Fundraising+ Growing Your Revenue

- Welcome everyone. Hello. Thank you so much for being with us here today. Welcome to the second and final philanthropy series webinar of 2025. This is Fundraising and Growing Your Revenue. So for those of you that I haven't met, my name is Miriam. My pronouns are she/her, and I'm a senior consultant fundraising specialist based out of our Manchester office in the UK. I'm joined today by two other members of our global fundraising team. We have Jake Larimer, based in New York, and Sara Stevens, based in Austin, Texas, and we're also joined by Lucy Robinson, consultant based also out of our Manchester office. We are also absolutely thrilled to be joined by our guest speaker today, Carter Tholl, development director from Music Theatre Wichita in Kansas. So thank you so much for being here, Carter. We'll hear from her in just a little bit. So a little bit of housekeeping for you. We are recording today's session, and we will send the recording and all other resources mentioned by the team today by email after the session. And this webinar will last for approximately one hour, including time for questions at the end. We do also have live captioning available, which you can turn on and off using the CC button at the bottom of your screen. So let's get started. Our webinar today is on Growing Your Revenue. What a big topic. So we are going to be taking you through various strategies that arts and cultural organizations can implement to invest in growing their revenue. Some of these strategies are quick and low effort, but they have a high financial and relationship building impact. Some take more planning and strategy, but allow for long-term security. Your role as fundraisers is to prioritize what are the most impactful plans for your team, your audiences, and your potential donors, aligning with the resource that you have on hand. And this is gonna look different for every organization, but you know your audiences best. But before we dig in to some strategies, and even some new developments on the Spektrix side, I want to encourage you to pause. We understand that growing funding pressures mean that often fundraising teams are presented with higher targets with less resource, and it can be really, really tempting to just throw every idea at the wall and see what sticks. I'd like to suggest that, before implementing any new strategies and trying something for the first time, you should understand and record your baseline. So where are you now? You want to understand which metrics you are interested in hoping to change when you try something new. And throughout every example that we look at today, our presenters will suggest the best ways to, and appropriate metrics to measure a baseline before you implement something. This is going to ensure you can identify which change has caused an impact, which will allow you to measure what worked, what didn't work, and why. Ultimately meaning you can have lasting revenue generation in the future. Finally, and I cannot stress this enough, write those findings down, not just the baseline of where you started from, but also the dates where you implemented a change. This is going to make that final evaluation all the easier. With that said, let's jump into our agenda for today. So, terribly sorry. So we are going to begin by handing over to Lucy who will introduce us to some small tweaks that you can make today that can have a massive impact on your online donor journey and your revenue. We are then going to move on to Jake, who will take us through some longer term, but no less simple strategies, to build a strong donor base across all levels of support. And we're gonna end with Sara discussing the importance of making connections in outbound proactive campaigns, and hear from Carter about her amazing work during Music Theatre Wichita's outbound fundraising campaign. We'll finish off at the end with some time for questions. So with that, take it away Lucy.

