Anedot Learn session transcript ↓
Colleen:
Hey, this is Colleen with Anedot.
Welcome to Anedot Learn where we help you grow your organization through giving.
Today we have Matthew joining us, who is an Anedot customer.
He and his team use this platform very well, and they specifically have done an incredible job with our Upgrades feature.
So I asked him to join us and kind of talk a little bit about our Upgrades feature.
But before we hop into it, I wanted to see if he could tell us a little bit about his organization, who y'all serve, what your mission is, and what kind of programs and work that you do that your donors support.
Matthew:
Sure. I will be very happy to. It's a pleasure to talk to you, Miss Colleen.
You have been our customer service for a long time, and we're very happy with that.
I'm a full time volunteer for a nonprofit organization called the American Society for the Defense of Tradition, Family and Property. TFP for short.
We are a think and do tank that works to defend those principles in our turbulent world.
This is done primarily through writing books and publications, writing articles.
We spend a lot of time on the streets of major cities and universities across the US, getting into debates and having a lot of work with the people on the street itself. We also have a very large, at this point, growing online presence for four different major sites.
That would be tfp.org, americaneedsfatima.org, returntoorder.org, and tfpstudentaction.org.
We also have three different YouTube channels. We are primarily funded through a lot of little private donations, which is why we're here today.
Colleen:
Thank you. That's great. That is a wonderful overview.
Can you tell us a little bit about your role specifically at the organization?
I know you wear a lot of hats, but can you explain a little bit about how it's connected to fundraising and managing recurring donors as well?
Matthew:
So primarily I focus on finding solutions to our electronic needs because of those multiple variants that we have.
We grew up over 45 or 47 at this point years. And we had to use a lot of different systems, and we had lost some of those and got new ones in their place.
So there was a lot of building bridges. I'm the person who builds the bridges between one platform and another, and make sure that they talk to each other perfectly. And in an automatic manner.
We're not allowed to have any manual processes, if possible. We try to take out that part.
So I try to build all the bridges, and I had the pleasure of building the bridge to the Anedot donation system, our donation platform.
Excellent. They work with us very well. They've been kind enough to do an export for us every single day. Which eliminates again that human factor.
Otherwise, I would spend a lot of time downloading every day and then importing and causing problems for error or getting a lot of options for error. We want to eliminate that.
So the objective is always to build a bridge and work myself out of a job. So I’ve done a lot of that.
And in that process, we've also worked with you all to get that donation export to show our recurrings.
In the very beginning, we use the old method of getting recurring donors, which was primarily to write an email asking people to sign up. And it's rough.
Signing somebody up to get a donation through an email or a recurring donation through an email is difficult, especially being that you're sending an email that may or may not be at just the right time.
Turning donor intent into recurring donations
Colleen:
I know that it's been a while. Like, you guys set up your donation pages awhile ago and you're always refining that and building new ones.
But specifically when you first started using Upgrades with inside of Anedot, what specific problem or opportunity were you trying to solve for with the recurring program?
Matthew:
Right. Again, so our primary problem is that when you write an email, you may or may not catch the person in the right mood.
So that means you have to do it multiple times. And nobody likes to get a lot of emails asking for recurring donations. I mean, that's standard operating procedure.
We don't like advertisements. We don't like things that quote unquote, force us to do what we don't want to do necessarily at that moment.
The best time to ask somebody for a donation is when they're in the mood.
If they've already gone into the Anedot platform to give us a donation for a specific project, that's the best time to ask them for a monthly donation.
And the upsell happens right inside that stream. And one of the best parts about the upsell for recurring donations is that even if they say yes, then we get the recurring donation.
If they say no, we get the one time donation. But it's seamless. There's no extra steps involved. They literally hit a yes or a no, and the operation already happens.
And that's because all the information for donating is collected prior to the upsell. So regardless of what option they use, it just seamlessly goes right on through.
So that simplicity really helps out.
Colleen:
Yeah, that's a great point on the timing too, that if you're sending in an email, you don't necessarily know where they are, what they're thinking, the mood that they're in.
But if they're already on your donation page, you know that they have the intent or the heart to give. So that's really cool. And you guys do a really great job on specifically the impact value.
I was going to see if you're willing to share one of your donation pages that you have set up. That'd be awesome.
And if you want to screen share and just kind of show us what that looks like, that'd be awesome. Because, you can enable the Upgrade feature, the pre-conversion recurring upgrade.
We have something that's kind of set templated. But we really encourage people to customize it. And you guys have done a beautiful job with that.
So if you could just walk us through even your mindset in customizing that.
Matthew:
So here's a page that is what we call the generic donation page.
So we send out an email for instance for our Call to Chivalry Camps, asking people to give to our Call to Chivalry Camps.
