PRESENTATIONS

PEDRO LARA

JOEL NICHOLSON SHOW NOTES

• Welcome to our 19th LemonTree Donor-centricity Collective event held in the last 6 years!
• Teamwork is key; to make this as engaging as possible we try to make this more than a 1-way Zoom webinar – expect polls and reflection time!
• Burning questions will be addressed – raise them through the Q&A function
• Contribute to our collective thinking via the survey which will be sent following the event
• Our Donor-centricity Definition – “The continual dedication to increasing the depth and breadth of your donor understanding, so you can connect more meaningfully, collaborate more effectively, and – most importantly –genuinely care for your donors in order to create ongoing value exchange, build trust and increase loyalty.”
• Today we focus on the Keep Me stage of the Donor Relationship framework
• Poll results from the last Grow Me event
  • 48% of NFPs still use RFM to segment donors
  • 64% are focused on Regular Giving
  • 94% of NFPs think we should be considering our donor’s wellbeing
  • 60% of NFPs say they are unlikely to incorporate gamification into their fundraising strategy
• Keep Me is the next event, which will be followed by Endear Me
• Questions you may be asking…
  • Do we still have the same goals?
  • Are we still communicating the right way?
  • What shared memories are we creating?
• And more specifically…
  • What does COVID mean to KeepMe?
  • What are you seeing in our current environment and fundraising? Are attrition rates improving or declining?
  • What are you doing to Keep Me right now?
• All this and more being discussed on the DCC LinkedIn group right now!
• Poll – how is your fundraising adapting to donor engagement with COVID?
  • 48% say it has fast-tracked digital programs and innovation
• LemonTree Primed case study
  • Retention rate of 79% at 12 months, 15% improvement
  • Attract the right audience
  • Build the relationship
  • Personalise the relationship
• The DCC Quiz is now live and allows you to benchmark your answers against your peers in real-time
• Poll – How would you rate your organisation’s channel optimisations
  • 55% of the audience said mid – some personalisation of channel preferences
• KeepMe Actions
  • Collect more meaningfully?
  • Collaborate more effectively?
  • Care more genuinely?

JONATHAN STOREY SHOW NOTES

• Fundraising Director at Environment Victoria for the last 6.5 years
• A bit about us
• been around for 52 years, Victoria’s leading environment charity
• Focus on climate change and some more localised issues
• 100% funded by donations
• 12,000 cash and regular givers
• 120,000 active email addresses
• 65,000 social media audience
• Raise about $3m per year
• Maurice Denham
• Book – Relationship Fundraising by Ken Burnett
• Alternate Book – The Zen of Fundraising: 89 Timeless Ideas to Strengthen and Develop Your Donor Relationships
• Maurice is accountant, Barry is one of his clients
• Barry’s brother Terry runs an agency called EHS Brann
• EHS Brann’s key client is Tesco, UK’s largest supermarket
• Terry’s first inspiration in CRM was not the customer, but Maurice who runs a one-man agency
• Terry knows the name his clients, but also their partners, interests, and desires… This knowledge has opened many a door over the years
• Terry’s understanding of his audience has informed CRM, and how relationships with our customers drives customer happiness (and growth!)
• “The future of our brand lies in the strength of the relationships we build with individual customers”
• “One brand, one set of values, one customer relationship”
• in 2002 Tesco had 10m customer records with transaction, demographic, and behavioural data against every single on, refreshed daily
• Today Tesco has 29% market share and is the largest food retailer in the UK
• Three things
• Knowing a lot about your customer really works
• Making customers happy involves joining up the critical points to create a consistent experience and an integrated, enjoyable customer exerperience
• Every little bit helps
• What does this mean for fundraising?
• Take a whole of organisation approach to communication >> give a “brand EV” experience
• We don’t do “big” supporter journeys >> marketing over-automation
• Most people get everything most of the time
• Every interaction is a journey
• Integrate and automate where possible
• Poll – Supporter journey mapping – winner or wallpaper?
• 38% implemented and saw increased value
• 38% tried it but unsure of value
• Strategy with real-life
• Voice and content
• Clear and trusted voice – CEO
• Trusted experts
• Consistent messaging and story telling
• Social integration with paid content and social sharing
• Fundraising appeals that match our campaigns
• Tactics
• Try thigns and fail fast
• Upgrade, upgrade, upgrade
• Annual bequest call
• RG upgrades
• Mid value donor treatments
• Major donor growth
• Long term view to your ability to support, wherever you came from
• How do we know it works?
• Pareto suggested Environment Vic were #1 for 5 year single giving
• RG accounted for 32.6% of additional income

