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- [00:00]
Rhea Wong
Hey, you, it's Rhea Wong. If you're listening to Nonprofit Load on, I'm pretty sure that you'd love my weekly newsletter. Every Tuesday morning, you get updates on the newest podcast episodes. And then interspersed, we have fun special invitations for newsletter subscribers only and fundraising inspo because I know what it feels like to be in the trenches alone. On top of that, you get cute dog photos. Best of all, it is free. So what are you waiting for? Head over to riawong.com now to sign up Foreign welcome to Nonprofit Lowdown. I'm your host, Rhea Wong. Hey, podcast listeners, Ria Wong with you once again with Nonprofit Lowdown. Today I am sitting with my friend Sean Littman. He is the founder of GiveSuite.com he is a podcaster. He is an all around awesome human. And today we are going to talk about retention marketing, which I know is a huge pain point for all y'all out there. So, Sean, welcome to the show.
- [01:01]
Sean Littman
Awesome. Thank you so much, Ria, for having me. And as I always say, when I get on shows, it's always fun to be on the other side of the microphone for a change. I've been doing podcasting since before it was cool. I always preface that I've been doing podcasting since before it was cool. And people like, what does that mean? I was like, oh, it means back in the day.
- [01:16]
Rhea Wong
Wait, what's back in the day? Because I've been running my podcast before it was cool.
- [01:20]
Sean Littman
I think I'm talking about eight years ago podcasting, before it like really blew up, like where everybody was started getting podcast.
- [01:27]
Rhea Wong
I mean, mine was like seven years ago, so maybe that that was before it was cool.
- [01:32]
Sean Littman
Now everybody and their mother and their brother and their dog has a podcast. So.
- [01:36]
Rhea Wong
That's true. That's true.
- [01:37]
Sean Littman
It's a very saturated market with a lot of interesting shows out there, but only not so much interesting content. But when you stumble on shows like yours that are actually very interesting content, it's worth the listen. And this is also why with our show too profiting nonprofits, we get a lot of people coming to it because it's just interesting conversation.
- [01:55]
Rhea Wong
Yeah, I agree.
- [01:56]
Sean Littman
I'm super pumped to be here.
- [01:58]
Rhea Wong
I am pumped to have you because you and I have many things to talk about. So I know you're a marketer. I know you're a technologist. I know you've done a lot of thinking about how to help people in the nonprofit world. So we're going to take all of that knowledge and we're actually going to zoom in on this pain point that I know everybody has, which is retention. So as a sector, we know that we have terrible retention rates. If you were in the for profit world, and you saw the retention rates of our sector, you'd be like, what are you doing? What are you offering? Why can't you hold on to your people? I think we're below 40%. I don't. I haven't seen the latest statistics.
- [02:35]
Sean Littman
Something like that.
- [02:36]
Rhea Wong
Okay, so that means all of the hard work I put in to get donors in the door, Most of them are only giving one time and then going away. So before we get into what to do about it, Tell me a little bit about what is your perspective on this phenomenon.
- [02:52]
Sean Littman
It's the key to success with everything, is follow up. A long time ago, one of my first jobs I ever had Was selling herbalife. If you know, I was a herbalife independent distributor. And I hate every minute of it because. But I learned one thing from those giant mlm summits. This guy got up on stage and said, follow ups lead to fortunes. And I took that to heart. And in my telesales career and in my marketing career, everything. It's all about follow up. Follow up leads to fortune. What? Follow up can be a number of different things. It can be making phone calls. It can be sending out messages. It can be sending out emails. It's all about cultivation. And what I like to call it. I don't like to call it follow up. In the nonprofit world, I like to call it continuing the conversation. You've got, as you said, you've got all these people in. You've worked your butt off to get all these people into your database. Whether it's through fundraisers, events, newsletter signups, if you're running ads, if you're skilled enough to do that, that. And you spent a lot of effort to do it. You've paid probably a bunch of money to do it. And then you just let these people sit there. And. And then you're wondering why nobody engages with you. And then you're trying to do a crowdfund campaign. And you're wondering why no one gives you money. And then you're sitting here trying to figure out what's the end of the year. And it's giving Tuesday. And all these other stupid things that everyone just, like, has to do. Because you have to do them. And you're wondering why no one gives you money. It's because you're not following up with them. You're not cultivating them. You're not Continuing the conversation.
