FRR75 - 5 must haves in your digital fundraising strategy

Sprecher None Sure.

Sprecher 1 Herzlich willkommen zum ersten Tag auf dem Deutschen Fundraising-Kongress 2019 in Kassel. Herzlich willkommen auch vom digitalen Fachtag, der ja heute zum ersten Mal stattfindet und ein Novum ist für den Deutschen Fernseher-Kongress, ein ganzer Tag lang. unterschiedliche Formate, Keynotes, Barcamp-Elemente für Menschen, die sich für digitales Fundraising und Online-Fundraising interessieren. Wir sitzen hier im blauen Saal und der blaue Saal füllt sich Stück für Stück. Es scheint jetzt schon so zu sein, dass der digitale Fachtag von den Anwältezahlen ein echter Erfolg ist und auch hier Menschen vor Ort sind, die eigentlich sonst vielleicht gar nicht am Fundraising-Kongress komplett teilnehmen wollen würden. Wir beginnen gleich direkt mit der Keynote und die wir entsprechend auch einfach so mitschneiden. Pasquale Gentil, ich hoffe ich habe es richtig ausgesprochen, ist Fundraiser bei Greenpeace International. Und seine Keynote geht um die Five Must-Haves in Your Digital Fundraising Strategy. Wir sind gespannt, das wird ungefähr eine Dreiviertelstunde sein. Und ja, ich wünsche euch jetzt schon viel Spaß dabei. Die Keynote wird auf Englisch sein, wie der Titel es schon sagt, aber ich behaupte mal, dass die meisten Menschen von euch der Sache folgen können. Bis dahin.

Sprecher 2 Can you hear me? The back? Yes? Cool? Good. Hi everybody. I’m Pasquale Gentile. I’m Italian. I’m right now I’m based in Hamburg. I work for uh Greenpeace International. So uh Eva say everything’s best Basically, but it’s not eleven but it’s thirteen year in Grimpeace. No, it’s okay. So uh yeah what we I will uh show you today is like um uh squids um I can say squids presentation about what you should like consider to have in your digital fundraising strategy Before usually when we do this kind of presentation we know who are from the audience, you know. I don’t know very well what is your job, what is your role, what is your um company or NGO. So for me, if you feel that I’m a little bit far, please raise your hand and stop me. Maybe if my English is not really good, raise your hand. I will go much more slow. Okay? It’s fine? Yeah. Cool. So one of the most important things, it’s like uh for every digital activity when we create every digital output, most of the time we think K I have something to say, I will translate, and I will say something on my channel. This is a little bit old style because usually we use the same level of the paper because in the paper when you send the paper to your donors you need to wait time One month, two months, to understand your revenue and all entire your your your entire journey. The difference between digital and offline is digital everything is measurable everything from the start to the end. So and this is really good, it’s really important for our activity. So I put a channel and audience analysis. Because also one interesting point when I arrived to Greenpeace Germany I would say, okay, we want to do a long strategy, big strategy, but exactly where we are, how we work on the digital channel, and I discovered that we are sitting in a mountain of data. But we don’t use. But most of the time we don’t know that we are sitting in the mountain. Because everybody who used Facebook Who use email marketing? Send the email. Who use Google Analytics? Huh. You know you use all the tools. So you you have more than ninety percent of your data. You need to just like improving the connection with your CRM. But it’s really important analysis because help you to create a digital strategy to find the right target in the right channel because we consider that all the people most of Most of the time on Facebook is what we think. But outside on the digital world, it’s very heterogeneous. Not everybody react has in the same time uh understanding this the ask or react with a different picture of different video so it’s very big heterogeneous complexity on the digital. So how we can find our small niche to reach our target analyzing data. So uh more we know about our supporter and more up your plately we can treat them effectiveness to create a supported journal because At the end, what we want to achieve in our digital, create unique experience for the people. Because we want to provide them an experience We don’t want to provide them an advertising to make a donation for us and then finish. No, we want to create a long term experience to to create a long term experience and what time I can in what time of the journey I can present advertising, what time of the journey I can send an email, in what time of the journey I can create a resend email. So this is a really important to understand and to create And build this user experience also from the other side. So but most of the people most of the time people say, okay, but where we start? What we have, how we can start our analysis. So Usually in Greenpeace we split in two big pieces. One is internal audience. And this is why I told you who use Facebook, who use Google Analytics. There is like a lot of information from the insight on Facebook and also audience insight. But we have also Google Analytics there when we can have a segmented report, age, interest, and device category So all this kind of information need the time and I can say expertise to learn because first of all we want to know which kind of out digital output we create, which kind of platform we use, so