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Hey, I'm Jon.
And I'm Becky.
And this is the We Are For Good Podcast.
Nonprofits are faced with more challenges to accomplish their missions, and the growing pressure to do more, raise more and be more for the causes that improve our world.
We're here to learn with you from some of the best in the industry, bringing the most innovative ideas, inspirational stories, all to create an Impact Uprising.
So welcome to the good community. We're nonprofit professionals, philanthropists, world changers and rabid fans who are striving to bring a little more goodness into the world.
So let's get started. Becky, what's happening?
I can tell that people are gonna be really excited about this conversation today, because we are in the How It's Built Series, and this has been such a brilliant series. I love lifting just the ideas and the case studies that we found in community. And this one today is going to tell you how seven shifts can yield seven figure fundraising growth. And this is not just like word salad or something that we're throwing up, you know, into the ether. This has actually happened, and we are so delighted to have Jon DeLange in our house today. Jon has this incredible story. We can't wait to unpack it about how he's played in different sandboxes within the nonprofit space, from major gifts, and now he's over in the direct mail strategy session, and he has led this nationwide direct mail program and digital supporter strategy for Summit Ministries. And he's also like side note, building all this relational trust with several dozen of the organization's largest donors, and since he's been with Summit, and during that tenure, he has doubled their number of active donors, and he's working with families to secure the organization's first ever seven figure cash gift, like in last fall. So doing all the things spinning, all of the plates. Want to give a shout out to his lovely wife, Ali and their beautiful son. They both live on the shores of Lake Macatawa in Holland, Michigan. Y'all, I had to work on that pronunciation. But here's the thing, Jon reached out to us when we were taking pitches for this, and he was like, Hey, we've had this thing that we've been testing, and we made some of these subtle changes, and it helped grow our nationwide active donor file by 25% last year. So my eyebrow quirked, so I'm asking him sort of more questions about this email strategy. And he's like, look, we're curious. We tried stuff. You know how much we value that in this community of space. And he was like, Look, we had wildly different results, with a 30% conversion rate on one and a 1.6 conversion rate on another test. We are talking about testing, we are not going to be afraid of data and trying new stuff. Jon get in our house and make us more comfortable with it.
Thanks so much. Becky. I'm excited to join you both and unpack a little bit of what we've been up to for the last year at Summit.
Well, we're really, really intrigued by it, and we want to dive into it. But of course, you've listened to the podcast long enough to know like we want to get to know Jon first. We want to know about some of those early experiences you had in your life that really led you to going down this impact space that you're working in now.
Yeah, so we're, we're actually about 10 years from when I realized that a career in politics was not for me, and so as we, as we go through 2024, everybody, everybody's already tired of all that messaging and the the constant political asks and that sort of stuff. But that about 10 years ago, I had a mentor who challenged me to think about who are the people that have both impact as well as meaningful lives outside of work and all that sort of thing. And I saw some of that, and a friend challenged me to consider nonprofit development. So I got to work in some small shop organizations where I wore all of the hats director of development, more or less right out of college, and worked with a local organization that had five healthcare branches here in Michigan. So that was that was a great experience. My my time there was done after a few years, and I started developing major donor relationships for Summit Ministries about six and a half years ago, and so then, then three years ago, they asked me to take on responsibility for our our direct mail and digital efforts across the nation. So that's been it's been fun to trace maybe an opposite path. From most, most development professionals who go from small to large giving, but being able to play in the sandbox for both has been one that I think I've been able to bring a relational focus to a lot of our transactional giving. And so that's that's really at the heart of some of these seven shifts, is how do we shift some of our efforts to be oriented around the relationship with the giver or the the partner that we're interacting with?
I mean, yeah, I love, I love the story. I love that it's kind of reversed from the typical but like, the lens that it's coming to this conversation is, like, so helpful, Jon, I mean, and we just came off the Responsive Nonprofit Summit, you know, which is all about responsive fundraising. This concept of, like, knowing people at scale is like, here, like all of our brands that we engage with feel like we they know who we are and know what our preferences are. So we have to step into that world. I love that you're bringing that into this conversation. So I want to talk about the impact, because How It's Built is all about breaking down the playbook, but first we got to, like, understand, I mean, y'all really blew this out of the box. Like, what talk a little bit about the impact that you saw, and what are the mindsets, because we love to get below the surface too. What are some of the mindsets that you brought into this fundraising kind of playbook that you're going to share today, too?
