Marketing Automation for Non-Profits feat. Kerry Kriger

Narrator 0:00
You’re listening to the all systems go podcast, the show that teaches you everything you need to know to put your business on autopilot. Learn how to deploy automated marketing and sales systems in your business the right way with your host, the professor of automation himself and founder of automation bridge, Chris Davis.

Chris Davis 0:32
Welcome everybody to another episode of The all systems go podcast. I’m your host, Chris L. Davis. And today, I’m excited for this episode because we get to talk about a topic I haven’t addressed yet. Out of all the episodes in the podcast, I have not addressed non profit marketing automation, or another way to say it, marketing for nonprofits. And I have someone special that’s joining us today because he is someone who I trust dearly with everything strategy and software with respect to nonprofits. And that is Dr. Kerry Krieger. He’s the founder of Save the frogs, a nonprofit organization that has held over 2000 educational events in 60 countries to raise awareness of the world’s rapidly disappearing amphibian population, everybody. He is also a certified automation service provider and the founder of nonprofit ICU, a nonprofit consulting and web agency, through which he advises nonprofits on everything from fundraising to technology. Do y’all Do y’all see why I’m excited? You are in trusted hands today. Dr. Krieger is an accomplished musician and founder of bond serie bliss, a music education platform through which he has taught hundreds of students, the bamboo flute and ancient music of North India. Dr. Krieger holds a Ph. D. PhD everyone KerryI believe we’re the first doctor, first official doctor on the podcast, in environment, his PhD is in environmental science, and a bachelor’s degree and guess what? Mechanical Engineering so you all who are listeners to the podcast know Why Kerry holds such a delicate place in my heart as a fellow engineer, well respected doctor. And if I didn’t read it in the bio, he’s been in the nonprofit space for over a decade. Kerry, welcome to the podcast. Thanks for coming on. How you doing?

Kerry Kriger 2:49
Hi, Chris. I’m doing great. It’s fabulous to be here. It’s a great honor. And I look forward to sharing tips with everyone on how to run a nonprofit and how to accomplish your mission as effectively as possible and get as much done at a low price and bring in more revenues and make your life easier, especially if you’re a nonprofit, founder or director or executive.

Chris Davis 3:18
Yeah, and I think this this is especially important for me in nonprofits. I’ve experienced nonprofits twofold in my professional experience. One is, excuse me, I actually founded one who 2012 maybe earlier, I found a one with my best friend. And then just historically, I’ve always served in in local churches, which are nonprofits. So I’ve witnessed a lot of a lot of nonprofits struggle with

Kerry Kriger 3:57
there’s plenty of that going around. And we probably all go through it if if you are a nonprofit founder, there will definitely be some struggle. And yeah, I try to reduce that for detail but you know, almost everyone has some difficult times getting a nonprofit going keeping it going keeping it going for the long run especially

Chris Davis 4:19
yeah and that’s why I had you on because when it comes to marketing, you know Kerry when you came into the program in the beginning I you know, I was just like what are what has saved the frogs and you just know just trying to get a handle on exactly what you do. But listen, everyone We’ve got weekly office hours, we’ve we’ve got all types of content that Kerry is always engaging with and one of the best things that I enjoy about Kerry is having someone like him using your product or in your community. He sees so many details and points so many things out so I’ve got intimate experience. And and I figured who but you would be perfect to talk about some of those struggles, right? When it comes to marketing a nonprofit, I know that it can be overwhelming, just holistically, to get started, somebody has gone and filed, their nonprofit, they’re excited, they’ve got a big cause big heart to make a difference. And they need to start getting the word out. What are some of the things that they can do initially, as a nonprofit, that maybe that you’ve seen other nonprofits kind of just like jump over or leap over and not realize that those were the first steps that they can do to get some early results? Well, I’ll

Kerry Kriger 5:35
tell you what I did. And what I would do. And I know it worked for me and I started save frogs in 2008, when, you know, the online world was a lot different. And what I still do, though, first, think about who are your professional contacts, all assume that if you’re starting a nonprofit, and this may not be all the time, but a lot of people have experience in their field. And so for me, I had been, I did my PhD in environmental science, I spoke in a lot of conferences, and I’ve been to a lot of conferences. So I started out and just started getting the word out to those people who were in my field, and hopefully, you know, experts who could get the word out and who would already I know, care about the mission. And then there’s getting the word out to the public and potential donors and potential volunteers and just, you know, the beneficiaries and the people who would care. So, for me, the very first thing that I did was I created a poster. Now, I don’t suggest this for everyone, but I made a 18. Now it’s 24 by 36 inch frogs Australia poster, that was step one, why did I do that? Because I wanted something to sell when I built a website, which was step two. So step two, you know, it was long time ago, I read 1000 page book on Dreamweaver and built a website in Dreamweaver. Now, I don’t suggest you do that. But you know, I learned a lot doing that. And that website lasted us for eight or nine years. But these days, I get straight into WordPress, and build a website. And not I know WordPress can take a while for a lot of people. And I’m here to help people solve that problem of making WordPress a bit easier and providing guidance, but kind of fear of WordPress in that it’s true, it takes a lot to get started compared to some of the other systems. But in the long run, it’s definitely worth it because it’s a super powerful open source system. And I don’t think people should skip that step, don’t just go with whatever you hear is the simplest website solution. Go with WordPress. And what you need to do is start, you know, educating people about your mission, the problems that the problem in the world that you’re trying to solve. And I’d spend a good amount of time just doing that making sure that you have a website that you can refer people to because for me, the websites, the websites, like the hub of everything, and that’s where the money comes in, generally speaking, for any kind of online business, and in this day and age, most businesses have a significant online presence, the websites where the money comes in. So if people can land on your site, and especially for a nonprofit, you have to build trust as a nonprofit, perhaps more so than other types of businesses, because people aren’t, they’re not really expecting anything in return. Other than you getting, you’re doing good things for the planet. So you really have to convey that you’re an established nonprofit, that you’re really knowledgeable about what you do that you have active programs. And I’d start getting that content up online so that when someone lands on your website, they can immediately tell these people care. I understand what they do. I know who’s behind it. And I’m willing to actually just send them some money. And I know when I started saying the frog that people very close to me who said no one would ever donate to something like that. And I quickly prove them wrong. There will be people for whatever kind of nonprofit that you’re that you’re running or starting. There are definitely people who care about that issue. So you just have to get the word out to them. So number one, I would get the website up and then if you do know of events where the correct kind of people hang out like conferences, then I would go there and start spreading the word get an email list for certain Get, get a newsletter sign up at a minimum. I know before we started this, we were talking about lead magnets for nonprofits and it is perhaps a bit different but you can have ebooks just like businesses would have on the topic of it. interest, save the frogs. We have the little book of frog poetry Volume One people love it. So just something like if someone came to your site, what would they care about enough to give you an email for. But there’s nothing wrong with having a newsletter sign up. Because people still do sign up. I know, you know, there’s a lot of people who say people don’t just give their email for a newsletter, people have too many emails, but you know, people do sign up for newsletters. But for me what I have what serves as lead magnets if I like to give events online, and I recommend, everyone does that. And, you know, for someone to join the event, I don’t just give out the URL zoom, I make sure everyone signs up for. And we’ve got things like contests, people saw people enter, we have a save the frogs art contest that’s had about 20,000 entries from 100 countries. Over the years, people are giving us their email, we’ve had a poetry contest, Video Contest. So there’s lots of ways to get people’s email addresses, and then send out a regular newsletter. For me, if I want to raise money, I’m going to send out a newsletter. So you should have some follow up. When when you first get someone’s email, definitely send them out an email, thanks for signing up, tell them about yourself, tell them about your mission. But definitely send out a regular newsletter. Because as a nonprofit, you should have things to announce you should have active programs going on success stories, upcoming events, purely educational articles, and volunteer opportunities. You can feature volunteers and which I definitely recommend get people helping out, let people know what they’ve done. And that’s one of the best way to keep keep people coming back to your site. Keep people involved in your organization’s inspire them with stories about what other people what similar people have done.

