Name: Preparing for Your Annual Appeal
Uploaded: 2025-07-30T19:31:33.831Z
Duration: 36 min 16 s
Description: Preparing for Your Annual Appeal

Transcript for "Preparing for Your Annual Appeal": Hello, and thank you for joining us today for this installment in our arts and cultural webinar series. This time around, we're going to be talking about preparing for your annual appeal. Please feel free to introduce yourself in chat, and, we'll get started here momentarily. As you can see, Evan's already introduced himself here and saying hello to everybody. Just to let you know, Evan is going to be in our chat so that, he will be, more than happy to help, answer some questions as they come along. But we'll talk a little bit more about that housekeeping stuff here in just a moment. Yes. Hello, everybody. I see people starting to file in. Excellent. I'll give it just another thirty seconds or so as people get in here. Excellent. Alright. So let's talk a little bit about some housekeeping and allow me to introduce myself here. I am Jeff Arbuckle. I'm a customer success manager here at Blackbaud. I'm actually located, in the Indianapolis area in a small little village inside of Indianapolis called Beech Grove. I am an avid comic book reader and fan. I have a massive comic book collection. I also like to go see movies quite a bit. So you can imagine that, the month of July was very pleasant for me for, Superman and Fantastic Four alone. But, I also have a couple of cats. I have, a boy cat named Kirby and a girl cat named Sadie. Kirby is asleep currently just to my right on my desk. You might see his tail flash by at some point if he decides to get a little squirrely. Sadie likes to stay away from the camera as much as possible. But, happy to have you here. Now let me go go ahead and go over some, of the housekeeping tips here that I have for you. The audio for this is going to be broadcast through your computer speakers. If you encounter any technical issues such as, maybe some freezing or audio cutting in and out, Usually, a quick refresh of your browser is the best way to get things working again. Worst case scenario, leave and, just log in again through the the link that you used to get here, just a little bit ago. Chat and q and a are located on the right hand side of the screen. I would be, be grateful if you use the chat. Like I said, we've got, Evan in the background kind of helping out with some questions while I go through the slides here. If you don't get an answer to your question during the session, we will follow-up with you over the next, day or so. So, just be mindful of that. But feel free to ask questions. And also, you know, I wanna I wanna use this opportunity to kind of help build a little bit of a community here amongst the all true users. If you know the answer that somebody has asked, or the to the question that somebody has asked in the chat, by all means, feel free to go ahead and, you know, talk to them about that or talk about some of the things that you do, that might help them with their question as well. But if you don't get an answer to your question, we will follow-up one way or another by either getting you in contact with your customer success manager or with support or a combination of both. So just to let you know there that that is available. The q and a only goes directly to me. So I do, request that you do use the chat so that everybody can see the question and we're all basically able to, talk on that same, on that same section there. Also, next to chat, you should see documents, or docs. Please click on this to access links and resources. Some of the stuff I'm going to be referring to during the course of the session. This is also going to be available to you in the recording of the session that you will receive, tomorrow at the end of, about twenty four hours after the end of the session that we have here today. You can also adjust any settings by using the cog wheel at the bottom of the event space. And finally, you can also use the tabs on the top of the event space to see, you know, see information about me, various agenda or or, whatever might be included there for this session. Slides can be a bit squished in, Goldcast. So if you are, having a hard time reading some of the stuff that's on the slides, you can hover over to the right hand corner of the display and and, click the box to expand the slides, in that section of the, of the presentation space. Alright. So with that, So now that we're almost to August, believe it or not, it's already almost August. It is time to start planning for your annual appeal. Because if it took if it was this quick to August, you can imagine that the year end is, gonna come even faster. But at many organizations, the launch date for the year end appeal annual appeal is typically late October, early November. Sometimes, that's even a little earlier. So to make sure you give yourself adequate time to get your appeal out the door, I would typically recommend that you should work backwards from your launch timeline and set a series of milestones to kind of help guide you through the creation of your appeal. Now for example, if you have your annual appeal hitting mailboxes, say November 1, you may want to start pulling your initial list and working on the design in August. Set a week or so for, letters to make their way through the mail, a few days to sign letters, a couple of days to print, a month for design, etcetera. You know, just think ahead. Now we're going to run through a typical appeal process, and kind of give you, like, a start to finish process of kind of on a higher level to give you an overall idea of the important steps and milestones. Now do keep in mind that this is less about the step by step, kind of click here, click there process of building a letter in Blackbaud. It's