The Just Be Cause Podcast

The Power of Stewardship: Insights from Two Major Nonprofit Conferences

• Katherine Lacefield • Season 1 • Episode 5

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Hey, generous souls!

Are you ready to level up your nonprofit's fundraising game and improve donor retention? 

Tune in to the first solo episode of The Just Be Cause Podcast with your host Katherine Lacefield! In this episode, we're diving deep into the world of nonprofit stewardship and donor relationships.

Join us as we unpack the key takeaways from two recent conferences Katherine spoke at, including the impact of natural disasters on animal welfare, but also the practical tools and segmentation strategies recommended for successful stewardship efforts.

Don't miss out on this inspiring and practical episode!

In need of some tools? Here are the top tools mentioned in the episode:

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Meet your fundraising expert


Thanks for listening to Just Be Cause Podcast! I'm Katherine Lacefield the founder and head consultant of Just Be Cause Consulting.

My goal is to partner with YOU nonprofits and philanthropic organizations to help you make a positive impact in your community.

With over 20 years of experience in the nonprofit and philanthropic sectors, I help organizations optimize their operations with key knowledge in various domains, such as fundraising strategy, grantmaking research, communications, and development.

Sign up to my newsletter, The Nonprofit Nuggets for FREE fundraising advice, tools and guidance!

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Katherine Lacefield [00:00:00]:
I believe nonprofits should invest in stewardship just because successful fundraising is all about nurturing and building relationships over time. Welcome to the Just Because Podcast. In a space in which the scarcity mindset has been normal for far too long, discover how we're helping nonprofits finally take back their power, find their true purpose, and even use mindfulness to manifest their dream solutions into reality. I'm your host, Catherine Lacefield, a lifetime nonprofit times of adversity and understand the interconnectedness of all causes towards a more conscious philanthropy. Just because it's the right thing to do. Hi, everyone, and welcome to yet another episode of the Just Because podcast. Today, I really wanted to cover 2 of the main takeaways from the 2 conferences I spoke at last month. 1 is the evolution of the interconnection between animal welfare and natural disasters in the space, but also more practically donor stewardship strategies.

Katherine Lacefield [00:01:07]:
Stay tuned for some practical tips on improving your donor retention strategies through automated email series and database segmentation. Alright, guys. So first of all, thank you to everyone who participated in the podcast launch last month. It was absolutely incredible and went beyond anything that I thought would have been possible. Honestly, getting to the top 2 nonprofit podcasts in Canada wasn't really something that I was expecting within the 1st week of going live. We've been amazing. This past month was extremely intense. I sometimes even question how I made it through, but at the same time, I think for anyone who is working or has worked in nonprofits, wearing so many hats is a quite a common occurrence.

Katherine Lacefield [00:01:53]:
So this was not really anything surprising, but this was really how I felt in the past month. If you've been following me, the month of May was very intense. I had 2 virtual conferences along with 2 in person speaking gigs at conferences in Canada sandwiched in between these 2 virtual ones. 1 was in Montreal, and 1 was in Halifax. And they were different in many other ways other than location, but they had a lot of very similar lessons. The main reason why I wanted to have a conversation today was really about how even if it was a completely different audience, one was really targeted to animal welfare nonprofits, and the other one was more institutional philanthrop On the one hand, we have often more grassroots, bootstrapping nonprofits, and on the other, larger institutions with often bigger budgets and donor portfolios. But when I was talking to people after, there was a lot of similarities between the 2 in the sense of how people were reacting and the feedback that I got from the different people that participated in my talks. So let's first dig into the humane Canada summit for animals.