Chris Davis 12:05
Yeah, yeah, that was, that was great carry out. I’m taking notes, man. And as you’re talking, because I’m thinking about the nonprofits that that I know of, as well. And I want to say everyone, marketing is marketing. From a theoretical standpoint, for winning, it comes to methodical and application, that’s when it starts to change a bit. And one of the things that stood out when you were talking about all that you did when you started is you are intentionally focused on lead generation and information capture. Business and nonprofit differ a little bit when it comes to websites. And I want to make this transition by talking about newsletter and moving over.

Chris Davis 12:54
Traditionally, websites for nonprofits need to be packed with information about your cause, right? Because if you’re going out and telling people about it, you can’t just have a landing page that says, hey, give me your email and get this ebook on top 10 Whatever, right? It needs to be more informational. And when you’re balancing that out, you also understand or when you’re building that out, you also understand the people that are going to the website may be potential donors, right? These may be people who are going to give you money for your cause. So your even your newsletter, is the information in your newsletter. And it being informational is different than a regular business, you know, for profit, because we’re all about conversions and opens to purchase. And sometimes you just need to keep on top of mind the entire year. So when it comes time to raise some funding they they’re aware they’re caught up to speed. So Kerry, I want to give you the floor. Talk about how you’ve done that balance between information and conversion. Because I think that’s one critical point, too, is making sure you’re informative enough. But also don’t put your information head on without keeping a little bit of the conversion, you know, in the forefront.

Kerry Kriger 14:17
Yeah. Well, first someone say because he kind of touched on, like the timing of things. And one thing is that as a nonprofit, the money comes that often comes much later. Like don’t say no to things just because you’re not going to get paid. If someone offers you the platform to give a presentation and they’re going to bring their people there, go get the presentation. If it’s not, you know, if it’s not a huge deal to get there. Now, if they’ll give you an honorarium great, but I’ve done plenty of free presentations. And people donate $1,000 a year for a decade after that. And I’ve even set up in for educational tables at farmer’s markets. You No Go There a good day. You know, maybe $50 came in from people who just walked by give you a $5 bill, buy some stickers, buy a t shirt, but somebody put their email down on my newsletter signup form, and they’ve been donating 1000s of dollars since then. So definitely go just do the things that get the word out there and that make people happy with what you do and the money will come. I’ll also say, the most important time of the year for nonprofit fundraising is December pretty much across the board for all nonprofits. It’s the end of the year, people are trying to get there, they know their finances for the year, they need to get their tax break deductions in and they’re in the giving mood from the holiday season. So basically, every, say October and November, you should be ramping up your communications with everybody through email newsletters through social media, however, you get the word out, if you do send out a hardcopy newsletter or annual letter, that would be the time of the year to do it. So that in December, you can ask for money, and you won’t just have been this person who was you know, where, where Where are you, I haven’t heard from you in months, that you’re top of mind. And they know because they’re also gonna have tons of other nonprofits writing to them asking for donations. So make sure that you’ve been communicating a lot success stories. And then, most important, for me now giving Tuesday’s the biggest donation day of the year. For me, it’s never been all too important, but it is a big day. So that’s like end of December start of start, probably end sorry, end of November. But for me, the biggest time is the final week of the year. So I always am going to send out a donation appeal on the 26th or 27th of December, and on the 30th of December and on the 31st of December. And when I say appeal, I don’t mean a little donate button at the bottom of the email those I always have. Because I generally don’t ask for money, a lot I used to, but it’s a little bit stressful, and you get a little bit worn out of asking for money a lot, I’d rather just have the system set up so that people know we accept donations, there’s a big donate button. At the top of our site, there’s a Donate button at the bottom of the emails, but I’m not explicitly asking for donations much of the time. But those last several emails of the year, they it should be right at the top of the email dear so and so I’m writing today to ask you to donate to save the frogs or whatever organization so that it’s extremely clear. Now you can have information under that I don’t recommend too much like you don’t want to distract them with lots of other things. But you know, it’s fine to have some good photos of volunteers and action or whatever it may inspire people to act and to have a success story or two. But those emails are going to bring in a lot of donations. So the other thing to remember is that summertime right now it’s July, when we’re recording, there’s not a lot of activity for most nonprofits, because people are out there, the kids are out of school people are on vacation. So make sure that you have funds in the bank to get you through the slow season. And then in the fall, things start picking up. So keep that stuff in mind. As far as, as far as like the ratio of asks, I used to ask a lot more, we used to have dedicated fundraisers for a lot of things. And fortunately now I’ve been able to reduce the nonprofits expenses significantly, through automation through just being efficient through knowing my technology and having a lot of experience with things. And the longer that you’re going to the nonprofit. The more donors you have, the more people trust you the more recurring donations you have. And things should get easier over time. But definitely, I don’t like to I don’t, I don’t like to fundraise too much. I’d rather be spending my time accomplishing the mission and doing the things that you know, people expect us to do. So I’m happy to be at that point where I don’t need to be fundraising. But you know, keep this keep this in mind. As we said at the start nonprofits, you’re gonna have some hard times and when the hard times do come, then you you should not be shy about sending out a fundraising email. That may even sound a bit like hey, we really need money. And you know, people will know you need money and they will respond. Some people may be turned off by it but you know, some people are going to donate and that

Chris Davis 20:19
All right, so sorry about that, Kerry, we have a little hiccup but no, you were you were mentioning that you didn’t have to, you know, you’re in a place now where you don’t have to worry about fundraising as much. But for those who, you know, maybe that’s still something on the table, how to kind of balance that out online and in your newsletter in an informative way, but still very effective with conversions per se.

Chris Davis 20:53
All right. And we, listeners, thank you for your patience, we had just a little bit of a hiccup there. On recording. So you may seem see that we had one one idea where we were talking about Kerry and him saying, you know, he’s glad he’s in a place where he doesn’t have to fundraise anymore. And we kind of chopped chopped up on our end, but we’re back everyone. And I want to talk about it in still talk about the raising in the balance of information, and asking for for for money, per se because that’s the main difference between a business and a nonprofit is you’re you’re looking for donors, you’re looking for people to give to the cause. What, what kind of, let’s let’s go into the technology Kerry? What kind of technology can someone use to get donations? I mean, you had mentioned, a lot of your time is now being able to be spent on making things more efficient through automation and all of those things. I know, receiving of money is one of the critical points, what type of software, what type of systems, what type of processes are out there to really help these nonprofits make that easy online?