And as a boys summer camp, there's one coming up right now in a couple of weeks. They’re ten days long. And we asked people to help out with that camp.
You'll see here that this is what we call a generic page, but much more efficient as a page, obviously, that it gets down into the nitty gritty. It shows pictures of the boys.
Obviously you have to get permission for this. It gives a specific name, and this is actually a camp participant that needs help to like, can you cover his meals, ten meals, half a sponsorship or full sponsorship?
And no, $575 does not cover everything that that young man will eat in ten days. That's that's standard operating procedure.
All right, so that information is all collected. If I wasn't already logged into the system, it would ask me for my name and address. And I can also hit other and give whatever dollar amount I want.
But the minute I hit donate to give money, then it asks me for the upsell. And here you're seeing the better of the two upsells.
Dear Matthew, would you consider helping, being very specific, Diego. All right. Now, if I go back over to the generic one and I hit $15 and I say donate, I'm going to see that it goes to TFP mission, is that understood?
So this one here is very generic. Our mission is massive and there's a lot of things that we do, whereas the other one is very specific.
The more specific you can make both your donation ask and your upsell ask, the better the results will be.
The relevancy is a key factor. And the next key factor is not just changing this message.
You must also change these here. If you don't change this here, you will have a confusion.
And one of the learnings that you have on your list to ask me about is what did we learn along the way? Well we learned that a simple yes or a no here leads to a lot of phone calls down the line.
All right. And those phone calls, they're not all happy. Most of them are kind of confused. Some of them are little upset.
But the second you say, yes, I want to make you a monthly gift or no thank you, and you add the helper text. Where's the other one at? Okay.
So the helper text is very, very important because again, I don't have anything to spare at the moment or I know, TFP needs help.
Yes. That little bit of extra information is mostly psychological and it hits the subconscious. But at least and that's what happens if you wait more than a minute. It automatically sends you through.
When it does your one time donation. All right. So but to go back to the text I think I can get here in the workflow. Yeah. There we go.
Changing this text here saves you a lot of trouble. And it also needs to be relevant. Keep the relevancy from your email to your donation page to your upsell language and your button language.
If you can keep all of those things in align, you are much, much more likely to get monthly donors.
And it's automatic. And if they say no thank you, you still get your one time donation.
Choosing pre-conversion upgrades to capture donors in the moment
Colleen:
That's a great point. So that's exactly what I wanted to point out.
You guys do a great job making sure that everything works together, because I know you guys will use these in an email, or you might use them in different ways, but the page itself works with the pre-conversion recurring Upgrade.
And like you said, the impact value that yes and no.
You make it clear. So there's no confusion. The helper text and even how you had you guys do a great job with the variable tags.
So it's always custom to say like, hey dear Matthew, dear Colleen. Like whoever is visiting the page, you're addressing them by name. So that was an example of our pre-conversion recurring Upgrade.
Do you guys use the post-conversion Upgrade at all or what made you decide to use a pre-conversion versus the post-conversion?
I know they're very different and for different purposes. But what's your thought process there?
Matthew:
Yeah we much more stick to the pre-conversion because it's the whole mood factor. They’re in the mood, they’re in the moment.
And we found that statistically you're 75% better off using the pre-conversion for our particular needs. We've never found a case where it was better.
One of the other questions that frequently comes up is the dollar amounts, how we chose the dollar amounts.
Dollar amounts, again, relevancy is key. We all know what it costs to feed, I shouldn’t say we all do.
Some of us know what it costs to feed people on a big scale, either with a big family or running an association, organization, whatever.
And so if you tell me that you want $35 per meal, I'm like, well, what are they eating gold or something?
If you tell me it's $2, I'm like are they eating hotdogs the whole time? So be realistic. Just be realistic.
The more realistic you are, the easier it is for people to believe you. And believability, being honest is the best policy. There's no getting around that.
How testing and iteration shaped a scalable recurring strategy
Colleen:
That's so true.
So when you guys were building out those pre-conversion Upgrades, did you do any type of tests or did you just kind of go straight with we're just going to be completely transparent and honest so that we're the most trustworthy in that ask?
Matthew:
Yeah. So the only thing we tested were the bigger amounts.
So the relevancy on the smaller amounts is as to what we charge per per meal, every campaign is different.
So if we're on the road off with people, obviously it costs more to eat at restaurants than it does to eat during a summer camp where we control the kitchen and our people cooking are full time volunteers, etc.
There's a big difference. In fact, if I’m being honest, I think is the main factor why we chose those amounts.
Then as far as the bigger amounts, then those ones are done a bit of testing, but I'm talking like $15, $20 relevancy in difference. It's not anything major.
Another thing we did test was how many to do. Four is where it's at for us, with an “other.”
But it can be maybe something different for y’all.
