Automated sales system for non-profit organizations

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e great thank you so much Bethany so we are going to get started with some introductions today so diving right in um my name is Kristen kippen I'm the marketing manager with ideal Consulting and I've been an idealist now for about two years and before that I worked with nonprofits managing scholarships back when pretty much all applications were still paper and we thought we were really high-tech by using Survey Monkey so it's come a long way since then um nonprofit technology has and um I'm thrilled now to work with idealist Consulting where our mission is to help nonprofits and small businesses optimize and use Salesforce more powerfully and integrate that with other um Solutions like AO on so um we've gone through a path at idealist of moving from just mass email alone up all the way through marketing Automation and so that journey is um a similar Journey that we're going to kind of start talking about how you can get started on today and then I'll hand it over to Rachel hi thanks for joining everybody today my name is Rachel rosin I am the marketing programs manager here at Acton software um and while I don't have a background in nonprofits um I do have a heavy background in marketing automation um and helping small businesses and you know businesses of all sizes really uh adopt the best practices of marketing Automation and really helping them use the different capabilities of marketing automation to help their businesses grow um and we are thrilled to have one of our customers on the uh presentation today and we have a cat creger joining us from Jefferson Awards Foundation hi thank you so much now I'm cat I have been um with the Jefferson awards for about two years and in the marketing space for five or six um here at the Jefferson Awards I run marketing and communication but also technology um marketing technology as s with Acton um and social and graphic design and about eight other hats as I'm sure many of you understand very intimately at a nonprofit and and I'm really excited to share what we're doing great thank you Pat so with that we are going to dig into the um content for today so just to set the stage um this is my image in my head when I think about nonprofits starting to adopt marketing automation because it's such a courageous leap to make on top of all of the hats you're wearing and all of the things that you're doing already um adopting new technology is challenging but really really really critical as you look towards um where you want to go in the next 5 to 10 years as an organization so these stats on here are actually more um more relevant to the private sector but I think they help with um kind of understanding why this is an important uh type of solution to start looking into now so first of all 60% of the buyer's journey is complete by the time the buyer reaches out to a organization and in 2020 just in five short years this rate of completion is projected to be 85% or higher so in your mind replace the word buyer with donor or possibly Prospect member Advocate or volunteer and these are all people that are going on some sort of Journey with your organization as well and um they're starting to expect the same kind of personalized approach when they engage with you as a nonprofit that they get when um they're doing uh when they're when they're relating to much more more complex organizations like you know putting in an Amazon order um or you know just trying to trying to um register for an event somewhere um the difference is that most nonprofits are not actually there yet with their technology and so the expectation of the user is not met by the reality of what um what their experience is when they start to engage with your systems so you are truly innovators and on The Cutting Edge by considering marketing Automation and we are going to do our best today to give you kind of some ground um spots where you can start with approaching this so here is our agenda for today um first we're just going to talk for a few minutes about what is marketing automation just to set the stage and how nonprofits can use it and then we're going to dig into five really concrete ways to get started which is going to be focused primarily around the idea of user personas and donor personas and then we will move into a case study which I'm sure you're all super excited about to um hear more from cat about how Jefferson Awards Foundation has used Acton to fuel their um systems and then we'll spend some time at the end for Q&A and just putting it all together so as ban said at the beginning you can save up your questions and we will have um time at the end to address those so just keep them coming through the question panel and we'll get to as many as we can at the end so what is marketing automation to start so these items on the screen are key components that you'll usually see in a marketing automation solution and this includes Solutions like Acton other ones you might have heard of are parot or HubSpot and typically they solutions that do much more than just maass email but um email automation is often kind of the heart of what you're achieving through marketing Automation and then all of these other components can kind of amplify and build into um to your system so that you can get more of a 360 degree view of what one contact is doing across um across their across your website across your emails across your forms that they're submitting um whether they're reading your blog whether they're engaging on social media all of those pieces can be facilitated through a marketing automation solution and they also include um there's also a CRM comp component where that's integrated with uh marketing autom so for example um I think cat was saying that um that her organization is integrating with Salesforce now and that's a very common one um but there's usually a piece of that as well so um Rachel I think were you going to speak to this briefly as well yeah definitely and I think you know an important thing to point out here is that there are as you mentioned a variety of different marketing automation vendors and platforms that you can choose from um but essentially they're all offering the same tools and capabilities but here at Aon we like to Define marketing automation as a platform that's designed to cultivate and engage your donors at every stage of their Journey because modern marketing and I mean really Communications is all about the digital world and in order to stay relevant you really have to broaden your