Sure. So I, as I think about this, I just want all of our listeners, and it's pretty easy for me to get back into this spot, but back in the fall of 2022 as we looked forward, everybody was just kind of stressed out. And maybe you feel this again, looking forward to annual planning for for 2025 but it seems like giving participation is down across across all sectors. And you know, we're just just feeling a little bit more stretched than than maybe other years. And so as we started thinking through the impact of some of our tactical shifts, we said, how can we bring people into relationship with the organization? Through fixing some of our form friction, identifying individuals for personal participation, expanding email engagement, and then just being really nimble in our our paid advertising and and spending we we held each of our line items in our budget with a with a very open hand as we approach 2023, because it was, it's, uh, yeah, some of those, some of those line items, can get pretty, pretty stuck in the mud. I was like, Oh, we've always done it. We've always done it this way. But, and I'm listening through the through the lens of somebody who's like, man Jon, how? How does fixing conversion rate optimization issues on my website include relationship building? Well, if you think about the fact that we have almost 2 million nonprofits in the United States, and all of them have somewhere north of five giving or five pages on their website, that person who got to your website had to pick that page to be on that donate page of yours amongst 10 million website pages anywhere in the country. And so by helping them complete the gift, you're giving them the opportunity to be in relationship with your organization. And so helping, helping more people start those relationships. Helping more people continue those relationships through their generosity is a way that we get to honor them and their interest in our causes.
Okay, good on you. Good on you for taking what we is like call a trigger point of the way that it's always been done. And say, if you say that phrase, it's probably a little flag that's waving in your organization that says, we need to disrupt this. We need to reimagine this. We need to look into the guts of this and talk about is this thing still working in the in its current format? Because when I think back to fall 2022 I can imagine the things that were in place even three years before that were probably incredibly irrelevant, and so I'm just really proud of you for reimagining what this can look like and reimagining how you can connect, because we're living in a brave new world. We're all connecting in different ways and in different places. We're watching a lot of people, not beyond every single platform. They're maybe starting to just find their people, maybe in one platform, which makes omni channel, you know, such a prevalent thing that we need to do, because not everybody's hanging out in the same space. So okay, we have set the tone. We have talked about your impact. We want to give the people what they came for. So we want you to start breaking down for us, really, what are these seven shifts for seven figure fundraising, group growth, we know you have the playbook. We've got our notepads ready. Let's dive in.
Awesome. Well, I'm, I'm excited to jump into this. I shared with with the listeners a little bit about our. Are four guiding principles around expanded email engagement, personal participation, nimble spending and fixing our form friction. And those are going to be the basis for each of these, each of these seven shifts. So as I talk through them, I'll reference back to which of the themes they connect to. So first of all, as we think about donation page, friction, I got to give a huge shout out to Fundraise Up and Next After for their donation page friction, study. Anybody who hasn't made time in their busy, busy calendars to at least download it and take a look through that is leaving money on the table frankly, because the different things that we did, I'll talk about three specific changes in the fourth quarter at Summit, we recognized that a lot of people had high giving intent, and so we removed the header navigation on our donation page, so that way people, once they got there, they weren't visually distracted by anything in the desktop experience on their website. So that way the main thing that it was clear that they should do next is interact with the giving form. We also moved the form up above any page copy directly below the picture on the website. So the hero image there, that was something that we we did during the fourth quarter. We're not currently doing it, since we're putting new traffic on our default giving page, and we want to educate people about the organization. But as you're thinking about this and thinking about your own nonprofit, just just a couple of those changes can change the conversion rate, and so having two out of 10 people give, or three out of 10 people give instead of one, can be a significant change. The last thing that we did on our donation page specifically was just recognize that people can be overcome with decision paralysis. And so we looked at our giving form. It was defaulted to six buttons and an open field, and then a drop down menu for for the designation. So we we made a default to where most needed, and we took away three of the six options. And we saw, we saw these things make, make a specific change. So in the month of December, in 2023 we saw our conversion rate double from 19.3% to 46.2% so almost half the people that were getting to our donation page through a direct click through an organic search, getting to our website. Somehow, once they got to that page, half of them were making a gift that that excludes email and some advertising. We were pretty excited about that.
I must have a very distracting menu, or maybe this data is just like crazy, you know? I mean, it's like so interesting that just by hiding that you saw such a lift. I mean, these are simple shifts. This is not something that's going to take a lot of time. I love that you're lifting these examples like it's so encouraging that it's like we could see those kind of results immediately by just making simple shifts and being smart about it.