PEDRO LARA SHOW NOTES

• Largest retailer for online coffee in Australia
• What challenges do you see in retaining your customers? As time goes on and Amazon becomes a serious force, it will change how we do things and speak to our customers
• Pre-COVID
• The thinking was luck really – started do this at 19 and didn’t know much, learnt a lot through real world experiences
• Our customers were cafes and barristers, it made it easy to have friendships with the people I was already clienteling
• At this time the industry was not as mature, and so we were all growing together
• Open conversation meant the industry grew, learnt, and adapted through friendships
• Despite growth and mergers the relationships stayed the same – it’s always been about being social first
• “Rome wasn’t built in a day” – we took our time and did it our way
• We’ve scaled this idea as the number of customer grew through knowing who influencers are and who has the loudest voice – forming relationships with these personas allowed our message to go further
• Data has been leveraged in balance – what we know about consumption and trends with what we love ourselves; there is so much data it can be overwhelming so we need to humanise it
• Post-COVID
• There are two different worlds now – home which emerged through COVID and the commercial cafe
• The former has emerged but the latter has declined due to business confidence – our product is a premium one so has suffered as discretionary spending has declined
• From a home perspective it has forced a channel strategy change to “chase” these consumers across platforms such as Google, Facebook, and YouTube
• Poll – How well do you know your data?
• 50% say they know their data “OK”, they know key data point but aren’t actively forecasting or making decisions from them

Q&A

During these difficult COVID times, what innovative things are you doing to drive retention?

Jonathan Storey: Integration between email and social audiences >> will allow us to create a single customer view and build better Facebook custom audiences, this will feed into a social funnel driving them to a given action.

Knowing your donor and having what feels like infinite information about them is great, but with limited capacity to execute on them it’s difficult to demonstrate how this translates to fundraising; do you have any tips to leverage this information?

Jonathan Storey: Terry from EHS Brann had it when he said ‘Perfection isn’t essential. It’s better to do one thing well than 10 things badly – but make it that one thing that really makes a difference. Start from the basics first then work up:

#1 Your basic donor data – Make sure names, addresses, salutations, postcodes, phone, emails are correct. Look at your system for flagging donor preferences – does it work or even make sense. Do people actually know how to use it etc. – do the simple stuff first. 

#2 Your transactional data – look at results, giving channels, donor sources, and use an RFM model to segment and pull data selections. Make sure your regular giving program is working as well as it could. Look at external assistance on data analysis/donor review/RG metrics if you don’t have those skills in-house – clever use of skilled consulting resources can save hours and add value a lot faster than a busy fundraiser. 

#3 Once you’re happy with #1 and #2 soft data like age, supporter actions (volunteering, petitions, events, etc.), email history, notes, and any known donor interest preferences can be used to build up a picture of your top donors. You can start simple with a small number of people in your pool (try the top 20 donors – it can be as basic as sorting a spreadsheet by $ value) and give them a call. It’s all scalable if you start small with pathways to major/mid-value programs and bequest opportunities down the line.

If you feel you’ve done the basics well then it really is all about using more advanced techniques to make a difference at the margins i.e. things like big data analysis, deep digital engagement, investing in key content, more granular reporting on everything, RG benchmarking, etc. That normally comes at a cost, either in time of expert resources, so make sure your basics are covered first and choose to do the things you think will give the best bang for your buck.

I’ve heard that reminding RG donors of their monthly gifts can prompt cancellations. What are your thoughts?

Jonathan Storey: I contact my monthly donors to ask them to take action in one of our campaigns, thank them for their support, invite them to events or webinars, send them campaign updates, celebrate wins, see if they want to join our organising network, share news on social media, give them their tax receipt (and thank them at the same time), ask them to fill in a survey, see if they want to upgrade their gift…  

Yes, of course some people may cancel at any these points, but what am I missing out on by not having a relationship with them and showing how much I value their support?  I’d rather a few donors leave well, than have all of them left out. As an example, 33% of regular givers in our last upgrade call campaign increased their regular gift and 0.9% cancelled their gift in response to the call. In dollar terms it’s $38k additional income v’s $3k lost income from cancellations over the next 12 months. If your donors cancel when you contact them, I suspect there’s other factors involved, and I would be looking at your whole program for answers.

POLL RESULTS

DCC Insight – A number of our fundraisers in the community have directly shared that digital programs have organically expanded with COVID to supplement offline programs. Good to see a majority keeping to the long-term strategies yet connecting through our current COVID challenges.  A small number are impacted by organisation wide budget cuts. 

DCC Insight – Channel optimisation was debated with our DCC speakers, particularly with using email cadence and targeting as important to maintain healthy digital ratings with the major platforms, while balancing the importance of including consistent messaging across each of the donor segments.

DCC Insight – A polarised 50/50 outcome from journey mapping across our fundraisers, half seeing increased income and half not so sure. Our speaker, Jonathan had the experience that the process highlighted new different strategies to contrast against prior journey map.

DCC Insight – Great to see a significant number of our fundraisers are focused on effective donor data analysis to early understanding of trends and patterns in donor behaviours. However, 72% of our fundraisers appreciate much more could be done to improve fundraising outcomes through better data understanding.

YOUR FREE DONOR-CENTRIC RESOURCES

WEBINAR RECORDING

Thank you to our guest speakers Jonathan and Pedro, we look forward to seeing you at our next DCC event in November!