Colleen:
Yeah. Did you guys, when you created those Upgrades.
And I know specifically the one that we're looking at for the camp example, even for your other pages.
So say if we go to your website and we give, we go to give. Are they generally the same or do you guys kind of vary your Upgrade asks?
Matthew:
No. Once we found what what works we just left it and we literally clone all the pages and I make changes.
That's the only one we do.
Colleen:
Okay, I love it. Do you remember when you were testing this out and you were creating it when it kind of clicked that you saw, like, this really works.
Did you see, like a boost in your recurring like, when were you like, okay, we're going to add this to every page? This is something we definitely want to to do.
Matthew:
So the click actually happened on the only page we were using it on. And that was the only one where people were going there randomly.
And that was the donate button on our home page. Well, the donate button on our home page at that time was simply a one time donation. But we have a second button now that's recurring.
It goes straight to recurring. You can choose one of the two even before you get into the system, but essentially on that one time donation button, it's random.
And we were asking them also to give monthly, because we know that a lot of our people are going to be going there from our direct mail operation, which is many times larger and decades older than our online presence.
So they may not want to give a check. So they go look for us online, and then they hit the donate button. And so then we put the upsell on there with the old language.
We just literally just put it on to see if it would work. And we started getting monthly donations and be like, what? We didn't even do any work.
We just clicked a couple of options. So then we started putting it on a couple of other pages for testing purposes, and we're getting monthly donors. It was almost in a sense, it was almost for free.
So okay, well then we did it on a couple of bigger campaigns, and that's where the problem started.
And then the phone calls because of the volume, they started getting phone calls back at the customer service. And then we realized, oh, I need to change the language.
So that was one of those late night, which was in 7 p.m. I'm in here on all four accounts, changing the language across the board and saying, too bad if you don't like it, we'll talk to you later.
Okay? This is an executive decision. I'm sorry. It's got to change. So I don't get any more phone calls from customer service.
But then we realized, okay, so we can put it everywhere and we can actually reduce our recurring email system to once a year.
And we almost don't need to do that, to be totally honest with you, because once you have a monthly appeal every now and then, we have two appeals per month when something crazy is going on.
Then because we only do things for our actions and we have a lot of actions, whether it's books or, like I said, the work on the streets, our protests, our rosary rallies.
There are 20,000 rotary rallies in October. It's huge. It's a massive operation.
We have plenty of things to ask for. So we have all four sites to do it on, and all of those go to different accounts in Anedot under one general.
And then what happens is we started getting recurring donations on all four of those sites, just simply by putting the upsell and by not doing anything else.
The reason for that is, again, it's the moment.
So now I don't have to worry about making a monthly donor appeal in the middle of the month, because I'm getting them every time I do appeals, every single time my one time appeals go out, I'm getting recurring donors because of the upsell. That make sense?
Colleen:
That's very cool. What you're saying reminds me of what you said in the beginning, where you said, you don't really want have to do anything manually.
Anything that you can automate is going to save you time. It's going to save you money. That's our goal is to save you time and save money.
And it's smart that you guys set up a very specific, customized Upgrade and you just clone the page.
So that way it's included on every page and it makes sense on every page.
And then you're not having to manually reach out and ask for those recurring gifts because people are already being asked on your initial page.
Matthew:
Right. So let's say that you do 12 appeals a year, one time appeals.
Okay. If I have to cut one of those to do a monthly appeal, because monthly donors are what make an organization run, the bread and butter is monthly donors. Okay.
Sorry. If you don't get that then you'll need to get it okay. We need monthly donors and we do extra things off at one time.
Does that make sense? Yes. All right. That need, that necessity means that I have to cut one of my one time appeals to ask for monthly. But you're going to get a fraction.
Maybe in the long run, you're going to get more because they're monthly donors, but you're going to get a fraction of the responses.
Well, now I don't have to cut one of the one times and I'm always having a monthly.
Designing a clear and consistent donor journey
Colleen:
Yeah that's great. Yeah, y'all are doing a great job with y'alls system and how it works. I know kind of talking from like a customer's perspective.
We kind of talked through how to set it up. But what about from a donor’s perspective, what would be like the ideal donor journey of how they are approached, what that looks like?
I know we touched on it a little bit, but just kind of like in simple terms, what does that look like?
Matthew:
Correct. So we'll go back to the point of relevancy. And that is we want to ask the donors for something that they like.
That's the reason that they’re on our file and it needs to be very specific. And no, never give them more than one option to help you on. If you want them to share to a friend, then it's a share to a friend email.
If you want them to donate, it's a donate email. And if you want them to ask to donate, don't be generic about it. Be specific. People give to specifics.
So if I have a campaign for I need money for the upcoming summer camp for the boys because youth apostolate is expensive, then I need to be specifically asking for that.
