The ENGAGE Podcast

Is donor retention different when the donor is acquired online? In this episode, you’ll learn more about ways to improve donor retention for online-acquired donors. Joining the podcast today is Rachel Clemens, Chief Marketing Officer of Mighty Citizen. Listen to today’s conversation to learn what Rachel thinks about building relationships between donors and organizations, the role of segmentation, and how language factors into donor retention.

Topics Discussed in This Episode:

• What organizations do to improve how they retain and engage online donors
• Building the relationship between the organization and the donor
• Preferences of people making online gifts
• How segmentation plays a role in driving the relationship
• The factor of language in donor retention
• What people want to see in brands
• The mindset to retaining different kinds of donors
• What organizations can do to focus on retaining online donors
• COVID-19 adaptations that might remain helpful going forward
• Advice for organizations to double down on retention of online donors

Resources:

Rachel Clemens

Quotes: 

“I always think about donor retention as part of the donation process.”

“It’s not a transaction. It’s a relationship.”

“The thing that comes to mind almost immediately is just getting their tech in check.”

The newest Blackbaud Luminate Online® Benchmark Report provides unique insight to online fundraising during its meteoric rise in 2020. Learn more about the shift to email engagement, how one-time online giving changed nonprofit revenue composition, and the steady march of sustainer donors. Joining the podcast today are report analysts Mike Snusz, Rachael Ahrens, and Deb Ashmore of Blackbaud’s Professional Services team as well as Erik Leaver, Principal Customer Success Manager. They also share their predictions for the next big online fundraising opportunity in this new guide.

Topics Discussed in This Episode:

• Background on the Luminate Online Benchmark Report
• The difference between this year’s report and previous reports
• Increases in online one-time giving
• Growth in number of gifts, but not the amounts of the gifts
• Growth in first-time online donors
• When the biggest spikes occurred
• Lessons learned from 2020
• Growth of email fundraising and engagement
• Growing sustainer programs
• How data is segmented in the report
• Lessons learned from different sizes of organizations
• Takeaways from the metrics
• The reliability of open rates

Resources:

Blackbaud Luminate Online Benchmark Report

Quotes: 

“Ultimately, I always like to have nonprofits know that the best benchmarks are your own.”

“Be prepared for emergency giving.”

“Those that grow the fastest have the most robust direct acquisition strategies.”

We are now just a little more than a month from GivingTuesday is getting closer all the time, you don’t need to stress if your organization hasn’t yet developed its plan. Today, Blackbaud’s GivingTuesday experts Matt Connell and Jackie Zimmerman join the podcast to talk about the value of Giving Tuesday, how organizations can start planning now for a successful day, and the GivingTuesday campaigns have inspired them.

Topics Discussed in This Episode:

• Why Matt and Jackie value Giving Tuesday
• What organizations should do if they don’t yet have a plan for Giving Tuesday
• Tips and tricks for GivingTuesday
• Content strategies for GivingTuesday
• Examples of successful GivingTuesday campaigns
• Resources that can help organizations with GivingTuesday

Resources:

Giving Tuesday Toolkit

Giving Tuesday Webinar Series

Quotes: 

“While we should be giving every day of the year, let’s make sure that we especially give on this particular day of the year.” –Jackie Zimmerman

“If this, again, is your first experiment with it, you’re not the first people experimenting with it.” –Matt Connell

“Giving Tuesday is the day I make sure that my matching gift is used up for the year.” –Matt Connell

Digital communications have become ever more important over the last year and a half, and visual storytelling is a critical part of an effective strategy. Visual images help supporters visualize and understand what the organizations are doing, and how their contributions make a difference.

That's why today we are bringing back an ever relevant episode originally recorded at bbcon 2018 featuring Ira Horowitz, the founder of Cornershop Creative. Listen in to hear what Ira has to say about why visuals matter in storytelling, how to demonstrate to donors that they can be the heroes of the story, and how to match copy with the right visuals for maximum impact. 

