Name: Connect for Success - Arts & Cultural Boost Revenue Streams
Uploaded: 2025-04-16T18:32:08.336Z
Duration: 18 min 24 s
Description: Connect for Success - Arts & Cultural Boost Revenue Streams

Transcript for "Connect for Success - Arts & Cultural Boost Revenue Streams": Hello, and thank you for joining me today on our session today for leveraging Altru to boost revenue streams. We're gonna start in just a moment. I'm gonna give people just a quick chance to join us and get comfortable. Okay. We're going to start off right now. Everyone, I'm excited to have you guys here. My name is Evan. I'm a customer success manager. This is one of our Connect for Success sessions. It's an informal get together, so we're gonna share tips and tricks and some best practices and, you know, we hope you guys can learn something from here and feel free to share if there's anything that you've got that we don't bring up, that's something that your organization has done to, leverage Altru better for this. I think it's a great thing when we can learn from our peers. So we'll get started going with forward. Some quick introductions. Like I said, my name is Evan. I've been at Blackbaud for over five years now. I work primarily in the arts and cultural field, and I help Altru users get the most out of their service. And if you don't know who your customer success manager is, you can reach out to me in the chat, which is in the upper right. I would also like to have you reach out in the chat right now and just tell me a little bit about your organization maybe, anything you wanna share, where you are. I live in Maine currently where spring is starting to spring, but it's a little cool still. So you could share who you are, your organization, maybe what your organization does, maybe share your favorite kind of pie. My favorite kind of pie is apple pie. I feel like it's always a good choice. Anything like that you wanna put in there is always helpful. Love to get to know you guys a little bit more. The chat, like I said, is in the upper right of your screen. That's also where you will find an area that says docs. I hope you click on that at some point as the docs section contains lots of different helpful materials related to what we're gonna talk about today. Hi, Kathy, and thank you for joining us in the chat. You're working remotely from Charlotte. I'm sure it's nice and warm there today. It's only 45 degrees where I am. So we're gonna talk today a little bit particularly about Altru. Oh, let's see. It's another person from the South, Amanda from Georgia. Excellent. You're here to join us as well, Amanda. So as I was saying, though, Ultra does have tools to enhance your revenue streams and to offer your constituents meaningful ways to support the organization. So today, we're gonna cover best practices, share valuable tips, and help you maximize your revenue potential with Altru to make a significant impact on your fundraising effort. Basically, we're gonna make sure that there's no secrets that you don't know about in Altru for places for you to reach out more to your customers. So let's talk about your main revenue streams that you have in an Altru. First of all, you have your tickets, your events, your programs. Right? So where can you do an upsell, and how can you ask for additional donations? When is it a good time to talk about memberships? These are all things to be thinking about when you're talking about the people that are walking in your door. Right? And when you're talking about memberships, these are people that you're gonna count on. Right? These are your ambassadors. So are they donors as well, and have you set them up for auto renewing memberships? And when you talk about, you know, the real heroes here, your donors, you know, people that are giving you these donations, they help sustain you. Right? We We wanna talk about making sure that you're doing everything you can to turn your donors into members and that you do an opportunity to upsell any donation to a recurring donation. Remember, you're a nonprofit. It can't hurt to ask. So I hope that you are taking every opportunity as nicely as possible to do that and ask. So let's talk about unlocking additional income from ticket sales. Okay? So when a ticket buyer is interacting with your organization, it's a great time to see if there are other ways that they could be involved. Altru gives you the opportunity to put a donation request on a ticket form and to take donations at the front desk when people are buying tickets. So this means that you need to be looking for every opportunity to include a link to become a member on your ticket sales forms, asking ticket buyers at the front desk if they wanna become members, and most importantly, including additional donation asks on your membership, your event, and your ticket forms. And if you're at the front desk, encourage people at the front desk to find a friendly way to ask if an additional donation might be something someone's interested in adding to their current ticket sale. All of this can be done through Altru, and it's a great way to bring in just a little extra revenue. One other thing is you need to be incentivizing membership sales on-site. When you're thinking about your front desk