Katherine Lacefield [00:03:02]:
One thing I wanted to bring up about this summit was just how happy I was that many of the conversations were on the interconnection between animal, human, and environmental causes, which is, of course, the whole point of this podcast. So it was great to be able to talk about that, and it brought so much joy to see this topic actually becoming more and more mainstream. This really wasn't the case when I was working in nonprofits back in the day, especially not in the animal rights world, which really seemed that everything was very separate. Disasters and the impact on animal welfare. 2 speakers that stood out were Marlene Tuttle of the Nova Scotia SPCA and Deanna Thompson of the Alberta Animal Rescue Crew Society. These 2 inspiring women shared their stories about natural disasters and the impact that it has on different animal rescue societies and animal shelters alike. So in the first talk, Marnie from the Nova Scotia PCA was sharing about how the many different natural disasters that they had gone through in Nova Scotia had a really big impact on their shelter and in ways that were kind of surprising to me. So, originally, I was thinking, of course, where do you displace all these animals that are in the shelter if the shelter itself is compromised? If there's a risk to them because of whatever disaster is happening, where do you put these animals physically? But Marnie also explained how they also had to consider all of their staff that might have been displaced themselves or on what you would normally think about when you're thinking of managing an animal shelter.

Katherine Lacefield [00:04:43]:
They are almost like humanitarian aid workers in some of these crises. They had people coming in and staying in the shelter as an emergency relief while they were also trying to save the animals they were responsible for. So, of course, the increasing reports of natural disasters that are associated with climate change are only gonna make this situation more common. So all of these questions led me to better understand and appreciate just how deep this interconnection between certain causes is, which is, of course, the whole point of why I launched this. So in this case, the impacts of climate change and increased natural disasters will have an impact, of course, on humans through forced displacements, destruction of property, and more, but also on the domestic animals that often get stranded in the process. This brings me to the next speaker on the panel that I really appreciated, Deanna Thompson. Disasters where other rescue teams that were more human focused will come in and not really know what to do with all of the animals that are left behind. So sometimes they end up doing what they think is best, which is taking these animals from the homes or from that area and putting them up for adoption on different websites and through different rescues because they're seen as abandoned.

Katherine Lacefield [00:06:03]:
Was that in some of these communities, in this case, those indigenous community, the was that in some of these communities, in this case, those indigenous community, dogs that were free in their backyards were not actually abandoned animals. It's simply that if a family gets evacuated, they can't always bring their animals with them as is often the case in these situations generally. So the whole concept of pet guardianship is also quite different from one community to the next, a subtlety that really has to be considered in these kinds of rescue cases to avoid more distress. Situation of placing some of these animals up for adoption actually caused a quite a big tension between the communities and what these natural disaster rescue teams perceived as being the right thing to do for the animals, which causes a distrust of rescue teams in general. So one of the suggestions that Diana had brought up was this need for human focused organizations, let's say the Red Cross or any other rescue organization, especially for natural disaster relief, to work hand in hand with animal rescue societies to make sure that all parties, be it human or animals, are, better taken care of. Unfortunately, though, as Diana explained, is that it is often too late for many of the pets that are left behind when the animal rescue teams are finally called in, which causes just more heartbreak for the families that have already lost so much, and, of course, the loss of animal lives themselves. So many of the other talks I can make they were bridging this connection between the intersectionality of causes. They even brought up issues like DEI and how that shows up in the animal welfare world.

Katherine Lacefield [00:07:46]:
So I was really glad to hear that the message that I've been screaming from the rooftops or well, what I actually mean is from behind this podcast, Mike, is already making its way through the movements involved, especially those that are closer to my heart, so the animal welfare movement and the environmental movement. Alright. So this was more from the podcast theme. But from another point of view, the most eye opening thing for me at the Humane Canada Conference was how little we talked about fundraising. So let's back up a bit and just say this. This summit brought together over 400 attendees working in the nonprofit space and over 65 speakers, and yet I was the only one there to talk specifically about fundraising or generally about fundraising. I do admit there was a talk about storytelling, which or organizational development was not really the main topic of the conversation of this summit. But then again, you would think that with organizations that are all dependent on fundraising being the main attendees, there maybe should have been more talks or spaces for conversation around how they can increase their own capacity for action through fundraising.

Katherine Lacefield [00:08:57]:
So this just goes to prove that there's still so little talk around fundraising and, in my opinion, basic nonprofit managing support in certain spheres of nonprofit action, and I would even say more so in the nonhuman philanthropy space around animals and the environment. So when I finally got on stage and started talking about fundraising, I could tell this was a topic that these different professionals were all craving. One of the things that I thought was really important to highlight when I was preparing for my talk was this bigger need for donor stewardship, which was a big part of my speech. And Timmy had mentioned how my talk inspired them to implement 2 basic changes that would have major impacts on their donor retention. So the 2 things that really seem to come up the most in my conversations post talk were email series and database segmentation. These two strategies resonated most with people who attended both of my talks, actually. So email series. In my mind, this is something that is very common knowledge, and it is very easy to implement.