Topics Discussed in This Episode:

• Why visual storytelling matters to fundraising
• Ways that organizations can make donors the heroes of the stories they’re telling
• Resources that organizations can use to get the visual images that they need
• Matching the right copy and content with the right visual images
• How to test and fine-tune a story over time
• How to make use of imagery even when an organization has limited staff or resources
• How visuals can help make data more comprehensible
• Examples of great visual storytelling

Resources:

• Ira Horowitz
• Cornershop Creative
• Blackbaud University: Multimedia Storytelling

How can finance and fundraising departments better work with each other? Why does it matter? Often, these disparate personalities find that working together feels chaotic, but it doesn’t need to be that way. In today’s episode, you’ll hear some ideas about how finance and development can build connections and better work together to support the mission.

Topics Discussed in This Episode:

• Why collaboration between finance and development is important
• Key differences that pop up between these two groups
• The different types of jargon that the different departments use
• Brainstorming with no fear
• Starting a conversation with “I want to know more…”
• A few things that a typical person in a finance department is focused on
• The role of technology
• First steps toward making connections

Resources:

Financial Management Toolkit – Blackbaud Institute

Blackbaud University Curriculum For Blackbaud Financial Edge NXT

Quotes: 

“The idea of everybody working together as a team in order to support the mission is immense in a nonprofit.”

“Nobody that is in finance in a nonprofit organization wants to see us go over budget.”

“I would think that the first thing you want to do is open the line of communication.”

Today, improving ESG (environmental, social, and governance) performance is no longer optional. People want to work for companies that are helping to change the world, consumers are making purchasing decisions based on how brands are solving social problems and addressing climate change and investors consider companies that are ESG laggards to be high-risk. Despite the imperative for corporations to be making social change a priority, many businesses continue the practice of "CSR lite," an approach that prioritizes communications and optics over meaningful and measurable change. 

Join Paul Klein for a conversation about why it's more important than ever for corporations to shift from a checkbox approach to corporate social responsibility to one that contributes to solving social problems. They will discuss what social change leadership looks like today and how businesses can help solve social problems and benefit from doing so.

Topics Discussed in This Episode:

• Impakt’s role and background
• Environment, Social, and Governance (ESG) and how a company balances these elements
• Why ESG can be hard to measure, especially the S
• Quantitative and qualitative data
• The practice of CSR lite
• What it takes to move a company that isn’t there yet
• Which organizations are getting it right
• Companies that you don’t hear as much about
• Keeping the small and mid-sized businesses in mind
• Amazing examples of how companies mobilized their resources
• How people can learn more

Resources:

Paul Klein

Impakt

Impakt Foundation

[book] Change for Good by Paul Klein (ECW press) - coming spring 2022

Quotes: 

“I think that the social dimension of business is the next frontier of what it means to be a business in society today.”

"There's a leadership vacuum at a social change level."

“So many companies don't take [being socially responsible] beyond the bare minimum and that's what CSR lite is. It's the optics, rather than the substance."

“To me, the essence of innovation is thinking about the fastest way to make the biggest difference at the lowest cost.”

What impact has COVID-19 and the racial justice movement had on corporate social responsibility (CSR)? The Association of Corporate Citizenship Professionals (ACCP) partnered with Rocket Social Impact to research just that. Join Carolyn Berkowitz, President and CEO of ACCP, on today’s episode to learn all about it and what motivated their research.

Topics Discussed in This Episode:

• What the ACCP does
• What motivated the research on the intersection of COVID-19 and racial justice
• What trends and data the research revealed on CSR budgets, importance to the C-suite, staffing needs
• Integration between CSR teams and other teams in companies (DEI, HR, ESG, Marketing)
• How to access the report: The Impact of Pandemic & Racial Justice Movement on CSR

Resources:

Carolyn Berkowitz

ACCP resources

The Impact of Pandemic & Racial Justice Movement on CSR

Quotes: 

“The expectations of CEOs and of senior leadership is significantly raising the game. They want to be reported to more frequently and want to have a greater hand in the [social responsibility] work.”

“There’s a heightened demand for measurement and there is not necessarily an increase in the internal resources to do that work… We’ve got to have the right people in the right places to do the volume of work that is expected and necessary to make change.”

