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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 Nonprofit Lowdown fans, it's Ria with you with another solo episode today. I'm going to talk about how to make sure that you are plugging the leaks in your donor funnel before the end of the year. As I'm recording this right now, it is mid October and and we are going to be sprinting hard till the end of the year December 31st. I like to call this quarter the super bowl of fundraising. It is the calm before the storm. I know that a lot of you out here are working on your end of year campaigns. You're writing your email copy, you're designing the letters that are going out the door for solicitation. You're segmenting your list, all of the things, because we all want to make the most of your end now. Why we all think year end, especially for our donors that, for example, have DAFs. There's no compelling reason for them to give specifically for year end for tax purposes. But for whatever reason, as a sector, as a culture, we have trained people to give at year end, which is very annoying if they the end of the year is also your fiscal year. And so what we know is that 30% of donations come in that last week, which is very annoying. I think some of you think of it as dead time. Like you're thinking about going on vacation. If this is the case, if you are in development, I say to you this that last week should be a hard sprint. This is the time when a lot of the gifts are coming in. This is when your reminder should be going out. This is when you need to be checking the mail for checks. Because I I know some people send checks for my little baby Gen Z ers out here. Unfortunately, that last week of the year is not going to be a time of relaxation for you. Maybe you can do it sometime in mid January. Anyway, you embark on this big project for the end of year. What I wanted to do before all of that is I wanted to talk about the the four areas that you may be overlooking where money is leaking out of your pipeline. Now, a lot of people talk about the donor funnel. For those of you who don't know what the donor funnel is, a funnel is essentially, as you can imagine, a funnel with the widest part on top and it gets narrower and narrower at the bottom is where we look at conversion. The idea being that at the top of the funnel are people who might hear about your work, but that as we get to the bottom of the funnel, of the conversion, people drop out of the funnel because either maybe they're not interested, they're not engaged. The problem here is that a lot of you, even though you think you have a funnel, you actually have a sieve. What do I mean by that? What I mean is that for a lot of nonprofits, they are not actually carefully considering the areas in which there are holes in the funnel. And so they are losing donors or prospective donors without actually realizing that they're losing them along the way. Now, I know that the year end giving campaign is the most critical time for all of us. But without a solid foundation, all of the marketing and all of the hard work that you're doing won't stop the leaks. Today we're gonna talk about the four most common leaks that are costing you thousands of dollars and how to fix it before the holiday rush. Today I want to talk about the leaks that you should be thinking about before you do all of this hard work of pouring a bunch of people into that funnel or trying to upgrade a bunch of people. Fix these leaks first before you launch your campaign. Here are the four leaks that we'll be talking about. Acquisition, conversion, upgrade and retention. We'll also be talking about a multi channel strategy. So it's not just email people, it's direct mail, it's phone calls, it's DMs, it's video. Because we are living in an omnipresent world and you have to be omnipresent. Let's get into it. Leak number one, the acquisition leak. Now, I speak to a lot of fundraisers and the number one problem I hear over and over again is Ria, we need more prospects, we need more leads. And while I think that is generally probably true, the issue is that we haven't maximized or fixed these other leaks. And therefore, it's only once we tune up these other leagues that we should really think about in aggressive donor acquisition campaign. Because if you're losing them out of these other holes in your pipeline, you can pour in a whole lot of new donors, but you're losing them out of your leak. Let's talk about this. The donor acquisition leak. When we fail to personalize or when we fail to produce content that is valuable to our prospective donors, they don't even pay attention to us in the first place. What does that look like? It looks like generic, one size fits all outreach. You might treat a first time donor prospect the same as you treat a longtime recurring donor. You send the same email, you send the same outreach, you do the same playbook. And because of this lack of personalization, people feel like they're a number and and not a partner in your mission. I say this all the time. When people donate, they want to feel seen, they want to feel valued, they want to feel like they belong to a community. And how warm a community might they feel if they get the same generic letter which demonstrates that you really don't know them at all. The only second worst thing after dear friend is when they misspell your name or they refer to you in the by the wrong name. For example, I have gotten email addressed to Mississimo. Simo is my husband's last name. There's only one Mississimo in the world and it's not me, it is my sister in law in Miami. Make sure that you get those names right because the most beautiful sound that any of us hear is our own name. When you screw that up, you've already demonstrated to me that you don't really know me. There are three tips that I want to highlight for this acquisition link. One is understanding where