Host: Welcome, everyone, to another episode of the Go Beyond Fundraising podcast. Today, we’re diving into another installment in our series about omnichannel fundraising. This series looks at how to know if your organization is ready for omnichannel and the different ways to make sure your organization is organized and staffed appropriately.

Today, we’re sitting down with some of our experts in the nonprofit marketing and fundraising tech space to look at all the different technological components that are required to be successful with omni-channel fundraising.

Joining me today are Mark Leta and Stephanie Drahan. Mark and Stephanie, welcome to the show. Mark, I’d love to start with you before we get into today’s topic. Could you share a little about your background and some of your work here at Allegiance Group + Pursuant?

Mark Leta: I’m the Vice President of Technology at Allegiance Group + Pursuant. My background is primarily in business requirements, QA, and tech consulting, particularly for mid- to large-size nonprofits working on various problems, typically with integrating different systems or pulling disparate datasets together and trying to make sense of them. I’ve been working in the field for almost 26 years and have had a lot of interesting projects and experiences taking on different challenges.

Host: I love that. Thank you. I’d love to get into the data question once we get into today’s episode.

Stephanie, I’ve not gotten a chance to get to know you very much. Could you share a little about yourself with our audience?

Stephanie Drahan: Sure. My name is Stephanie Drahan. I’m an Associate Vice President here at Allegiance Group + Pursuant, and I sit on the client experience team. I work with our clients on overarching digital strategies, and that can be around fundraising and general marketing. Mark and I work in close concert across a couple of clients.

I came from nonprofits and have been on the agency side for nearly 10 years. I’m really excited about integrating both offline and online and all the challenges it can bring us.

Host: Thank you both. I’m really excited to dive into today’s topic.

Mark, I’d love to start with you. In your introduction, you mentioned your background and experience integrating disparate data. We know that with so many different channels today, both digital and physical, unifying data to get a complete picture of who a given constituent or donor is can be challenging.

How have you seen organizations successfully bring all these different inputs for data together to build that rich, comprehensive picture of your donor file?

Mark Leta: We’ve seen success happen when you’ve got buy-in from the top, particularly within large organizations. It’s that willingness to make investments and ensure the different programs you’ve got going on, both online and offline, are set up so that you can make sense of the data once it starts to flow in. It sounds simple, but there are enormous challenges because typically, you’re tying together sometimes six, seven, or eight different systems and trying to make sense of this fire hose of data that’s coming in in various ways.

The first thing any organization needs to do to be successful is to do an inventory and have high-level system planning around what systems are in play. What are those systems handling in terms of the business functions, and what data profile is coming in? How is the data being interpreted within the system itself, and what opportunities are there to move that data or to use it or leverage it across the organization?

Thinking about things like how you might handle something like a universal ID that could get assigned to a data record, for example, is essential. How are you going to normalize data that’s coming from different systems and being brought together? Those types of things become very important.

It comes down to doing high-level system planning and road mapping as you’re looking at how to establish an omnichannel approach. That’s really what nonprofits should be focused on at a high level.

Host: I’d love to step back and look at all the channels that could feed data into a nonprofit’s database. We know that because the word “omni” means “all,” it can mean a lot of different things and a lot of different channels.

What are the most common ones you see most large nonprofits using today?

Mark Leta: On the digital side, most large nonprofits have some web presence, so they have data flowing in through a CMS. The CMS might be managing a website or websites and some application data.

Typically, too, they’re going to have an ECRM or a CRM, maybe both. The difference is that the eCRM is focused on online or digital-only type activity and transactions. And often, it’ll handle multiple parts of the business. Some eCRMs handle email marketing, fundraising, and advocacy potentially. Then, the larger, more sophisticated ones may have a separate CRM that can tie together both online and offline data.

On the digital side, as nonprofits become more sophisticated with their ad tech and advertising efforts, they get more sophisticated within the social platforms. They set up new and varying tactics across TikTok, Meta, Snapchat, and X to do lead generation or other types of data-gathering on the platforms.

They may also have a separate marketing platform. Think of the HubSpots and Marketos that set up distinct landing pages they can then use to drive traffic and collect marketing data. And then they may even have a separate email marketing system on top of that that they use.

Also key to online is the analytics setup they have. Many organizations we deal with are using Google Analytics — GA4 — at this point, but there are other types of programs out there. For instance, one client does a lot of work in Adobe Analytics.

If they’re taking the next step on the digital side, there’s also a data warehouse or data lake that might be available. They use that as a repository for all this data collected around these various systems, bringing it together and trying to make sense of it to do things like lookalike targeting and so forth on the digital side.