and people walking in the door, it's a great time for human interaction. So encourage visitor services staff to ask ticket buyers if they would like to upgrade their tickets to a membership. If your admission is free, think about additional benefits that that could possibly promote. It is easy in Altru during a ticket sale to apply it to a membership, and that means that somebody's current ticket price, if it's a $20 entry fee and a membership is only $40, you'd be saying to them for an additional $20 that we're gonna apply right now. You would get that ticket in the door plus your membership. It's fantastic, and it's a great way. I hope that you guys have your own incentive incentivization going on. And if you do, I'd love to hear you guys share in the chat how you incentivize your team to upsell tickets. Kathy, I'm glad you asked that. The fee coverage option is something we are looking to add, although they haven't given out official timeline as to when that would happen. As a customer success manager, I talk to the public all the time, which means I'm a blabbermouth and they're not going to give me any information like that unless they are certain of it. But I can tell you that I know that they're aware that fee coverage options is something that you guys are looking to see on event and ticketing forms. So the other thing to make sure you guys are doing is including your ticket buyers in your membership and annual fund appears. Amanda, I love what you're saying here that you offer a commission on new membership sales to your front desk staff to encourage them to promote it. That's great. Anything you can do to get as many members as possible because members are fantastic. And, Kathy, I'm so glad to hear that you are trying out our new optimized forms. So remember what I'm saying though, include your ticket buyers in your appeals. Okay? Altru has great ways to segment and pull apart your ticket buyers and target multi ticket buyers and exclude your active members, and you need to make sure that you're looking at your data and you're pulling out people correctly. And if you have any trouble with that, reach out to your success manager or support and talk about what you're trying to do, okay? So think about that. And I'll also think about how do you communicate with ticket buyers after their visit? Every ticket buyer gets an automated thank you, but do you send out maybe a monthly email to everybody who bought a ticket in the last month and say, we hope you had a great time. Did you find things to be satisfactory? Would you maybe consider being a member? Would you maybe consider being a donor? If you're not doing that, I really recommend you look into it. And again, it's very easy in Altru to organize a query or an appeal based on people who just recently bought tickets. So ask, ask, ask. So the next thing you need to do is make sure that you are designing your headers and footers to have those links in them. Well, Kathy, it is possible when you, your question you said, and Amanda hopefully can read it, was that you wanted to collect contact info for people who've purchased via daily sales. You can actually create a contact for them in the daily sales while you're doing that if you want to. It does make the process a little longer on the sale, but you can very quickly gather their information if you would like. And that way, you have a contact information for those who purchase via daily sales. Yeah. It just slows the line. You're exactly right. That's why it's a lot of people don't do it. It's totally understandable. One thing you could do though, is you could, ask them. You know what I mean? Like, you know, give them some kind of a flyer or a thing like that. I know an organization that does this, or put something in their receipt that gives them a way to go online and, become a member or go online and register and share their information, things like that. It's just something to think about. But you should also be aware that you can add links to in your page designer in Altru. So you could put in your headers and footers these quick links like I've got on the screen here where you can add donation forms or membership sales. Basically, every time they're looking at one of your websites, you want them to be able to do that. So members, we talked about this, they're amazing. They're they're ambassadors. Right? And they've already shown a great interest in the organization, and they want you to succeed. So you need to lean on that. Create specific mailings to reach out to members for a campaign and send links to donation forms in the mailings that members can share with their friends and families. And also reach out to your favorite members and see if they wanna help you drive a fundraiser. I think that members that sometimes are overlooked and these people can not only be just regular givers, but just excellent, excellent help in driving a fundraiser, and they want you to succeed. Don't forget to enable auto renewals for your memberships. They help increase and protect it, they cut expenses, and they can be set up online, in person, or in the back office. You wanna help protect your membership revenue month over month, and that is the best way to do it. It allows members to pay their