are the source of your prospects. A lot of us have various on ramps onto our list. For example, maybe you have volunteers, maybe you have events, maybe you have social media followers. Maybe you have people who subscribe to your newsletter. Maybe you have people who are affected by your services. Look at all of those different channels and analyze how many people are coming from those different channels. And that is going to be an important piece of information for you. Because once you look at all of the different sources, you might say, gosh, it looks like the top sources for our prospects or our best donors are coming from two or three channels. Double down on those. That would be the first thing. Analyze where they're coming from. Number two, look at your CRM system. And by the way, this is a great opportunity to clean up your database by clean up your database. Look at emails that have bounced. Look at weird capitalization of names. Put in any data that you know about people. Look at their addresses. Look at phone numbers that have been Inputted incorrectly. This is a great time to clean things up. More importantly, what I want you to do is to look at all of the donor information. Are we sure that the gifts have been recorded properly? Are we sure that we have acknowledged the gifts? Do we have biographical information that is actually in our database? So your database is your single source of truth. You want to download all the information that everyone carries around in their brains and you want to put it in your system. Now, when you're looking at your CRM system, I want you to do what we call segmentation. What I mean by that is let us look at this list of folks and create different groups of people based on their giving behavior. For example, you might want to look at people who were lapsed donors, first time donors, major gift prospects and prospects who are going to get your annual appeal. The more you segment, the more you can customize the outreach and the copy to those people. Now, I know that there are some of you out here who are doing like 10 different segmentations. There is a point of diminishing returns. However, I think having the big buckets that you can speak to people in the way that is specific to how they've engaged with the organization. For example, if I'm a first time donor, it would be very meaningful to me to get an email saying, we're so grateful that you gave to us for the first time on this date. Here's what we did with your money. It makes me feel like you know me. And then once you have these segmentations, think about how you're tailoring your story and tailoring your outreach to that specific segment. What that might mean is a different email, a different direct mail letter, and a different phone script. If you're actually doing phone calls. The idea here is you want to, as much as you possibly can, roll out the red carpet to make them feel special, to make them feel that you see them and value them and that the interaction with your organization has been noted such that they walk through the front door. Okay, that is the first one, the acquisition link. Let's talk about the second one, the conversion link. Broken giving experiences. You have a confusing, clunky or a slow donation process. If I'm a donor and I have have every intention of going and making a donation on your website, but it's confusing. I don't know where to find things. And then once I do find the donate button, it takes me like three clicks to get there. Having a baby. Her sister, my other cousin, invited me to the baby shower. I can't make it. But I thought, lovely to be invited. Let me go ahead and send a gift, y'. All. I'm not even kidding you. I looked at the invitation. Fine. There was a registry. Fine. Click that. I found a couple of things that she said that she wanted. It puts it in the cart and then I have to go to another site to buy it. And then there were some books that I wanted to buy. It was going to send me to another site. It was a hot mess. Guess what y'? All? I haven't bought anything. Not because I don't love my cousin, not because I don't intend to, but it just made it so confusing to do that. It felt like a choreography. It didn't make it easy when we're thinking about our donation process, this is the most immediate and fixable leak. When you have long forms or forms that aren't looking good on your mobile app or unclear calls to action, these kill. This also applies to your traditional channel. If you're doing for example, hard copy mail, do you have a donation form that is super confusing? Like decrease the friction to increase the action. Here's the fix that you should consider optimize for speed and simplicity in all of the giving methods. Actionable Tip 1 Digital and Traditional Harmony Ensure that your online donation page is seamless, but also that your direct mail reply is simple and your phone donation process is easy and quick for staff. By the way, save some pro tips here. If you have donors that are a little bit more advanced in age, make sure the font can be seen. Bigger font is key. The other thing is make sure that it is accessible. For example, you don't want to print things in a font or a color that won't make it hard for folks to see. The last thing I will say about how you design your donation page is I like to default to monthly based on whatever giving platform you have. Put the highest amount first because people will anchor to that. If you're starting at a $5 and you go to $500, I've already anchored in the $5. It's a little bit of psychological twist there. Remember, when you are designing your giving experience, make sure the Donate now button is prominent and that when you are making an ask in your hard copy letter. For those of you who are doing a hard copy letter, don't bury the lead. Put it in the first paragraph. This is not a time to be coy. Then the last bit of business that I want to