scope and utilize both inbound and outbound marketing tactics across the entire life cycle of your prospects and donors so um the way that you're able to do that is you're attracting your new owners or Advocates and uh to your Association through these inbound activities and then you're able to effectively nurture those relationships and really expand their use and their education and knowledge of your nonprofit and then really um the platform ties everything together so that you get some really rich reporting on what's really been truly successful for your marketing and Communications campaigns like you're running great thanks Rachel so um how can nonprofits use it so before we really dive into um some specifics about these Solutions these are three key ways that you can think about marketing Automation and we wanted to present this webinar today because usually when you look at a um marketing automation website it's put in terms of sales and how how sales and marketing can intersect and how they can improve re revenue and um that sort of thing and the lead Journey Maybe and so we wanted to just start to break this down into more nonprofit friendly terms and so three key ways that this might resonate with you is that um you can use marketing automation to listen first of all so learning what your prospects are interested in through um web analytics and through social media engagement that sort of thing can teach you more about who your prospects are before you even start to talk with them on the phone for the first time and qualify is a big one as well so um when I used to work for a nonprofit I know I spent a lot of time just calling through like 50 applicants a day that kind of thing just to get a sense of who was um on the program side applicants was was kind of the people that we were reaching and so we spent a lot of time trying to figure out who was worth spending more energy on who was actually interested that kind of thing and today with marketing automation you can really use um tools like lead scoring and um other analytics to focus your time on the most engaged prospects and not just call through everyone all the time and then finally to measure and grow so um again we're focusing the conversation today on donors um since it's end of year I'm sure you're all busy in in the fundraising um frame of mind and so you can really use marketing automation to increase major donors and recurring donors through kind of a moves management process so um a lot of side benefits as well I would say one of the biggest one is just um reduce manual labor so your again spending less time kind of doing those manual tasks that really amplify burnout and um kind of make you crazy and then finally consistent branding and pure duplicate issues too so these are all these are all benefits you can get from moving towards a marketing automation platform so these are five ways you can get started on this path and we are going to spend um the next bit of the webinar today kind of going through these one by one starting with identifying your top three donor Pro personas and ending with some um key performance indicators and reports that'll help you measure progress and I will turn it over to Rachel to get us started with that great thank you uh so I wanted to kind of start us off by giving a framework for how to identify personas for your nonprofits um and I really want to stress how important personas are to really set the stage for your content strategies because you're developing content for uh your various donors and your uh your your prospects or audience for your nonprofit um they want more of a Content focused experience they want something that's personalized and relevant to them um so by now most marketers and Communications professionals recognize how important it is to adopt a Content marketing strategy um and that's because the the revenue and the return that organizations are seeing uh from content is uh remarkable recent stats show that website conversion rates are nearly six times higher for Content marketing adopters versus non-adopters and that's ing to the aine group um and that's because like I mentioned people want this content focused interaction from the nonprofits that they're associating with they want to be the hero of Their Own Story and the content that you're creating should really address those needs uh what their needs are what their interests are and what you know their pain points might be so knowing all that I'm going to walk you through how to create personas so that you can start to tailor your uh content to address the needs of your different donor personas uh so for the personas that you're creating you want to give each different Persona a name to help you differentiate them uh you're going to start by defining their common demographic characteristics and then what their defining characteristics are like what are their interests or you know why why do they choose to donate and affiliate themselves with your nonprofit so in order to do this you can start by looking at the data that you're collecting as three distinct layers which are demographic psychographic and behavioral data and on the next slide we have a a screenshot that shows the the three different layers here so the traditional method of profiling donors through demographics and firmographics is still pretty widely used um but this information is stuff that you usually already have like you you know who who your donors are uh so you're able to pinpoint some of that information within your database um it's the information like geographic location gender uh income for example education uh but to really dig deeper we need to add in our psychographics and behavioral layer to really make a difference in the content that we're creating so psychographics is where you can take an educated guess about uh psychological commonalities about our audience so this goes beyond that service level of age and income and looks at common motivators and pain points that unify groups within your donor audience so this data isn't normally a straightforward to collect uh but marketers are able to and Communications professionals are able to consolidate this type of data by creating avatars for these groups uh based on those common characteristics so to give a little world uh for the marketing automation specifically we're able to separate our personas by job titles so we look at marketers SE Suite titles and sales titles as a way to segment um and identify commonalities within each group and for the nonprofit nonprofit sector you could actually do something very similar when