Katherine Lacefield [00:10:05]:
But as they say, never assume. And after these two conferences, I realized that it's not necessarily as accessible as I had previously thought. So what do I mean by an email series automation? Let me give you a little example. Let's say we wanted to curate the experience for a first time donor. Someone makes a donation to your organization, what communications should they receive right after? Of course, most organizations will have the and personal. So what I recommended in these conferences was to have a series of emails that would lead people towards either a second action or a second gift. So let's take the example of a first time donation. Someone just took the time out of their day to sit down, go online, and make a donation to your nonprofit.

Katherine Lacefield [00:10:57]:
Obviously, you should be super excited, as should they. One of the things that you might do is not just send that automatic thank you or have that pop up that says, thank you. Your receipt is on the way, immediately after the donation is confirmed. One action that you can integrate is starting to get to know your donor as of that first interaction with them. There are some platforms that exist like Proof Pack that'll allow you to, right off the bat, ask people in a more conversational way, why are you donating today? So, for example, in either the follow-up email from the donation or ideally directly on that thank you screen, you might wanna have a little prompt or even leave a video recording of themselves sharing their stories. Platforms like Proofpact, which I use myself to collect testimonials after exploration calls, for example, really allows you to automate the story collection process into your existing donation protocol relatively easily. This way, you're really making the experience of making a donation memorable and also reminding them of why did they make a donation today. You might get some amazing stories that you can not only use to do your own social media content, with consent, of course, But you can also use it for following up with this particular donor in the future by sharing how you just love their story about how Pickles the Pug, was adopted 3 years ago or whatever their story may be.

Katherine Lacefield [00:12:18]:
So this could be one of the initial actions or that you can do or have it in the first email that you send following a donation. A second email that you might wanna consider is sending a general introduction to your organization. Organization that they know everything about you or your organization. You might wanna include things like where they can find you on social media, or where can they find the most updated information about your programs. Maybe you even have a recent video or a podcast that you're really proud of that you can share. This is really just a great way of introducing yourself or reintroducing yourself to your new donors, but also keeping them more engaged on other platforms so you can keep the ball rolling. A third email might be more of a story that comes from you. So this could be a story of either a beneficiary, a success story of sorts, like a child that benefited from your services or a family, woman who was empowered by the services and programs you offer, or even a cat that survived a house fire.

Katherine Lacefield [00:13:22]:
So by sharing a more individual personal story, people are much more likely to connect with your nonprofit and see the potential impacts that their donations have made. This article, come visit us at such and such place, whatever it may be. This is, of course, dependent on your current situation and also what's happening at that time in your organization. If you want this to be an automated process, you might wanna have that email as something that kind of changes every couple months depending on what your priorities are. Or if you have a really big event at the end of the year, this could be a way of already getting people excited about it throughout the year. A 5th email might be a more personalized thank you to remind them, even if it's a couple of weeks later, that you're still thankful for the donation that you haven't forgotten. This puts them back into that mindset of, oh, yeah. That's right.

Katherine Lacefield [00:14:15]:
I made a donation to this organization. I'm awesome. But this can be a different form as the than the initial thank you. For example, being sent from the president of your board or from the CEO or executive director or whoever maybe that have some more cred or just a little extra level Public figure, that might be the good place to place this thank you from them. Finally, a 6th automated email from this series, you might wanna have this one being sent a bit later on, so maybe a few months after the initial donation. That would already ask for a second gift. What I could also suggest, and we're gonna talk about segmentation in a little bit, but you might wanna only save this email for donations that are under a certain amount so as to avoid over soliciting. For example, someone that made a $1,000 gift, you might not wanna ask them 2 months later to make a second one.