now I can create a kind of analysis. And for example, also cross-channel behavioral data in your CRM. For example, when I arrived in Greenpeace, Germany, most of the digital activity was setted on the segmented on the email send out. Not behavioral information. So I’m thinking I send an email to Eva, I will select Eva again because I send an email to Eva. So, I mean I received 345 email per day, more or less. So, uh most probably if you send me again and again and again an email, I will not open, I will not spend on my web page. for more than or your webpage for more than two minutes, my engagement rate with the NGO will be very, very low. So It’s really important have this kind of information, behavioral data from the people. I know that Germany it’s a little bit complicated in terms of policy data But what we are discovering, for example, how compact use also their strategy and so on, there is not there is not impossible You can do you can moving forward. It’s just like you know exit from the comfortable zone. Because stay in the comfortable zone means my CRM, it’s okay. I received my tons of donation. It’s okay, but in the moment when you want to grow really, you need to go out from your comfortable zone and you need to really understand what the people are How interact in your web page? How interact with your CRM? How interact with your fan page? Because Facebook is changing a lot. And also we see in the last keynote on Facebook. that Facebook will be much more oriented or purchase platforms so a place market platform and they will enable much more group and messenger and Facebook Messenger. So uh means like connection one by one and they will give us a tools to analyze the disconnection one by one. So we are moving forward and we are going in that direction. So we will have much more connection. The people with one by one will be not much more will be not more broadcasting system. And when we are talking about broadcasting that we need to have a whole analysis system in place. So, and the second part of the analysis and audience. So, we say here all internal: what you can do in your office. If you don’t have any kind of analysis on that, please. Try to hire people or going to an agency and give them access to your data just to have like a clear picture. What the people do in your website, how they act, what are they behavior, how they behave in terms of donation And the second is external audience. External audience are, I think, they are all part of research, all part of analysis from external perspective. You can do in a two in a three-way. You can see a review existing research, for example, we use it a lot Statista. I don’t know who can who know Statista It’s a tool where you can basically see the behavior of the people in some country, how they interact with the different market segment, the purchase, and so on. Where they go on traveling. on holiday so you can match a lot of information. Also you can use like and brainstorming for example. I I can remember in Greenpeace um uh US no in uh Australia they do a big campaign about um uh reef barrier they invite like uh twenty donors 20 cyber activists and 20 legacy. They they had like a long brainstorming for two days, and they were like sitting showing their picture was an agency organizing this. And we also they bring different people, young people, middle-aged, old people, so was really uh really complete in terms of audience. And then you can have the interview, so you can have a really direct interview with your support activist volunteer. So when you have this bubble of the external audience, so what can be the people external that can be close to my mission What I have in my database, there are two bubble. When you try to put close this two bubble, you will find your target in the middle exactly It’s a long time process, but it’s really needed because without this channel audience analysis, I don’t trust in any digital fundraising. honesty strategy. Without this, for me, it doesn’t make sense. You can tell me whatever you want, you can spend also 10 million of Euro. But I will tell you where is the in uh uh channel audience and analysis. Because if I don’t see this because it’s like most of the time we act as a assumption. Ah yes we think that the people will donate for the Arctic because they see the polar beer. Yeah, it’s like five percent. But if you want to have like the rest of 25, it’s not that. You need to interview the people, you need to show the picture, you need to say what you think still You will make a donation for Greenpeace, you will make a donation now. Or before you want to you want to be much more warm and then after one month you want to donate. Or maybe I can call you after three months. Or maybe I can send you an email and recall after four months. So this is the all all analysis that we need. It’s really important that we get. And these are the tools that right now we are using for do for doing this because In Greenpeace it’s a little bit complex. We are not fundraising organization. Of course, fundraising for us is the most important things, but we are campaign organizations. So and what I try to tell to the people, if we don’t know the people We need to know the people, we need to know the channel, because without people without channel, no campaign, without campaign, no money So most important things are understanding people, what the people do in our and how they interact with us This is for example a