analyzing your donors like you know do you have government and federal aid donations that could be one Persona uh do you have corporate and business organizations as another donor and then uh your third Persona could be you know personal donations people that aren't Affiliated to any sort of organization or federal uh entity but or I mean even too uh if you're a nonprofit like Jefferson Awards Foundation you can segment by students and teachers and press and Cat's going to give some examples of this later on in the presentation today but with the help of marketing automation you can track every digital interaction a donor has had with any of your digital assets that live online so you can start to factor their behaviors into your profiles as well which will really come in handy when you're creating content for various programs and campaigns especially nurturing which we'll go into in a bit so on the next slide I'm sure many of you were thinking that yes this sounds great and logical but how do you obtain this information and the best place to start is by asking around internally you're going to want to talk to your donation coordinators your events teams I mean really anybody that has any interaction with your donors because they're interacting with them every day and they probably have some really fantastic insights about what their needs and their interests are and if you have the budget to spend sometimes doing focus groups or surveys is another really great way to get this information but if you do have a limited budget definitely collaborating internally is a great place to start here so to help us out we do have a few questions that you can be asking but before I move on to those questions I really wanted to stress here that the objective here is to identify commonalities and underlying patterns so in doing this you should be able to identify about three to five groups of likely or ideal donors for your nonprofit but you probably know who you you know who your donors are already so you're just conducting this process so that you can segment them based on their interests so that you're able to provide really relevant content that's personalized to to their interests so not only does this help you build trust but it helps build a stronger connection with your nonprofit when you're serving that really personalized experience and so here are some of the questions that we recommend you using you know the first one is what do they perceive as valuable you know is it a tax break is it some sort of donation incentive or do they just do it for that altruistic feeling uh what keeps them up at night you know which causes uh are they the most worried about you know what what is their stake in them how involved are they getting uh what are their aspirations you know whether they're campaigning for world peace or just looking for some form of charitable affiliation uh where do they spend their time engaging with your organization or nonprofit are they primarily on your website or do they respond to emails or are they really active on social channels uh you know how can you help them solve issues that your nonprofit faces uh can they use their Network word about your your cause or are they able to provide just monetary donations um and what are some of the common objections that they may have you know do they not have money right now or are they not happy with the transparency of how the funds are being used you know these questions are a really great starting point for obtaining that psychographic information that's really going to help make your content stand out and so I know this might seem a little redundant but one of the most important steps that you can do uh is to take all of this information that you're collecting and format it into a nice concise and easy to read format that you can share with everybody on your team and as a thank you for attending today everybody is going to receive a copy of a workbook that Acton has called four steps to creating a Content plan and on page four of this workbook there's actually a template for completing this p uh Persona Matrix for you so keep in mind that the the workbook is is designed for B2B marketers but all of the same Concepts and principles still apply here in the nonprofit world but I condensing everything onto one sheet it can act as an easy reference point uh so that everybody in your company whether they're interacting with any donor all of the messaging and that communication remains consistent and that's how you can make this really easily referenceable and so once you've collected all of that great psychographic and demographic information to identify who your persona should be you can start to segment your Communications based on their behavior and where your donors are at in their Journey so you're going to be using uh the Great sites that you've developed from the personas to deliver relevant content and messaging to each Persona at the different stages in their journey and this really helps enable you to send the right messages at the right time to the right people to really kind of deliver that customized and personalized experience that I've been talking about and this cycle that we show here on screen represents what we as marketers or Communications professionals need to accomplish um for each donor's Journey uh we're attracting them to the nonprofit capturing their information we're nurturing that that relationship by providing targeted emails and targeted content and then we're converting them into actual you know donors and expanding their interest uh in your nonprofit to help them you know donate on a more regular basis and to be really affiliated with a nonprofit and this expansion phase is really particularly uh important for nonprofits because this is where you can share what the donations have achieved and so that everybody that has donated can really feel good about their contributions and want to keep contributing to help support your causes and one of the best uses for marketing automation is how you're able to use this information in nurture programs which we'll go into right now so let's level set here and Define nurturing what is it nurturing is an automated email program that encourages your audience to interact with your nonprofit sounds pretty simple right but nurturing is so important because when when your potential donors are attracted to your nonprofit they aren't always ready to donate right away does that mean that they'll never donate no it just means that they're just not ready right now so nurturing allows you to keep connected and