Thank you. Yeah, we were pretty excited. We saw in 2023 overall. As we worked on that donation page, we saw about a 65% increase in in small dollar gifts, so under 10k so not our, not our major gift level. And that was that just reinforced, to me, this idea that friction kills donations. There's, there's no other way to think about it, and we can't afford as organizations that are trying to always do more with less, to expect that people are going to, you know, give us the benefit of the doubt in their in a poor online experience. It's just that's, uh, we're competing with Amazon for for a frictionless checkout, essentially.
Because you can't help that that's going to be the expectation we, of course, I think we love to like, think that we're in a different box, but we're not like in terms of people's day they are checking out at Amazon in between making the gift to you and doing the next thing that's real frictionless. So we don't want to be the thing that stands out. We want to be the thing that's just as easy and just as, you know, seamless, as the other experiences online.
Absolutely, the second shift that that I'll throw out there, and this is, this is where we can get real practical too, is we, we've been working on this playbook for for about three years at our at our end of year, and we follow a 60/40, split between cultivation and solicitation, so 40% of our emails, even in the fourth quarter, have no ask. They're not linking to a donation page. We're offering people stories of impact and enthusiasm and social proof outside of the clear asks that we're making. And so one of the things that I wanted to throw out there, too, if you guys want, if anybody wants to hit me up on LinkedIn and just send me the message queue for I will send you our. Actual q4 calendar with dates and titles and notes and the open rates of all of our emails that we sent last year, this email strategy put out 40% year over year, growth from 2022 to 2023 so I'll be happy to share that with anyone who pings me on LinkedIn.
That's awesome.
There you go.
It was, it was a lot of we saw a failed test where we were putting a video on a donation page in 2022 we thought me and people will be so excited to watch our gala video, and they've gone to our donation page, and we'll inspire them. And maybe it will be lower gifts, but maybe it will be a higher average gift, or something like that. Well, we saw our best click through and best page visits the whole year in in 2022 on that that hey, watch this video, email, but the conversion rate was less than 2% so of 100 people who got to our donation page, 98% of them. 98 of them left without making a gift. And so rather than throw that out entirely, obviously we didn't get what we were hoping for. We recognized that we were putting people on the donation page still with that tactic, and so we didn't rely on it to convert giving in 2023 but we still sent two emails saying, hey, come watch this video, and we're able to help our audience understand, hey, when I click through, there's sometimes there's something that I can do, sometimes it's something that I get. And we were able to share, again, a documentary style impact video, but then also an iPhone, an iPhone authentic style video. So I asked one of our junior team members shout out to Noah to hold the iPhone up in front of our VP in our our headquarters, and just take a video of him talking about the impact of the organization, and that, that, again, brought loads of people to the donation page where they could check out that video. I think, I think the thing that I learned through this process was so many times we're over asking in the fourth quarter, you know, we don't want our audiences to think that every time they see an email, it's, it's the same thing. And so following this back and forth strategy, we're able to give people more or less of an emotional experience sometimes, and also the the clear ask to motivate them to generosity.
Okay, are we on shift? Number three,
You got it as we as we thought about our our media placement, we decided to run a true test. We'd never done anything like this before, and so we threw out our audience enjoys satire news, and so we thought it would be kind of fun to give people a different experience of that. That was our best click through email of the whole year. One of the things that we have recognized is there's a lot of times people seem to need an educational experience with our our website before they're ready to make a gift. And so we thought, as we went through the process that branded search might be a better place to put put some of those dollars. And so for those that aren't familiar, branded search allows you to articulate some short copy in Google search results, and we were able to run these ads that articulated our year end match language in the Google results. And so you want to see, you want to see three, four or five times return on ad spend from those ads. Yes, some of the people that are searching your name are going to donate anyway. But we were able to articulate that that value of our year end match right on the right on the Google page. And so we saw about a nine and a half percent return on ad spend through those, those ads that we were running. And that was, that was a huge win.
Yeah, which is like almost four times what you would have converted with people who are in your email list who tried that video email. I mean, it's staggering that you can do that with ads. And just shows that diversifying your approach to the way that we connect and the way we can get someone's attention and point them in the right direction is really a valuable tool. So love this, Jon.