flag here is when you have your donate page, make sure that you address all of the different ways in which people might want to donate. For example, I did this the other day. I went on an organization and I wanted to send a check. All they had was a credit card donation. I literally had to dig through, find the contact information, email them to say is this the right contact information? Instead, on your donation page you should have. Let's say you accept credit cards. Maybe underneath you have information about here's where to send a check. Also, I would highly encourage you all to put a widget on your donation page for DAFs. There are people out here who have DAFs. For those of you who don't know what DAPPs are, please listen to my episode with Mitch Stein. You'll learn all the things so if you put on the website. By the way, here's a way to give via your daf. It's a DAF widget. There's a free one that you can find at on marketsmart.com I have no affiliation with them other than the fact that I think Greg Warner is awesome. You can put it on the site because you want to make it easy. Also, by the way, I would put information on maybe you want to donate stock, maybe you want to donate other sorts of assets. Put it on the page. You don't want people to hunt around for this. The more you make me work, the less likely I am to do the thing. What I would recommend that you do is once you design your online donation page and your solicitation page and your donation return envelope, ask people's opinion about what they are supposed to do. Ask them if it's clear that the Donate now button is where they should click you. You want as much data as possible before you go live on this. Because again, if you make me work, if you increase the friction, if you make it hard, I'm just not going to do it. Okay, segment three I want to talk about the upgrade leak. So you are ignoring demonstrated interest. The leak is the failure to ask for the value upgrade from your warm lead. What I mean by that is this is a leak that happens when you treat someone who has already attended an event or volunteered or downloaded a resource. The same as a cold prospect or a past donor who's demonstrated a higher level of interest. For example, maybe someone gave $100, but you can see that they're opening all your emails. You can see they're clicking through. You can see that they came to an event that signals somebody who might be ready for an upgrade. How do you fix this? You create a warm lead upgrade path and you help Leverage your board. So the first thing to do is identify the upgrade signal. What actions indicate that a donor is ready for a larger ask? It's everything from attending events to agreeing to a meeting, to opening emails, to clicking through emails, to having conversations, to engaging with you on social media. There are any number of ways that people are raising their hand to say that they are interested in being engaged further. Make a list of those things and then run your list through those gates to see who might be upgrade ready Now. The reason why upgrading is such a powerful tool is that it increases donor lifetime value. Let's say for example, I spend, I don't know, $100 acquiring a donor. Now if that donor just gives me $100, I've broken even. However, if that donor gives multiple times over their lifetime and also increases their gift, I'm able to maximize on the initial hundred dollar cost that it took me to acquire the donors. Obviously, if someone over the course of their lifetime gives $500, the $400 is a profit from my original investment of $100. Here are other things that you can do in order to identify the upgrade. You can engage your board members. Can you leverage your board members to personally call and thank major donor prospects? Sometimes a personal call from a board member is the ultimate upgrade. Ask and then finally use specific channels. If you're over relying on just email and digital communication and I know I have a lot of folks in my program who are scared to pick up the phone, please consider picking up the phone. A warm lead might be better suited with a personalized phone call or a targeted direct mail piece, not just a mass email. If you are doing hard copy mail, my best tip is that you actually spend the time to hand address the envelope. I know you're sitting out here saying I don't have time for this. Do you have time to raise money? When I ran my nonprofit, we had over a thousand people on our list. You know what I did? I got the list and I sat in front of Netflix for a weekend and I just wrote. The reason why is think about your own psychology. You are obviously much more likely to open up a letter that is hand addressed versus one that's printed. Are you not? The other ninja trick, if you're really feeling it is. I like to employ a strategy called lumpy mail. It is exactly as it sounds. You put a piece in the envelope to make it lumpy. Why? This accomplishes two things. Thing one is that because you can't stack anything on top of lumpy mail, your lumpy mail piece is going to be at the top of the stack already. It's going to be seen. The second thing is, is that it sparks curiosity. Like, you may not even recognize the name of my organization, but you're going to open the letter. Because who can resist a little piece of lumpy mail? The third thing I would say is if you're doing an upgrade path, you want to think about a cadence, maybe the. Oh, and you also want to ask for a specific amount. Don't do the would you consider giving more? Tell me what I gave and then tell me what the upgrade amount is that you're asking for. The caveat here is unless you're doing a major donor ask, major donor asks should always be done in person. But let's say we're looking at an annual donor or a mid tier upgrade. Maybe you start with a letter, then you follow up a couple days later with a phone call. Maybe then you follow up with a dm, right? So