Kerry Kriger 22:15
Yeah, well, I’m a bit different, I believe, than most nonprofits, because there’s a huge industry dedicated to providing technology to nonprofits. And I used to use plenty of those platforms, but I don’t really use any of them anymore, I just see is mostly the same technology that, you know, everyone in our sphere uses the technologies that you talk about all the time. Now, there’s a few different ones. But so I’ll say that that whole nonprofit industry, they make a lot of money selling technology to nonprofits. And the reason I left those tools behind is because I always sensed that they were charging too much money, and that there must be an easier way. For instance, just to throw out a name that probably still well known, they definitely used to be very well known Network for Good. And I used to pay them $100 a month to have one donation page, they would allow me to have one page where I could bring in donations, and that was it, they would hold the money for up to 45 days before delivering it. And it you know, it just was not ideal. So these days, as I said at the start, I recommend everyone have a WordPress website. Why is that because there’s so much flexibility in the tools that you can install into WordPress, they usually cost a fraction of what you would pay an outside platform to handle so for donations. And on the topic of fundraising, I’ll say don’t restrict yourself to only donations. There’s also you know, you can sell merchandise, say the frogs as a shop, say frogs.com/shop. And we sell T shirts, and stickers and flags and all these things have our logo on it and our name on it. And it’s promoting it. And it makes our you know, the buyers of it are our supporters, it makes them happy, they’re able to support us, it’s a good way for them to spread the word out us and we make some funds from that. We also lead eco tours that will take people out to the jungle for 10 to 12 days usually. And you know those trips cost 1000s of dollars and we make a good profit on them if we can fill them up, which we often do not always, especially in the unknown travel times that we’ve been in, but right now everyone’s back traveling, so I expect her upcoming tours to fill up. So yeah, be creative with how you raise your funds. And so I said we have a shop and that’s run through WooCommerce which is the most popular WordPress selling platform. And the good thing is that WooCommerce also handles our donations now won’t do that in a smooth manner without another plugin. The other plugin that I use is launch flows. And what that enables me to do is have a really nice looking donation. One page that I can create and send people to dedicated thank you pages. I know Chris often talks about the importance of thank you pages on your website, it’s the page that 100% of your buyers will look at. And so I always make sure I’ve got good, I’ve got good thank you pages, if someone gives us their email in any kind of lead magnet or Event Registration Form, if they pay for anything, if they donate, then I want to send them to a dedicated thank you page. And on that thank you page, I’m gonna make sure that I have some next actions for them things that I want them to do. Let’s see, I totally digress. The technology. Yeah, so launch flows, enables you, if you just have WooCommerce, then I believe that by default, when someone pays for something on your site, it’s just gonna send them to a pretty ugly looking page and may have like order confirmation. Yeah, you don’t want to do that. So launch flow solves the problem, and launch flows, it’ll help me connect with WooCommerce subscriptions and make the recurring donations all happen in a smooth manner. So yeah, WooCommerce to sell anything, including take donations, but WooCommerce subscriptions, super important. Because as a nonprofit, you definitely want to offer recurring subscriptions, I suggest monthly and annual, you could try quarterly. But for me monthly and annual has always worked fine. And those are super important. Because another way that a nonprofit differs from a for profit business is that when people have subscriptions for for profit, the second that they realize they’re not using it, then they’re they have a high likelihood of canceling it. Whereas for a nonprofit, recurring donation, people will just let those go indefinitely until they hit hard financial times. So we’ve got people who set up recurring donations seven or eight years ago, and they’re still coming in every month, we even have a guy who writes out a postal money order by hand and puts it in the mail. Like clockwork, he’s done that every month for about 10 years. So definitely give people ways to send in the recurring donations. And that is super helpful. Because if people don’t do that, then what are the chances that they’re going to remember to go donate a year from now, even if you’re top of mind, you know, yeah, I see your emails, but I’m not in a donating mood. Whereas if that if you can get them to set up that recurring donation, then that’s money that you can count on for a long time. Yeah, yeah. So that’s, I mean, that’s about what you need. There’s some small plugins to add into that to just make it all a little bit smoother. But the main ones are, have your WordPress site, have WooCommerce and WooCommerce subscriptions, and have launch flows to make the process smoother. Now, if you don’t have WordPress, that’s fine. There’s plenty of other platforms that can handle donations. As I said, there’s a huge industry of nonprofit technology. And, you know, look into them, they’ll work it’s just for me, everything tends to eventually move to WordPress, because I find that having things in WordPress is just less expensive, and it runs smoother. There’s more flexibility. Even within WordPress, I used to use give WP that’s the most well known donation plugin. And it worked fine. It’s just whenever you have you kind of give you give another company control and you give up some flexibility when you do that. So I I’ve been happy since I switched to just having it all go through WooCommerce because I’ve got complete control. And it works perfectly fine.

Chris Davis 28:49
Yeah, this is, you know, many of the reasons why I wanted you on because there are times and every industry has it, you know, finance, medical, real estate, whatever industry, they all have their proprietary software, and companies that make software specific to them. And if you can break free at times, you can realize that you have more control and you can keep more money and get the money faster. That’s one thing that stood out another one is don’t forsake other ways of receiving money, everyone. Kerry just said someone mails in a money order every year. Make sure you have a physical address that people can send their mail to or send their money to make sure you have a way to except in all capacities. Because one thing that I’ve learned just watching you Kerry and being involved a bit in the nonprofit space is that you just never know who your donor is and how they prefer to give money, how they how they do that. So you want to just make sure that You’re in a position to receive all of that. And one thing that I liked about everything that you said, you’re not explicitly calling it out. But as an experienced marketer, you’re also making these decisions on software based on control and being able to create the experience that’s going to be the highest, that’s going to generate the highest sentiment with you the engaging visitors. And I want to give people an insight to this Kerry, you more recently redid a website. For I don’t believe it was a nonprofit before for another business. And I want to just put on display, kind of your decision making, so that people see that use, you can be strategic with your website with your technology in the nonprofit space. And some of the things you look for if somebody were to say, hey, take a look at our website. Dr. Krieger. What would you recommend that we do? So if you would take that latest website redo that you did? And say, Okay, if they were in the nonprofit space and came to me, what are some of the pointers, you’d imagine you would tell them based on all of the nonprofit websites that you’ve seen, and the ones that you service through nonprofit ICU, that you kind of see as a theme of maybe make sure you have this in place? Because usually they don’t?

Kerry Kriger 31:22
Yeah, well, on the topic of rebuilding sites, I’m actually in the process of rebuilding all of my sites. And I’ve rebuilt probably five or six sites this year for my clients. And for myself, my saved the frog site, my bond, sorry, bliss music site, I’ve completely rebuilt them, so that they’re exactly the plugins, and theme and everything that I want. And rebuilding the site is no small task, I admitted, it takes some time. And when you’re in the thick of it, it’s, you know, you can’t do too much else for a week or so or however long it takes. But now that I find myself on the other side of it like this whole last week, I’ve been building new web pages on my site, the frog site and Bansuri bliss site. And it’s just, you know, it’s a breeze and so much faster, everything goes exactly how I want it. So, you know, website, technology changes fast. So don’t be, don’t be stuck, if you don’t like your old site and be open to moving forward once you know how that should be done. As far as a nonprofit site. I’ll start with a couple things that you said before, one thing I left out is we use stripe for payment processing, you’re going to need that. So that’s the important piece of it. And that we haven’t talked about is nonprofit discounts. So you should always ask for a nonprofit discount or look for it on the website. Usually on the pricing page at the bottom, there’d be something about that if there’s not all right for the software, not for any kind of software. Okay, yeah, for me, really, for anything you do as a nonprofit, if you’re going to be spending money, go ahead, ask them, you know, say, ideally, you’re a 501 C three public charity, say we’re a 501 C three public charity with a mission to whatever. And we’re curious if you offer nonprofit discounts. And sometimes they don’t have a system set up for it. But they’ll say not Not usually. But here’s a discount for it. So I bring that up right now because stripe is where the money’s coming from. Usually stripe is 2.9% for domestic transactions plus 30 cents. But for nonprofits, it’s 2.2%. So make sure you get your nonprofit discount. TechSoup is a large nonprofit technology company that’s contracted by some of the huge tech firms to give out their nonprofit discount. So one of the first things that you should do after getting your 501 C three public charity status approved is to sign up for a Tech Soup account so that you can make use of all of their discounts that they offer for things such as Adobe CC. So Adobe CC, I’m guessing we pay about a third of what other organizations pay air table, which we haven’t talked about, but not too many podcasts go by, without you mentioning air table. So I’m gonna bring it up and say I’m a massive air table fan. And I could not run anything with any type of efficiency without it and air table will give 50% off to nonprofits. And that’s even, you know, you can get a whole lot done on air table three plans, but if you need their pro or premium, then you’ll get 50% off. So definitely take advantage of that Google workspace is what most people most businesses use for their email platform. Google workspace will give 100 free email accounts to your nonprofit. So definitely get that and pretty much you know every time you’re about to sign up for some type of technology, just ask for that nonprofit discount and you’ll save a ton of money doing that. Now. I forgot what the original question was how to assess the nonprofit website. Make sure make sure that people can tell what you do right from the start. I personally, because I’m the founder of my nonprofit and the founder of the two businesses that I run, I like to have, you know, something about me, you don’t want to make everything about you. But there’s nothing wrong with people knowing who who’s behind this, because that’s one way to instill trust, especially if you have background or some kind of, you know, a good reputation in your field. So I’ve got that right on top of my pages, and make sure you have a really thorough about page about your about your, you know, your mission and your cause. Why should somebody care? So one of the first pages I ever built for say the frogs was the why frogs page? Because people ask, you know, they’ll ask me, Why frogs? And that’s either going to mean, why did you decide to go into a career dedicated frogs? Or it’s going to mean, why should they care about frogs? So make sure that you have a thorough about page answering, you know, what’s the history of your organization? Why do you exist? Why should people trust you? And I also have a support page. Now most people think of us support pages, how do I get support for this software product that I’m having trouble with, but for me, the support page is how can you support us. So that means you can donate electronically, you can send in a check, you can put us in your will, your bequest, you can, you know, set up your charitable distribution from retirements and all the ways that you can think of workplace giving combined federal campaigns, everything that you can think of that that person may be able to help out. Now, of course, you can also have, you can also volunteer, and then link out to your volunteer page and one other significant it for any nonprofit, in the early years, chances are, there’s going to be my financial issues, not enough money to the expenses are too high, the revenues are too low. And one thing that I notice is that people hire employees, that’s normal, that’s what most businesses do. But then there’s a bit of a mindset that who I need to keep paying this person who may or may not, you know, be the best person anymore, but you got to remember, your mission is not to be employing people. It’s to be, you know, doing whatever good thing for the planet or society that is truly your mission. And along that line, we have the benefit in a nonprofit, of being able to get volunteers, people will highly skilled people will provide us with free labor, and they will be happy to do so. And you should take advantage of that. And the way to do that is make sure you have a page about volunteers on your site, lists out the just start with the most important things that you need people for, you know, at least until a couple of years ago, that would be a graphic designer probably now in this day and age, there’s plenty of simple graphic design tools, but you probably still need or should have a professional graphic designer, and not even one because that one person is going to be busy. Sometime when you need them, have a list, have a bunch of people ready to go that you can call on as you need. So put up have a page, we’ve got one, save the frogs.com/graphic-design. And it says what we’re looking for, and what they can expect. And then all of our different volunteer positions will have a dedicated page for them. They’ll link out from the main say, the frogs.com/volunteers page. But when you go to that page, they’ll all say submit your application here that all feeds into one page, which I believe is say the frogs icon slash volunteers dash apply in in that that’s going to go into an air table, all about volunteers, and it’s gonna have all their applications, make sure you ask them like, you know, give us your CV. Why do you want to do this? What are your skills find out about them, because if you get them talking and writing, you can tell, you know if they’re truly skilled, and you may even see some things that they have skills that that can benefit you that they were not even expecting necessarily to be doing. So get a good volunteer management system going. Now, the next step is Don’t waste your time sending out some massive project to this person who just said they want to volunteer because they applied in the heat of the moment. They were inspired. And they said yeah, I’ve got eight hours a month to dedicate this. Well. Maybe they don’t and And maybe they’re not good at communicating. So what I do, I also one of those tables that I have in the air table is the different tasks, or I guess I have three main ones, I’ve got the volunteers, those are the people with their applications. And then I have the different positions like graphic designer, and then I have a different table for the tasks, here’s 30 different tasks that I need done graphic design, some of those are recurring, they’re always going to be ready to go, we’re going to have saved the frog, say, every year on April 28, I can always use a graphic designer to just come up with the next cool, save the frogs a promo image. And that then becomes a simple thing. I can just have a pre written out thing. Hey, thanks for offering to help out, can you create this, you know, 314 100 pixel wide, give them the basics and like a paragraph or two, just a simple task for them to do that will benefit you. But that only takes you a minute to email them. And then you can see how good their work is if they ever reply. And then from there, you can get them doing bigger projects, or even really the first email I usually have two emails, I’ve got one email that goes out to them with just a general description. Hey, I could use a a promo image for say the frog’s day that’s coming up, does that interest you? And if they reply, then I’ve got the next email ready to go. And that’s with all the details to actually do the entire thing. So get a good volunteer system going. And you shouldn’t need that many employees you should be able to operate your nonprofit certainly with let far less employees than a for profit doing the same magnitude of work.