really stay top of Mind as they go through this consideration process so nurturing or email drifts as a lot of marketers call them uh it allows you to do just that it allows you to warm up your donors over time so that you stay top of mind and most of the time nurturing the nurturing process is not exclusively about a hard cell that comes later once your pro once your donors are warmed up you're educating them about your nonprofit you're responding to their needs and you're developing trust with them through a series of emails and other Communications you don't want to turn them off by sending emails that say like send your donation now email that barely know anything about your nonprofit I mean they're not going to bite you want to get to know them and you want them to get to know you to start to trust you so you want to provide really relevant and educational information about why they should trust you and why uh why you're a great nonprofit to associate with uh so you need to know uh that your job as as the marketer Communications professional really is to build that trust and give them information that they need to move through the process to actually making a donation and one of the ways that you're able to do that as I've mentioned is with your content so once you've developed those personas and uh great content for each personas it's time to build your nurture programs and one of the best places to start is to start mapping out your content at the different stages of that Journey so really quickly we have a template uh here for mapping content which is also in that workbook that we're going to be sharing with everyone and so the goal here is to really understand the journey and support it with contents and you're going to trigger these marketing messages or emails based on where they're at in their Journey and uh Jan's going to go into this in a bit more depth in a bit but once we have all of the goals of each stage mapped out you can start to fill it in with content that would apply to each stage for each of your personas and begin building your nurture program from there now we're going to go ahead and take a look at what a nurture program looks like so when you get to the point of putting your first automated program together you're going to want to sketch a plan out and here are two examples here on the left we have uh an example that it's a very simple uh nurture path we have five different or four different emails scheduled here you have weight steps in between and basically the goal here is that uh specific actions within those emails are going to uh gonna have certain uh points attached to them through lead scoring and so once somebody reaches a threshold of we know that they are more than likely ready to talk to your development team so as soon as it hits that 30o threshold it's going to automatically open up in your CRM if you have that integration set up and then your development team is going to be notified that yes they are indeed ready for contact and then another example we have here on the right is that you can uh segment once they've talked to your development team and you uh have deemed that they do need a little bit more nurturing you can base them off of the different personas they can get different emails um and you can do some really cool things with conditional branching and dynamic messaging so that uh you can set up one nurture program and have uh Dynamic content that will serve up the Persona content based on which Persona they are and uh here are just a few tips we have to help you get started um so when you're going into nurture programs the most important thing to do is to know what you want them to do after the program you have to know what action you're trying to elicit from your donors when building programs like this are you trying to just educate them about a new donation they can make or are you trying to get them to follow you on social channels or share information with friends and family knowing all this information up up front is going to help you build out the emails and the plan for that particular nurture program tip number two is uh link your programs together you can have somebody move from one program to another without having to do it manually or create conditional rules um and you can do this based on their behavior or even non-b Behavior you know have they opened a particular email then yes they can move into a different nurture path if they've ignored the email and haven't done anything then you can put them into another nurture path that's designed to provide more education uh and information to kind of help them us SP more engagement uh tip number three is know the short and the long path uh some of your donors are going to take different paths you know some are going to be ready to donate right away and so you don't have to do as much nurturing with them and then you can move them into more of an educational nurturing in that kind of expand path and really just teach them more about your non profit so that they get more engaged and and spread the word or you know some people that are going to take a while to donate uh you can put them into a longer path and uh the the last tip that I think is probably the most important here is to consider one-offs instead of editing nurture programs uh nurturing is a great email capability to kind of uh add more automation into your emails so that you as a marketing or Communications professional anybody who really is setting up these programs doesn't have to manually send out these emails all the time but not every email is going to fit within that path you know if you have something like a press release or an announcement about uh you know some uh new donation that you've got or some you know Government funding consider sending that as a one-off or you know if you have an event or a a gala happening you know those invitations should be sent off as one oneof emails opposed to eding them into your nurturing programs because that'll cause you a bit more work and like I said not everything fits within nurture and uh you definitely can still send those oneoff email messages uh so now that uh we've talked about nurturing I'm going to go ahead and pass it back off to Kirsten to talk about how you can schedule your nurture programs to really coincide with your Communications calendar great thank you Rachel um so yeah I guess I want to just pause for a second here and acknowledge that I know a lot of you maybe aren't on a marketing automation tool yet where you can set this up as um fancily as we just saw and that's okay and really um kind