Facebook insight. You can see how the people, the differences between woman and man, how the people interact. more or less. You can see here Google Analytics, you can see also the breakdown by ages. For example, what we discovered for Ambacher Force was one of the best campaign on Grimpus German last year. So I should I fight it a lot with the fundraising department because they were saying like we cannot send the people that signed a petition in Instagram to the donation We received 220,000 220 donations from Instagram from people from 18 to 24. What means this That the assumption was completely failed in the beginning. So we tried, we assume this risk, but we test and we had the results So right now we know that if we want to create a new campaign and this campaign is really fit very well with Instagram, we will send these people to the donation. It’s just It’s very clear we are talking about digital and this is a new and tools that we are using a lot is fanpage karma, it’s a German tools. We are using uh globally, like Southeast Asia, Taiwan. It’s they are using these tools. It’s really good tools that we are uh we can understand really the fun retention because the most important things right now on Facebook the people is not that put like but the people that in the long terms react more than one two times per month. So these tools help us really to understand how he’s the healthy of our fanpage. The name is fanpage karma. So, and the end of the part of the channel audience, why we want to do this analysis, that’s the main point. So for Greenpeace, the four R are really important. Right ask, right channel, right time, and right message So if we are available to understand this 4R, our understanding our targeted audience will be really easy. In Greenpeace we are running a lot of this workshop around the office called Support a Journey Workshop. Then Support a Journey is the entire process, but One big important part of this workshop is audience understanding. What we go what we do, we go to an office, we bring a portion of information of data from their database, from their Facebook from their analysis, they come up. I want to do a kind of persona because the end of this workshop is building persona. Pasquale, 36 year old. from Italy, don’t like car, like bike. He also he’s in internet from 7 in the evening to 10 in the evening. He likes lifestyle, he is vegan and blah and blah blah. So having all this information can make make your Life much more easy, you know? So this is why audience and audience analysis and channel are important. The second important point, and it’s really connected, because when you have the persona, for example, Pasquale living in uh in Rome, 36 year old, using bike and vegan. So if I they if we develop a persona we can do a several tests on the on this specific persona. We will not just doing a test, let me see the people that take a train and the people that take a car Because you are out of the target. You want to target people, they’re take a bike. So you are losing money, resources, time, and maybe m a lot of money because you use an agency. So first of all it’s important first step is analysis and second step is testing because tests help to minimize risk Maximize response, reduce cost of course, because if you know that you want to go for the people that have a bike, you want to show the mountain bike on the electric bike. You will not lost money to show the pop up them in terms of advertising of email, of content of email, talking about train. So stimulated creativity, it’s really important also for the team, and uh protect support. Because the question is always how we expose our reason to our supporters. Because supporters are really unique Not all supporters are the same. Not all supporters behaviour in the same way. So much information we have of the supporter, much more we can create this experience for our NGO or our organization. So yeah, culture of test. Most of the people like you know while we are not taking our support If we are testing and we are not learning, and if we are not learning, well we are not taking out the supporter in our heart. That’s the the ma the main important things. This approach will surely lead us on a road that we don’t want to end up on. And this picture is really interesting. Testing is too painful, so I’m going with my gut. Let’s go with the blue and pastrami sandwich. So this is a kind of you know most of the time people say I want to test what I want to test, I want to test just the button, I want to test just the subject line, I want to test just the time of the email sent I mean this is very you can find this book in the uh like uh ten years ago we were talking about what you can test in the mail marketing and so on, subject line and button blue and green. So but we see how it’s important have the information of the supporter and using much more tests related to the supporter. So the question is where do I even start? There is a lot of tools that we can use for doing this A B test. For example, on the website, we can use Google Optimize, but also we use the a lot the email marketing system when we want to s uh spread directly specific information for different segments. For example, Greenpeace UK is creating a template of email, but they send an email to twenty-five different target audience and for this 25 different target audience, they have a different content, they have a different time send out and they have a different