Then, of course, on the offline side, there’s usually some caging system for direct response and direct mail. That data may also flow into a database that could be integrated into the digital side.

Host: With all those different data sources and different ways nonprofits can engage with their supporters, I would imagine that many nonprofits face challenges getting all those systems to talk to each other.

Mark Leta: Yes. Absolutely.

Host: Stephanie, do you have any thoughts or comments to add or any real-world examples of how you’ve seen some of those challenges pop up in organizations you work with?

Stephanie Drahan: The big question around omnichannel is often solving this problem or getting to where it can be operationalized. Syncing data back and forth between the systems is essential, as is determining what needs to be updated more or less immediately versus daily or weekly. Answering those types of questions is really important.

Once you have all the data playing nicely together — to the extent that’s possible for an organization, and that can vary and grow — it’s taking advantage of it so you can see things like the largest gift, whether online or offline. You can then leverage something like the largest gift online in their offline asks. For instance, if we have information on their interests, that might help feed the ads they’re being served down the line because we can pull and segment that information more completely.

Host: When we think about front-of-house versus back-of-house regarding what’s happening with your nonprofit technology, we know the goal is for donors and constituents to have a seamless experience. The messages they’re receiving on one channel are consistent with the messages they’re seeing on another channel. The left hand knows what the right hand is doing.

When you start to work with a nonprofit client, and they’re facing an inconsistent experience in different channels, what’s a typical process you might go through to fix that issue? And how can you work with the back-of-house tech team to resolve any problems causing that misalignment?

Stephanie Drahan: That’s a great question. For so many nonprofits, that’s a big task and challenge. To me, it’s ensuring we’re getting the right people around the table at the right time.

When we’re starting to spearhead omnichannel and integrated efforts, there might be different people in the room than when you’re putting together an offline or online strategy. We want to ensure we’re talking across the organization with the fundraisers and perhaps people on the marketing or communications teams. Those are often entirely separate, but we need to know what else is going out over email when our mail pieces might hit homes.

It starts from a place of having those conversations and gaining that knowledge. Then, you crawl, and you take it a little further, so those messages are more integrated — so e-newsletters include information about upcoming fundraising campaigns or reflect a donor’s status if they’re a sustainer. There are easy and quick steps and ways to pull personalization and start to integrate in those ways.

And then, there’s so much more you can do once you’ve started down the initial path of integrating that work. For instance, when we look at the data that’s coming back — how folks may be replying or donating — that may provide a different email address than has typically been on file.

So, there’s constant work in ensuring the data is up to date and correct. Is the past email address they’ve given us the right one to use, or should the new email address supersede that? It comes down to an organization’s business rules.

I don’t know how much we’ll get into this now, but source codes are so vital in fundraising to make sure you know where your gifts are coming from. It’s making sure all your digital links include information so you can then source back all the gifts and maybe apply them back to other campaigns and vice versa.

So, are folks coming to your website and clicking that nice big donate button, but it turns out they’ve received mail? We want to be able to match that back and see that full view of how the donor has engaged with you and also give a little credit to other channels that might have played a role in it.

Host: Absolutely. We’ll speak more in a later episode about attribution and some of the thorny questions and issues that come up. But it’s important to call that out — so many channels can influence a gift, even if a donor never transacts in that given channel.

For example, as I scroll through Instagram, I may see something I want to purchase that looks interesting, but I don’t like the purchasing interface within Instagram. I often open my laptop or a browser on my phone instead to find that item. If I decide to purchase, I’ll go through the purchase experience on the website rather than through social media because it’s just a better experience.

If a for-profit organization was looking at my data, they would say, “This person never really buys on Instagram. We shouldn’t serve them ads there.” But that wouldn’t tell the complete picture.

Mark Leta: That’s a great point. It happens both online and offline. We’re influenced by the direct mail we throw out. Even if it’s something you may not respond to, the organization is still building awareness when you get that piece in the mail.

As you said, the same happens when you’re flipping through social media or even looking at your email. You may not respond to a direct message at that time, but it still could be lodged in the back of your head, and you may return to it later.

To achieve an omnichannel view of the donor record, you need to be able to look across the different channels and at least draw a dotted line to the attribution based on the message they’ve received.

Host: Absolutely. Going deeper into this idea of unifying data, there’s been a growing use of APIs, webhooks, and tools like Zapier to help bridge that gap and bring data from new channels that may not have a built-in integration with another platform or with the warehouse you’re using to store your data.