I'll jump through these last ones fairly quickly, since we I don't want us to run out of time. So shift number five, we thought through intergenerational involvement for our organization. So one of the families that I work with had made a significant gift for our organization the year previously, and we were putting together a major supporter retreat, and we had the opportunity to invite their their son and their daughter and both of their spouses to that retreat because those those individuals, sit on the Family Foundation Board. And after that retreat, we got the call saying, hey, we want to give more than we're pre approved to give. And so they went back and advocated for our organization at their family foundation meeting, and that was where we ended up closing the seven figure cash get through bringing in not only the gen one, but also gen two, and kind of showing them the culture of our organization through personal involvement at a retreat style event. So as we, as we go along with that, we have our major gift team. They had similar leading indicators that we asked them to adopt in 2023 and they they had a goal of 100% of their managed relationships having voice to voice or in person experiences with that major gift officer before December 31 and so we hadn't, We hadn't put in place leading indicators like that before, and so we're confident that that moved the needle on the whole for the organization. So shift six was that leading indicator, along with that, shift seven is thinking through deploying content for our organization. We're an educational organization, and we thought through, okay, we have, we have all these books. We have these free resources. Is there a way for us, since our president does keynote speaking, to offer people, rather than a transaction, to get the book at the table at the back end of the keynote, to simply give the book away and give them, give people a QR code on the inside of the book or in on the bookmark with a link to a giving page. Say, Hey, pay it forward. You know, we want to, we want to inspire reciprocity, and that was one of the key drivers of some of our donation growth, our donor count growth throughout the year, and then also, we also, we wrote some specific content series that were delivered via email and also reinforced through direct mail, to bring people into engagement with the organization. Beyond just giving, they were also able to read and participate and kind of report back on their experiences.
I love the interactivity of that, and it allows like many hands to go in, and many people to be inspired and touched by the mission in a different way. And I think that that has a rippling effect. And so love that suggestion and bring us home with the last one, Jon, you got number seven.
You got it. So as we were talking through that was that deploying the content is our is our final shift, the major, major donor officer, leading indicators, or shift six. And I'm just really grateful for the opportunity to represent our organization at that nationwide scale. It's, it's a joy, and we had to, we had to have the healthy culture that's instilled by our VP, Aaron, to give each of our team members the ability to try things that might not work. And so after each one we we go into a process of, okay, what worked, what didn't work, what do we want to do differently? We do that for each of our events. And you know, when we do strategy review after each key giving season.
So good. And it makes me think of an episode we had with Ronen Tal out of Canada that talked about just the power of, like, the hypothesis, like writing down what you think is going to happen. So you can really sit down and be like, did this work or not? Because a lot of times we kind of change the story over time. As you know, we're like, what did we start off thinking this was going to do? We kind of, like, kind of shift that to protect our own egos, probably at some level too. But love this conversation. I feel like you'll have this innovative culture that you're trying stuff. What do you would you lift did you kind of look back and you're thinking like, what really matters in terms of, like, a pro tip that you've garnered through this process? Maybe it's from your, you know, looking back at your career too, from major gifts to now, the scalable kind of side of this, what's, what are some things to center totally?
I think that the thing that I would throw out there is, you know, oftentimes we, we scare ourselves away from interactions that might not be a way that we know how they're going to turn out. So that could be a digital test, that could be a phone call or a visit or something like that. And I learned from a speaker when I was about 18 or 19, he was, he said from stage, every time he picked up the phone, he was a sales trainer, he said, I'm gonna I'm gonna pick up this phone, I'm gonna call this person, and when we go to coffee, I'm gonna leave that coffee either with a story or a friend or both. And as a shy kid who was pretty scared to make fundraising calls for several years and I started out my career, I just had that as as a mantra, I'm going to leave this call, or I'm going to leave this coffee visit with a story or a friend or both. And I hope that, hope that can be kind of a rallying cry for people that sometimes it sometimes is scary. I'm not going to lie to you, it's those are the phone can can look like it has teeth.