- Thank you Miriam. So we are cutting straight to the wins in this section. We're focusing on high impact, low effort changes that use your existing Spektrix tools to dramatically increase your donated income. This is about being agile, securing quick wins, and building a foundation for growth, without requiring a massive resource overhaul. And the single most powerful, yet often under optimized tool for this, is your online purchase path. And why focus here? Because the online donation ask is included within your Spektrix system as core functionality. This means there is no additional cost to implement, it requires minimal setup from your team, and it's proven to drive revenue, often from zero. When your customers are here they're already engaged, they're already spending money, and they're in the process of booking. It's the perfect low barrier moment to ask. And in 2024, organizations using Spektrix saw, on average, 78% of all their donations under £500 processed online. So by simply asking every customer, you empower far more people to become low level donors. But we can maximize this even further by using dynamic, bespoke asks tailored to their habits and your strategic goals. Chemainus Theater Festival in Vancouver Island have seen a staggering increase of 370% in the number of first time donors they've had since moving to Spektrix and simply turning on purchase path donations. But before we dig in for how to customize, we need to address benchmarking. As Miriam mentioned, this is absolutely key. How do you know what success looks like, or even if a change made an impact, without a baseline? And to do this, we can use the standard report donation conversion analysis to establish this. Take a look. What's your conversion rate? Which is your top fund? Is that aligned with your strategy? And what are the top events that your donors are attending? And for those of you who are already using online purchase path donations, take this as an opportunity for an audit. Run the report. Can you look at increasing your average basket donation based on your donor history? And for those who aren't yet, this is your starting point. Note down your current conversion rate, and your average donation amount, and watch it increase from here. And good will look different for every organization, but you all need the baseline to track and celebrate your success. So before you do anything following today's session, please take a look at your donation conversion analysis report, it is standard in every Spektrix system, and establish your baseline. And as we go through the next few action items, I'll be showing you how to make data informed decisions based on what you'll see in those reports and your Spektrix system as a whole. So let's start with the names and descriptions for the funds displayed on your website. Firstly, do you know which of your funds are shown online? Are they all up to date? Are they clear, compelling and specific? This is your first chance to get the attention of your potential donor. Every customer going through your online purchase path should see at least one ask. Harness that power. And do you have more than one fund visible online for different times of year or for different campaigns? And if not, why not? You could have multiple funds, all of them restricted, but they use different names and calls to action. Altrincham Garrick Playhouse, a Spektrix user based in the northwest of England, recently updated their fund name from a generic Support the Playhouse to something much more mission specific. "Help us keep producing great theater, donate now," alongside a really clear description. They also aligned their default amounts using Spektrix data, and the result was an almost immediate financial boost. In just two weeks, their average donation increased from four £4.08 to £5.12, and their conversion rate increased by 3%. A measurable uplift achieved with minimal effort, a change that only took their team minutes to action. Now let's strengthen that ask even further with a shift from a generic message to one that is highly targeted using event criteria. Event criteria allows you to automatically tailor the donation appeal to the specific event the customer is purchasing tickets for. The message is instantly relevant because it aligns with the show they're paying for. What we're doing here is simply leveraging the existing Spektrix event criteria, which makes it easy to set up for an immediate impact. So why not direct your family bookers to your youth program or your bursary funds? Or ask your patrons booking for your main space to directly fund and the upkeep and enduring legacy of the venue they love? Or your gallery bookers, ask them to pay towards your next exhibition or help take art into the community. And for funds not tied to a specific venue or event, we would highly recommend using event attributes to identify the event type. This means any new events are automatically included when they match that criteria, saving your team time and keeping your donation asks dynamic and relevant. And we also wanna make sure that we have an ask that is always going to show at checkout as your fallback, meaning that everyone is asked, regardless of what they're booking for. The place, a specific Spektrix, sorry, user in London identified that their low web conversion rate was due to event specific funds missing some of their customers. So by streamlining this using event attributes, their positive change was remarkable. Their conversion rate increased by 9% and this is agility in action. It ensured that the right message reached the right audience at the right time. So now let's layer in some customer criteria. And again, we're looping back to existing data. What do we already know about those who are donating? Have a think about who you want to be sending a different, maybe more personalized message to. Using customer criteria, you can personalize the donation experience based on, have they donated before? Are they a member or a supporter? Have they donated to a specific fund? And once you've analyzed your current donors, use the data in your Spektrix system to maybe have a fund name to thank previous donors next time they donate, or to have a specific message in your fund description for your members and high level supporters. This creates bespoke, dynamic asks with very little effort and help lead to stronger relationships. Bristol Old Vic, based in the southwest of England, achieved a stronger donor connection by successfully using multiple unrestricted funds tailored to the individual's giving history using tags. This sophisticated approach creates more meaningful, tailored asks, and it helps strengthen those long-term donor relationships. So this is where we transition from making the right ask to the right person, to making the right size ask based on a demonstrated capacity. And this is by using the native functionality, default amount, which can be customized on each fund. And this works by ensuring that your ask adapts. The donation amount automatically scales based on the total value of the customer's basket. The higher the spend, the higher the suggested ask. Comprehensive calculation. So crucially for this, the calculation for capacity isn't just based on tickets, it includes tickets, but also memberships, merchandise, every revenue stream they're committing to in that moment. Right ask, right time. The goal is simple, to stop leaving money on the table. Here you are always meeting the donor where their current spending capacity lies. And remember, data is your starting line. Use your reports to capture your current average donation and precisely quantify the revenue uplift after every tweak. So let's talk about those zero value baskets. And I'm thinking here when somebody might have used an offer, or a voucher, or has received free tickets. These zero value baskets are still donor opportunities. If someone's getting a free ticket, that doesn't mean they won't wanna give. So why not prompt them to donate your standard ticket price, or at least have something set as the default amount for your zero value baskets? Remember, these are still engaged loyal customers. The Gate Theater in Dublin achieved a significant lift by recognizing this, and they set the default amount for their zero value baskets to €25. And since implementing this change, they are receiving more standalone €25 donations than ever before, and their average donation amount is consistently tracking around €15, really demonstrating the power of a bold ask. And for hands-on, step-by-step guidance on what we've talked about already, do check out the asking for donations recipe card. A link will be shared following the session. So the key takeaway from this section is simple. Just give it a go. Mark your baseline, test the outcome, learn from the results, and if needed, try something else. The organizations I've shared examples from today didn't do a full overhaul. They made strategic, data informed tweaks and saw quick, measurable results. This proves it's possible to make a huge difference with minimal effort, and once you've made these small yet mighty changes, not only will you see an increase in your donated income, but the data you collect can become a powerful tool to identify potential regular givers. And that's exactly where we're headed next. Thank you for your time and over to Jake to dive into longer term strategies.