Chris Davis 41:38
Yeah, yeah, man. Kerry full of gems. I know that there’s people listening, who have a nonprofit that were probably like, Wait, what did he say? Listen, this is recorded, you can always go back and listen to it. Pause it. But but more. So. Kerry, I just I envision most nonprofits need a little bit of encouragement, right? They’re doing the right thing. Again, I don’t I don’t know of a single nonprofit that doesn’t have to have a noble cause. They’re trying to do good. And sometimes doing good just doesn’t feel like it’s appreciated. Any words of encouragement, you’ll leave that young, nonprofit established, nonprofit, aspiring nonprofit person to help them just navigate this very rough terrain of surviving in the nonprofit space until they it’s no longer surviving. They’re actually thriving and actualize the vision that they have. What would you what words of encouragement would you give them?

Kerry Kriger 42:44
Okay, well definitely look to people who have done it before. I’m out there. My name is Kerry Krieger ke R R, Y k, r i, G E R. So look me up, I have a website, nonprofit dot ICU, I do nonprofit consulting, I can help out your nonprofit. And I’ll say also this, collect testimonials. I have an air table for all my businesses, certainly for say the frogs, I’ve got hundreds of rows of testimonials. And every time someone says something good about my organization, then I’m probably going to copy that and paste it into a row, not just so that I can look at and feel good. Now I couldn’t do that I usually don’t need to. But you know, that’s one way if you need to feel good about the work you do. But I’m going to put those up on the website. So I’m going to have a column in that air table. And it’s gonna say Where has this been published, has it gone into the two most important places are the newsletter in the website, every time I send out a newsletter, I’ve got a template, more or less. And at the bottom of the newsletter, there’s always going to be a PS under my name that just gives them one extra thing of interest. And then there’s going to be a quote, The quote is, or sorry, there’s going to be a testimonial. And that I’m just going to go grab that from my air table ready to go pop in a testimonial, inspire some other people. And then there’s going to be some kind of quote, now, you know, the quote is not as important as the testimonial, I’m talking about quote, like, you know, here’s a famous quote about something that may be relevant, but the testimonials, you got to sprinkle those all over the place, put them on your website, for every web page that I put up. I also have an air table that tracks every web page on my site, and there’s a column there doesn’t have a testimonial yet. And you know, every page is going to get a testimonial on it because I want this to go somewhere. How are you going to collect the testimonials, people email you and they’ll say things like, hey, I really appreciate the work that you do. And also when I have forms, like even on the on the donation form, it’s got right before you you hit pay or you know, check out your get here’s my credit card info. It’s got a place there for just, you know, through comments or something you know, put When a comment, is this being dedicated to someone, so people give people a place where they can just write, when I have event registration, it’ll say something like, how did you hear about us and anything else you’d like to say? So just those open text areas, give someone some blank space to write. And that’s where your testimonials are gonna come from, because that’s people are gonna say if they, you know how much they like you, and those are perfect for marketing.

Chris Davis 45:30
Got it? Got it. Well, listen, everyone will have all of those links below in the show notes, just in case you missed them. Kerry, thank you so much for coming on to the podcast. This is this has been brewing for a while and it lived up to my expectations and hopefully listeners, it lived up to yours as well. Again, Kerry, I can’t thank you enough. I get to I’m spoiled everyone. I get to see Kerry often at least four times a month on office hours he travels a lot so sometimes you can’t make it so look forward to continuing to engage with you and grow with you in the community. listeners. Thank you for your listenership. Do me a favor on this one, everyone. I believe most of you listening, no nonprofit owner have aspirations to start your own nonprofit, or know somebody that could benefit from everything that Kerry just mentioned on this podcast. Make sure you share this with them. Just say hey, look, I know you gotta nonprofit, check this out. There’s software that he’s mentioned that they probably don’t even know exists, strategies did you? Did you hear of all of the different ways that he gave you to support you know, like it, he’s been doing it for so long. And lastly, do not hesitate to reach out to Kerry. He is open and available. This is his mission, along with Save the frogs is to help you in your nonprofit journey, especially navigating online. So make sure you click the link below to get access to Kerry And again Kerry. Thank you listeners. Thank you, everybody. Continue to automate responsibly my friends.

Chris Davis 47:15
Thank you for tuning in to this episode of The all systems go podcast. If you enjoyed it, make sure that you’re subscribed at the time of recording the all systems go podcast is free to subscribe to and it can be found in Apple podcasts, Google podcasts, YouTube, or wherever you get your podcasts new episodes are released every Thursday. So make sure you’re subscribed so that you don’t miss out and while you’re at it, please leave us a five star rating and review to show some love but also to help future listeners more easily find the podcast so they can experience the value of goodness as well. We’ve compiled all resources mentioned on the podcast, as well as other resources that are extremely valuable and effective at helping you grow your marketing automation skills quickly and you can access them all at all systems go podcast.com Thanks again for listening. And until next time, I see you online. Automate responsibly my friends

Narrator 0:00
You’re listening to the all systems go podcast, the show that teaches you everything you need to know to put your business on autopilot. Learn how to deploy automated marketing and sales systems in your business the right way with your host, the professor of automation himself and founder of automation bridge, Chris Davis.