- [04:08]
Rhea Wong
I work with fundraisers, as you know, and I feel like one of the things that holds people back from doing the really intentional stewardship is that they sometimes don't get a response. And so for them, they're like, it doesn't work because I send out these emails, I send out these phone calls, I do these quarterly reports, I tell people what we're doing with our money and nobody calls me back. And I'm like, yeah, but it doesn't mean that it's not working. So, so tell me a little bit about that.
- [04:38]
Sean Littman
But also, you just hit it right, you hit the point right on the hammer, is that it's people. You're doing all this stuff and you're telling people, you have to. It's all about showing people. It's not about telling people because no one cares. Like I'm telling you, we did X, Y and Z. I'm sending you quarterly boards. I'm doing, you know, like nobody cares. They want to see, they want to feel, see how, and be shown how their money's working for this organization, how your efforts are working with this organization. How literally, like, it's like living vicariously through the organization without having to be on the beach saving the wills. Because nobody wants to actually do anything they want. This is why people are giving you money, because they don't want to actually come down and volunteer their time. But you have to give them that experience. It's about creating raving fans. It's about creating that experience. And it's something I just actually read an article the other day by Jesse Cole, the founder of the Savannah Bananas. It's like the Harlem Globetrotters of baseball. And his whole philosophy is Fans First Entertainment. That's the name of his company. It's all about fans first. And you want to create fans. You want to create people who are there for you and show them what you're doing and by continuing the conversation, cultivating them. And yes, even if you're not getting any answers back from people, it doesn't mean that they don't care. But you're doing your effort because the fact that there's, you're constantly top of mind with them, even if they're not responding to you, it shows that they're going to do something eventually with you. And I've seen this because we run a lot of email marketing campaigns, we do a lot of drip campaigns, we do a lot of follow up campaigns with people. If you're constantly following up with them, you're constantly top of mind when doing the end of your campaign, you're going to see a lot more engagement than if you wouldn't have done it before. It's all about the long term. It's long term game.
- [06:19]
Rhea Wong
The other thing too is, I would say, Sean, to take it a step further. I think we don't often ask enough questions and we don't create an opportunity for feedback loops. And so it just feels like throwing tennis balls into the vacuum cleaner. Oh, here's the annual appeal, here's the impact report, here's the whatever, the annual report, et cetera, et cetera. But you're not actually asking your people like, do you want this? Is this of value to you? What do you want to know about? How can I give you more of the thing? And so we just guess at what people want.
- [06:52]
Sean Littman
Correct.
- [06:52]
Rhea Wong
And then we're confused about the fact that they're not excited about the stuff we're sending them. Hello.
- [06:58]
Sean Littman
Yeah, that's the whole thing is that I find a lot of nonprofits, especially with their marketing, are very siloed into doing what everybody else is doing because this is what we've been doing for 100 years and this is how this worked. And people are very scared to step outside the box because they're limited on resources, they're limited on manpower, and they're limited on brain power too. And to you, to, to your point was like, do you really want this stuff? It's all about creating a good offer. Part of what we do when we bring people, when we're doing these campaigns for people with our whole system is creating offers that are compelling to people. I have a whole methodology in marketing. Funnel, offer, follow up and frequency. You have a good funnel, a good offer, a strong follow up and knowing your audience. And you win at marketing. I have tested this and if these, if something's out of place, then your whole thing flops, Your whole campaign flops. And it's all about the offer. Like, you have to create, you have to like when you're working with a client, when you're working with an organization. Organizations are like walking storybooks. There's like a bajillion different things you could offer. You just have to use your brain like a tiny bit and figure out what it is that might be compelling. Like, for example, we work a lot of Jewish organizations and we work a lot of religious Jewish organizations and those are niche of a niche when it comes to running Google search ads for nonprofits. But we thought we, we have to use our brains to think outside the box. What would be an offer that people would want to get from this organization. Come holiday time. We give out little Rosh Hashanah cards, We give out little Jewish holiday kits, cards and things like that that are something of value, that's tangible, that's connected to what they were searching for, connected to what they were doing, brings bridges that familiarity and puts them into that email drip. Just continue the conversation. So now you've given them something of actual value. Like, I don't want an impact. I don't really care about an impact report. I don't care about your stats right now. I really don't. I just care about, I gave you money. What's my money doing for me? But now that I'm giving you something like a gift, like an offer that's more of a gift. So that's great. Now it's okay. Now I associate this with this. And then, then the emails come, and then conversation continues. And then you're like, oh, this is really cool. Now you're engaged. And then you say, go check out our socials. Check out this. And then, by the way, you want to make a donation? Sure, let's do it.