- Thanks so much, Lucy. So we can't understate the impact that some of these quick wins can have on your fundraising. However, online donations are only one slice of the pie when we're looking at all the kinds of initiatives and strategies that you need to raise money each year. Growing your revenue in ways that provide long-term security for your organization can take longer to carry out and see results from, but these strategies don't need to take a long time to set up. In fundraising, we often see the Pareto principle at work, or the observation that, as a generalization, 80% of outcomes come from 20% of sources. Among your donors, we can often see this principle at work, where you might have just a few donors responsible for the majority of your funding, and conversely, the majority of your donors providing a smaller proportion of your budget. Of course, both of these groups are vitally important. So we want to employ strategies for both of these groups of donors that combine both automating our work to save time, while also keeping a personal touch for all donors of all levels. So let's first dive into how we can secure longer term, consistent funding from our base group of supporters here. So data shows that the number of recurring donors to all nonprofit organizations increased by 127% between 2018 and 2022, even though the amount of donors overall went down for most nonprofit organizations in that same time. With trends we've seen among arts organizations since, it suggests that these recurring giving schemes are only growing more popular among donors. Especially considering how ingrained the subscription model is among every industry nowadays, it's not too surprising that this model continues to become more widespread in the fundraising world. Now, compared to one-time donations, gifts that donors give regularly can quickly add up. Even though it might seem obvious, if we compare the difference between someone who gives you one $100 donation and someone who gives you $10 monthly for a year, the monthly donor is giving you 20% more by the year's end. Additionally, when we know that donors are giving at a certain level each month or each year, this makes it easier to predict our income as well as their behavior. And on top of this, data shows that recurring donors are very likely to remain recurring donors, even in cases where the amount they give changes. Many finance teams can also benefit from this more consistent and predictable giving behavior, as regular giving can help with the cash flow for the organization, especially for organizations that raise a large percentage of your revenue from fundraising, or who have big ebbs and flows in their earned income, like seasonal venues. Having a consistent stream of even small donations throughout the year can help relieve the pressure of earmarking exactly the right amount of money ahead of time in case of large or unexpected expenses. Recurring giving is also popular with donors themselves, too. One of these reasons is that donating in regular installments, like with monthly giving, is more approachable and sustainable for the majority of your audiences than giving one lump sum. Especially for younger and lower income patrons who do want to support you, there may just not be the ability to respond to something like an end of year campaign with a $100 gift, because the cash may not be on hand. A small monthly gift can be a much more feasible option for these patrons. This way of giving also allows for donors to be flexible in how they give, as they can adjust their giving at any time. If a donor wants to support you, but has to stop for any reason, or would like to upgrade for a higher tier of benefits, this can easily be facilitated. Most crucially, however, the biggest draw of a recurring giving program for your donors is how convenient they can be compared to other kinds of giving. In Spektrix, auto-renewable memberships can easily offer this kind of recurring giving structure, and I think they really shine in offering that convenience to your donors. The option for a donor to put their card on file and let it renew each month can be the break point that causes someone to give when they otherwise might only have given once or not have given at all. And this applies to you as well. Once you've built a membership in Spektrix and set up auto renewals, all you have to do is check a box to get this set up on your end. On that flexibility note, this same easy to set up tool in Spektrix can be used to support so many different kinds of recurring giving programs. This could be a fully fleshed out annual membership program with tiered benefits, like Jazz Forum Arts provides with their club membership. This includes automatic offers applied to these members when they buy tickets based on their tier, and tailored communications, like a welcome to the club email that not only thanks members for joining or renewing, but also helps create a sense of exclusivity and community as a member. Or you can create something like Williamston Theater in Michigan offers, where the same auto renewable membership setup simply acts as an avenue for donors to give monthly as opposed to one-time donations. However you may want to brand the recurring giving model that works best for your organization, Spektrix's memberships functionality can provide an approachable, flexible, and also convenient way for donors to support you, while at the same time being easy for you to set up. Our membership functionality has historically allowed you to set fixed tiers that you can offer your donors. However, recognizing how important flexibility is to donors to be able to support you on their