Katherine Lacefield [00:15:13]:
However, someone that made a $25 donation, they might already be ready for another $25 or maybe even a $50 donation a couple months later. So if this is automated into the system, you will be getting donations not just when you have your big campaigns and your reach outs, but you'll also have this fall these system can be easily implemented and set up on most email management systems, but I personally use Flodesk. I find it's very simple to use. It's very user friendly, and these workflows or email series can be done for different segments. So it can be for a 1st donation, second donation, or even for just someone who signed up to your newsletter. What I like about it the most what I like about using Flodesk is that there's no limit on the number of of emails or people that you have on your list. I have previously been using Mailchimp, and there's definitely a lot more functionalities and personalizations that were possible with Mailchimp. However, the more emails that I had on my list, the more the price of my monthly subscription went up and quite dramatically, to be honest.

Katherine Lacefield [00:16:25]:
So for you as a nonprofit, if you want to grow your list, this might be something that has an issue with Mailchimp. Will be quite low. So let's say you might have a 5% click through rate, which is still decent. Of course, you might be able to get a fire, of course. However, let's say for just basing ourselves on your current strategy that you know that 5% of your list gives. The bigger your list is, the larger the amount of donations you'll be able to collect just from that same list by maintaining your same strategies. There are countless ways to generate more from your campaigns, but they generally fit into 2 categories. You can either increase the quality of the content or the quantity of the emails you send out.

Katherine Lacefield [00:17:15]:
My suggestion, of course, is to do both. I highly recommend you check out Flodesk for your nonprofit to improve your own emailing strategy. And I even have a special link for my listeners that will save you 50% off your 1st year. These are savings of over $200. Find the link in the series. There are tons of other automation possibilities that I talked about during some of my talks last month, especially more at the second conference in Montreal, or annual philanthropic gathering, which was really focused on data automation, AI, and tech overall. I talked about the automations and tools which allowed me, even as a business owner, to improve my overall processes, but that also can improve the efficiency of funding your non profit. So here are the top 4 that I would recommend for stewardship in particular.

Katherine Lacefield [00:18:09]:
Number 1 is Calendly. I honestly don't know how I lived without Calendly before. It allows me to quickly book meetings with prospective clients or just networking people in a heartbeat while also managing to keep my 3 calendars. I know I have to clean that up, but 3 calendars in order and making sure I don't double book myself. This can be a great tool to build relationships with them. So, for example, offering a quick 15 to 20 minute coffee chat to get to know them, hear their thoughts, maybe even ask them about, a potential project that you're working on. Get them to feel that they're exclusive, that they're getting this exclusive back, like VIP access to your stories. But, also, maybe ask them to share their story of why did they choose to make a legacy gift to your to your to your organization.

Katherine Lacefield [00:19:00]:
Why did they make such an important gift last year? So by automatically adding that into an email that is sent out to all of your major gifts with the link of, like, book a time here, you can very easily book some really high quality stewardship time with your donors. Okay. Number 2 is more around social media. Do you have a social media platform that allow you to automatically post on all of your platforms at once? That really changed the game for me around creating more content. So I use Vista Social, which is, cheaper, more affordable perfectly fine, and I can have quite a lot of different me has been perfectly fine, and I can have quite a lot of different social accounts on it. How does this relate to stewardship? Well, it it'll definitely save you time in your communication strategy overall, but I also find that it'll easily allow me to tag my different, let's say, donors and recognition or my sponsors on different posts quite easily. As long as it helped me save less save a lot of time by not getting lost and doom scrolling, as you all know. So I highly recommend getting a social media manager.

Katherine Lacefield [00:20:16]:
Number 3 is Cast Magic. Cast Magic is especially helpful if you're someone or an organization that has a lot of audio content. This could be podcasts or webinars or if you guys are doing a lot of talks or speeches. This platform really allows you to take any automatic content. So this could be social media, a newsletter, or quotes. Whatever it may be, it'll create automatic prompted content. It's been a really amazing platform, especially for this podcast itself, which really allows me to easily create and recycle content in different ways and has just generally sped up the process. Once again, the goal of all of these tools is to be more efficient and to find systems and automations that will allow you to increase the capacity of your organization by creating quality content more efficiently and connecting more with your donors.

