits moving into SMS for the first time this end of year were able to tap into the incredible boost in revenue that adding this impactful channel to a fundraising program can drive. One organization they partner with stood up an SMS platform ten days before year end and saw the channel raise $27,000 to drive a 1,200 plus return. Similarly, more in their reports, they found that some organizations with the largest increase in overall Giving Tuesday revenues were those that spent $20.24 creating and building their texting list and then rolling them out for Giving Tuesday and year end. And then finally, M and R found that no surprise here SMS is becoming more and more critical part of a fundraising program and that organizations who had an SMS program saw revenue either flat or up year over year and one client reported SMS out raising email in December. Alright. So before we get to some questions and I give you the QR code, then you can download that report summarizing everything that I covered today, the 10 key lessons from text messaging. Again, this recording will go out, within twenty four hours, so you'll be able to get it then. But if you wanna take a screenshot or just have this to summarize, text messaging increased, the volume increased, the revenue increased at year end. We found that another trend was that texting converts directly, but it also can lift other channels. But then indirect donation asks can convert as well. Other channels, segments work within texting too. So what you're doing with your segmentation works within texting. It's important to mix up message types, number six, number seven. Evenings had the highest conversion rate. Number eight, as did the day after Giving Tuesday was a high converting day. And number nine, sending a cultivation text before an appeal can let the average gift amount. And then number 10, new texting programs were high performers in 2024. So I mentioned a little bit earlier that certainly I know some organizations out there have been affected by the federal grants and and what has happened. And so certainly that this is, this is a channel that is part of an omnichannel campaign program that, what has worked well in the past may not necessarily be working with today's or tomorrow's donors that the channels, the tried and true digital channels that have started to see less and less performance or not the ROI that has kept up with the increased cost of direct mail or events, that it it's it's time to find other ways to get in front of your donors, to be able to reach your individual donors, to grow that individual giving piece, to make sure that that part of your funding has a strong 2025. And so texting is one of those channels that, really has become an essential part of an omnichannel program, and it does not require any staff or IT resources to stand up. The content can be repurposed from email. There's no HTML. There's no IT resources that are needed to get going with text messaging and start up quickly. Alright. So before I show you the QR code for the insight report and we take some questions, we're gonna have our next poll here. And so I'm gonna have the poll be shared here. And so one second, we're gonna get that live. K. So this poll is would you like and this is over perhaps on the side next to chat where it says poll. You can head over to that poll tab and you can answer there. Would you like someone from Tatango to contact you about text messaging from our platform. K. So we'll give you a couple minutes there to answer that poll, and I'm gonna scan some of the questions that we have here. I saw a question in here about the presentation deck available. If that's not in the recording, I'm gonna put my email address at the end here where, I'm happy to send out the PDF of that, though I think it's gonna be part of the recording that that comes through. Alright. I see some questions as folks have answered the poll here. So you can answer the poll in the tab in the right of the chat box if that's helpful for everybody. So to the right of the in the tab to the right of the chat box. Alright. Give it a few more seconds. Okay. So, real quick, the text messaging insight report, if you have not seen this, that we put out over the summer at the bridge conference, again, it was 200,000,000 nonprofit specific texts that were sent in 2023, a 62,000 donations received, $5,400,000 raised, and from 15 nonprofits using a short code program. There is the QR code. I'll let you scan that. So as I leave this up here, I'm gonna start to go through our questions and see what questions that we have that we can we can answer. Appreciate all the great questions here. We should have time to get through a lot of them. Alright. And, also, if you if you're not familiar with texting as much and you'd like to see what a sample Giving Tuesday campaign looks like, you can receive a sample campaign by texting the word give to 808 and you'll receive about four to five sample Giving Tuesday text of what a campaign looks like using images and animation and some other features of MMS text that you can share this with your team internally. So I'm gonna leave that up there and then for a few minutes, and then I'll put my email address up there. I'm gonna start going through the questions. Question from Lana. Does Tatango offer the ability to send one time project batch text? So I I if I understand you what you're asking correctly, Lana, we we we do. We we can send one time, one to many texts that you can send out. So I'll put my email address up there at the end if you want. If you have additional questions, feel free to reach out. Question from Dustin Cook. Does the public know that, does public know about short codes? Not sure what part you mentioned, Dustin, but if you want to put the question in there, I'm happy to to answer it as I go through the questions here. Question from t Scott. How do we ensure mass marketing through tech stays secure? I would say whatever platform you use, I I would ask that, check to make sure they are SOC two compliant so they have the highest level of, guidelines and security