you want to make sure that you remind people of the opportunity that you're offering to them. Okay, let me talk about this big leak. This is the leak. This is the mama leak, y'. All. This is the leak. The one leak to rule them all, the retention leak. If you hear nothing from this podcast, hear this. Please know your retention number. As a sector, we are historically not great at retaining our donors. I think across the sector were retaining at 18%, which means that over 80% of the people that those hard fought people that you got into your funnel and you invited them to make an investment and they did, they're leaving you. The reason why we often have retention leaks is that we have a thank you void. What that means is that donors give and then they hear nothing. This is a phenomenon. Not you, of course, never you, but other people. It is when donors give and then they hear nothing but another ask six months later. There's truly nothing more annoying than that. This has happened to me. I'm sure it's happened to you, right? The only the next time you hear from them is they're asking you for money and you're like, what did you do with the last gift I gave you? It's like having a teenager who only calls when they need money. Failure to build a meaningful relationship after the first gift is a single biggest reason for high donor attrition. Now, I talk about this a lot. To me, the most important gift a donor makes is not the first gift, it is the second gift. Because the second gift implies that you have built enough trust and it was a Valuable enough experience for me that I'll do it again. But the sad truth is most donors are one and done because we as a sector have not done a great job of making them feel like they're part of a community, making them feel thanked, making them feel valued. Let's talk about stewardship. In this age of AI and automation, it can be so easy to make people feel special. One thing I want you to all think about before you launch this amazing campaign that you're going to launch at the end of the year is think about your stewardship sequence. And part of the stewardship sequence should be an immediate and heartfelt thank you. By the way, people, this does not include the tax acknowledgement letter that you get after you make a donation. That is just standard. I talk to lots of fundraisers and they say, oh, we thank our donors. And I say, aside from the tax acknowledgement letter, and then all the hands go down. Here's your tax receipt is just standard. What I'm talking about though, is something else. Maybe within 24 hours. As an example, you get a personal phone call from a board member or a staff member, or above a certain threshold, you receive a handwritten note, right? It does not cost you a lot of money, but people want to feel that their contribution has been recognized. Now let's talk about your actionable tip number two. Report the impact. When people give, they are asking three different questions, even if they're not aware that they are asking these questions. The first question is, what did you do with my money? We're out loud here. I could be giving to any number of causes. Heck, I could be taking the money that I gave to you and buying myself a new pair of shoes. Why was the money that I gave you worthwhile? What'd you do with my money? Two, would I be better off giving to somebody else? There are 1.5 million nonprofits in this country alone. How are you making the case for me that my gift to you has been well invested? And then the third thing is, how do you make me feel good or bad? At the end of the day, giving is an emotional decision. And we want to give to things that make us feel good about ourselves, make us feel good about them, make us feel like it was a great experience. And part of it is reporting the impact of what did you do with my money? Plan a communication cadence in the new year that shows the donor exactly what their year end gift accomplished. And then finally with retention. And I know some of you will feel uncomfortable with this, but on December 31st, the last day of the year. You need to be aggressive. I have a checklist that I'm going to include below. It's a free checklist, but our checklist details sending three separate emails on the final day to capture every last minute gift. How many times have you all been intending to do something and at the end of the day you're like oh, I forgot to do it. Yeah, same. So we want to make sure that people don't forget to do it. And at the end of that last day we send emails like, hey, now is the last chance to get your 2025 gift in. Okay, so let's summarize. We've covered the four major leagues, generic outreach, broken giving experience, ignoring upgrade potential and the thank you void. If you fix these now with a robust multi channel approach, your key to a successful holiday season is within reach. We've created a little checklist that is free. Below we've put together the Holiday Giving Readiness Checklist. It's a step by step guide covering everything from setting your goal to optimizing your donor page and planning your stewardship. Don't just download it, use it. To apply for a donor growth evaluation call@riawong.com let's stop the sieve and turn your funnel into a flood of support. If you want this free resource, you can click it in the show notes below or go to riawong.com that's riawong.com leaks. Thank you so much. Good luck and we'll see you next week. Hey fundraisers. Looking to nail those big fundraising asks? Check out my big ask gift program@riawong.com Bag say goodbye to uncertainty and hello to confidence with my program. Get expert strategies and personalized support to secure those game changing donations. Don't let fear hold you back. Join me and take your fundraising to new heights. We're enrolling now@riawong.com bag. That's riawong.com bag. So if you like big asks and you cannot lie, I'll see you in the program.