more about the overarching process. But speaking of building an appeal, this webinar, understand communications in Blackbaud, and, you know, the the, discussion around, like, the streamlining your patron communications, was from last year. But my colleagues and teammates in the arts and cultural space, Jessica Pierce and Evan, who's in the, chat right now, went over some great ideas. And included on that link that, you can find again in the doc section of this session, not only can you view the recording of that, but there's also a bunch of great resources that you can also take advantage of to get an idea of how your communications can be created, run, and basically how you can also take advantage of other tools like Blackbaud's address finder for Altru. Now, speaking of address finder, let's see what other data health tools are also available alongside that one. First things first, before beginning your annual appeal, or honestly any campaign for that matter, you will want to ensure your organization is maintaining your database and adhering to best practices for managing donor data. This is a year round effort. It it really is and it can make a huge difference in the success of your various constituent outreaches. So the information in your system is only as good as what you put into it. So remember that time honored, I guess cautionary term whenever, working with a system like Altru. Bad data in, bad data out. So it is really important to kind of stay on top of all of this stuff and make sure that you are running the duplicate merge process on a regular basis. I would say monthly at a minimum and in all honesty weekly if possible. And if you've never run the duplicate merge process before, reach out to your customer success manager. We can certainly provide you with some helpful resources to get started. If it does seem a little overwhelming at first, don't worry about that. You can merge multiple constituents at once. So it makes that a little bit less of a, worrisome, oh, I've gotta merge this one. Now I gotta merge that one. And now, you know, you're having to run through those one by one by one. But, you can also use the address finder and the deceased record finder features under data tune up to manage constituent updates. AddressFinder utilizes the United States post office, and the national change of address database to basically look for updated address information. So the USPS updates the NCOA database four times per year. So these are likely ideas that you are pretty fully aware of, even if you don't know the term address finder or NCOA. You likely know that the post office has a database for changes of addresses. Now when it comes to the deceased record finder, this is a service that screens existing constituents submitted from a database through the Social Security death index and a few other sources. Use these two easy to use features to ensure that you have a clean and up to date information and avoid embarrassing solicitation errors. Now, next, I'd like to talk a little bit about training and onboarding. So when you onboard staff who are new to Altru or they haven't yet really kind of gotten into the database, it's really important to help them understand that Altru is an interconnected system. Information entered by one team, say like at the front desk by a ticket seller, can impact the data extracted by another team. Example, a development officer looking for new visitors. Inaccurate information can lead to mistakes that may impact a supporter's opinion of the organization. For example, contacting a deceased person or make outreach that much more difficult, like inaccurate contact information. So all organizations have access to basic courses in Blackbaud University for an introduction to Altru. If you have a training subscription, usually listed as the learn more subscription on your invoices, make sure that your staff members are taking advantage of it. You can ask your CSM to help you access your organizational transcript to see what, training courses have been taken. But I'm also including a link to our Blackbaud University support request form in the, docs area with the, rest of the resources that I'm providing. The BBU team is able to help with course recommendations, transcripts, and more. Now, your organization should also spend some time putting together your own best practices guide to outline how you want your information entered into the system for consistency. Do you abbreviate streets? How do you handle addressing letters to spouses? Do you use titles or a more informal name style? You know your constituents and their preferences best. So creating a data entry guide for your organization really does help streamline the information you are putting into the system and can help cut down on the amount of cleanup that you might have to do a little bit later on. Now some important fields to pay attention to in your data cleanup efforts include things like name formats, addresses, and solicitation codes. Your organization may have constituents with specific needs or preferences, so by defining best practices specific to your organization ahead of time, you can help create consistency for your supporters and staff. Now before you start to craft your appeal, sit down with your team and lay out your goals for the campaign. Like, who will you be asking? What will you be asking for? Are you raising funds for a specific project? Trying to reach a new segment of donors? Increase engagement? These are important questions to ask and we've really kind of lay you know, listed them here as the who, what, when, and how. So let's start with who. Who makes up your core donor base? Are you looking to bring in donors from a new group? You could 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 of, like, high level donors, you may