terms, and for each organization to create the recurring giving model that's best for their patrons, we are introducing a new feature to our membership solution, variable recurring giving. With this feature, you'll be able to set a giving range for your memberships that allow donors to choose the amount they'd like to give. What we see here is just a mockup, but this will work just like your memberships do now. So this is a great way to allow donors to have even more agency over how they support you, while also having the convenience of saving their card and letting it renew each month or year. Be sure to check out the what's new at Spektrix page that we'll link in the resources to see updates as we get closer to launching this feature soon. Now what about that other group of donors from our Pareto principle examples? This would be our major donors, who might engage with our memberships or recurring giving programs that we set up also, but these often require significant cultivation and stewardship because of how much they give and the variety of ways they can give. Because this small group of donors have such a large impact on us, we want to ensure that we're building meaningful relationships and including them as partners in the organization. As I mentioned before, these 80/20 numbers are just a generalization. So let's look at some actual numbers for the arts sector. According to the fundraising report cards data on arts and culture nonprofits in 2024, donors who give over $5,000 a year represent only 2.3% of all donors to an organization. And this group of major donors are responsible for 65% of annual fundraising revenue. This means that your average arts organization is completely reliant on that 2% to give consistently every year just to keep the doors open. The more diverse our sources of fundraising income can be, the less risk we take on in case any one specific donor or institution changes their giving behavior or stops giving entirely. Prospecting new donors of this giving level can be time and resource intensive, however, and that's on top of all the stewardship it takes to retain that 2% of mission critical major donors in the first place. When I was working with these kinds of donors, I was often keeping a lot of this information in various Excel spreadsheets, if it was centrally documented at all. It was a nearly weekly occurrence that I'd be discussing our grant calendar sheet with leadership and we'd be looking at different information because they had a different version of the Excel downloaded than I did, which caused more than one panic as grant deadline closed in. That's why it's so important to keep donor information in one place, so you'll always be seeing the most up-to-date version. And the opportunities interface in Spektrix is designed to create that central source of truth, even for this kind of personalized and varied work you do for these important block of donors. One way to leverage these tools is to build a portfolio to organize your donors and all the tasks and details associated with them, which then live updates as you make changes and record new information. This is simple to set up in Spektrix by using the owner field on your opportunities. You can assign asks for major gifts to different members of your team and create personalized dashboards to keep track of just the opportunities you are working on. Or, for those of you on one person teams, you can use this to separate out major asks for different campaigns or strategies you have. This can further be sorted by different stages in your moves management pipeline. What this could allow you to do is to log into Spektrix, click into the ops interface, click on a tab that says your portfolio, and immediately see who you need to reach out to for drinks to talk about an upcoming capital campaign, or if you need to follow up with a board member about their pledged gift. The more we can set up your CRM to do the project management part of your fundraising work, the more time and energy you free up to let you focus on the personal connection bit. And more time for personal connections means you can build stronger relationships with more of those major donors. Now, even if you aren't using the opportunities interface, your system is already holding a wealth of information about these major donors, how much they've given, what they give to, their attendance behavior, and more. Anything on the customer record and in the transaction history of your patrons can help inform who they are and how to engage them. And this can power a lot of your prospecting work. However, there's going to be information you just don't know yet, especially when you want to look at expanding your donor base to help diversify who's supporting you each year. For donors and prospects in North America, we now have an integration with Kindsight iWave, which allows you to automatically write back wealth screening data into your Spektrix system. You can tailor this to the information that you think is important about these prospects, and with the integration you can use it like any other data you might have in the system. From powering Dotdigital campaigns, inviting them to opening night events, or adding those opportunities to start building portfolios for these donors into your existing donor pipeline. Beyond this integration, we can always import information that helps you get a better understanding of who your prospects are. All of this is to empower you to work on the relationship building side of things as you make an ask of these donors. And I'll throw it over to Sara to further expand on how to proactively make those connections with your donors.

