Nicole: Hey, everybody. I'm Nicole Alvarez. I'm the customer success manager with Tatango.
Mike: Hi, everyone. I'm Mike Snsuz. I'm the director of non-profit customer experience at
Tatango, and we're talking about Giving Tuesday, which is coming up shortly. Giving Tuesday,
you know, Nicole, it's been around for a while now. Each year it gets bigger and bigger. Most
non-profits have jumped on board. It's a very big giving day for them. It kicks off the giving
season in a lot of ways and carries on into the end of December, which is also a huge time for
fundraising. And some of the questions we get is, what does Giving Tuesday look like from a
text messaging standpoint? You know, a lot of organizations are updating their website
and doing social media activities, posts and advertise, emails, and what does it look like
from a text message standpoint? And the answer is it's pretty simple. It's pretty similar to it.
It's easy to do. A lot of the content's already there. They ask about what is the schedule for
Giving Tuesday? And we talked a little bit earlier about the beginning of November is a great time
for reporting back and cultivation of your donors. And then the schedule for text messaging, I see,
is a lot like what you do with email. You know, you may have the preview coming up of Giving
Tuesday, you may have a Thanksgiving cultivation message, you may have a couple of Giving Tuesday
text, multiple going out. We were talking a little bit earlier that it's messaging for
the moment and giving Tuesday is a moment. And so text messaging is one of those channels that
you're gonna make sure you're reaching people at the right time during a critical moment.
Nicole: Absolutely. So November and December are key peak giving times. So that very early
November where we were talking about potentially even avoiding the elections, but it is a chance
for you to really talk them through what the rest of the year is going to look like and how
they have the ability to make that impact. So if you're really working on the story part of it,
planning that out, having a perspective of these are the ways that I want to talk to them. Going
through the mission and the vision, explaining, re-introducing people to what your organization
is all about. But telling that story through many moments. So taking the moment of giving,
but giving thanks. I'm gonna give time to share my mission. I'm going to give thanks
for those who are supporting the organization. I'm also going to give a lot of perspective.
So it's all around giving on where before we just ask, we're gonna tell them why we're gonna give
them the hows but then we're going to go for the ask. And so, from a Giving Tuesday perspective,
it is giving thanks on Thanksgiving Day, it is, the day before giving Tuesday,
you want to make that timing relevant. It's not too late. You can give in the morning.
Here's our goal at noon. We're halfway through our day. Here's where we are,
right? So as far as the timing on Giving Tuesday, what do you recommend?
Mike: Yeah, I think that's a great point. I think a lot of the timing can mirror what
organizations do from an email standpoint and follow that cadence. But you also can go off
that on Giving Tuesday as you're close to a deadline. Most organizations have some sort
of matching goal or goal that they're trying to reach. As you're getting closer to that,
a lot of those emails are either ready to go or prescheduled,
but this gives you an opportunity with text messaging to send a one-off update,
messaging in the moment that gives a timely update. Maybe there's something relevant that
happens that day or just with a specific donor or something else. And text messages are so easy to
get out the door and create and send. So I think that's an important piece for how it's different.
And with Giving Tuesday, there are challenges. So it's getting bigger and
bigger. There's a lot of organizations that participate. Leading up to giving Tuesday,
you have Black Friday and Small Business Saturday, and Cyber Monday,
and so there's a lot of noise during that time. We know email deliverability is causing some
email messages not to get through. Non-profits are also trimming their email list, where it's
only the people who've opened in the past few months that they are sending to, to improve
their deliverability. So some of the challenges are getting in front of people on Giving Tuesday,
having them engage and read and open your message. So when we think about challenges and
either having to pay to get in front of them, and it's a lot more expensive to advertise and pay on
giving Tuesday at the end of the year or making sure your emails are getting in front of them.
Text messaging is one way we know with 99% open rates with high click-through rates that, they're
going to get the message that is sent. So some of these challenges, it's about having the message
in front of them enough, and text messaging is one of the ways that you can ensure that your
constituents are going to get the message that they're gonna read it, but there's also some
different things you can do with text messaging that you cannot do on email as well or you cannot
do on social. We can add in, you know, email, you can add in merge fields for a certain amount that
you wanna ask the donor. You can do that with text messaging too. So if you last gave $100,
we can ask you to give $100 again or $125. You can do that on email, but that's harder to do
with some of these other channels, search, and social to personalize the ask for the donors.