- [09:12]
Rhea Wong
Yeah. Sean, you're really hitting on something that I think is pretty fundamental, which is the notion of human beings being into reciprocity. So if I do something nice for you, your inclination, generally speaking, is to do something nice for me. And I think sometimes nonprofits, they get into their own heads and they become very donor centric, and they make it all about themselves. And what can you do for me versus what can I give first? And you and I both know, like, we both create lots of free content. We're both doing, like, free webinars, etcetera, with the idea that if we create enough goodwill in the atmosphere will come back to us. And unfortunately, I think nonprofits, they tend to think that way about their beneficiaries, but they don't think that way about their donors. And I'm curious, why do you think that is?
- [10:03]
Sean Littman
It's because a lot of work, again, a lot of organizations are stuck in their ways, and they're siloed into this. We're a nonprofit. We can't make any money. So we need to try to bring in as much money as we can, so that way we can do everything X, Y and Z. But they don't. The appreciation of the gift is not there because they're looking at it as we need to pay our bills. And when you switch that head off from being a nonprofit and saying, I can't make Any money to be like, I'm actually a business, that I'm an LLC that gives tax deductible receipts. What's the difference between myself and the McDonald's next door? Nothing. You know, then you can start to focus more on the experience. Fans first, donors first, Be more donor centric and more giving. Because at the end of the day, it's all about relationship building. And I feel like a lot of people who are in the non profit space, they do it out of passion and they're not necessarily business people. So they don't understand how to cultivate relationships and they don't know how to build relationships on the business side of things. A donor is just, is a donor is a customer. Like a donor is a customer. They there's a transaction that's been made, they're working with you and you want to continue, you want to keep getting their business. So how do you get people to come back to do more business with you? You got to treat them right, you got to give them the red carpet service, roll out the red carpet, white glove, the whole thing. And I feel like a lot of organizations are just not in that headspace because they're so like focused on we need money, we can't make money, we're not allowed to make money, blah blah, blah. And once you take a step outside of that and focus on your customers and why is this person giving to me? What's their connection to me? How can I build a relationship with them? How can I continue that conversation, cultivate that relationship with them? They're going to, one, they're going to enjoy what they do more and two, they're also going to get a lot more money out of these people because now the person sees that, wait a minute, this guy actually cares about me. I'm not just his atm. And I've seen this with firsthand with organizations I'm involved in. I offer my time to and I tell them, like, what the hell are you doing? Like, why are you trying to ask everybody for? Literally in my synagogue, I'm like very heavily involved because they know I'm the non profit guy and I'm just like, what the hell are you doing? Like, why are you asking everybody for money? Don't do it like this. Because when we need them for to build our building, like everyone's going to be crapped out. No one wants to give us any money. That makes sense.
- [12:28]
Rhea Wong
The other thing I would say is part of the resistance, I think that people have to building relationships. And I see this all the time is like we tell people, fundraisers did go out and build relationships, but often they're trying to build relationships with people who don't know them, don't trust them, and don't want to have coffee with them. And so it's not as simple as, oh, I invited them for coffee, therefore I built a relationship. It's. What did you do in order to build the trust enough that I think that going to coffee with you will be a good use of my time because, look, time is more valuable than money. And, and I think this is our fault as a sector. We have created such a distrust of what we do. If I say I'm going to coffee with Sean, I'm going to expect that he's going to ask me for money, which might be true, may not be true, but if I'm expecting that, I'm going to be way less likely to go to coffee with you. Even if your intention is genuinely to get to know me.
- [13:26]
Sean Littman
Yeah, but it's all about that, lowering that expectation or getting rid of that expectation. Just going into the situation of I genuinely want to make a connection, I want to meet you, I want to see what you're all about and see how we can go further from that. It's like in sales, it's like anything, really. And if once you, like, get rid of that mindset, then you'll have a lot more success at meeting people and getting to know them. Because if you're only looking at people as dollar signs, then that's your biggest mistake.