How have these technologies changed how nonprofits handle that flow of data? Could you share some best practices for using these tools to make sure that, no matter what source a data point is coming from, you can keep it consistent across channels?

Mark Leta: To answer the first part of the question, how it’s changed the landscape of integrations, it’s introduced low- and no-code solutions to the public, to organizations, so they can much more quickly and easily integrate these systems. Zapier is just one example of this type of tool; some other ones are Make or Integrately.

It’s now possible to use a tool like Zapier to listen to an event happening in one system and trigger a response in another. Doing so is more about configuration and not about writing code at that point. You can use their tools in a fairly straightforward and quick setup. That empowers organizations to do things like try different marketing tactics. For example, social platforms set up new marketing tactics all the time, and those tools make it easy to add those to the toolbox.

In terms of best practices, if you’re doing the setup yourself, be aware that requirements can change. For example, if you’re supporting your webhook and integrating directly with somebody like Meta or TikTok, it can sometimes be problematic because those platforms will change their APIs. They may change the requirements for working or integrating with their systems based on evolving or changing security concerns.

So, that’s something to be aware of, and using a third-party tool focused on setting up those types of integrations may give you a better outcome. It’s certainly cost-effective in the sense that they’re the ones on the hook or responsible for watching for changes or new requirements that are coming from different platforms. You can offload that part of it onto the third party, pay them to manage that, and take advantage of their low- or no-code solutions to do the integrations.

Be wary of changing requirements, but also know how the data will come in and what you’re going to do with it. Think through how you’ll leverage the data from one system to the next because there may be some ETL — extraction, translation, and loading logic — that you need when data’s coming from one system and being loaded into another.

Host: I know we work with a lot of large nonprofits that have big budgets and a robust IT infrastructure. But say a medium-tier nonprofit is listening today, and they want to dip a toe into the omnichannel waters. In your mind, what’s the minimum viable product they need to get an omnichannel experience up and running? Maybe they’re building it from a CRM or other basic marketing automation tool, or perhaps they have a few other medium-tier tools.

If you were going to come into an organization and help them beef up their omnichannel capabilities, what steps would you take?

Mark Leta: It’s certainly a crawl-walk-run approach because of the complexity of integrating these different systems. You want to go through piecemeal and prioritize first.

What data does it make sense to bring together initially that will give you the most bang for your buck? That may be the easiest thing to do — to focus on them one at a time. For instance, if you have a CRM and a separate email marketing tool, maybe start there. If you’re doing quite a bit of business through email, make sure the email marketing tool can integrate back into the CRM. Then, keep expanding from there. It might make sense to then integrate the data you’re bringing in through web forms on your CMS. Do that integration next.

It’s thinking about and looking at the omnichannel approach at a high level. I like to create different systems diagrams so I can see everything that’s in play and map out where the data is flowing and why. Then, you can prioritize it from there and work on one of those integrations at a time.

Host: I’d like to bring things back to the topic of data, specifically with advertising and the data wars between large companies like Apple, Facebook, and Google and questions around third-party cookies. We know collecting and accurately cataloging the data that’s coming in on your website is becoming more and more critical than ever.

What kind of changes are you seeing on the horizon, specifically regarding data management, as many of these large companies go to war over who gets to have the data and how much it costs?

Mark Leta: People are much more security-conscious at this point in terms of making sure the data that’s coming in is much more protected. We’re not giving exposure or access to data to people who don’t need it. Instead, we’re locking it down and only allowing access to data and resources to the people who need it to do some part of the organization’s business. That’s one thing we’re seeing more of.

You mentioned data wars and hinted at the move away from third-party cookies. Interestingly, in the last couple of weeks, we’ve heard Google is abandoning its plan to get rid of third-party cookies, so it’s keeping them for now. It’s likely seen some challenges regarding its search and ads business, so, at this point, it’s looking at some other approaches. For now, the third-party cookies are still alive and well with Google, even though Apple abandoned them.

So, one, we’re seeing organizations be much more security-conscious. Two, we’re looking at other ways to track and follow users in the aggregate. That may not rely on just third-party cookie tracking. Even though it’s still going to be around, it’s something people are more and more wary of.

Stephanie Drahan: Another thing that’s important when we’re thinking about the future and where you want to go and setting yourself up for success today is to start planning ahead.