within their organization. That's one way to check off that your mass marketing texting will be secure, SOC two compliance. How do these question from Michelle. How do these stats apply to arts organizations versus general nonprofit stats? Michelle, we we didn't break out the nonprofit text messaging insert report data by organization, but we plan on doing the report again this year when releasing it over the summer. And hopefully, we'll be able to have a little bit more, organization specific, benchmarks or or metrics within there. We we did have advocacy versus non advocacy, but hopefully this year, we'll be able to break it out even a little bit more. Question from t Scott. How does this integrate with RE? So there is a an API integration that we have with RE NXT. Tatango is a separate text messaging platform or one of Blackbaud's partners in the marketplace. It's an API integration, so when somebody comes into RE NXT and they have consented or opted in to receive text, they will automatically be added into Tatango and will capture their donation information at that time, but also current, future donation information as well. So you can segment by somebody's last gift date, their last gift amount. That information will continue to come over to Tatango as well. You had asked, do we have to upload cell numbers and refresh them periodically or is this a seamless integration? Yeah. You you won't have to upload cell phone numbers. Again, the folks that come into RE NXT, they'll be added to Tatango along with their updated donation information. So go to the other questions here. Question from Addie. If you send p to p text only, does that cancel out the legal need for somebody to opt in? Yes. It does. So you don't need somebody to opt in to send them a peer to peer or one to one text. You can rent a list. You can find phone numbers and send peer to peer text to them. And Eddie says legally to text someone right now, my organization needs the user to double opt in. But are you saying if we use peer to peer text, you can work around that? Yes. Peer to peer texting will let you text anyone. Also, with broadcast texting programs, you cannot just text anyone. You have to have the person, person has to have given you their phone number under the TCPA to be able to text that person. You're not able to rent or, go out and and buy phone numbers with broadcast programs. Okay. Let's see the other questions. Is this frequently used by colleges and universities? Texting, I think, is an absolute great use case for text for colleges and universities. We we have some, customers ourselves who are our colleges and universities, but especially for Giving Days for so many use cases of alumni stewardship, alumni weekend, different fundraising campaigns that you have, but especially for Giving Days, I think it's a great use case. Question from James. Can you send scheduled text? Yes. You can. So you can set up a text now to go out at 08:15 this evening, hit send, and it will go out at 08:15, and as I mentioned a little bit earlier, it can be delivered by time zone based on somebody's, zip code. Question also further, can you import list from NXT into Tatango? Yes. You could. Or you could just use the r a n x t integration that automatically adds folks from NXT into Tatango. Question from Amy. How do I get set up to send by SMS or MMS? Amy, I'll put my, email address up here. Feel free to reach out, and we can get you the information that you need. Question from Angela. How soon is too soon to send your next text from cultivation to fundraising text? Great question, Angela. I think it depends a bit on the time of the year. We have a lot of organizations that around Giving Tuesday, they will send multiple texts from the day of Giving Tuesday through the day after Giving Tuesday. Some may send three to five texts. Some may send more. Other times of the year, you may space it out a little bit. I I think it's whenever you have an important fundraising moment that you're able to reach out to folks, and at busier times or important moments, that may be more text. But generally, it's I I would say outside of those important fundraising moments. It's good to space them out a little bit, but we typically see organizations sending two or three texts per month. Question from Melissa. How far in advance to send the cultivation text before the ask text? Really good question. The customers we saw maybe sent it anywhere from a week to two, three weeks maybe in advance. So ahead of Giving Tuesday, they may have sent it one to three weeks ahead of Giving Tuesday. They may have sent it on Thanksgiving or they may have sent it in early November, that cultivation text before the fundraising text. Question from Melissa. Don't we need to send MMS text to include photos, videos, and graphics? Yes. To send photos, to send videos, or graphics, you would use an MMS text including that multimedia. Question from Ariana. Does the rule for cultivation text before and ask also apply for sending membership renewal reminder text? I would think so, Ariana. I haven't seen that specifically, but I I think if you do that as part of your other channels or if that's helpful to get your members to renew, then I think having some sort of impact or other communication that is not a fundraising or membership ask specifically, ahead of that membership ask is a good idea. Question from Altair. How do we quickly grow our audience? What are the most effective methods prior, for obtaining express prior consent? So there is a a lot of different ways. I I find that, adding it to your donation forms, your event registration forms, your email sign up forms, those are usually, really effective ways to grow the list in a in a rapid fashion. We'll have organizations that will send a dedicated email to their list inviting people to join their list. We have, organizations that, have have had phone numbers that have been given to them in the past that they will initially reach out to about their text messaging program as well. Direct mails, other other ways through, different social media platforms, reaching