- [13:53]
Rhea Wong
I agree. Well, I also think the mistake too is not recognizing that there is this gap of distrust, this chasm of distrust. Oh, for sure. So if you don't actually understand that they are inclined to distrust you first, and then you are doing something specifically to bridge that gap, you're never going to make it over the gap.
- [14:14]
Sean Littman
Oh, no. 100%. 100%. And also this is why, like strong digital marketing and digital cultivation and relationship building is huge. Because say you're running, you're generating leads and you're bringing people in and you're putting them on the email sequences and you're talking to them and showing them what you're all about, giving them more insight to the organization. And you can gauge who's being active in your emails by who's opening and clicking. You can segment them out into more active and less active and start shooting them more frequent emails and more infrequent emails. And then you can start to see from those who are people who are actually giving through the automations and then you can put them into a pipeline to see, wait a minute. Maybe these people are worth giving a call to, to start really cultivating a bigger relationship. Because at the end of the day you can't predict people's giving habits. And this is why I always say about nonprofits and marketing with nonprofits is that there's so many different. An organization can create so much different content. You never know what's going to hit somebody. Like one thing open them up to give you like $10,000 and another thing could open them up to give you $5. It's all about hitting the pain point. That's trying to see what connects with people and then building that relationship from there. And once you're able to segment that out and see your data, then you can go out there and easily connect with them and be like, hey, this is Sean from awesome non profit organization. We noticed that you've been interacting with our emails. We appreciate you for what you're doing, we really appreciate your gifts and want to know if you want to grab coffee sometime and so I can learn more about you in person and not just from the fact that you engage with my emails.
- [15:46]
Rhea Wong
Well, I think we are living in the golden age of digital marketing where we can track things like views and opens and click through video views and stuff. And I'm going to say having done my own marketing, it's not so clearly a one to one. It's not like you see my social media, therefore you automatically make a donation.
- [16:06]
Sean Littman
That can happen.
- [16:08]
Rhea Wong
But typically what I think about with things like social and your email list is your brand building, your awareness building. So that when you do an ask people are like, oh, I know this organization. And so I, I say that all to say that I think a lot of people are out here trying to do the viral ice bucket challenge kind of thing, which I'm like that that's not a thing that you should be shooting for. That was a blip, that was an outlier. And even then that campaign was running for a while before it actually started to raise any money. So how should people be thinking about use of social and use of emails with respect to the donor journey?
- [16:48]
Sean Littman
So that's an awesome question. I love when I get this question asked because as I always say, followers do not lead to money. Followers are people who are interested, they see what you're doing, they like it and they move on. But creating a community, creating a fan base is much more ideal. And when it comes to social media, each platform has its own capabilities. And each platform has its own language that you need to be using to be able to connect with the people. Because again, it's all about relationship building. It's all about how speaking the language of the people you're trying to engage with, creating blanket posts that go out on Instagram, Instagram, LinkedIn, Twitter, TikTok, the whole bit, it's not going to do anything. In fact, it hurts the algorithm, your algorithm, because they see that you're just posting the same thing everywhere else. You have to know how to talk to your people on each different platform. Like for when I tell people, Instagram, use it for pictures, showcase all the different pictures and videos and reels and things like that you're doing. Your organization, use that as literally your giant like slideshow of this is what we're up to. Kind of bit Facebook. You can leverage Facebook to post about your updates, do different updates once a week updates what's going on Facebook and then LinkedIn for more professional content, more articles, more. This is what we're doing on the article side of things. And YouTube. Create a YouTube channel based around the different activities that you're doing. Create. Create a podcast for non profits. I used to produce podcasts for non profits because it's a huge revenue generator. It's a huge content piece because you get multiple pieces of content from it and you just have to be smart about it too. And as I said, I feel like a lot of organizations, they understand it on that base level, but the implementation is so hard because they're doing a million different things and they don't have the right people. When you're subservient to volunteers, you can't get it right. And this is why I find it's important to invest in your marketing. But when it comes to email too, you want to constantly just be creating email emails that go out that are storytelling emails, not necessarily direct ask emails, because people, when you have direct ask emails, people don't do it. You have to cultivate them. One of our main things that we do is we do a lot of storytelling emails. And we've created this email sequence that we kind of cookie cuttered out to different clients because it works that way. Called Meet the Heroes because every organization from the janitor to the CEO has a reason why they're working there. And everyone has a story and everybody has a different story. And we've noticed that when we tested this sequence with different organizations, it brought in way more money than other stuff because people feel like they're finally, they're Connecting with somebody. As I mentioned before, that point of something's going to hit. Something's going to stick to somebody and it's going to, they're going to connect with them, they're going to resonate with it and they're going to give you money.