Katherine Lacefield [00:21:12]:
Number 4 is about choosing the right CRM. What your CRM allows you to do or doesn't is super important on how you can best do your stewardship. If you don't have enough information on your donors, like how much they've given, when did they last give, what's their open rate on your email position to do more and better stewardship. One of my personal favorite CRMs for stewardship, particularly in the United States, is Donor Doc because they have an incredibly user friendly stewardship tool, which allows you to activate automatic nudges for specific criteria. So for example, they have one called the spike up gift, which is brilliant, that is for when donors make a donation that is much larger than their average gift. So, say, someone is has historically given a $100 a year and suddenly they give a $500 gift, you'll get a notification. There are many others nudges like that, like for birthdays or lapsed donors. You can automatically set it for every 2 years.

Katherine Lacefield [00:22:18]:
If a donor doesn't activate, you'll automatically get a nudge or pledge reminders, etcetera. You can also create tasks with these nudges and assign them to different team members. So it's not just a CRM, but also a task. They've really automated the stewardship process to kind of take the thinking and the strategy out for you and just simplify it so that if you only have, let's say, half an hour a week to to do stewardship, it can even give you the top five people that you should reach out to. If you're in the middle of looking for a CRM right now or if you're thinking about changing, if you wanna have more information, I highly recommend checking out donor doc and signing up for a quick demo. It can really help increase, your donor retention. To sum it up, my recommended text pack for stewardship is, number 1, Flodesk for email series, Calendly to book donor meetings, Vista Social or Hootsuite to publish social content, Task Magic to create content, and Donor Doc as your CRM. All the links to these will be in the show notes, including the discount codes if I have any.

Katherine Lacefield [00:23:25]:
They'll all be there, so don't hesitate to check them out. Okay. So the second major component that matrix. I'll talk about the matrix as much as that would be exciting. When I talk to my clients about donor stewardship, they're like, yeah. I get it. But how am I supposed to do all of these amazing strategies for all of my donors? I have 100, if not 1,000 of them. I can't do all of these follow ups with them individually.

Katherine Lacefield [00:23:55]:
Of course, you can't. You have to understand and be aware of what your realistic capacity is, and this is exactly where segmentation can come in and save the day. So by establishing different segments based on specific criteria, you'll be able to focus on your higher value donors, but this will really depend on what criteria you're considering to segment. There's 3 that I highly recommend starting off with just to get you on the right track. Number 1, of course, that we when we think about separating major donors versus regular donors is, of course, the amount of their donations. But don't just limit yourself to their last Think about what's the maximum donation they've ever given. The but, also, you might wanna consider their average so that you can also better estimate what their donation will be next time. You might wanna look at not just their individual one time gift, but maybe their annual giving so you can have an annual budget or annual projections, especially if they're monthly givers, for example.

Katherine Lacefield [00:25:00]:
But you might also wanna look at their lifetime value. This is especially helpful if you want to do some more recognition around lifetime long term loyal donors. This is a great way of having different angles to explore even with just one criteria, like the amount of the donation. You can really see different things from a donor, and some donors might shine in different ways. This is where CRM really comes in handy, but, honestly, don't even worry about it. I've still conducted the majority of my database analyses by using this famous spreadsheet. 2nd, criteria that you might wanna consider other than the amount would be the frequency of their gifts. So, of course, we can think of are they a one time donor versus a monthly donor, but you might wanna also look at the frequency over their entire lifetime.

Katherine Lacefield [00:25:50]:
So a donor that's given to you 5 times in their entire lifespan is definitely a more loyal and committed donor than someone who's only given to you once or twice, even if they've given larger amounts. Finally, there's the question of recency or the date of their last donation. You really have to understand that fundraising is kinda similar to dating in a way. So if you've just been on a date with someone recently, the chances of you getting a second date are actually much higher. If it's been several years or even, like, a couple months, if someone randomly writes to you, hey. How have you been? It's been a few months. Would you wanna go on a date? It can be kind of creepy. So definitely think before making an ask just to check-in.