of focusing on those personas and getting even just a really simple um you know for email drip campaign setup is something that you can do through a simpler solution to before you're moving up into um into something like Acton so there's a lot of different levels you can approach this with you don't have to go all in all at once um and one of the other kind of foundational pieces that's really critical as you're starting to move in this direction is to have an editorial calendar and to start really tracking what kind of content you're producing and who it is designed to go out to so um this is really critical once you get up to those um amazing marketing automation Solutions with nurturing campaigns because you if you have like a five email series that then goes into another um another program that has several more emails after the holidays perhaps um you're going to have to have something to say in all of those emails right it's not just a question of like you know creating it and and walking away so um content on your blog or on your website can really help with giving you some ideas on what to put in those emails besides just donate now join now that kind of thing over and over so we have some examples here of how to um bold content into your nurturing program so this is the same graph that we saw a few minutes ago with Rachel and then I just added the layer here some example pieces of content so content means not just email copy but also all of these different um communication assets that you can develop so blog posts videos um an FAQ document an infographic those are all examples of content that you can use in your nurser programs and so at the first stage here just to walk through this briefly when a donor is just becoming aware of your nonprofit um maybe we can take the example of a nonprofit that sends veterans to help with firefighting support and so our Target Persona here is um is maybe a veteran and their spouse who are interested in donating themselves because they feel that Affinity with your mission and so maybe you can um have a blog post first of all to warm them up to this idea about ways that you can help prevent forest fires um little Smokey the bear style there and then uh in stage two the donor is become more becoming more interested in starting to research your cause so maybe at this point you want to actually show them a video and have a day in the life with one of your firefighter volunteers um stage three they're evaluating specifics more and so at this point they're probably wondering like how do you set yourself apart as a nonprofit from all the other um veteran organizations that help with firefighting and and maybe your field um is even more wide than that you know if you're a breast cancer organization or um doing doing work with um I don't know uh kids in education that sort of thing it can be hard to really show how you're unique and so having an FAQ document or some blog posts about how how you're uniquely serving the problems that you're addressing can be really helpful um stage four you could p in an info infographic perhaps so at this point they're validating Their donation decision before they um pull the trigger and showing them what kind of impacts they can have could be really huge so if you can show you know what just $20 would do to um impacts the issue they're concerned about that that's huge and a little picture about this goes a lot further than words sometimes and there's a lot of um there's a lot of free or lowcost infographic tools available online too if you're if you're thinking oh I don't have a aign team that's going to be impossible um there are some ways that you can get around this and when you think about the impact it might have it might be worth just spending a little time looking into that so and then finally stage five they complete the donation and become an advocate okay so at this point they are spreading the word they're sharing what um this cool organization did with all their friends and so giving them something that they can easily share at this stage is really key and so maybe that means a blog post or an infographic on the impa impact again that your campaign had on this key issue and make it sharable with um with buttons for them to share through Facebook or um other types of social media so briefly this is a quick picture of what an editorial calendar could look like and so these are some of the pieces of content that we just spoke to and um at idealist Consulting we just use a Google doc for organizing this there's also ways that you can um use marketing automation tools so you have kind of an all-in-one repository for this but um the key here is just trying to plan out a couple weeks in advaned at least or you know ideally much more than that and get into a rhythm of when you're putting out different types of content and get more people than just you involved with producing that so um assign authors and make sure you document when you want the draft due when you want to publish and who your target Persona is going to be for that piece so that then you can look back at this and fold these pieces easily into your nurturing campaigns and then finally um an offer or a call to action is really key at the end of each of these and and any email that you put out as well so give them a reason to act on what you're doing now rather than just waiting a couple weeks so maybe there's a time-sensitive thing where if they donate sooning you can have a match donation or um there's a few spots left for volunteering that kind of thing is really powerful and then finally um make sure that you have some ways to measure progress so before you start out on any kind of new technology project it's really critical to um figure out what goals are and a lot of times you don't have to think of new goals you can um you can fold in things that you're already measuring as an organization so Beth caner I'm sure many of you have heard of um produced this little graph in the in the screen right now and she wrote a book called measuring the network nonprofit that goes into great detail about some different kpis and metrics that nonprofits can measure to be able to tell of what they're doing is having a different making a difference and having impact on their issues so these are just things um related to marketing automation that you might be interested in measuring um whether it's email clicks or blog analytics um or then going back to some of your big picture organization goals and looking at donation amount per individual those are all things that you can track on a high level and