- Thanks Jake. So when I worked in fundraising, and honestly even a little bit to this day, my family members did not understand what I did or do. They knew that I fundraised for a theater, but they didn't understand why that was necessary. They could not connect that ticket costs don't fully supplement what it costs to put on a production or an exhibit. And unfortunately, I can tell by the emojis, that might be the case for a lot of your family and your audiences as well. It is so important that you are constantly messaging to your audiences that you are a nonprofit. And if you're not a nonprofit, that doesn't mean that you don't have needs from your audiences as well. This ensures that they're making the connection that you're a nonprofit, but it also ensures you are making and strengthening a personal connection with your audiences and communities. So while you're sharing the need, it's important to outline who you are, and more importantly, what is your impact? And this goes two ways. How do you impact the community around you? Whether that is by providing a space for young people to learn and grow their craft, or by providing a cultural hub in your communities, but it also goes for how the community impacts you. Tell them what their money from donations and ticket sales are going towards and how important they are to you, but also not just monetary. How does the community physically showing up for you impact you too? From volunteers, performers and beyond. Sharing this far and wide is key, and email is the best way to maximize that sharing. Email also just so happens to be the most automatic way of getting that messaging across. So let's talk through some of the automation tools that you have at your disposal with the Spektrix integration with Dotdigital. And it should be stressed, automation does not mean that there's no personalization. We know that relationships are at the core of what we do every single day, and we wanna make sure that we are building and maintaining strong relationships with all of our donors. And there are ways that we can still do that, all while saving time and resources that may be better spent elsewhere. So let's chat through how Spektrix and our integration with Dotdigital can do that for you. First things first, dynamic content is the easiest way to tailor your emails to your customer base. This is a way for you to change content based on things like tags or attributes on the customer record. So for example, this could be something small and subtle, but still impactful, like referencing the customer's name in an email or in the subject line. So for example, perhaps you have a custom salutation field that may be different from somebody's first name, like in this case for Jake. That's more of a casual and personal outreach than his first name here, flagged as Jacob. So I can make sure that that email references the salutation field, and if that is blank, reference the first name field. Or this could be entire blocks of content. For example, maybe you're sending out a booking reminder to your subscribers, and you wanna do a donation ask on top of that, but you don't wanna ask people who recently gave. You could trigger that blocks of text for someone with a recent donor auto tag to say something like, "Thank you for your recent support of our organization, click here to see more about your impact." And then for folks who don't have that recent donor tag, they could get that traditional donation ask. Then we also have Dotdigital programs, which is an automated workflow of emails that can trigger based on how your audience interacts with the email before it. And we have found that these emails that go through programs have up to seven times more engagement than regular one-off emails. This allows for easy follow up that is just running in the background, thus freeing your time up for those one-on-one relationships that Jake mentioned earlier. And it's still personalized based on how the customer has interacted with you, and it allows you to set exit criteria, so that you're not continuing to engage with somebody who has either already done what the email has asked of them or it doesn't overwhelm somebody who isn't engaged. So let's take a look at what this could look like. So a customer can enter the program and are sent an initial email, and based on their interaction with what they're sent, they're sent along different routes with different communication being sent as that follow up. And I understand they can look really complex at first, but they are easy to dissect, and to help get you started, we actually have some prebuilt templates to get the ball rolling. So currently we have seven prebuilt templates that have released so far, but there's one more, an eighth one that I'm excited to introduce you to today. Just in time for your year end campaigns, we now have a Dotdigital program template designed for a specific fundraising appeal. So you'll start by deciding who should receive your appeal emails, and that group will be sent appeal number one. If that person has donated, they'll then get a thank you email and will promptly exit the program so they don't receive any additional asks. If that person did not donate, then they'll be sent a second email, and you can take that even further. Once the second appeal has been sent, if the person donated, they'll get the thank you and exit the program just like the first batch of donors. But what if they didn't donate? Let's look at other signs of engagement. Did they open the email and click a link but not make a donation? Let's try them one more time, but maybe enhance the email with a subject line that has a little bit more urgency to try and get that person to cross the finish line, or maybe even leveraging some of that dynamic content. Then of course, if they donate, send them the thank you and exit the program. But if they don't, maybe that was the last shot and they exit now anyway. Going back to appeal number two, what if they didn't open or click any links in that appeal? That's kind of signaling they're not engaged, so let's exit them now so that we don't bombard them with a third appeal. And these program templates are just that, a template. They can be adapted to your specific timing, needs, number of appeal emails, and so much more. They can also even sync with Meta ads and TikTok ads. So there is so much that you can do, and the best part is, you only have to set it up once on the backend, and you can trust that Spektrix and Dotdigital are doing all of the work to follow up with this group of people automatically without you having to do any of that mass follow up yourselves. And this will now hopefully free up some time for you to have some of the one-on-one touchpoints with prospects and donors that you're cultivating, either for the first time, re-cultivating, or stewarding. Like Jake mentioned, it's so important for you to develop deeper relationships with folks that are in your portfolios. So carving out time in your day to talk to your donors, or finding them at an event to have a conversation, or even calling them up after they saw a show will have a really big impact on that relationship. It'll ensure that you are learning more about their interests, and this may come in handy one day when you're doing a show that aligns with those interests and are looking for a sponsor. Additionally, you can never show enough gratitude. The easiest way to lose a donor is by not thanking them or showing appreciation in any way. So going out of your way to go the extra mile and have a board member email them and thank them, or to call folks after you see a gift come through online, or you receive a check will always help. And lastly, we shouldn't just be reaching out to donors when we need something. We should also be reaching out to them to keep them informed about what's new and upcoming. And that brings us to our wonderful guest speaker today, Carter Tholl, development director at Music Theatre Wichita in Wichita, Kansas. Around this time last year, Carter launched an outbound fundraising campaign with coaching by the one and only Cal Haney from Cal Haney Consulting, a Spektrix partner, and also a previous philanthropy series speaker. The campaign ran over the course of three months and saw really wonderful results. So to share more about that journey, I'll let Carter take it from here. Oh, Carter, your sound is cut off. No. Oh goodness. Live theater, nothing like it. Not quite. Oh, somebody else said that they can hear you. Other panelists, can you all hear Carter? I still cannot.