want to consider some kind of a special outreach to those types of segments. Next is your what. Define what success looks like for your organization and for this appeal. You know, maybe you're raising a million dollars for a new exhibit or trying to attract 500 new members. So is your appeal going to be cause based or for general donations? Maybe it's a combination. So you could consider a friend raising campaign as well to share more information about your organization with constituents that may not be ready to join as full blown supporters. So defining what you are hoping to get out of your appeal certainly can help you determine how it needs to be executed. Now, when it comes to, you know, having answered the who and the what, now you can move on to the when and the how. So to meet your goals, when does your campaign need to go out? For many donors, the period between Thanksgiving and New Year's is usually when they plan to give their annual gifts. So does your organization tend to receive most donations at year end? Do you have supporters who only give once their appeal has come in with the little return envelope inside. Yeah. These are things that you will want to decide, including things like, you know, should you be the first year end appeal your donor c, or maybe does your organization prefer to be at the end of the pack? So you'll also need to decide how many touches you will include in your appeal. So for more for many organizations, the annual appeal is a simple single piece mailer for all donors. For others, they may have, like, a multi stage campaign with a soft launch and a newsletter ahead of the mailer. They follow it up with social media posts, and perhaps a second outreach to those donors who have not yet made a donation by a set date. So setting your campaign schedule will also depend on your appeal format. Has your organization moved entirely to electronic communications only? You know, so perhaps your donors and supporters expect a hard copy mailer each year. Your organizational needs will also help you to to decide on a digital, physical digital, physical, or a combination of the two in terms of your campaign. Last but not least, will your organization participate in Giving Tuesday? That's something to also consider. And I am going to be touching upon that a little bit later towards the end of the session because we do have some, some tools around that as well. Alright. So let's talk a little bit about creating the annual appeal itself. Now once you have defined the who, what, when, and how that I just talked about, you can move on to this to designing the campaign itself. So if you choose a campaign with multiple mailers or email and social media tie ins, do you want each piece to look cohesive like one suite of outreach? Or do you want standalone pieces? Maybe the differences in how things look. Maybe that helps, you know, attract attention to certain outreaches for some people while others act on other, you know, on other layouts and designs. That's something to take into consideration. Also consider your social media and overall communications calendar. So, like, let's say if you choose to do a Giving Tuesday donation push, you can craft those posts ahead of time and perhaps pick out several unique pieces of your mission or opportunities for funding to highlight, like, for example, I don't know, $10 provides free admission to the museum for one school child. A $100 feeds an elephant for, I don't know, ten minutes or whatever. Design is your opportunity to kind of pull those donors in and show them the good that your organization is doing. So that really is something to take into consideration is how you want that to be presented to the the people receiving the appeal letters or the appeal outreaches. Next, let's talk about building an appeal in Altru. So there are two components to running your appeal in Altru. The first is the appeal and the second is the appeal mailings. You can create multiple mailings or letters for each appeal within the appeal mailing configuration window. So this is helpful if you are segmenting your recipients, for example. If you have created multiple letters, you can define which letter a constituent should receive by setting a specific order under the letter section under part three of the configuration window labeled finish up. When adding an appeal mailing, that's where you'll see that, finish up to that part three in the configuration window. So more specific groups like board members, volunteers, affinity groups, and so forth. These should be ranked higher over a more general solicitation because Ultra will determine which mailing a constituent should receive based on your ranking and will generate only one letter. So running an appeal in Altru will tag a constituent's record and indicate that they've received your outreach. This is helpful later on when you are receiving donations so you can measure the success of your appeal and can also help prevent reaching out to the same constituent too many times. That's another one of those, things to to keep in mind when we talk about, like, embarrassing mistakes that can be made when data is not clean. Well, if you start to reach out to constituents too many times after they've made a donation, that can also be, kind of an unforced error also to to try to avoid. Now in Altru, appeal mailings generate letters or emails to be run through the system, and also you can create lists to be sent to a mail house or lists to be mail merged with, with a letter in house. So using an appeal mailing to generate lists versus queries, can help with deduping outreach preferences and will also provide that tag on the constituent's record. But if you have a query that captures all recipients, that you would like to include in an appeal, you can then make a selection