then if you have a solution like Acton integrated with Salesforce you can pull reports to be able to see kind of if your if your actions are helping move the needle on that all right so um before we turn it over to cat to get into a case study I wanted to just speak briefly to some signs that you might be ready for a marketing automation solution and idealist Consulting is um is also running a um free assessment right now where we will help you have an individual conversation about this and help you decide whether like MailChimp is all we can handle right now and give you a few tips for making the most of that or um moving upwards into a more complex solution so we'll send a link so that you guys can um take advantage of that after today's webinar along with the free resource that Acton is providing but a couple brief signs that you might be ready for a marketing automation solution I think um the key is that you really are feeling some pain with your current solution and you think there might be a better way so that probably speaks to many of you but some other Key signs are that you have a couple staff who are dedicated to Communications um you have at least 5,000 contacts and typically um an organizational revenue of several million or more um other than that you're you might be too small um to really take advantage of this or not have the staff who who could really um help you make the most of it but again I think the really key point is just feeling some pain with your existing system and with that I'm going to turn it over to cat to talk a little more about how her organization has used Acton and personas great thank you again so much so first let me just tell you a little bit about the Jefferson award here we power public service so what does that mean well um you could be five or 105 or anywhere in between um or you could maybe be looking for an easy too service project or and on the other hand intense service leadership or mentorship um and that's where we come in we're here and we celebrate and Elevate service at every level um you know we're in our 43rd Year and have five very active programs which in turn gives us very um very many unique sets of constituents or fire personas um that all really have different needs and wants and need to be communicated with in different ways um so we communicate with them now um with the help of Acton and and really I think we've been using Acton for a little over a year now um and you know we sort of did come to that point where you know we just we had too many people in our database and we just really couldn't communicate with them and in the way that we needed to um and that's the at the point at which we brought on Acton um just to briefly describe I mean you can see in the slide here I'll read a bit deeper after the webinar um but just briefly Le 360 students in action and Globe Changers are our youth-based program Champions is for organizations and companies in our media partner program which I'll talk about the most um really we work with over 120 newspapers television and radio stations across the country and they in turn reach out to their local communities to look for people who are giving back and they recognize them with a local Jefferson award and you know depending on where you are in the country you may have seen the Jefferson Awards featured on your local notes um if you go to the next slide I've broken out um just for that media that media partner program all of our constituent groups and sort of paired them together um and and also what you know they may be looking for with those you know what the opportunity is for both JF and what the opportunity is for the media partner or constituent group so with the media ownership as well as editors and reporters um we get a modesty from our Media Partners for using our branding and running our programming but the biggest thing we get from them is free media um because they are essentially running our program on the on the news sometimes to on a weekly basis depending on the news Outlet so we're getting a ton of free media um in turn they get great Feelgood stories and content and we get that content too so for nominees and nominators at both a local and National level there's a similar workflow and a mutual opportunity that that goes back and forth so we all share the Feelgood content and the story and in the process We Gather potential and future donors um what we frequently hear from our local Jefferson Awards winners um is that winning a Jefferson Awards is really a gamechanging moment for them um you know many who went on to then build a global nonprofit um after they were recognized at a local level um go on to the next slide so to dig in a bit deeper into what that buyer constituent journey is um for just local nominations as an example um we use an Acton form a nomination comes into our site and an automated email goes out that's pretty simple um on the local level um of there's a selection committee that picks the winner and that then again triggers another automated email and welcomes them to the overall Global Jefferson Awards family simultaneously there might be a story in the local news or in the newspaper that we share um on a yearly basis we have a huge National ceremonies in Washington DC and every media partner will send one of their winners to DC a year so when that gets reflected in the database again we send out an notated email um just go on to the next slide so what you can see here this is actually a shot from our Acton back end and really lean on the intelligence that we get from that platform um in terms of who's looking at our email who's opening them how we divide into contier groups this is just a real small shot of all of our different um segmentations that we do but I can tell here who's engaged with an email who's open and clicked um you know when they've done it and then can Target further email um much better um for example we're getting ready as I'm sure many of you are to launch our end of your giving campaign and that will go out to many of our s constituents but I will lean on this intelligence in order to send better emails and better content we also um run some automated programs particularly around our lead 360 program where we're tracking um service impact throughout the year all right thanks cat so um I think at this point we are going to open it up for Q&A and Bethany is going to um Step In to um bring up some of the questions that have come up all right so our first one is going to Rachel in your experience looking at your most success all right so pH cut out yeah sorry about