- [19:35]
Rhea Wong
I want to just interject, I know you were on a roll, but there are a couple of things that you said. I want to make sure that we don't lose here. One, I want to talk about email. So we talked about social. Typically, I recommend people, if they are on social, use that as simply a funnel onto your email list because to your point, email is where the money is made. So. Oh, and texting. Yeah, I think I'm, I think I'm scarred from texting because ActBlue overused my phone number and now I'm like, I have feelings about it anyway. But yes, I agree that texting is probably. But even within email, I think people can be more creative. Like use video, like loom video, send people audio message. There's so many ways.
- [20:22]
Sean Littman
That's the thing is exactly. There's so many different out of the box ways to be creative. And I just feel even in the regular business sector, people are just so stagnant in their way. They're stuck. They. No one wants to think, no one wants to be creative. No one wants to like think outside the box and disrupt the flow of things. Because when you become disruptive and you're creating content that's engaging, people are going to remember that it's like liquid death. These guys sell water, but nobody knows that they sell water. They just know them for their goofy commercials. Oh, wait, they happen to sell water. And you see these brands like out there doing this. So why nonprofits can do the same thing. You want to be, you want to stand out. You want. I just wrote an article about this on LinkedIn. It just went up today. You want to stand out, you want to be the differentiator because everyone's competing for the same people's money. At the end of the day, everyone wants everybody the same people's money. So you just have to raise your hand higher. So if you're getting people on your email list, you want to engage with them. You want to create that stuff that's going to engage with them. You want to be able to talk to them on their level. And to this point, we have a software company and we're doing our research into for to start running ads. And I noticed like everybody's doing the same type of ads, pitching Talking about features, talking about this speaking tech jargon. And I'm just like, these people don't understand tech jargon. They're non profit people, right? I'm like, we have to create our ads and we have to create our videos and we have to create our content that we're marketing people speaking their language because that's how you're going to hit them. It hurts when they feel that you can connect with them on their level. They're going to connect with you and then there's going to be a transaction that happens. Whether it's a volunteer opportunity, whether it's a monetary opportunity, you have to connect with them on their level.
- [22:04]
Rhea Wong
The other thing I was going to say about the marketing piece and being disruptive is it almost feels like when everyone else is zigging, you should zag. So what I mean by that is we know that everyone is trying to get into your inbox, we know that everyone's texting you, et cetera. Why not do snail mail, right? Go old school and give that a roll. I love a handwritten note. I can't remember the last time I got a hand, but I do remember the last time because it was so unusual and delightful. It was from my best friend's kids. I helped with some of his high school application essays and he wrote me a thank you note and I was like, oh my gosh, I appreciate the fact that I have something in my inbox that's not a bill. So I think Ziggle, other people are zagging. The other thing that you said that I think we don't talk enough about in nonprofit is this concept of testing, right? So we in our little bubbles, like we create content or we create the newsletter, we create the emails, but we actually don't test to see which messages are landing. And any marketing company will tell you that testing is where the magic happens. So, so talk to me about how we might think about testing messages before launching it out into the wild.