- [Miriam] No, afraid not.

- How about now?

- [Sara] There we go.

- Okay, great, thanks for sticking with me, everyone. Hi there, I'm really happy to be here. As Sara said, my name is Carter Tholl, and I'm the development director for Music Theatre Wichita. We are a summer stock musical theater located in Wichita, Kansas, with about a $5.5 million budget. We have a full-time staff of 14, and a newly increased development department of two. Just in April of this year, we added a second team member to our development team. But up until then, I was a one woman show. And as Sara said, as we approached the fourth quarter of 2024, we were looking at the numbers from individual contributions and there was a delta between where we needed to end up for the year and where we currently were. What an opportunity. Our managing director, Angela Cassette, when trying to think how are we gonna solve this problem, wanted to get a little creative. Often when we do any kind of professional development, we're thinking, well, where is an area where someone is really lacking a skill, and what resources can we provide to try and fill that gap for them? And Angela thought, well what if we did it the other way around? What if we took something that Carter was already really good at, in this case being on the phone with donors and patrons, and how can we help her build that skill to really create some results for the organization? She heard from Cal Haney on a podcast episode speaking about her five minute fundraising technique that she has developed, and we decided to engage with her over the fourth quarter of 2024. Through individualized coachings, she talked me through her whole technique of the five minute fundraising call, involving gratitude to the donor, speaking about your personal fundraising goals, and how the donor can help make that possible, help you achieve those. Whenever I am making these calls, I always have the patron's Spektrix account pulled up. I can see their past donation history. For instance, I can say, "You made a really fantastic gift of $1,000 around this time in 2023." I can look at their ticketing history and say, "Oh, I saw that you were with us for our performance of 'Newsies' this year, and that you bought some extra tickets. I'd love to know who you brought in addition to just your normal subscription seats." And I can also say, "And I see you've gotten your season tickets for 2026 already sorted. You get a gold star for that." As I'm building towards my fundraising ask. the other tool from Spektrix that is really, really helpful to me as I make these is the donor giving by fiscal year report, which is not a standard report, but that Spektrix, the team can really easily put together for you based on your organization's fiscal year. Ours happens to end December 31st. And so I'll now get to some of the hard results that we found through this, making these phone calls over about three months. It was about 25 hours altogether on the phone over that course of time, and renewed gifts pledged or made right there over the phone were about $30,000. Upgraded gifts, so someone making a larger gift than they did the year previous was almost $60,000. And then on giving Tuesday alone was another $14,000, beating a daily goal I had of $12,500. So over the course of quarter four for 2024, it was just over $104,000 raised on the phone. In our next slide we can see how this compares to some of our other methods that we solicit donations. Historically our ticket subscription, folks making an add-on gift right along with their subscription has historically always been the time that we've seen the most gifts come in. And you can see that our phone campaign during the fourth quarter of last year brought in almost exactly the same amount of revenue, which was really, we were really surprised by that. So because of that, we not only achieved our budgeted goal for the year, which was about $680,000, we actually surpassed that by about $15,000 more. In addition to the real hard resorts, which of course had a very true impact on the organization, going through this training with Cal and getting me on the phone with the donors really changed my mindset about donor communications overall. One of the things that Cal really encouraged me to do when I was on the phone with someone was, whether I was speaking to them or just leaving a voicemail, to make sure that at the end of the call I explained when and how I was going to follow up with them. If someone says, "Oh yes, I'd really be interested in making a gift, but I have to sit down with my spouse and talk the numbers and see what we're giving." I would say, "That sounds fantastic. I'll make sure to give you another call right before Giving Tuesday and I can talk to you about what you've decided." Or you know, just however it would fit for that specific donor. And that really helped me go from, oh gosh, I've tried once, but I should really try a second time, so I better, okay, I better like give myself a pep talk and call 'em again. And really instead it changed to, well I told them I was going to call them, they're expecting me to follow up with them, and it would really be rude of me to not make that call that I said I was going to make. So that really changed how I thought through those kinds of things, which even then has applied to things like letter campaigns and email campaigns. In the email I will now say, and I'll be sure to either, depending on the donor group, either give you a call or send you another email as we get closer to this deadline to make sure you have the opportunity to help us get X, Y, Z goal, or make the match for some sort of incentive that we have, or make sure you get your name in the playbill in time, whatever the case may be. Even with our fundraising event, we have a gala at the end of the season. As many of us do, we had a silent auction, and there were just a few lingering silent auction items. I had a bottle of bourbon on my desk, and while it seems most convenient or easiest to me to shoot off an email to that attendee and say, oh, by the way, your bottle of bourbon is here, you can pick it up, here are our office hours. Instead I said, no, I'm gonna call this person. I'm gonna get this person used to speaking to me on the phone so that later, when I'm calling in December, they'll be used to hearing my voice on the phone. It'll really set myself up to make their gift. So that's what I did at the end of 2024.