that we'll we'll try one more time here okay so we can take the first question um we're asking uh for Rachel or cat I guess if um in your experience what was it that made a marketing automation program particularly successful I'm sorry can you say that one more time yeah in your experience what was it um can you point to any key factors that make a marketing automation program particularly successful yeah definitely uh so so I think that what makes programs uh really successful is when you really take the time to really integrate all of your different uh technologies that you're using into your marketing automation uh because really as as cat really uh featured as well is you're able to use um the platform to do all of your your functional activities but even more than that it provides a lot of really rich data so that you can continually optimize what you're doing so I think one of the best ways to really get the most bang for your buck with a marketing automation program is to really make sure that you're taking the time to integrate everything so that you're getting clean data and that you're you're making sure that everything comes into one uh dashboard and that should be the marketing automation dashboard uh to really give you insights into you know what's working you know what what isn't working what could you be doing better um so I think uh people that are able to really make that they have a clean integration and really take the time to do I it can seem daunting to set up some some of these automated tasks because you're developing all these emails at once you're developing all the content at once but in the long run you're saving yourself a lot of time being able to automate processes in the future um so I think you know taking the time to integrate and really taking the time to learn the programs and really build them out um and and learn how to use your your platform to the up most of your ability is really going to make the difference between you know somebody that is really successful and somebody that is know some pH nominal results all right good great so let's see there's a question from Chad here um to cat and his question was other than email marketing statistics what is the most beneficial aspect of AC on for example um there's website visitor tracking social publishing or other pieces besides just email what would you what would you say cat I mean I think it's just how I'm able to integrate it with everything I mean for example I mean we use Acton for all of our registration forms um across all of our programs um it integrates really well with our WordPress backend so no matter what we're doing um I know I can get it all into Acton and see it in one place um you know I think Rachel mentioned this but we use Salesforce for our CRM and it integrates so nicely there um you know it's just being able to really pull it all together and have the intelligence of all our constituents I mean we have a pretty large database of about 36,000 contacts so it's really daunting um and we're doing it with really little resource es um despite those 43 years you know there's really just I think 25 of us fulltime um so having just such a powerful solution that sometimes I feel like we're barely scratching the surface as to what Aon can do after the first year um but you know I'm certainly glad um you know to have them as a partner because as we continue to grow and scale um you know I know that they'll grow and scale with us great I'm going to try this one more time okay great I'm getting a thumbs up on audio here um do you use behavioral score in clicks on web pages or just clicks in emails to keep people engaged and are there ways to Target different messages for people that click or don't click on emails and that's a question from Samantha and I can take that um yes you can you can do scoring on uh landing pages um one of the the better ways to do the scoring on landing pages is if you do have some sort of form or call the action where they're clicking through to you know through to something else um that's typically the best uh kind of scoring Point um because they they've taken an action um emails definitely any click-throughs through emails everything can be scored um and it's it's one of the best ways is is really just orienting your your scoring Triggers on actions um but you know one thing I'm going to share is uh we have a really successful email program that we use here at Acton um and even when there is a lack of action you can do some sort of trigger uh email campaign because we have here we have a couple of uh pages on our website that we know are very good indicators that somebody is really interested in in the platform and the product so we have set up workflows so that when people have visited these Pages not necessarily taken an action just visited those pages they're going to get a triggered email that says hey we caught you peeking you know take take a deeper look into Acton um and it it then directs them to uh looking at a 10-minute demo video of our product so um even it just shows the capabilities that even if somebody's not taking an action and even if they're just looking on your site if they're a known Prospect if you have their email address you can still do automated and Trigger messages um even with without that specific scoring event to really kind of trigger and automate uh and to keep that uh communication fresh because at in that instance you're engaging with them as they're engaging with you which uh really makes a difference in terms of conversions and and having people have a more substantial interaction and relationship with with your brand or your nonprofit awesome thanks Rachel so I'm going to combine a couple of questions for this next one from Jessica and Samantha when you're getting started um would you advise starting out small setting up one test then making some tweaks and changes or doing a bunch all at once and then how long does it typically take for a company or organization to really get up and running feel familiar and see um a comfortable return from a a marketing automation platform yeah so I'll go ahead and start off first and then I I'm sure that Kat has some great insights on this but um you know here at Acton uh typically your impementation is about six weeks you're going to go through uh classes and training uh with one of our we call them customer service managers they are there dedicated to help supporting you and they are a dedicated resource that you can reach out to at any time uh they help you get your your program set up and and really show you the features