- [23:18]
Sean Littman
You have to, you have to sit down and you have to use some brain power and you have to understand who you're talking to. And if you don't understand who your organization is talking to, who your donors are, which, and your contact list and how to communicate with them effectively, creating a message is going to hit them and get them to open up their, their email is going to be a waste of time. So you have to sit down and understand who they are, what they're all about, understand their avatar really. So that way you can create a message. And that's really the key to testing is like just knowing who you're talking to. And I'll give you a really cool, funny example is when I was doing cold email campaigns for gives Suite, I was reaching out to a bunch of different nonprofit. I had a whole list of nonprofit organizations I was reaching out to and I actually did the due diligence. I went on each one of their websites. I wanted to check what donation platform, platform they were working on, gave. Each tried to give them a donation and I want to see how their process works so I could send them an email to. And so my subject line was, I tried to make a donation, but your thing crapped out. And then I wrote an email saying, hey, my name is Sean Littman. I tried to. I love what you're doing, and I really did. I genuinely, I'm very honest with people. I tried to make a donation on your website, but your thing, your. Your donation thing crapped out on me. And I'd love to circle back with you and try to complete that transaction. By the way, I also run a software company called Gives me for nonprofits. It's an all one donation management, fundraising marketing platform, blah, blah, blah. The amount of responses I got were like, hey, whoa. I didn't know our thing was down. I didn't know. We're so sorry about that. Here you go. Can you try to make a donation? I gave everybody five bucks. And the fact that, like, the response was almost instantaneous because that's what people care about. The fact someone reaching out tried giving them a donation and their thing crapped out on them. They're for. They're going to respond. So it's the same kind of disruptive, like thinking and like creative marketing, like you have to do with your organizations. It's like you have to figure out who you're talking to. You have to do your research and see what, what's happening and then you can create an email. I used to do this with Facebook ads too. When I bet a million years ago when I did Facebook ads and I was charging like peanuts and popcorn to do them, and I was working with people who literally had peanuts and popcorn ad budgets. You go through their market, create one ad with a really killer headline with really killer body content, and then a creative that knocked you out. I would test different headlines. I would see. I was really into this. And I launched that one ad and the ROI and the roas was huge because it was targeted. So targeted. The message was so on point that people were trying to hit that it worked.
- [25:53]
Rhea Wong
I Have two more questions. We're living in the age of chatgpt and I know. So while on the one hand it is and can be a huge time saver, on the other end I think it's just creating more crap. So as folks are listening and they're like, I don't really have time for all this. I have a small team, I don't have a lot of bandwidth to create all these email campaigns that you're talking about. I'd like to use AI. What recommendations do you have for people to either not use AI or to use AI responsibly? I hear you groaning on the other end.
- [26:30]
Sean Littman
I just love how you said it. Use AI responsibly. What are we drinking beer and driving a car?
- [26:34]
Rhea Wong
That's just kind of. Because the thing is you can tell when something is AI generated.
- [26:39]
Sean Littman
Oh, 100%.
- [26:40]
Rhea Wong
Like I get these emails from people and I'm like, no, no, I like thank you ChatGPT for the email. So I do think though it can be helpful at least to get a first draft. But I just see people like throwing stuff that I know how is chat GPT up on social in emails.
- [26:58]
Sean Littman
So I'll tell you, it's a tool, it's a supplement. It's not the end all be all to your life. Because I'm seeing this more and more. Exactly. You're saying people are basically shutting off their brains, relying on AI for, and chat GPT for writing images, like everything they could possibly do. And it's just, it's stupid because you're, you still have to have a brain to be able to write the prompts. And so if you don't know, again, it comes back to communication. If you don't know how to communicate with the robot, how are you going to create what you input is, what the output is going to be? I personally, I use it for touching up stuff like I use Grammarly to fix different things. I use Grammarly to fix up some of my emails and fix up my posts and I'll use Gemini to help me draft articles and stuff like that. But then you have to add your spin to it. It's about using it as a first step up, but not a final solution, if that makes sense.
- [27:50]
Rhea Wong
Yeah, totally. And I think if anything, the big picture here, the headline here is you have to use it responsibly. You have to use it intentionally. Don't just put in a prompt and then just, oh my God, that sounds.
- [28:03]
Sean Littman
Like a great commercial. You remember back in like the beer commercials was always like Drink Budweiser. Drink responsibly. You imagine now like, like ChatGPT commercials were made with Chat GPT and some guy's sitting on his computer and just trying like typing prompts and then, then it flashes like use responsibly.
- [28:22]
Rhea Wong
No, I think it, I think it should be. That should be a thing. All right, I've got two last questions for you as we round the curve here. So we talked about retention marketing and so could you dig into me, Dig into, what does this mean tactically? Does it mean like an email sequence? Is it, does it mean a whole funnel? What do you mean when you say retention?