Yeah, and I think you're talking about scarcity mindset. And I think that we can talk ourselves out of doing just about everything in this sector, if we allow that scarcity mindset to control us for because for years, I was thinking, oh, it just, I would hate to be a major gift officer, like going in and asking somebody for a major gift like that just feels like too much pressure. And then, as I grew up and got into it, it was like, Oh, this is not about the ask at all. That's like, .01% of what I'm doing here and what we're doing is so much bigger. And what if I don't have to be scared about sitting down at coffee with this person? What if it's just one human being sitting across from another human being, hearing their story, feeling changed by it, and just seeing if there's an intersection where maybe we can make something really great happen out of this? So I love that you lifted that story. I love that you're beating back all of the fear and the scarcity I think that holds us back, and you're just living proof, Jon, of just adapting, going for it, taking risks, doing those pilots. I just think it's a brilliant case study, and I love that we're going to add this to sort of the album of How It's Built. It's such a good case study. And so you've listened to the podcast before, you know we're going to ask you about story, and we really curious about what story that stayed with you in your career, in your life. Anything about philanthropy, generosity, kindness, we welcome it all.
Absolutely this, this is one that really touched me. I I was with my wife, and she got to go along with me on this trip to another Midwest state, and we sat down with a couple. They invited us to stay with them in their home. And they had been to one of our our retreat weekends before, and I didn't know what to expect. They used to live in Florida, and then they moved back to back to the Midwest, and we stayed with them. They showed us around their town. We ate pizza together at the local joint, and they told us about, you know, 30 years ago, when the hospital moved across town and everything, and as we as we left the next morning, the the husband walked out through the garage and handed me a check for $100 and that was that was surprising to me, since their previous giving had been many times that, and what had happened was they they sold their home in Florida and moved back to the Midwest to care for a child who lost a spouse, and they ended up working with their grandkids and footing a lot of the medical bills that that were very unexpected, both for them and their for their family members, and so their financial picture had changed, but he didn't want me to leave their home without contributing to the cause that that they really cared about. They used to volunteer with our organization. His wife had had some health issues, and so she had a hard time articulating herself. But the clearest stories and the clearest words that she spoke were about her volunteer experiences with our organization, 20-30, years prior, and so that just reiterated to me so much how how closely the the act of giving is to people's hearts. And the dollar figure on the check was not, was not an indication at all of their their love for the organization. They they were doing the best that they could, and I applaud them for all of that.
Yeah, beautiful story. I mean that that aligns with the values we lift here, which is why you're missing the boat. If you're pulling, you know, pulls out of your database of like, at a certain gift level, you're going to miss people like that that actually could unlock and are the most hospitable, most kind, most generous people, if you're only looking at the zeros. So, like, that's, that's a beautiful story. Jon, thank you so much. As we round out, you know, I got to ask for a one good thing. You know, this is a piece of advice, or maybe it's something that's bubbled up to you as you've talked to us today. What's something you leave our community with? One good thing that you get activated around?
Yeah, yeah, absolutely. As I think about as I think about that. The thing that so often happens is we get busy and we forget the the flywheel that we're pushing as fundraisers, which is helping people feel like they are making a meaningful difference, like they are a hero to the organization, not not that they are the hero of the story. You know, I know there's a back and forth about that in the nonprofit community, oftentimes, but helping, whether it's a supporter, member who gives, whether it's a volunteer who leverages their talents, whether it's a staff member who's generous with their time, all of us in fundraising can help one individual every single workday feel like a hero to the organization and to the mission.
Yeah, I just think, where are your heroes? Like look internally in your culture, we may call them believers or rabid fans, but it's like there are people willing to step out and step out because they believe so deeply, or because your mission has profoundly touched their hearts and left a story within them. And I think this is such a great story and case study to look at today, and Jon, I know people are definitely going to want to connect with you, because you just dropped the holy grail of meet with me, and I'll give you the entire playbook. So drop where you hang out online, where people can connect with you, or Summit Ministries.
Totally so Summit is available at Summit dot O, R, G. I do a bit of work outside of that as well, but most of the time, I am active on LinkedIn, so people can search Jon de Lange, D, E, L, A, N, G, E, and shoot me a connect message or comment on a post or something. And we will, I will get you that Google Sheet with notes and the actual subject lines and which day we sent them on and which individual in our organization sent the email. And I'm happy to make that available to everybody who's listening.
It's like plug and play.
Plug and play.
Jinx joke, you owe me a Coke. Make it a Diet Coke. That is so generous. We love it when people come in and not only just share the playbook, but then give the playbook away. I think that's really generous. And friends, I hope that this has awakened something in you to test something, to try something, to make generosity frictionless. And Jon, we just really are rooting you on, rooting the ministry, Summit Ministries team on. Just really appreciate you coming into our house and just being so open handed.