Chris Davis 0:32
Welcome everybody to another episode of The all systems go podcast. I’m your host, Chris L. Davis. And today, I’m excited for this episode because we get to talk about a topic I haven’t addressed yet. Out of all the episodes in the podcast, I have not addressed non profit marketing automation, or another way to say it, marketing for nonprofits. And I have someone special that’s joining us today because he is someone who I trust dearly with everything strategy and software with respect to nonprofits. And that is Dr. Kerry Krieger. He’s the founder of Save the frogs, a nonprofit organization that has held over 2000 educational events in 60 countries to raise awareness of the world’s rapidly disappearing amphibian population, everybody. He is also a certified automation service provider and the founder of nonprofit ICU, a nonprofit consulting and web agency, through which he advises nonprofits on everything from fundraising to technology. Do y’all Do y’all see why I’m excited? You are in trusted hands today. Dr. Krieger is an accomplished musician and founder of bond serie bliss, a music education platform through which he has taught hundreds of students, the bamboo flute and ancient music of North India. Dr. Krieger holds a Ph. D. PhD everyone KerryI believe we’re the first doctor, first official doctor on the podcast, in environment, his PhD is in environmental science, and a bachelor’s degree and guess what? Mechanical Engineering so you all who are listeners to the podcast know Why Kerry holds such a delicate place in my heart as a fellow engineer, well respected doctor. And if I didn’t read it in the bio, he’s been in the nonprofit space for over a decade. Kerry, welcome to the podcast. Thanks for coming on. How you doing?

Kerry Kriger 2:49
Hi, Chris. I’m doing great. It’s fabulous to be here. It’s a great honor. And I look forward to sharing tips with everyone on how to run a nonprofit and how to accomplish your mission as effectively as possible and get as much done at a low price and bring in more revenues and make your life easier, especially if you’re a nonprofit, founder or director or executive.

Chris Davis 3:18
Yeah, and I think this this is especially important for me in nonprofits. I’ve experienced nonprofits twofold in my professional experience. One is, excuse me, I actually founded one who 2012 maybe earlier, I found a one with my best friend. And then just historically, I’ve always served in in local churches, which are nonprofits. So I’ve witnessed a lot of a lot of nonprofits struggle with

Kerry Kriger 3:57
there’s plenty of that going around. And we probably all go through it if if you are a nonprofit founder, there will definitely be some struggle. And yeah, I try to reduce that for detail but you know, almost everyone has some difficult times getting a nonprofit going keeping it going keeping it going for the long run especially

Chris Davis 4:19
yeah and that’s why I had you on because when it comes to marketing, you know Kerry when you came into the program in the beginning I you know, I was just like what are what has saved the frogs and you just know just trying to get a handle on exactly what you do. But listen, everyone We’ve got weekly office hours, we’ve we’ve got all types of content that Kerry is always engaging with and one of the best things that I enjoy about Kerry is having someone like him using your product or in your community. He sees so many details and points so many things out so I’ve got intimate experience. And and I figured who but you would be perfect to talk about some of those struggles, right? When it comes to marketing a nonprofit, I know that it can be overwhelming, just holistically, to get started, somebody has gone and filed, their nonprofit, they’re excited, they’ve got a big cause big heart to make a difference. And they need to start getting the word out. What are some of the things that they can do initially, as a nonprofit, that maybe that you’ve seen other nonprofits kind of just like jump over or leap over and not realize that those were the first steps that they can do to get some early results? Well, I’ll

Kerry Kriger 5:35
tell you what I did. And what I would do. And I know it worked for me and I started save frogs in 2008, when, you know, the online world was a lot different. And what I still do, though, first, think about who are your professional contacts, all assume that if you’re starting a nonprofit, and this may not be all the time, but a lot of people have experience in their field. And so for me, I had been, I did my PhD in environmental science, I spoke in a lot of conferences, and I’ve been to a lot of conferences. So I started out and just started getting the word out to those people who were in my field, and hopefully, you know, experts who could get the word out and who would already I know, care about the mission. And then there’s getting the word out to the public and potential donors and potential volunteers and just, you know, the beneficiaries and the people who would care. So, for me, the very first thing that I did was I created a poster. Now, I don’t suggest this for everyone, but I made a 18. Now it’s 24 by 36 inch frogs Australia poster, that was step one, why did I do that? Because I wanted something to sell when I built a website, which was step two. So step two, you know, it was long time ago, I read 1000 page book on Dreamweaver and built a website in Dreamweaver. Now, I don’t suggest you do that. But you know, I learned a lot doing that. And that website lasted us for eight or nine years. But these days, I get straight into WordPress, and build a website. And not I know WordPress can take a while for a lot of people. And I’m here to help people solve that problem of making WordPress a bit easier and providing guidance, but kind of fear of WordPress in that it’s true, it takes a lot to get started compared to some of the other systems. But in the long run, it’s definitely worth it because it’s a super powerful open source system. And I don’t think people should skip that step, don’t just go with whatever you hear is the simplest website solution. Go with WordPress. And what you need to do is start, you know, educating people about your mission, the problems that the problem in the world that you’re trying to solve. And I’d spend a good amount of time just doing that making sure that you have a website that you can refer people to because for me, the websites, the websites, like the hub of everything, and that’s where the money comes in, generally speaking, for any kind of online business, and in this day and age, most businesses have a significant online presence, the websites where the money comes in. So if people can land on your site, and especially for a nonprofit, you have to build trust as a nonprofit, perhaps more so than other types of businesses, because people aren’t, they’re not really expecting anything in return. Other than you getting, you’re doing good things for the planet. So you really have to convey that you’re an established nonprofit, that you’re really knowledgeable about what you do that you have active programs. And I’d start getting that content up online so that when someone lands on your website, they can immediately tell these people care. I understand what they do. I know who’s behind it. And I’m willing to actually just send them some money. And I know when I started saying the frog that people very close to me who said no one would ever donate to something like that. And I quickly prove them wrong. There will be people for whatever kind of nonprofit that you’re that you’re running or starting. There are definitely people who care about that issue. So you just have to get the word out to them. So number one, I would get the website up and then if you do know of events where the correct kind of people hang out like conferences, then I would go there and start spreading the word get an email list for certain Get, get a newsletter sign up at a minimum. I know before we started this, we were talking about lead magnets for nonprofits and it is perhaps a bit different but you can have ebooks just like businesses would have on the topic of it. interest, save the frogs. We have the little book of frog poetry Volume One people love it. So just something like if someone came to your site, what would they care about enough to give you an email for. But there’s nothing wrong with having a newsletter sign up. Because people still do sign up. I know, you know, there’s a lot of people who say people don’t just give their email for a newsletter, people have too many emails, but you know, people do sign up for newsletters. But for me what I have what serves as lead magnets if I like to give events online, and I recommend, everyone does that. And, you know, for someone to join the event, I don’t just give out the URL zoom, I make sure everyone signs up for. And we’ve got things like contests, people saw people enter, we have a save the frogs art contest that’s had about 20,000 entries from 100 countries. Over the years, people are giving us their email, we’ve had a poetry contest, Video Contest. So there’s lots of ways to get people’s email addresses, and then send out a regular newsletter. For me, if I want to raise money, I’m going to send out a newsletter. So you should have some follow up. When when you first get someone’s email, definitely send them out an email, thanks for signing up, tell them about yourself, tell them about your mission. But definitely send out a regular newsletter. Because as a nonprofit, you should have things to announce you should have active programs going on success stories, upcoming events, purely educational articles, and volunteer opportunities. You can feature volunteers and which I definitely recommend get people helping out, let people know what they’ve done. And that’s one of the best way to keep keep people coming back to your site. Keep people involved in your organization’s inspire them with stories about what other people what similar people have done.