- [28:46]
Sean Littman
I'll explain it to you. So in the e commerce world there's this whole, there's this, you have, have this whole phenomenon, but it's not really, it's been around for ages. It's called retention marketing. And you can put these pixels on your website and put them on different pages of your sites that are will do anonymous lead scraping and it's all legal, it's all kosher. You're able to get people grab the traffic that's coming to your site that didn't actually opt in. That's one aspect of it. And the other aspect of it is it's like when someone goes to make a purchase on your website and they don't buy and they, you get, then you get, all of a sudden you get an email. Hey Ria, we noticed that you're trying, we here, welcome to Sean's super cool emporium of goods and services. Here's 10%, here's a 10% off coupon. And you're like, oh cool, 10% off coupon, that's not creepy. But so we're doing that with donors and with donations because donations and purchases are the same thing except different values. And so we're working on testing this because nobody's doing this and seeing how much more donations we can get by putting these pixels onto, onto the donation pages. And we're seeing significant increase in donations because it's, you bring a ton of traffic to a site but only 10 of it will convert. So the other 90 is usually lost. But now you're shooting them an email, you're getting there, you have their information, you're shooting them an email saying, hey, we noticed that you're trying but you have to be more stylistic and creative than that. Basically, hey, we notice you're trying to make a donation. Come on back and help us out. And we see an increase in donations and that's retention marketing. This is something that's been. It's huge in e commerce. Massive E comm brands do it. And I realized this when I was working with one of my huge e comm clients. I was like, how come we're not doing this for nonprofits? And my guys were like, yeah, why aren't we doing this for nonprofits? I said, so I found. I reached out to one of my e comm partners and I asked her, I said, what's the deal with this? And she said, talk to these guys. We spoke to a company called Lead Post who actually has a profit plan. And I said, what's the deal? And they said, nobody's doing this because nobody has the bandwidth or understanding how to do it. So I said, okay, I'll do it. And it's huge because when you're getting all these people that came to your site, but you're actually getting them, and on the lead capture side too, you put them into. You get them into a half step of your funnel where it's, for example, you know, you have, you. You send them on email that has a very shocking head, like, head headline. And then give them something that's connected to that so they remember, wait a minute, I was on their site. Right. So now you're able to put them through the rest of that sequence and you get all this information, all these people's information, and it's huge because you're getting like the 90% that didn't actually opt in, but you're getting them to opt in and then you're growing your list significantly faster.
- [31:34]
Rhea Wong
Yep, very interesting. Yeah. I've actually played around with Lead Post at your suggestion. I'm like, oh, you reached out to them. Yeah, we chatted, we had a whole conversation. And I was like, you told my sentence. I did, I did. I was like trying to me. And I was like, impressed and also a little freaked out at the information that came back. And I was like, how is this legal? But okay, great. Okay, last question for you. I want to talk about automation because your average nonprofit shop does not have a whole team devoted to communications and donor reach out, et cetera, et cetera. I know that you are in the CRM game. So talk to me a little bit about how nonprofits can think about using automation in order to increase their capacity to communicate with folks, to reach out to folks, to close deals, etc.
- [32:25]
Sean Littman
First of all, having the right system that gives you no limitations on automations is step one into being successful with automations. And I know a lot of the software platform. The nonprofit platforms on the market either don't offer automations, have limited automations that you can use, limited actions that you can use in these type of things and they're just very hard to do. One of the things that we did in Give suite was we thrive on automation and we have so many different pre built automation templates for nonprofits that are focused on nonprofit like day to day activities. All you have to do is plug in your variables and we're seeing people use this stuff for pledges. We have a pledge form that we built in there that automates the charge and automates the reminders whether it's check a check or an ACH or even a credit card charge. So that's already following up with people who've pledged money that you don't have. Go sit and call. We've have, we've built in, we, we've seen people leverage these automations for follow ups, for follow up emails and move Create your moves management too where you can you once you get off the call with somebody you can create the automation that updates in the moves management to see where they're holding things like that. Send notifications to you to remind as a notification reminder to call these people. Even texting, automated texting, reminder campaigns automated. Pretty much anything you can think of you can automate. It'll save you time. Like we have some organizations that have literally automated their entire donation process which also includes getting things into their database and getting things in all everywhere they need to be and then sets reminder to follow up with them next month to see if they want to make another donation. And so you're cutting out so much time by creating these workflows and processes that you're enabling yourself to grow and scale more.
- [34:13]
Rhea Wong
Yeah, I double click on automation so whether it's built into your CRM system or you using Zapier or something else like automation will save your life. And I think just to quote James Clear, you fall to the level of your systems. Sean, thank you so much for being on the show. Appreciate it. I think you've given folks a lot to think about. If you like this episode, friends help Friends share. Leave a review on Apple Podcasts and until next week we will see you soon. Sean, thanks so much.
- [34:42]
Sean Littman
Cheers. Thank you.
- [34:44]
Rhea Wong
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