uh concept of the email. For some target I discovered that they sent just plaintext. So that’s the question, but how you can arrive to this to understand this? Just testing and know is Isolated on your CRM the specific target and try to have a kind of long-term analysis. This can be to arrive to this level, I think they take like more or less uh two year, one year and a half for understanding what is exactly the target that they will of course the target can change during the campaign, but you need to understand that for us it’s really important because we have a sparkly moment Greenpeace doing action. We have like one action in January, one action in February, we have a campaign. So we need to be really fast and flexible to change our target. So for us it’s quite difficult, but we are on the right way So yes, what the biggest mistake that the people often make is like uh like a button color, subject line, images. You know, that’s the issue. And also the culture of the test, most of the people say, okay, I want to test uh the button blue and I want to receive a de I want to do like a much more open rate for this email Most of the time when we do like brainstorming, we start our brainstorming with the important question. We need to have a question. How I can receive much more donation for this campaign. This is interesting diagram that you can work. You do, in fact, you can see how it’s important also do oops sorry. a background research also for testing and then create the hypothesis. Of course the hypothesis needs to start with a minimum of assumption. Because the tests always need to start with a minimum assumption. But you can be very fast, and the main important things is this: how big your segment should be. How many donation I want to receive? I want to receive 1200 donations. So this is the the number that I want to reach. And the most important thing is how I reach this number. which color I will change to reach at least two percent more. This is really important because most of the time the pe also the question is time. Because in Greenpeace we are really not uh exponential in terms of people and resources, the people that do the testing on the specific email marketing maybe is doing also Facebook advertising. You know, so the quest the main issue that I see in the t in the test is the time consuming. Most of the time what I suggest to the to the manager of the office is like try to change the culture in the people. The people need to have a curiosity on the result. You cannot just working and waiting the result. because the the the the result the best result come up if you are really curious on the data because we are talking about digital and digital is everything measurable if you are not curious on the data. I will say maybe find another person or maybe an agency or someone that can have this vision on the data on the digital So because it’s not just like a dress. It’s better the dress red or the dress blue is not like this. So I put in the slide three resources that the people can use for doing a kind of report template for um this is for Facebook this is for a b test and this is statistical significance calculator then you can put your entire sites of your database you can put like a percentage and you can see what you expect in terms of volume. Okay there are three So we say like audience analysis and culture of the test. And other important things is like paid and organic. This is a very tricky for us. Because uh most of the people like we have a big fight in the past right now less that uh when we have a campaign we want to spend X euro for a campaign, but they wish they say like, no, we want to grow much more organically. But if we thinks like in for example on Facebook on social media, right now it’s really clear if you invest 20,000 euro in a month your organic reach will go pop up. It’s like this There is no change. Of course, Facebook is money machine. So if you invest, you should have also return of organic. We had experimented this is in Greenpeace, Germany. How our reach is going up. because we are investing much money on the advertising. So it’s really important that you balance both of these organic and pain and not just thinking to escalate a kind of channel just with organic Because you will not reach enough people. Also, Germany is the most populated country in Europe and there is like the penetration on Facebook is not less than UK and Spain and Greece and other country So penetration is really high, people are there, are two billion of people per month around the world. So my suggestion is if you start to do advertising tr be sure that you grow together with advertising and organic. Otherwise there are some NRAO that they do a kind of failed and advertising they do only just advertising and not organically and the quality of their database was going completely down. So it’s important to maintain this So we use paid beyond driving new leads, it’s also about deepening engagement. This is a tarna support conversion to donors because also in the long terms if you do the first engagement on the social media and you grab quality leads, you will have a result maybe after six months. We see in UK that people rise like become a donor after one year and a half doing the first engagement on Facebook advertising. So um yeah. Okay. So for example, this is a kind of a activity that we do when we want to go online with a specific uh activity on campaign. So we can you can