of everything that you can use um implementation times are different with every uh marketing automation vendor depending on who you're implementing um but ours is typically about six weeks um and I think that probably as as cat kind of mentioned you know sometimes you feel like you're barely scratching the surface of what you can do there are so many different capabilities of a mark platform so I think that really it's in the question you kind of hit the nail on the head there to to start small um you know get something going and up and running and and learn from that continually As you move along because as you start to to build things and and gain experiences from what you've built you're going to learn about what you want to do differently and how you can do it better in the future and so starting small and building out from there really is a great way to make sure that as you're building more you're doing it correctly and you're you're using the insights that you've gleaned from what you've already done yeah I I would definitely 100% agree um with Rachel you know I would say it probably took us about six to eight weeks to get going um and a shout out to V who is um you know my um day-to-day resource act on sometimes um but um you know we started out relatively small you know like I said we have five programs and so you know the way we sort of implemented it is like okay what were our easy wins in terms of you know moving from a way less sophisticated platform to act on and it just gone from there and we are actually um working on one of our most um Technical and challenging Integrations right now that will tie into a big automated program and now that's been you know a little over a year um but you know having act on on our side has been amazing great and to sort of duvail from that who ultimately uses this tool you know is it a development tool membership management and how many staff are required to run it I mean I can answer that from my perspective um in terms of marketing users or admins it's basically just me and I have one um one other program director that's you know super in the weeds in terms of being a marketing user but um I mean my whole staff uses it um they primarily use it through our sales Source integration so they're sending all of their emails by Acton without ever clicking out a Salesforce um but we it at every level um you know so I think no matter whether you're developing or you know just working on from a Communications perspective um it can be helpful for everyone at every level of the organization yeah and I would Echo that I think kind of one of the the new terms that we've coined here at Acton is kind of this this team Trifecta uh and we Define that as as Marketing sales and customer support I mean really anybody that has has any sort of communication with your uh your donors or you know your audience in general those are the people that are going to see the most benefit out of a platform like this because it's a way to keep your communication consistent um and like cat mentioned you know we have Integrations with with CRM systems so your sales team is really able to to use this to to their ability as well without you know without logging out at the software that they're used to using they're able to get access right in uh their sales or their their CRM platforms um and and really I think in in customer support and in communication uh it's just a communication tool so anybody that is communicating with your donors and your audience is going to have a benefit and would be able to use this platform uh marketing automation there have been huge huge strides made from when it was was first developed to now on the ease of use and how how easy it is for somebody that has no background in in using this type of Technology can really get up and running pretty quickly and uh can learn how to use it fairly intuitively great thanks so um this is sort of a combined question we had Chad asking cat what other marketing automation Solutions did you consider and then maybe Rachel could touch on um how is Acton different from other Solutions um yeah I mean we were using um you know we were using vertical response before we moved over to Acton um we knew we wanted something that um you know had more functionality and um but we still really got a lot of bang for our buck we considered cardot um an exact target wasn't sure if we went in more sort of from a B2B angle or B Toc um but ultimately we went with Acton on um because it had all the the functionality we needed and then some it integrated with Salesforce which was hugely important to us and you know the price was right thanks and we're we're so happy to have Jefferson Awards foundation on board uh love seeing the things that you do every day um I've talked to V you gave him the shout out he's a big fan um but in in terms of marketing automation or on in general how how it differs from other marketing automation platforms I mean like I mentioned at the beginning any platform is going to give you essentially the same core capabilities um but where I think that Acton is a little bit different is we really focus on kind of the small to midsize and and entry level users um you know some of the the platforms that have been around for a really long time are more geared towards Enterprise levels and and teams that have you know 50 marketing staff and a really big it team that can help you out with some really you know complicated Integrations um Acton is supposed to be easy to use and it is uh you know a team of one can like cat can get things up and running and can start to see the return very simply and very easily and I think that where we different from some of the other vendors is where um you see U more of a focus on on on inbound um but Acton we really like to focus on kind of the whole life cycle and not just attracting people to your nonprofit But continuing that engagement and Contin continuing that communication so that you can expand their trust and their um advocacy of your nonprofit and really turn them into lifetime donors and lifetime uh you know fans of the work that you're doing great well thanks everyone and thanks to all the attendees out there for coming to today's webinar um we're going to show our contact information right now and if you have any questions or comments about today's contact content if you're curious about that free marketing automation assessment please feel free to reach out um thanks once again to Rachel cat and Kiron for your perspectives and info uh we appreciate everyone's time and have a wonderful rest of your day thanks