Chris Davis 12:05
Yeah, yeah, that was, that was great carry out. I’m taking notes, man. And as you’re talking, because I’m thinking about the nonprofits that that I know of, as well. And I want to say everyone, marketing is marketing. From a theoretical standpoint, for winning, it comes to methodical and application, that’s when it starts to change a bit. And one of the things that stood out when you were talking about all that you did when you started is you are intentionally focused on lead generation and information capture. Business and nonprofit differ a little bit when it comes to websites. And I want to make this transition by talking about newsletter and moving over.

Chris Davis 12:54
Traditionally, websites for nonprofits need to be packed with information about your cause, right? Because if you’re going out and telling people about it, you can’t just have a landing page that says, hey, give me your email and get this ebook on top 10 Whatever, right? It needs to be more informational. And when you’re balancing that out, you also understand or when you’re building that out, you also understand the people that are going to the website may be potential donors, right? These may be people who are going to give you money for your cause. So your even your newsletter, is the information in your newsletter. And it being informational is different than a regular business, you know, for profit, because we’re all about conversions and opens to purchase. And sometimes you just need to keep on top of mind the entire year. So when it comes time to raise some funding they they’re aware they’re caught up to speed. So Kerry, I want to give you the floor. Talk about how you’ve done that balance between information and conversion. Because I think that’s one critical point, too, is making sure you’re informative enough. But also don’t put your information head on without keeping a little bit of the conversion, you know, in the forefront.

Kerry Kriger 14:17
Yeah. Well, first someone say because he kind of touched on, like the timing of things. And one thing is that as a nonprofit, the money comes that often comes much later. Like don’t say no to things just because you’re not going to get paid. If someone offers you the platform to give a presentation and they’re going to bring their people there, go get the presentation. If it’s not, you know, if it’s not a huge deal to get there. Now, if they’ll give you an honorarium great, but I’ve done plenty of free presentations. And people donate $1,000 a year for a decade after that. And I’ve even set up in for educational tables at farmer’s markets. You No Go There a good day. You know, maybe $50 came in from people who just walked by give you a $5 bill, buy some stickers, buy a t shirt, but somebody put their email down on my newsletter signup form, and they’ve been donating 1000s of dollars since then. So definitely go just do the things that get the word out there and that make people happy with what you do and the money will come. I’ll also say, the most important time of the year for nonprofit fundraising is December pretty much across the board for all nonprofits. It’s the end of the year, people are trying to get there, they know their finances for the year, they need to get their tax break deductions in and they’re in the giving mood from the holiday season. So basically, every, say October and November, you should be ramping up your communications with everybody through email newsletters through social media, however, you get the word out, if you do send out a hardcopy newsletter or annual letter, that would be the time of the year to do it. So that in December, you can ask for money, and you won’t just have been this person who was you know, where, where Where are you, I haven’t heard from you in months, that you’re top of mind. And they know because they’re also gonna have tons of other nonprofits writing to them asking for donations. So make sure that you’ve been communicating a lot success stories. And then, most important, for me now giving Tuesday’s the biggest donation day of the year. For me, it’s never been all too important, but it is a big day. So that’s like end of December start of start, probably end sorry, end of November. But for me, the biggest time is the final week of the year. So I always am going to send out a donation appeal on the 26th or 27th of December, and on the 30th of December and on the 31st of December. And when I say appeal, I don’t mean a little donate button at the bottom of the email those I always have. Because I generally don’t ask for money, a lot I used to, but it’s a little bit stressful, and you get a little bit worn out of asking for money a lot, I’d rather just have the system set up so that people know we accept donations, there’s a big donate button. At the top of our site, there’s a Donate button at the bottom of the emails, but I’m not explicitly asking for donations much of the time. But those last several emails of the year, they it should be right at the top of the email dear so and so I’m writing today to ask you to donate to save the frogs or whatever organization so that it’s extremely clear. Now you can have information under that I don’t recommend too much like you don’t want to distract them with lots of other things. But you know, it’s fine to have some good photos of volunteers and action or whatever it may inspire people to act and to have a success story or two. But those emails are going to bring in a lot of donations. So the other thing to remember is that summertime right now it’s July, when we’re recording, there’s not a lot of activity for most nonprofits, because people are out there, the kids are out of school people are on vacation. So make sure that you have funds in the bank to get you through the slow season. And then in the fall, things start picking up. So keep that stuff in mind. As far as, as far as like the ratio of asks, I used to ask a lot more, we used to have dedicated fundraisers for a lot of things. And fortunately now I’ve been able to reduce the nonprofits expenses significantly, through automation through just being efficient through knowing my technology and having a lot of experience with things. And the longer that you’re going to the nonprofit. The more donors you have, the more people trust you the more recurring donations you have. And things should get easier over time. But definitely, I don’t like to I don’t, I don’t like to fundraise too much. I’d rather be spending my time accomplishing the mission and doing the things that you know, people expect us to do. So I’m happy to be at that point where I don’t need to be fundraising. But you know, keep this keep this in mind. As we said at the start nonprofits, you’re gonna have some hard times and when the hard times do come, then you you should not be shy about sending out a fundraising email. That may even sound a bit like hey, we really need money. And you know, people will know you need money and they will respond. Some people may be turned off by it but you know, some people are going to donate and that

Chris Davis 20:19
All right, so sorry about that, Kerry, we have a little hiccup but no, you were you were mentioning that you didn’t have to, you know, you’re in a place now where you don’t have to worry about fundraising as much. But for those who, you know, maybe that’s still something on the table, how to kind of balance that out online and in your newsletter in an informative way, but still very effective with conversions per se.

Chris Davis 20:53
All right. And we, listeners, thank you for your patience, we had just a little bit of a hiccup there. On recording. So you may seem see that we had one one idea where we were talking about Kerry and him saying, you know, he’s glad he’s in a place where he doesn’t have to fundraise anymore. And we kind of chopped chopped up on our end, but we’re back everyone. And I want to talk about it in still talk about the raising in the balance of information, and asking for for for money, per se because that’s the main difference between a business and a nonprofit is you’re you’re looking for donors, you’re looking for people to give to the cause. What, what kind of, let’s let’s go into the technology Kerry? What kind of technology can someone use to get donations? I mean, you had mentioned, a lot of your time is now being able to be spent on making things more efficient through automation and all of those things. I know, receiving of money is one of the critical points, what type of software, what type of systems, what type of processes are out there to really help these nonprofits make that easy online?