with that query. So in the appeal mailing, you can then use that selection to define which constituent should receive the mailing. And if you choose to build a process, and process your letter within Altru itself, you can then use the merge fields to create a personalized appeal. So by using appeals rather than a simple query, you can add in address processing options, name formats, and include or exclude constituents based on recent activities, like gifts within a recent date range, like lie bunds, gifts over a certain, value and so forth. While you could use a query to find that information as well, it is much easier and faster to do so in the appeal section. Now, after you have built your letters and hit save, you will then 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. And once you've run the mailing, any letters associated with revenue cannot be deleted. So when you click run mailing, you will see a the number of recipients for all the letters and create a selection of appeal recipients for easier querying and reporting. Now, if your organization uses the calendar features in Altru, you can also add your appeal to the organization calendar to keep other team members up to date on your communication plan. And this can be really helpful for team members working in other departments, say, like, if a member or donor is speaking to someone at the front desk and mentions the mailer, or your events team has another event in the works. These are really great ways for people to be aware that things happened or are about to happen. When you add an appeal mailing in the calendar, you enter only general information such as name, mail date, appeal, and tasks. Now, as mentioned earlier, clean data is so essential to the process and the success of your campaign. So pay special attention to spousal relationships, preferred name formats, solicitation codes, and deceased status to ensure that you are reaching the right constituents when and how they want to be contacted. Now ask ladders, are used to recommend and prompt donation amounts as well. So an ask ladder is a set of requested donation amounts based on a constituent's giving history and can be fixed or can multiply with a specific scale. The ask ladder assigns different, requested amounts to different segments of donors based on what they've given. So for example, if a donor's last gift was, say, $50, the ask ladder may suggest that they give 75, a 100, or a 125. In the example, you know, on this slide, I have donors with a giving history of $50 to $99.99. So receiving the set you know, they're receiving now a set ask of an increase to $100, while donors of a $100 or more are receiving a requested percentage increase. So to add an ask ladder, you go to marketing and communications, and then you'll click on configurations. And once the ask ladder is built and saved, you can then add it to your appeal mailing in the configuration window. Now I have some more information about ask ladders in the docs section with the various resources, that I also wanted to share with you today. So there's more information about those if you've not really messed too much with those ask ladders in the past. Constituents are now also able to indicate which appeal that they are donating to through web forms. So to add an appeal, you go to web forms and then manage donation form, then you click options, and then you'll find source. By adding appeals to your donation forms, you can understand why your donor is giving their funds and gauge the success of an appeal or initiative. When a donor gives through the form and doesn't choose a specific designation, the default appeal designation is automatically added. So you can also display the appeal designation as a field on the donation form and make it a required field. So donors must choose a designation before submitting the donation. Additionally, you can create some custom URLs for your donation form that include a specific appeal designation. So when donors use that URL to give, the designation appeal will be automatically added to their donation. Now, it's also important to consider how your donors will make their gift. Some donors will not make their gift without receiving that little return envelope with their hard copy mailer. My teammate, Lexi, who, came from an organization using Blackbaud products, has told the story that she once had a donation come in with a ten year old return envelope. So that's somebody really making sure that they use the, the, tools that you've sent them. Right? But others may not even have a checkbook and will only donate online. So it's important to make the actual process of donating as easy as possible for your constituents. Also, it's a good idea to make sure that you are appealing to the way that they like to donate. If you know that your constituent base isn't so much an online type of person, then maybe having those hard copy appeals are better way to go. But for those who do like to do online donations and still receiving a hard copy mailer, consider adding a QR code to those hard copy mailers to lead donors directly to your donation form. Also, add options for recurring gifts to both web forms and hard copy written, and return envelopes rather, to encourage your donors to consider a recurring gift. But if you do receive credit card information in a hard copy return envelope, ensure that you're disposing of it responsibly by shredding it or some other means of destroying it. You don't want that information to get out, by accident, and and put them into a lot of risk as far as their, credit card information. Now, if you receive donated funds in the mail, make sure your team has a consistent gift entry process. So this kind of goes back to the training and the idea that everybody's on board with understanding that Blackbaud is an