Better yet, more specific is a specific boy. That's the way it works. I need to feed 56 boys, but there's one that needs help.
And if you can help that one and include in that help all the other ones that I need to feed. Great. Okay. That's the way fundraising works. Well, so the more specific you are, great.
So the email needs to be honed down to a specific boy or a specific problem or activity. And then everything needs to follow that specificity. All right.
So the email, the donation page, the donation language, and then the upsell language, even the helper text language.
The more specific you are to that entire process, the more likely you are to get donations and the easier it is for the donor to follow you.
Otherwise it's called whiplash. They want to help you out with Diego, and they get in there and they see something about TFP activities when they're just, what in the world? Is Diego in the activities? I don't know.
And then see you later, right? But if they see Diego on the email and then they see his face on the actual donate page and a bunch of his buddies, you see what I'm saying?
That linear movement is really easy. There's no whiplash. And you click through the buttons and voila, then you can feed 56 boys.
Colleen:
Yeah, that all makes a lot of sense. And that's huge. And I know, we kind of talked about obviously this will boost your recurring program if done right.
And I think again a huge point is that you guys set it up. You kind of set it forget it. And you clone.
So it's not something that is going to take a ton of time and energy every time you create a page.
It's really just being smart in how you set it up. Working smarter, not harder in a way.
Matthew:
So the best part about cloning is that once you've been with Anedot for a year, you have your 12 programs.
Then when I want to do a summer camp, I go clone the summer camp one, maybe change the language from 2025, 2026 or whatever.
You understand what I'm getting at. So your upsells have all been made specific, and they need very little tweaking. So you don't have to constantly invent.
And if it didn't work, that's when you need to do testing. So on my normal, let's say that my normal email system gives me twelve monthly donors, just to be random, and then this one only gave me five.
Well, then maybe you should be testing on this one. Change the numbers, change the language, but don't fix what isn't broken.
Okay? If it's actually working, go tweak something else or try something entirely new. Or if you do test, don't test with your entire file.
Test with a part of your file, and as soon as you get the difference, then try it in the whole thing.
Practical steps to improve recurring giving with Upgrades
Colleen:
Say another organization wanted to boost their recurring using Anedot Upgrades.
What are two just very practical steps or changes you’d tell them to make on their page?
Matthew:
Okay. The first thing is change the generic language that is there because, well, first of all, you have to test the page, right? Put the upsell on there.
Put your percentages or your numbers in and test it. Just use the generic one for that. Test it. Once you see that it works, then go in and change the language and test it again.
Then give it to ten people to test and ask them their opinion about your being specific, if it was specific enough, or if they had questions at the end of it. But at the very minimum, test ten people, right?
And they can be random. We're talking about, depending on your donor base, you need to be testing people that are inside of your donor base, that are your friends.
So you need a grandma or you need a 22 year old, whichever one it is you need to be sending to those people, not the opposite.
Okay, whoever your donor base is, that's who you need to be sending out to asking them to test it.
Once you have that language down with those ten people, test it on half of your file, and if it works, then hit them all.
All right, so the name of the game is to make sure it works all the way through the process, then test it all the way through the process, and then go to your whole file.
Closing thoughts
Colleen:
Okay. That's great. That's a great practical kind of step moving forward for someone that hasn't used Upgrades before.
I was going to ask, looking ahead, how are you planning to continue to refine your recurring strategy?
Are there new types of Upgrades? Maybe post-conversion Upgrades, different campaigns, donor segments that you want to kind of tweak and experiment with?
Or is there anything you want to try to change, or are you happy with where you are and you don't want to kind of change anything? What are your thoughts?
Matthew:
So I would say that being happy means that we're a little bit complacent. So what we'll do is occasionally and again we'll take one that is a low performer and we'll do some testing there.
We should do that at least twice a year on the lowest performers. See if you can make them better.
If you actually end up making them much better, you should see what is it that I changed there that affected people?
And should I be applying that same type of change to the other upsells?
I'll be very careful with what is not broken because typically, especially if you are dependent on these operations, it's better to break it on a small scale than it is to break on a big scale.
So again, typically we'll take our lowest ones. That's what we do looking forward is we go take the lowest performers and see if we can make them better.
Colleen:
Awesome, thank you so much Matthew for joining us today and talking about Upgrades, how you guys use them, how you guys use them specifically for the pre-conversion recurring.
I know that this is going to add a lot of value to other customers that watch this. Maybe want to get started. Want to boost their recurring programs.
So thank you so much for joining us today.
And we do have a few other resources. We have another Anedot Learn episode on how to set up an Upgrade specifically. So we walk through exactly how to do that.
And we also have an Upgrades guide on our help center. But if you have any questions or need anything shoot us an email at help@anedot.com. Thank you.
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