- Thank you, Carter, so much for sharing. I know there are so many people on this call right now who are in a similar position to you that I hope are really inspired to pick up the phone more often and make those connections. And if you personally think it's a bit scary to pick up the phone and call a donor, or you want tips and tricks on how to get your wider staff on board with asking for donations on the phone or in person, I wanna highlight our Asking for Donations workshop. This workshop is designed to help your customer facing staff understand the importance of asking and how it ties into your organization's mission and their role in the process. And additionally, Cal Haney, the spectacular partner that worked with Carter to achieve this huge success, is launching an intensive ahead of year end season. So if you're interested in learning from Cal directly, we'll have more information about that intensive in the post webinar email, and we'll also have a link to the podcast episode that inspired this connection with Carter and Cal. Over to you, Miriam.

- Thank you so much Sara, and another massive thank you to Carter for joining us and sharing your success story. Really inspirational. So let's sum up now with some key takeaways. So first of all, before you try something new, record where you are now. That way you'll be able to report on what was successful. Your online purchase path is the source of very high volumes of donations. So make sure that it's tailored to your audiences and maximizes those donation opportunities. Build a solid long-term foundation by offering a range of accessible and regular options for support. And finally, share your needs to non-donors and donors alike via proactive outreach using personalized automation tools which can free you up for those one-to-one touchpoints, and never ever underestimate the power of a phone call. So let's have a look where we are for time. It looks like we've got roundabout eight minutes for our Q&A. So what I'm gonna do now is I'm gonna stop sharing so we can bring all of our wonderful speakers up on the screen. So as a reminder, any questions, you can submit them via the Q&A tool at the bottom of your screen. We are gonna do our very best to answer as many as possible live. If we don't get to yours, we will reach out directly to you via an email or a support ticket if you provide your information. So let me bring up my handy sheet so I can go through this. Okay, right, let's see. Getting started then, I have a question. Ah yes, a question around our instructor-led training courses. So this person said, "I've really enjoyed the instructor-led training courses. Is there one on those Dotdigital programs?" Sara, you were talking about Dotdigital programs, you wanna answer that one?

- Yeah, happy to. So not necessarily the instructor-led training courses, but now we do have some e-learning tools on Dotdigital. They are on the support center, and it's just kind of like a self-guided, at your own pace way of learning through Dotdigital. We'll also be launching some like activation workshops where you can hop on a call with multiple Spektrix clients and we can walk you through some of the templates and work with those a little bit more one-on-one. So stay tuned for signups from those.

- Amazing, thank you so much. Next question here, this is from Alice at the Segal Center. "How can you make this monthly giving page reflect your brand? Do you need your own in-house web developer?" What a great question. I'm gonna pop that over to Jake to answer that one.

- Yeah, yeah, great question Alice. So for those of you using Spektrix Subsites, there is some customization that you can do. It comes with a lot of like pre-structured infrastructure, so to speak, but you can use your own colors, like logos and language is all something that you have control over that branding in Subsites. With further web dev resources, you have even more options here. So there's definitely clients that do have an in-house web developer or who have partnered with someone who can get very creative with like how a monthly giving type page can work, and how it even integrates into the checkout flow. And also if that's somewhere where you are exploring web developers, or want to like explore like working with some partners that we have, a lot of like web developer partners that we have in our partner directory have worked with us before, and other clients can sort of testify to the work that they do. So that's always a good place to start if that's something that you're considering.

- Thanks so much Jake. Great, next question I have is from Jessica at Arden Theater. Do you have best practices for properly setting up customer lists for emails that utilize dynamic content? Is there specific segmentation to keep in mind as you build the customer list? Sara, do you want to take a stab at that one?

- Forgot to unmute, or to mute earlier, so sorry if you heard any feedback. All of your needs for dynamic content are probably gonna be like really unique to your specific organization, but dynamic content can work with either custom attributes that are marked as syncing with Dotdigital, so that's like in your attribute setup. And then tags will need to live in a specific Dotdigital tag sync group. There's some guidance on the support center about this. Manisha, I know you had another question about this, it was very similar, but those all need to be in like a specific tag group. There is some like character limit requirements. So just take a look at what those bits are, and if you ever need help on like, how can we best achieve this, this is a goal that we have, we're not sure how to do it, reach out to our support team and we are more than happy to just kind of like pick your brain and figure out the best solution for you.

- Thank you so much. Next question, I'm gonna hand this one over to Lucy, which is, "What is the process/timeline for doing the Spektrix and Dotdigital integration?" And I think there's another question that is similar to this. So yeah, Lucy, do you wanna talk through the sort of Spektrix Dotdigital connection?