Mobile fundraising, or SMS, has become more popular over the last couple of years, both with blast SMS and peer-to-peer fundraising. If your organization’s not doing that yet, consider whether you should add a mobile phone field to your donation forms. Of course, there’s a tradeoff there because more fields can decrease conversions. But if your organization might want to dip a toe into SMS in the future, it’s great to start collecting that data and the opt-ins now so you’re covered.

That’s another thing to consider on your direct mail reply devices. Typically, in the past, we asked for a home phone number. Now, with telemarketing not quite being as strong of a marketing plan as it once was, it’s more about capturing a cell number so you can still telemarket and potentially text.

Thinking about where you want to be is helpful to trying to rip off the omnichannel Band-Aid, so every time you want to add a new channel, you’re not starting from scratch. You’ve been chipping away at it over time.

Also, when we consider trying to integrate data, there are data vendors that can help you fill out the data you have. For example, you have offline donors, and maybe some of those folks have already given online, so you’ve captured their email addresses. You should be marketing to them with email, and then you can also target ads to them because you have their email address.

For those folks who have only been direct mail responsive, we work with our clients on an e-append, which essentially appends an email address to that donor’s record so we can try to reach them online. There’s a match rate there. It won’t be 100% perfect and clean, but generally, these folks have donated to you. They support you. Getting them on your email file is critical, and they may actually want to be there — or, at least, they won’t leave. That gives us another couple of channels to reach them on.

We all know email inboxes are full — mine is. But even if folks don’t open emails — and we really don’t know who’s opening emails anymore — seeing your email in their inbox can work as an ad impression. It might remind them to go to your website and donate, or it might remind them that their renewal is sitting on their kitchen counter, waiting to be mailed back.

So, there are these little tips and tricks and tiny things that will help lift all boats. The most important thing is that your donor is everywhere. Your donor is online; your donor is on social. Your donor is probably listening to podcasts or perhaps linear radio. Where can you reach them to continue the message you shared with them in their mailbox?

Host: I love your comment about SMS. I tend to use online shopping examples because they’re the people who get a lot of my money, so they’re doing something right. For example, when I order something, I love getting a text telling me my order is on the way. It’s information I like to have, but it’s not information I would have necessarily gone to my email to seek out.

Translating that to the nonprofit space, I loved the example you shared because I’ve given to a lot of nonprofits in the past who, for the most part, only send me emails and mail. I’ll get the #10 envelope with the donation appeal, but I don’t necessarily think about opening it and giving.

But suppose I received a text message from them saying, “Hey, we sent you a piece of mail. This was the request in it. We’d love to have all our gifts in by X date.” I would probably be much more likely to reply to that campaign, even if it was $5 or $10 they wouldn’t have otherwise gotten.

I would love to see many more nonprofits have the courage to try new channels, especially as people are focusing their giving on fewer and fewer organizations.

Stephanie Drahan: What you said is interesting because integration works both ways. You might not open the mail piece; other people aren’t opening the emails. So, it’s about getting where they are, and that’s what’s so interesting about SMS and its potential. It spans both offline and online. For many organizations, it’s starting to replace or has been replacing telemarketing because that gets more expensive but with a lower contact rate. Text messaging is so much cheaper for a nonprofit to utilize.

You’re reaching people you don’t have an email address for, and you’re pointing them toward an online donation page. It’s an opportunity to get a conversion, whether you get an email address from somebody or they send a check back.

I know there’s more to come on this topic, but make sure you look at all touchpoints in a campaign and all the touchpoints a single person receives when looking at performance. If Mark gets an email, an SMS, and a mail piece, but he donates only to the email, does that mean the other things are worthless and we shouldn’t have done them? Probably not. They likely played a role in the decision by reminding him: “When I got that SMS, I remembered that I needed to do this.”

Mark Leta: That’s one of the real selling points of omnichannel to nonprofits — that notion of building awareness. Initially, we’re all trained to think, “What’s the response to this campaign? What’s the response to this effort?” The response may be coming in through other channels.

It’s okay if we can’t directly attribute it that way. Some of the conversation needs to be around what the overall fundraising picture looks like. How are all the boats lifting in the sea, not just the one tied to our campaign?

Host: There’s much to talk about on the topic of attribution, so I’m excited we’ll be going there next. Mark and Stephanie, do you have any other thoughts before we wrap up today?

Mark Leta: It’s an exciting space to play in. Nonprofits should take a chance and get their feet wet with omnichannel to see what’s possible. Give us a call, and we can sketch out a plan for you if you have an interest in this type of work.

There’s a lot that can be done on pretty lean budgets, and there’s much to be gained by looking at integrating these different systems.

Stephanie Drahan: I’ll cosign that.