interconnected system. So they need to remember to add your appeal to the gifts that are being entered in, so that those back office donations are properly reflected in your appeal performance metrics. You can add an appeal under the marketing tab at the bottom of the add payment screen. Now Blackbaud reporting options include both queries and pre built reports. Pre built reports are a good way to easily and quickly pull information in a consistent format with no cleanup. Queries give you more control over the information you include 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 and, linking, and OData is also linked, you can simply refresh the spreadsheet without having to pull your query from Blackbaud again. We do wish you all the best with your year end appeals. Blackbaud just released our updated toolkit for year end planning and giving Tuesday. That link is also included in the links available under docs. That is something that will be, I'm sure that there will be some connect for success sessions planned in August or into September to talk a little bit more about the highlights of the toolkit. I know we've done that the last couple of years too. So, be sure to be on the lookout for that and, sign up for those, if you see information about that, start getting publicized out there. As for our next Altru webinar, we've got one coming up on August 27. So just about four weeks from now. And that's a membership by the numbers unlocking the power of membership metrics. Basically, last Wednesday of every month as usual, at the same time, 2PM eastern. We definitely look forward to seeing you there. Wanted to also call out that BBCON twenty twenty five is, just around the corner. First weekend in October. It's gonna be in Philadelphia this year. Go, Phillies. Hopefully, they will be playing a lot of games in October this year too. But the lineup for BBCON is live. There's lots of sessions that are already planned. There's all sorts of, different opportunities for people to get involved with their various products. If you're interested in, registering for that, head on over to bbconference.com and, take a look at what's going on there and, see if that might be something you're interested in attending yourself, if you haven't already planned to. I also want to make sure that we call out the resources that are always at your fingertips. We have Blackbaud University, which I already talked a little bit about. That's a great way to get a, basic understanding of Altru And, that's a great thing for new users to make sure that they take advantage of, especially, especially for the basics alone, but but even more so if you have a learn more subscription. I definitely recommend that you take advantage of that. There's always customer support and knowledge base to help you get some step by step information, some resources that might be available to you, especially from the knowledge base side. And, also, support is really good at troubleshooting some issues if you run into anything like that. And I definitely recommend everybody take advantage of the Blackbaud community if you haven't already. This is a great place to connect with other Altru users, other people that use the same Blackbaud products that you are. A great place to, brainstorm ideas, talk and, talk about things that you've done, ask people what some successes they've had. Great way to, be able to do that as well. As long as you have a Blackbaud ID, you should be able to get into the community and, participate there. I somehow forgot to have a slide for this, but I also wanted to, make sure I brought up the, the programs that we have for, like, Blackbaud Champions or our reference program. If there's anybody who's interested in joining either one of those, Blackbaud, Champions, I kind of call community plus. Not only can you interact with some Blackbaud users from various different products there. But there's also, like, some, career enhancement opportunities there for you to learn about. Some some, fundraising specific, information that you can learn that's a little bit outside of the products that we sell, just general thought leadership type stuff. That is also a place where you can connect with certain members of the Blackbaud team as well and provide feedback. The references program is, when somebody is looking to maybe purchase Altru or maybe purchase something like Financial Edge or or another product like that, and they are looking for somebody to talk to to just kind of ask them about some of the things that they've done or been able to be successful with the product. That's something that you have total control over how often you will reach out to, or be reached out to for a call like that. If you're interested in participating in either one of those, the champions or the reference program, just let us know in the chat, and we will make sure to, follow-up with you on that and and get you into that team. Alright. So that is all that I have for you today. I wanna thank you for coming. I hope this information kinda gives you a good idea of where you can start and, maybe some of the things that you might be able to do. Maybe it's some stuff that you haven't done before, but you're looking to do for the first time this year. Hopefully, this kinda gives you some of that, some of that push in the right direction to, to see how you can plan out your, your annual appeal this year. Again, if you have any questions, that we didn't get to, we will follow-up with you at a later point. But you can also always reach out to your customer success manager and, or reach out to the support team, and they'll be happy to assist you in any of your questions as well. But thank you so much for attending. I hope you have a great rest of your day. I hope you have a great weekend ahead, and we'll talk again soon.