“40% of companies in the survey said that they are making a long-term CSR focus-area shift. 64% of those are shifting or adding racial justice and racial equity as a priority.”

Federal grants complicate the budgeting process. You have to consider a lot of different scenarios, and you don’t have any room for error. In today’s episode, you’ll hear from Stacy Fitzsimmons and learn more about budgeting for Community Health Centers when grants are part of the picture. Listen in to learn about where to start with your budget, why you need to break costs into buckets, and how to get yourself audit-ready.

Topics Discussed in This Episode:

• The biggest challenge of grant budgeting
• Creating a realistic, achievable budget
• Where to start with your budget
• Using budget categories for your expenses
• Breaking down cost buckets
• Knowing how much money you’ve spent and how much is left
• The joint responsibility for budgeting
• Planning the budgeting cycles for different scenarios
• Putting guardrails in place
• How to set yourself up to be audit-ready
• Documentation back-up
• Having policies and procedures that support how you use your system
• Using budgeting and expense tracking to tie into performance measures

Resources:

Stacy Fitzsimmons

eBook: Set up Your Community Health Center for Federal Grant Success: https://hello.blackbaud.com/budgeting-for-community-health.html  

Whitepaper: Data-Driven Decision Making for Community Health Centers https://hello.blackbaud.com/Datat-Driven-Decisions-eBook.html

Quotes: 

“With this type of budgeting, you’ll also be setting yourself up for success and making sure that all of your funds are traceable within the accounting system by your grant award.”

“Why I recommend this is that you will then be able to report against your budget by these categories when you’re asked to report against it.”

“If you have documentation that supports that expense entry, upload it with your entry so that documentation is right there.”

What is corporate purpose? What are the current rules for corporate purpose? And why do we need to redefine them? In today’s interview with Judy Samuelson, Founder and Executive Director of the Aspen Business and Society Program, you’ll learn about her new book, The Six New Rules of Business, and why she’s been on a mission to disrupt economist Milton Friedman’s narrative about corporate purpose.

Topics Discussed in This Episode:

• Judy’s role at The Aspen Institute
• Judy’s campaign to disrupt Milton Friedman’s narrative about corporate purpose
• Why Judy’s proposed new rules are necessary
• How to start thinking about the rules
• Companies that are leading the way
• Advice for leaders who don’t understand yet that change is needed
• Where listeners can find Judy

Resources:

Judy Samuelson

The Six New Rules of Business: Creating Real Value in a Changing World by Judy Samuelson

The Aspen Institute

Quotes: 

“I like to say single objective functions, whether it’s about stock price or customers, rarely ends well.”

“In order to do very much, to last for very long, you simply have to be balancing the inputs that are critical to the health of the enterprise.”

“Sustainability is not an end game either, it’s a mindset.”

“Today the responsibility of companies is defined way outside the gate of the business.”

“To solve the most complex problems we need to bring people together, we need to bring these remarkably powerful institutions that we call business together to collaborate to go deeper into systems and change the norm.”

GivingTuesday isn’t a new or unexpected event, but some organizations struggle to make the most of it. Whether it’s learning how to better engage supporters or improving results over previous years, standing up a successful campaign may seem overwhelming. With 2021’s GivingTuesday coming up sooner than you may think, Sophia Latto joins the podcast to give expert advice on what organizations can do to seize the GivingTuesday and make it a repeatable success.

Topics Discussed in This Episode:

• What Sophia would tell organizations about starting their planning for 2021
• The importance of engaging imagery
• How to prepare in advance
• Communication cadence and frequency
• Strategy and segmentation
• How to improve past GivingTuesday performance
• Setting attainable goals
• Thanking your donors

Resources:

Sophia Latto

Blackbaud's GivingTuesday Toolkit

Quotes: 

“It’s important to connect a personal story about real people with your impact for GivingTuesday.”

“I always think of GivingTuesday as being the kickoff to end of year fundraising.”

“Keeping it simple will help you keep everything streamlined.”

“Think in terms of engagement and build that relationship and that goodwill with your constituents before you hit them with hard asks.”