membership dues automatically. It saves everything I was talking about, and it's a great way. If you enable auto renewals, you make sure you're following best practices though for notifying the members of the terms and conditions of their membership and including how to cancel. And, you know, the last major source of revenue, the my favorite ones are your donors. Right? So they're the best, and you need to make sure you're reaching them with all the tools you have. Okay? So make sure you're reaching out to donors in many ways. And as we were talking about with Kathy and, we have the new donation forms, and they're getting great responses. Don't forget to invite your donors too for any special events. If you don't know about the new donation forms, please reach out to the customer success team, and they can make sure that you are on track to use them. This is just an example of the new donation forms if you haven't seen them. We released them a little over a year ago at this point. We developed them to create the optimal donor experience. It's quick and easy. It's little information to fill out, so it cuts down on abandonment and increases donations. Alex Day, who's one of the Washington National Parks fundraisers, she was an early adopter, and she used the form for a campaign, and she got 40% more year over year. She really likes how the form let them keep their brand intact through the entire donation experience. I can Kathy, I can make sure that we send you information about credit card updater, but it's actually not in Altru. It's in another service, but it works with it to make sure that you have updated credit cards in Altru so that you can charge. So I'll make sure to send that to you. Thank you for asking. Don't forget, you guys should be encouraging your donors to set up recurring gifts, especially to our new donation forms, have recurring gift upsell as an option. And you can always try to do things with, your one time and recurring gifts, set them up. The average monthly donor gives 288 a year versus a one time gift of a hundred and $15. Okay? That's just money in the bank. And recurring gifts allow your donors to support you throughout the year with stable, predictable income. If you're using our donation forms, you can enable those and customize the frequencies and things like that. Online giving also has an upsell for their standard forms, and it's a donation form option that encourages onetime donors to change it into recurring gifts. If you're not sure about those, again, reach out to their customer success team. We'd be happy to show you how to utilize them, but it's a great way to get a better income coming to your organization. And a lot of people will actually consider becoming a recurring gift. They just hadn't thought about it until you brought it up. As I mentioned, we have resources. This is just a slide to show you what, what they look like, but all of those resources are available in the docs section. So up in the chat area, if you click on that docs section, you'll see we have everything about how to apply tickets to memberships, getting lists of first time donors, and turn first time ticket buyers, things like that. So those are all up in there, and I wanna make sure you get a chance to utilize them. So I wanted to put this slide in there so you get a chance to check it out. I also wanted to talk to you guys about, engaging with Blackbaud and your peers. If you've already used the donation form, that's fantastic, and I love that you mentioned, Kathy, that you liked it and it was great. If you wanna ever be part of our Blackbaud champions or reference program or maybe do a spotlight, You'll notice that in the slideshow I presented today, I talked to you about some quotes from a different organization and how much they liked using their system and how, it had made their lives better, and we shared some stats. We could be doing that about you as well, and that's a great way to get your organization's names out there to share with your peers all the good work and the things you've been doing. So if you're ever interested in becoming a champion or a reference or doing a spotlight, I'm actually gonna give a quick survey. And if you just put your, that you are interested in the survey, then they will, reach out to you. So that's a great way though to engage. Like I said with your peers, you might be even involved in, BBcon, which is upcoming this year. We're gonna be in, Pennsylvania, Pittsburgh, I think. It's a great organ it's a great way to get, your name around, and it's a great way to engage with peers. So if you're interested in that, it's in the survey, or you could just say I'm interested in the, chat, and I'll make sure that somebody reaches out to you about it. But I've launched that survey, and if you could, fill it out, I would really appreciate it because we use that to kind of determine how helpful things have been. So that's all I have to share with you guys today. I really appreciate you guys spending some time talking with me. Appreciate you guys engaging in the chat. If there's anything else you wanna ask, chat is still open, and I can still read what you write. You are both welcome. It's really great that you guys came by. I appreciate it a lot.