That's a big thing non-profits do with direct mail. And from a direct response standpoint,
you can include that within text messaging as well. There's also some unique features we've
talked about where you can include video that you watch it maybe on your watch or your phone,
and it gets in front of people. You can have audio messages that you can get a thank you
or some sort of message from a president after the campaign. There's animation there. There's
different things that, click to share where you get a message, you click on a button,
and then you can... It pops up a text message you can share with other people. So there's a
lot of unique things that text messaging adds, not only with reach, getting in front of people
and ensuring they're gonna engage it, there's some cool tools and some new things they can do that'll
supplement your campaign to help them engage and hopefully convert them on Giving Tuesday.
Nicole: Yeah, absolutely. So I think Giving Tuesday is, you're messaging in the moment, right?
You're showing the what's going to take in the moment for them to cultivate that donor, for them
to ask for that one-time donation, but there's also a key piece of Giving Tuesday that is turning
one-time donors into recurring donors. So talk a little bit about that of what your recommendation
would be to turn those one-time donors on Giving Tuesday into long-time lifetime supporters.
Mike: Yeah, it's a great point, and the priority for non-profits really for those small and midsize
donors, should be to convert them into a monthly donor. We know the retention rate is much higher,
almost three times higher. We know the lifetime value of monthly donors is much higher, again,
almost three times higher. So some non-profits try to convert their one-time donors and
non-donors to monthly donors around Giving Tuesday and the end of giving season. Also,
after and in January, that is a peak time. People are most likely to become a monthly
donor after giving a one-time gift within those first 30 days. So some organizations
try to convert them to monthly donors at Giving Tuesday at year-end, but if you
don't focus on that, if you're more focused on the one-time donations during that time,
then as you get into January, then running campaigns to convert them to monthly donors.
And so text messaging can help with engaging and reporting back on the impact of donations,
but also then getting that message to try to convert them to become an
ongoing monthly donor where we know the lifetime value is gonna be much greater,
but the lifetime value is higher with those monthly donors. So that's really the goal of
getting a non-donor to become a one-time donor and then moving those one-time donors to monthly
donors and using things like specific gift ask amounts in email and text messages and is an
important way to do that if you're somebody who gives $50 regularly, we may ask you to give $5 or
$10 or $20 monthly. So having an amount that is specific to your giving capacity and what
you've given in the past, and that's something you've always been able to do with direct mail,
though obviously there's an expense there. You can do it with email, and you can also do it with text
messaging to get the right ask in front of the person to convert them to the right type of gift.
Nicole: But being smart in the incremental asks,
like you're saying. So if I've consistently given $50 a month, it might be a hard reach to say,
"Can you give $1000 a month?" So being smart in the ask. "I noticed that you gave five $50 on
this date. We would love for you to increase that to $60." So being strategic in the ask but also
being smart and realistic that it might not be more of, "I can do an extra five or $10 a month,
but I can't do an extra several hundred dollars a month." So being smart in that.
Mike: Yeah, and one of the cool features Tatango has just added is because we're a platform that
is geared towards fundraising and engaging your donors and trying to get them to move
along that donor journey and eventually become a larger donor, we have the ability if you ask
them for a specific amount, you can then increase that amount within the platform
to ask them to give a little bit more, so 125% of your last gift amount. And that's one of the
things tooting our own horn here, that Tatango is geared towards giving and engaging donors.
And so we have features like that where if you've last given $100, Nicole,
we have automated features that we can ask you for $125 automatically. So that's one of the cool
features that to replicate what we know works in direct mail and bring it to other channels,
to email and to text messaging, you know, there's a history that that
type of approach works with donors to upgrade them, to keep them, to get them to a greater
level of giving. And so that's one of the cool things you can do with Tatango's functionality.
Nicole: So one of the key pieces of Tatango is donation fundraising,
right? It's where our roots are. It's where we started. It's what we know.
So now that we're in the non-profit space and we are a trendsetter and a leader in non-profit
fundraising, we have more key pieces than anybody else as far as preparing these non-profits for
Giving Tuesdays. For that customer journey, for the best practices, we've got the analytics
behind it to be able to share our best practices of our working with many nonprofits across the
months and years. So with Tatango's platform being unlike anybody else's because we're able
to help them with the fundraising ask and the aspect, that engagement piece is key.
So you engage in many different avenues on text marketing, whether it is the donation ask or it
is, "Here's our vision." So in January, when we hit the refresh button for 2023,
and we're talking about, "Thank you so much for what you were able to give,
are you able to increase that a little bit more? Here's what we're able to do with those donations.
Here's our quarter-one objectives. Here's what we're going to do with these funds that we
raised. Here's how much we raised. Here's what we're going to do with it." So being
transparent in that refresh is going to be able to increase the lifetime value for that customer.