Kerry Kriger 22:15
Yeah, well, I’m a bit different, I believe, than most nonprofits, because there’s a huge industry dedicated to providing technology to nonprofits. And I used to use plenty of those platforms, but I don’t really use any of them anymore, I just see is mostly the same technology that, you know, everyone in our sphere uses the technologies that you talk about all the time. Now, there’s a few different ones. But so I’ll say that that whole nonprofit industry, they make a lot of money selling technology to nonprofits. And the reason I left those tools behind is because I always sensed that they were charging too much money, and that there must be an easier way. For instance, just to throw out a name that probably still well known, they definitely used to be very well known Network for Good. And I used to pay them $100 a month to have one donation page, they would allow me to have one page where I could bring in donations, and that was it, they would hold the money for up to 45 days before delivering it. And it you know, it just was not ideal. So these days, as I said at the start, I recommend everyone have a WordPress website. Why is that because there’s so much flexibility in the tools that you can install into WordPress, they usually cost a fraction of what you would pay an outside platform to handle so for donations. And on the topic of fundraising, I’ll say don’t restrict yourself to only donations. There’s also you know, you can sell merchandise, say the frogs as a shop, say frogs.com/shop. And we sell T shirts, and stickers and flags and all these things have our logo on it and our name on it. And it’s promoting it. And it makes our you know, the buyers of it are our supporters, it makes them happy, they’re able to support us, it’s a good way for them to spread the word out us and we make some funds from that. We also lead eco tours that will take people out to the jungle for 10 to 12 days usually. And you know those trips cost 1000s of dollars and we make a good profit on them if we can fill them up, which we often do not always, especially in the unknown travel times that we’ve been in, but right now everyone’s back traveling, so I expect her upcoming tours to fill up. So yeah, be creative with how you raise your funds. And so I said we have a shop and that’s run through WooCommerce which is the most popular WordPress selling platform. And the good thing is that WooCommerce also handles our donations now won’t do that in a smooth manner without another plugin. The other plugin that I use is launch flows. And what that enables me to do is have a really nice looking donation. One page that I can create and send people to dedicated thank you pages. I know Chris often talks about the importance of thank you pages on your website, it’s the page that 100% of your buyers will look at. And so I always make sure I’ve got good, I’ve got good thank you pages, if someone gives us their email in any kind of lead magnet or Event Registration Form, if they pay for anything, if they donate, then I want to send them to a dedicated thank you page. And on that thank you page, I’m gonna make sure that I have some next actions for them things that I want them to do. Let’s see, I totally digress. The technology. Yeah, so launch flows, enables you, if you just have WooCommerce, then I believe that by default, when someone pays for something on your site, it’s just gonna send them to a pretty ugly looking page and may have like order confirmation. Yeah, you don’t want to do that. So launch flow solves the problem, and launch flows, it’ll help me connect with WooCommerce subscriptions and make the recurring donations all happen in a smooth manner. So yeah, WooCommerce to sell anything, including take donations, but WooCommerce subscriptions, super important. Because as a nonprofit, you definitely want to offer recurring subscriptions, I suggest monthly and annual, you could try quarterly. But for me monthly and annual has always worked fine. And those are super important. Because another way that a nonprofit differs from a for profit business is that when people have subscriptions for for profit, the second that they realize they’re not using it, then they’re they have a high likelihood of canceling it. Whereas for a nonprofit, recurring donation, people will just let those go indefinitely until they hit hard financial times. So we’ve got people who set up recurring donations seven or eight years ago, and they’re still coming in every month, we even have a guy who writes out a postal money order by hand and puts it in the mail. Like clockwork, he’s done that every month for about 10 years. So definitely give people ways to send in the recurring donations. And that is super helpful. Because if people don’t do that, then what are the chances that they’re going to remember to go donate a year from now, even if you’re top of mind, you know, yeah, I see your emails, but I’m not in a donating mood. Whereas if that if you can get them to set up that recurring donation, then that’s money that you can count on for a long time. Yeah, yeah. So that’s, I mean, that’s about what you need. There’s some small plugins to add into that to just make it all a little bit smoother. But the main ones are, have your WordPress site, have WooCommerce and WooCommerce subscriptions, and have launch flows to make the process smoother. Now, if you don’t have WordPress, that’s fine. There’s plenty of other platforms that can handle donations. As I said, there’s a huge industry of nonprofit technology. And, you know, look into them, they’ll work it’s just for me, everything tends to eventually move to WordPress, because I find that having things in WordPress is just less expensive, and it runs smoother. There’s more flexibility. Even within WordPress, I used to use give WP that’s the most well known donation plugin. And it worked fine. It’s just whenever you have you kind of give you give another company control and you give up some flexibility when you do that. So I I’ve been happy since I switched to just having it all go through WooCommerce because I’ve got complete control. And it works perfectly fine.

Chris Davis 28:49
Yeah, this is, you know, many of the reasons why I wanted you on because there are times and every industry has it, you know, finance, medical, real estate, whatever industry, they all have their proprietary software, and companies that make software specific to them. And if you can break free at times, you can realize that you have more control and you can keep more money and get the money faster. That’s one thing that stood out another one is don’t forsake other ways of receiving money, everyone. Kerry just said someone mails in a money order every year. Make sure you have a physical address that people can send their mail to or send their money to make sure you have a way to except in all capacities. Because one thing that I’ve learned just watching you Kerry and being involved a bit in the nonprofit space is that you just never know who your donor is and how they prefer to give money, how they how they do that. So you want to just make sure that You’re in a position to receive all of that. And one thing that I liked about everything that you said, you’re not explicitly calling it out. But as an experienced marketer, you’re also making these decisions on software based on control and being able to create the experience that’s going to be the highest, that’s going to generate the highest sentiment with you the engaging visitors. And I want to give people an insight to this Kerry, you more recently redid a website. For I don’t believe it was a nonprofit before for another business. And I want to just put on display, kind of your decision making, so that people see that use, you can be strategic with your website with your technology in the nonprofit space. And some of the things you look for if somebody were to say, hey, take a look at our website. Dr. Krieger. What would you recommend that we do? So if you would take that latest website redo that you did? And say, Okay, if they were in the nonprofit space and came to me, what are some of the pointers, you’d imagine you would tell them based on all of the nonprofit websites that you’ve seen, and the ones that you service through nonprofit ICU, that you kind of see as a theme of maybe make sure you have this in place? Because usually they don’t?

Kerry Kriger 31:22
Yeah, well, on the topic of rebuilding sites, I’m actually in the process of rebuilding all of my sites. And I’ve rebuilt probably five or six sites this year for my clients. And for myself, my saved the frog site, my bond, sorry, bliss music site, I’ve completely rebuilt them, so that they’re exactly the plugins, and theme and everything that I want. And rebuilding the site is no small task, I admitted, it takes some time. And when you’re in the thick of it, it’s, you know, you can’t do too much else for a week or so or however long it takes. But now that I find myself on the other side of it like this whole last week, I’ve been building new web pages on my site, the frog site and Bansuri bliss site. And it’s just, you know, it’s a breeze and so much faster, everything goes exactly how I want it. So, you know, website, technology changes fast. So don’t be, don’t be stuck, if you don’t like your old site and be open to moving forward once you know how that should be done. As far as a nonprofit site. I’ll start with a couple things that you said before, one thing I left out is we use stripe for payment processing, you’re going to need that. So that’s the important piece of it. And that we haven’t talked about is nonprofit discounts. So you should always ask for a nonprofit discount or look for it on the website. Usually on the pricing page at the bottom, there’d be something about that if there’s not all right for the software, not for any kind of software. Okay, yeah, for me, really, for anything you do as a nonprofit, if you’re going to be spending money, go ahead, ask them, you know, say, ideally, you’re a 501 C three public charity, say we’re a 501 C three public charity with a mission to whatever. And we’re curious if you offer nonprofit discounts. And sometimes they don’t have a system set up for it. But they’ll say not Not usually. But here’s a discount for it. So I bring that up right now because stripe is where the money’s coming from. Usually stripe is 2.9% for domestic transactions plus 30 cents. But for nonprofits, it’s 2.2%. So make sure you get your nonprofit discount. TechSoup is a large nonprofit technology company that’s contracted by some of the huge tech firms to give out their nonprofit discount. So one of the first things that you should do after getting your 501 C three public charity status approved is to sign up for a Tech Soup account so that you can make use of all of their discounts that they offer for things such as Adobe CC. So Adobe CC, I’m guessing we pay about a third of what other organizations pay air table, which we haven’t talked about, but not too many podcasts go by, without you mentioning air table. So I’m gonna bring it up and say I’m a massive air table fan. And I could not run anything with any type of efficiency without it and air table will give 50% off to nonprofits. And that’s even, you know, you can get a whole lot done on air table three plans, but if you need their pro or premium, then you’ll get 50% off. So definitely take advantage of that Google workspace is what most people most businesses use for their email platform. Google workspace will give 100 free email accounts to your nonprofit. So definitely get that and pretty much you know every time you’re about to sign up for some type of technology, just ask for that nonprofit discount and you’ll save a ton of money doing that. Now. I forgot what the original question was how to assess the nonprofit website. Make sure make sure that people can tell what you do right from the start. I personally, because I’m the founder of my nonprofit and the founder of the two businesses that I run, I like to have, you know, something about me, you don’t want to make everything about you. But there’s nothing wrong with people knowing who who’s behind this, because that’s one way to instill trust, especially if you have background or some kind of, you know, a good reputation in your field. So I’ve got that right on top of my pages, and make sure you have a really thorough about page about your about your, you know, your mission and your cause. Why should somebody care? So one of the first pages I ever built for say the frogs was the why frogs page? Because people ask, you know, they’ll ask me, Why frogs? And that’s either going to mean, why did you decide to go into a career dedicated frogs? Or it’s going to mean, why should they care about frogs? So make sure that you have a thorough about page answering, you know, what’s the history of your organization? Why do you exist? Why should people trust you? And I also have a support page. Now most people think of us support pages, how do I get support for this software product that I’m having trouble with, but for me, the support page is how can you support us. So that means you can donate electronically, you can send in a check, you can put us in your will, your bequest, you can, you know, set up your charitable distribution from retirements and all the ways that you can think of workplace giving combined federal campaigns, everything that you can think of that that person may be able to help out. Now, of course, you can also have, you can also volunteer, and then link out to your volunteer page and one other significant it for any nonprofit, in the early years, chances are, there’s going to be my financial issues, not enough money to the expenses are too high, the revenues are too low. And one thing that I notice is that people hire employees, that’s normal, that’s what most businesses do. But then there’s a bit of a mindset that who I need to keep paying this person who may or may not, you know, be the best person anymore, but you got to remember, your mission is not to be employing people. It’s to be, you know, doing whatever good thing for the planet or society that is truly your mission. And along that line, we have the benefit in a nonprofit, of being able to get volunteers, people will highly skilled people will provide us with free labor, and they will be happy to do so. And you should take advantage of that. And the way to do that is make sure you have a page about volunteers on your site, lists out the just start with the most important things that you need people for, you know, at least until a couple of years ago, that would be a graphic designer probably now in this day and age, there’s plenty of simple graphic design tools, but you probably still need or should have a professional graphic designer, and not even one because that one person is going to be busy. Sometime when you need them, have a list, have a bunch of people ready to go that you can call on as you need. So put up have a page, we’ve got one, save the frogs.com/graphic-design. And it says what we’re looking for, and what they can expect. And then all of our different volunteer positions will have a dedicated page for them. They’ll link out from the main say, the frogs.com/volunteers page. But when you go to that page, they’ll all say submit your application here that all feeds into one page, which I believe is say the frogs icon slash volunteers dash apply in in that that’s going to go into an air table, all about volunteers, and it’s gonna have all their applications, make sure you ask them like, you know, give us your CV. Why do you want to do this? What are your skills find out about them, because if you get them talking and writing, you can tell, you know if they’re truly skilled, and you may even see some things that they have skills that that can benefit you that they were not even expecting necessarily to be doing. So get a good volunteer management system going. Now, the next step is Don’t waste your time sending out some massive project to this person who just said they want to volunteer because they applied in the heat of the moment. They were inspired. And they said yeah, I’ve got eight hours a month to dedicate this. Well. Maybe they don’t and And maybe they’re not good at communicating. So what I do, I also one of those tables that I have in the air table is the different tasks, or I guess I have three main ones, I’ve got the volunteers, those are the people with their applications. And then I have the different positions like graphic designer, and then I have a different table for the tasks, here’s 30 different tasks that I need done graphic design, some of those are recurring, they’re always going to be ready to go, we’re going to have saved the frog, say, every year on April 28, I can always use a graphic designer to just come up with the next cool, save the frogs a promo image. And that then becomes a simple thing. I can just have a pre written out thing. Hey, thanks for offering to help out, can you create this, you know, 314 100 pixel wide, give them the basics and like a paragraph or two, just a simple task for them to do that will benefit you. But that only takes you a minute to email them. And then you can see how good their work is if they ever reply. And then from there, you can get them doing bigger projects, or even really the first email I usually have two emails, I’ve got one email that goes out to them with just a general description. Hey, I could use a a promo image for say the frog’s day that’s coming up, does that interest you? And if they reply, then I’ve got the next email ready to go. And that’s with all the details to actually do the entire thing. So get a good volunteer system going. And you shouldn’t need that many employees you should be able to operate your nonprofit certainly with let far less employees than a for profit doing the same magnitude of work.