see like these are the four stage we do the first A-B test and micro segmentation with the people before to launch to the large large scale we do an A B test uh feature with the copy visual variation and we will pick the winner. Then we would do the preloads, schedule natively means like organically, and dark post and paid rich, target to core engagers, build the social proof. Then we go for organic, sorry, this was not organic, it was like paid. And then we go for the organic in the feed post. Prioritize by segment, post at peak time and build more social proof And then we continue the paid extension and we will get a new audience. Paid supporter, new audience use exclusion, cache-in, and social proof. So this is more or less the timeline. I can say that this can be like one month of work And there is like two people working on this. There is one is the social media manager and the other there is the social media marketing manager. It’s a combination of two. If you don’t have also people that can work on graphic, we go to another department or we go to an agency that can help us to create more or less this content. So this is really important because for Arctic five years ago we didn’t use this. We because was uh Facebook was uh changing uh complete changing completely in the last Okay. In the last uh three year. But this we used for the campaign for Hambach Ambacher Force, for example. and we reach around uh I can say 156,000 people and we reach like 200,000 donations. So uh sorry 200 donation 200 donation sorry no 200,000 is too much so just for this activity now just for this activity special activity Of course we use it like for email marketing, we add much more. Yeah. Okay. So, and another important point is like using a scalable channel. Scalable channel, what means scalable channel? I can start with a small amount, but but this can be exponential. For example, image that like You were able to truly scale a digital channel and reach millions of people and get them to start supporting your organization and get financial return at the same time. This is a dream, huh? I think so I can say it’s a dream. Yes, 500 new support from Facebook, 500,000 new support from Facebook in Greenpeace UK in 2018 So Facebook is scalable. It’s possible. It’s not impossible. It’s just like resources, time, people, understanding where the people are, and have like really agile and flexible people working on this specific channel. So for example sorry um yeah most of the people they have a big issue for example uh when I arrived in Greenpeace Germany it was like a little bit uh problematic, you know, like doing advertising on Facebook was really small amount and the people will say, but this is not a really good number. We cannot invest all our resources and time to get this small amount of number. How we can do it. So Most of the people, for example, in Greenpeace, the tendency that we have is like USIC, an internet an internal advertiser for Facebook and an agency for Google. Why Because Facebook is uh okay. Facebook uh it’s m much more time consuming but also need to be really connect with your activity in real time and also on Facebook it’s very uh real-time pop-up information activity it’s encrusted with the society. So the question is like Google need really long terms uh um uh adapting also all a question of the network and the the display network so need a really long time to be in place and get good leads. So the difference that we do in Grimp is there are some offices that they do lead generation with Facebook and Google. Some other doing just Facebook because it’s much more fast and you can do internally. But you need to have expertise and you need to have a really clear this four stage to start your campaign. Google, most of the people using agency because it’s very hard. But also it’s uh really the revenue is Much better than Facebook. I can say that on ten leads that we gain on we gain on Google are much better than the ten leads that we get on Facebook. course but the cost is very different. So the common pitfall that we we do on Facebook for example, who use Facebook advertising here? Who do advertising on Facebook? Good. So the main topic, the main problem, common pitfalls that we do on Facebook is multiple creative concept in one AD set. This is really common what’s happening most of the people that are doing advertising. multiple audience in one AD set. For example, small audience. The people when I went to the Greenpeace Mexico, they were doing like fantastic lead generation on Facebook, but their audience was really really small. So when the audience is that you touch in your advertising is really small, it’s basically 100% impossible that you can escalate this number and you can reach biggest volume. So the setting is really important. Also the creative concepts it’s really similar. I try like a polar beer on the piece of ice and I try polar beer like clothes. uh a piece of uh of ice. So this is a really close so it’s not really changing uh too much in the conscience of the people. And also editing edit your AD set is any way ever. The problem is that we think that with Facebook advertising we start the advertising, okay I will check in a couple of weeks Nine. You need to check after two hours. Three hour maximum. Or one hour and a half. Our advertiser works like from home. But works like until eleven in the night he can just send us an email at one, two, three, doesn’t matter. But he works