out periodically. I think those are all different ways to grow the list on an ongoing basis and replace any of the unsubscribes that you may get through text. Question from t Scott. Who sends the mass text? Where do they come from? And I assume it includes no reply. So the mass text would come from a texting platform where you have a short code number typically or maybe a 10 digit number. In it it has to include something like stop to end that's automatically added so people know if they wanna opt out of receiving future text messages they just need to reply stop and they will automatically be removed from the list. Question on the cost. So T Scott, if you wanna email me I will connect you with our sales team. They can get you the information that you need, on cost. Question from Deb. Is Tatango a separate company from NXT? Yes. So Tatango is a separate company from Blackbaud. You do we need Tatango to text from NXT? So you don't need to tango to text from NXT. I'm not sure what else is out there, but we do integrate with NXT so your tech subscribers in our NXT can be automatically added into the tango to be texted. Question from Cindy. What's the best way to have people opt in? So really good question, Cindy. When you do ask people to opt in, especially if you're using a short code, there's specific language that you need to use that the phone carriers wanna see. So on your donation form, there's specific language that you need to to say that has to be included for a compliance reason. So if if you wanna email me, I can send you some examples of donation forms that have that information for short codes, and and I can give you examples of what that legal compliance language is. Okay. Question from Nancy. What was the cadence of the stewardship text and fundraising text one week, one month, other? So we find about one, one and a half of each each month for the first ten months of the year. From January to October, we find about three texts are sent and that may be either two stewardship, one appeal, or two appeals and one stewardship. And then in November and December, it increases where it is probably three fundraising texts for every stewardship text. Question from Steven. If you send peer to peer text only, does that cancel out the legal need for somebody to opt in? Yes. So peer to peer text, you don't need them to consent, you can rent list, you can buy list, and text them through peer to peer programs. Question from Heather. What are the requirements for having Tatango? No no real requirements. We take care of the short code or the 10 digit number, get you set up. So if you wanna email me, Heather, I can provide more information on the onboarding process. It's typically four to six weeks with our customer success team that I'm part of. So during that time, we train you, we show you what's worked for other organizations, what hasn't worked, lessons learned, data, trends that we're seeing, and get you ready to start sending text. What is the best way to get cell phone numbers from Juan? I've answered that, a bit already. The different channels and, collecting and and having the proper language on different donation forms and online forms. Question from Heather, does it integrate with BBCRM? We're actively working on a BBCRM integration, Heather, so we're we're looking at that within another another organization currently. So, it is it is on the road map for us to integrate with Blackbaud CRM and, I believe that is already started down that road with one of our customers. Another question from Alicia. Are you able to upload this Tatango if your data is not housed within Blackbaud? Yes. If those folks have given you their phone numbers, consented to receive text from you. Let's see. Question Question from t Scott. So there is an opt in requirement by the donor before they receive the text from Tatango. So if somebody gives on a donation form to Scott, and if you have the language on that form for them to to opt in to receive text and they do give you their phone number, then they would be opted in to receive Tatango text. K. Question from Tara. Are there creative ways to personalize messages other than using first name? Yeah. So so you can really like email, you can personalize text beyond first name. We see some organizations use last gift amount. We see some event organizations that use, the name of the event, the team name, if somebody is a team captain. So really any personalization fields that you wanna use, you can insert them into text messages. So even though you may be sending one to many where it's going out to hundreds or thousands or tens of thousands of people, You can personalize first name, last gift amount, other information that may be relevant to to the donor. Questions here. Couple questions on other platforms we integrate if I know we're running out of time here. If you wanna email me, I can get you that information. So question from James, will the text from Tatango be automatically tracked in our RE NXT? So we will track back opt outs. So if somebody opts out of a text message that will go back into RE NXT and automatically be updated. Okay. I think we're just about close to out of time here. I think I got through most of the questions, but if there were some that I I did not get to, please feel free to email me. I have my email up on the screen here and also I think that, Abby just put it in the chat window here. So please feel free to reach out. I know we're we're towards the end here, so I appreciate everybody staying on for so long and I hope this was helpful. Hope hope you found some new ideas to test out or some data points that help to make the case if you're looking to add a text messaging program. We'd love to know your feedback, so feel free after the webinar to reach out with any follow-up questions or any feedback. Certainly would would love to to get ideas for future webinars or what you'd like to hear about text messaging in the future. Alright. So with that, we will wrap this up, everyone, and I appreciate your attention today and joining us, and have a great rest of your week.