Chris Davis 41:38
Yeah, yeah, man. Kerry full of gems. I know that there’s people listening, who have a nonprofit that were probably like, Wait, what did he say? Listen, this is recorded, you can always go back and listen to it. Pause it. But but more. So. Kerry, I just I envision most nonprofits need a little bit of encouragement, right? They’re doing the right thing. Again, I don’t I don’t know of a single nonprofit that doesn’t have to have a noble cause. They’re trying to do good. And sometimes doing good just doesn’t feel like it’s appreciated. Any words of encouragement, you’ll leave that young, nonprofit established, nonprofit, aspiring nonprofit person to help them just navigate this very rough terrain of surviving in the nonprofit space until they it’s no longer surviving. They’re actually thriving and actualize the vision that they have. What would you what words of encouragement would you give them?

Kerry Kriger 42:44
Okay, well definitely look to people who have done it before. I’m out there. My name is Kerry Krieger ke R R, Y k, r i, G E R. So look me up, I have a website, nonprofit dot ICU, I do nonprofit consulting, I can help out your nonprofit. And I’ll say also this, collect testimonials. I have an air table for all my businesses, certainly for say the frogs, I’ve got hundreds of rows of testimonials. And every time someone says something good about my organization, then I’m probably going to copy that and paste it into a row, not just so that I can look at and feel good. Now I couldn’t do that I usually don’t need to. But you know, that’s one way if you need to feel good about the work you do. But I’m going to put those up on the website. So I’m going to have a column in that air table. And it’s gonna say Where has this been published, has it gone into the two most important places are the newsletter in the website, every time I send out a newsletter, I’ve got a template, more or less. And at the bottom of the newsletter, there’s always going to be a PS under my name that just gives them one extra thing of interest. And then there’s going to be a quote, The quote is, or sorry, there’s going to be a testimonial. And that I’m just going to go grab that from my air table ready to go pop in a testimonial, inspire some other people. And then there’s going to be some kind of quote, now, you know, the quote is not as important as the testimonial, I’m talking about quote, like, you know, here’s a famous quote about something that may be relevant, but the testimonials, you got to sprinkle those all over the place, put them on your website, for every web page that I put up. I also have an air table that tracks every web page on my site, and there’s a column there doesn’t have a testimonial yet. And you know, every page is going to get a testimonial on it because I want this to go somewhere. How are you going to collect the testimonials, people email you and they’ll say things like, hey, I really appreciate the work that you do. And also when I have forms, like even on the on the donation form, it’s got right before you you hit pay or you know, check out your get here’s my credit card info. It’s got a place there for just, you know, through comments or something you know, put When a comment, is this being dedicated to someone, so people give people a place where they can just write, when I have event registration, it’ll say something like, how did you hear about us and anything else you’d like to say? So just those open text areas, give someone some blank space to write. And that’s where your testimonials are gonna come from, because that’s people are gonna say if they, you know how much they like you, and those are perfect for marketing.

Chris Davis 45:30
Got it? Got it. Well, listen, everyone will have all of those links below in the show notes, just in case you missed them. Kerry, thank you so much for coming on to the podcast. This is this has been brewing for a while and it lived up to my expectations and hopefully listeners, it lived up to yours as well. Again, Kerry, I can’t thank you enough. I get to I’m spoiled everyone. I get to see Kerry often at least four times a month on office hours he travels a lot so sometimes you can’t make it so look forward to continuing to engage with you and grow with you in the community. listeners. Thank you for your listenership. Do me a favor on this one, everyone. I believe most of you listening, no nonprofit owner have aspirations to start your own nonprofit, or know somebody that could benefit from everything that Kerry just mentioned on this podcast. Make sure you share this with them. Just say hey, look, I know you gotta nonprofit, check this out. There’s software that he’s mentioned that they probably don’t even know exists, strategies did you? Did you hear of all of the different ways that he gave you to support you know, like it, he’s been doing it for so long. And lastly, do not hesitate to reach out to Kerry. He is open and available. This is his mission, along with Save the frogs is to help you in your nonprofit journey, especially navigating online. So make sure you click the link below to get access to Kerry And again Kerry. Thank you listeners. Thank you, everybody. Continue to automate responsibly my friends.

Chris Davis 47:15
Thank you for tuning in to this episode of The all systems go podcast. If you enjoyed it, make sure that you’re subscribed at the time of recording the all systems go podcast is free to subscribe to and it can be found in Apple podcasts, Google podcasts, YouTube, or wherever you get your podcasts new episodes are released every Thursday. So make sure you’re subscribed so that you don’t miss out and while you’re at it, please leave us a five star rating and review to show some love but also to help future listeners more easily find the podcast so they can experience the value of goodness as well. We’ve compiled all resources mentioned on the podcast, as well as other resources that are extremely valuable and effective at helping you grow your marketing automation skills quickly and you can access them all at all systems go podcast.com Thanks again for listening. And until next time, I see you online. Automate responsibly my friends