because he knows very well because Facebook is really real-time with the people. You need to serve the right information. So and then last things, I think that I’m on time. Yes, five minutes. So uh and last things, and this is the main problem. This is the main problem that we get it always in all office, but mostly in Germany. So Uh it’s like uh the question is the integration between the different departments. I put like this from Greenpeace this slide. I don’t know if you’re uh organization workflow is the same, but we have a comms organ we have a comms department, we have offline department that is like volunteer uh active group We have fundraise and we I put that vocacy but usually we call it engagement. Engagement are the people that create try to create the funnel and serve, you know, um check all the fun from the beginning to the end for the people. This is the engagement. Fundraising is just an activity internally for the engagement. The main problem that we have in Greenpeace also I think send the most of the organization because I was in the Save the Children Forum in Madrid two weeks ago it was the same problem. There are like people that say I don’t understand why you want to advertise in on Facebook this. I want to show to the people this information. I don’t want to just bring the people to the advocacy page. So the the main problem, the main problem that we have, it’s like this cross-team do not have any shared goal. If you want to work in the best way, you need to have always a shared goal. Because I can say like between fundraising, campaign, and engagement, if we put in campaign like a goal of the donation and goal of the people that take action on this petition, they will understand and they will work with us, they will serve information, they will serve campaign, we will have a brainstorming And if you don’t share if you don’t have a shared goal always you will work for your garden, the other people will work to for the other garden we without find any collaboration because we are not talking about uh you know like uh i will do my job you will do your job to to do to do this kind of digital activity where we see like channel audience, testing, escalate channel, you need to be integrated really because if in this team there are people from comms that doesn’t understand what is what means support a journey, what is the journey, what means like that for Facebook it’s much important the engagement and the like and the reach. Because that’s the problem. Because for example the question that we have comms people say, oh this post had like two hundred and fifty thousand rich people and just react two percent of your database. So our goal is not 250 but is more moving from two to eight percent our engagement because we want we want to have the channel that performs better and the people understand what they are doing. So always is about that. This is a kind of analysis, it is a kind of workflow that we are trying to use and this is really important the digital fundraising activity of course you have the main goal for the team So the key digital fundraising activity, you can have lead generation, email marketing, analysis of the channel and so on. But if you jump With a cross-team, you need to have a foundational digital fundraising activity. Means that most of the time people need to understand what means fundraising, what are the fundamentals of the fundraising, because not everybody is clear on that It’s clear on that that the people land on the page. For example, we have an editorial team of twenty-five people creating blog. When I arrived, I asked them what about the blog? How many time the people spend on your blog? If they scroll down We cannot just producing output without any analysis. So we bring the editorial team in s n with the digital team and they understand and we set also goal. We want to see that the people scroll down, at least 40% of the people arrive on the blog. Scroll 40% of these people scroll down and this is a goal. We set the shared goal. So we help editorial team to find information on Google Analytics. And then we can get also information for the donation directly on the blog. That’s really, really important. So we see what are the five most important things for a digital fundraising strategy. Analysis, test, integration, paid and organic, scalable channel is most of the time important because when we say scalable channel, we we say like okay, we uh we had a good deal with a company that serves us 20,000 leads for 5 euro per leads. Is it scalable this channel? No, it’s not scalable. Absolutely not. Because you will pay millions of euro and after to convert these people as a donors. And these people are not warm. They do not enter in your first engagement funnel. I mean I’m s really skeptical from the and I’m talking about Greenpeace about the office that they try to buy leads It’s really not necessary because by lead means like I don’t want to put my hand in the in the work, really. I want to just justify my leads. So very very easy, very easy of course. But all these five topics can help you. Also you can see how resources is important and hard skill. Hard skill. Hard skill. Really, really important because I prefer have people in my team that are really data-oriented than people that are journalists. Journalists is okay, but not for my job. So I finish. Thank you. Uh I don’t have nothing with a journalist, huh? It’s I mean nothing. Another stickers.