Katherine Lacefield [00:26:40]:
Okay. So now that we have our three criteria, we have amount, frequency, recency. Where does the segmentation matrix come in? What I've done is I've established a point system. So if we go back to that first criteria of the amount, let's focus on the individual one time gift. Donors that have given a maximum gift of over, let's say, $1,000 would maybe get 3 points in your database. If they've given between 500 a1000, they'd get 2, and any donation under 500 would get 1. The same kind of system would apply for frequency and recency based on your data set data set and what you deem as being relevant. Generally, you take your top 5 to 10% of donors or based on the different criteria, and those would be the ones getting the 3 points.

Katherine Lacefield [00:27:25]:
So if, let's say, only 5% of your donors give over $1,000, then that's gonna be why those are gonna be the 3 points. Three points, and those below those two thresholds will get only 1 point, which will represent the great majority of your donors. This will allow you to have a 9 point system or, of course, 12 or 15 or however different criteria is you wanna take into consideration. And once you make the calculation for each individual donors overall points, you'll be able to rank them based on multiple criteria at once. So let's take a specific example of a donor whom, let's say, made a donation over $1,000, so he gets 3 points. They gave a total of 3 times in their lifespan, which according to your database gives them only 2 points, and they've given in the past year, which also gives them 3 points. So they have a total of 8 out of 9 points. They should be one of your top donors, which should get a more personalized stewardship strategy.

Katherine Lacefield [00:28:24]:
This might include a call or a personalized email or an invitation for a virtual coffee chat or even perhaps, like, a written letter. We're able to establish your top, let's say, a 100 donors, so those with 9 points or maybe 8 points depending, instead of focusing on your entire database. It's a pretty easy system to implement, though it doesn't really matter how many donors you have. It's really just a grid where you'll you'll be able to calculate each donor's points even if it's just in a spreadsheet, or you can directly integrate it into your CRM. I would then suggest sitting down and reflecting on what stewardship strategies you will do for different segments. Those with 8 or 9 points might be at the top, but those with 7 points might be worth spending a bit more time on than those with 3. So, basically, based on your capacity, establish what you can realistically do to keep each segment happy while also respecting those who are more involved and by giving them a bit more of your time. Alright.

Katherine Lacefield [00:29:28]:
So this was a lot to unpack. Let's do a quick summary of the things that I've learned. Four conferences in 1 month, I do not recommend. But still, while exhausting and definitely draining, the conversations I had with so many different nonprofit leaders around fundraising and stewardship made me realize that we do not talk about fundraising enough, and these strategies are not implemented enough in many nonprofits. Even some of those bigger foundations out there, they are not immune to forgetting to do donor retention. Number 2 is the interconnection of causes is still indeed a thing and is starting to gain ground in different sectors, such as climate change, natural disasters, and animal welfare, and DEI. So that was really great that I kind of confirmed that theory that I had. Number 3 was to implement an automated email series that allows you to steward your donors without too much effort on your part once it's in place.

Katherine Lacefield [00:30:25]:
Don't be shy to use other automation tools that allow you to improve your efficiency and internal capacity like explained with your Establish a segmentation matrix and identify what stewardship strategies you will do with your different segments. This will allow you to focus on and organize your efforts while simultaneously better understanding your donor distribution and making better projections for the future. So after all of this, if you have any questions about any of these tools or strategies or you'd like to chat about them, I'm always open and willing to have conversations with different nonprofiteers. Find me on LinkedIn. That's where I'm the most active. Send me a message. It would really be my pleasure to send you some of the articles or other tools and resources that I have and that I use on a regular basis. Don't forget, there are the links to all of the tools that I've mentioned in particular episode that I do believe would be really helpful for you, and I'd love to have your feedback if you do end up using them.

Katherine Lacefield [00:31:23]:
These are all tools that I either use myself or have clients who use in love. So find the links below in the show notes. Alright. Conversations with 2 nonprofit professionals working around food insecurity issues and how mindfulness has shown up in their work and lives. One of the best ways to support the podcast is, of course, by subscribing so you can listen to these next episodes as soon as they're released. Thanks for tuning in to the Just Because podcast. Are you enjoying the content we're creating? We'd love to hear your thoughts and feedback. Thanks for leaving us your wonderful review on Apple Podcasts and Spotify and hitting that subscribe button to have access to new episodes as soon as they drop.

Katherine Lacefield [00:32:09]:
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