- Yeah, so one of the wonderful things is that the integration is part and parcel of what you get with Spektrix. It's all included in your contracts. In terms of the setup, that would depend sort of where you are on your journey, have you already got some of it set up or not, and the resource. So we can work with you individually on your timeline on what would work. There is a warmup process, there's a few sort of technical elements, but we sort of can support and guide you on on all of that. So we can keep an eye, I know it's Connor who's asked, and anyone else we can reach out directly and have a conversation about that with you.

- Yeah, I think that that is true for many of the things here today. This is not the end of your relationship with us, and we love working through these types of questions that you have. So great. Let's have a look at questions. Sorry I'm just keeping an eye on the time as well. I have a question from Karen at Dukes Lancaster, I'll take this one, training available for the opportunities interface. Great question. We know that we mentioned the instructor-led training. There is currently not an instructor-led training on opportunities yet, dot, dot, dot, I'm very much looking forward to working on that. But what we tend to do for opportunities is, if you reach out to us in a support ticket, what we'll do is, we'll sort of chat to you about what your needs are and probably have a have a bit of a call with you. We do have the on-demand training videos for opportunities on our support center, and it's called Fundraising and Opportunities, I think, narrated by the lovely Sara Stevens. So I would start there, drop us a support ticket, and then we'll reach out to you with a bit of a connection for the training. Tom May, I don't have a an organization from you, but the question that you have is, "Is there an estimated launch date for the variable recurring donation feature?" What a great question, Jake, you wanna take that?

- Yeah, so the aim right now is by the end of the year. And that's something that, we have the What's New at Spektrix webinar coming up soon where they will be talking more in depth about that there. So I also highly recommend, if you can't get enough of webinars from Spektrix, to join that one and they can provide some more details, but it is truly coming soon. So yeah, great question. I know it's very exciting, at least for me personally.

- Yeah, I agree. Very excited about about that one. I'm afraid we've just got time left for one more question here. So I'm gonna have this one, Michael from Improv Theater saying, "How do you go about logging communications made to donors such as calls or manual emails so that other team members can see them on the donor's profile?" Thank you, great question, Sara.

- Yeah, I would say activities, that is such a good way. It's a tool in the opportunities interface that is meant to track communication with donors that happen one-on-one outside of Spektrix. So you can create as many activity types as you want to log the type of communication. You can record notes of phone calls. There's also like an automatic email tool called the BCC email functionality. Look that up on the support center. That's really helpful. And all of this is just meant so that Spektrix can be your single source of truth that shows you, here's all the information that I did, here's all of the tasks that I did to get that gift to come to fruition, so I can recreate those steps next year and hopefully get an increase the next time you ask that person.

- Thank you so much, Sara. Now I know that we had loads, lots more questions coming in, so if you did leave your name and email, what we will do is reach out to you after this session just to make sure that we're connecting with you in that way. However, what might also be a good thing is, what's on the slide right now, before I let you go, just wanted to mention briefly one of the developments at Spektrix that I am personally most excited about. We launched the philanthropy series back in 2020 as a place for the fundraising users of Spektrix to come together as a community, share our ideas, our strategies, and just have a space to connect with each other. Some of you may already be aware, but the Spektrix community is coming as of next week. On November the fifth, you will have access to an online space that is designed for you and your teams. In this curated online community space, you'll be able to connect with other Spektrix users across the globe, find peers with shared challenges, share successes, and inspire new ideas. And our testers that have been testing during the pilot have already been enjoying solving problems together and sharing the ways that they connect with their audiences. So look out for the launch email and do sign up. We will have a dedicated post on this webinar where you can grab resources there and share ideas between you on how you might implement all the things we discussed today. And a lot of us are on the community as well. So we'll look forward to connecting with you all there. And then, in addition to the philanthropy series, we do have a few additional events coming up to share. So various conferences. The next one that I'd really like to draw your attention to if you haven't already signed up, is the New At Spektrix Webinar on the 13th and 18th of November where we're gonna be talking through a lot of upcoming and new features at Spektrix. So yeah, don't miss out on that one. Once again, just a reminder, we'll be sending the recording of today's webinar along with a list of additional resources so you'll have the chance to review today's content and share it with any team members who are unable to join us today. Thank you so much for attending today's session, and we really look forward to seeing you all with us for our 2026 sessions. So yeah, thank you, and have lovely rest of your days, everyone.

• Recipe: Ask for Donations
• A Guide to Standard Reports (Donation Conversion Analysis Report)
• Auto Renewable Memberships
• Dynamic Content
• Introduction to Dotdigital Programs
• Introduction to Opportunities and Opportunity Stages
• How to build a Dotdigital Program
• Fundraising Appeal Program Template

 

Training

• Integrated Emails training
• Pre- and Post- Event Emails training