Missions to Movements
This isn't just another nonprofit podcast - it's your weekly invitation to think bigger, take bold risks, and create lasting change in an ever-evolving social impact landscape. Meet Dana Snyder, your guide through the evolving landscape of nonprofit innovation. She's on a mission to help change-makers like you push the boundaries of what's possible in nonprofit marketing and fundraising. Each week, Missions to Movements serves as your personal mastermind session, delivering actionable insights and bold strategies that challenge traditional nonprofit thinking. Dive into revolutionary approaches to digital fundraising, discover how to build magnetic monthly giving programs that create lasting donor relationships, and learn to amplify your voice as a thought leader in the social good space. Whether you're reimagining your organization's impact or forging game-changing partnerships, you'll find the ideas, insights, and inspiration to take your mission further than you've ever imagined. Ready to turn your mission into a movement?
Missions to Movements
How Automations Can Save You Time + Increase Donor Relations with Rachel Bearbower
If you're still manually sending thank you notes, chasing spreadsheets, or struggling to keep up with donor touch points, this episode could save you THOUSANDS of dollars.
I’m talking with Rachel Bearbower, an absolute systems wizard and the founder of Nonprofit Automation Agency, to break down how nonprofits can implement systems and automations that actually feel personal.
Rachel walks us through some compelling case studies, including a monthly giving program that used customized workflows to segment donors by gift size and deliver messages that felt like they came straight from the Executive Director’s inbox.
You’ll hear how my team used Zapier to automatically send scholarship applications from HubSpot to Google Sheets. The kicker? These automations helped scale communications to over 4,700 event registrants without sacrificing personalization!
Plus, Rachel shares her “The One Minute Thank You” trick that lands pre-written, customizable drafts in your inbox the moment a donation comes through.
Resources & Links
Connect with Rachel on LinkedIn or Instagram or book a demo. You can also learn more about Nonprofit Automation Agency on her website.
Check out Rachel’s FREE Resources: 5 Ways to Automate Your Stewardship and Create a Remarkable Donor Experience.
This show is presented by LinkedIn for Nonprofits. We’re so grateful for their partnership. Explore their incredible suite of resources and discounts for nonprofit teams here.
Monthly Giving Awareness Week is May 12-16! Join me, RKD Group, and GivingTuesday for 5 days of FREE resources to help you launch and grow recurring gifts.
Are you still dreaming about building your monthly giving program or refreshing your current one? Applications are now open for my “done with you” Monthly Giving Mastermind. 4 spots are open and we start in July. Click here to apply.
My book, The Monthly Giving Mastermind, is here! Grab a copy here and learn my framework to build, grow, and sustain subscriptions for good.
Let's Connect!
Somebody is wasting about two hours every single day because of inefficient systems. Now if that person makes $25 an hour, that is $13,000 lost in labor costs. Or because you're uploading and downloading spreadsheets, that is $263,000 a year of money that you are losing because of donor attrition, bad donor retention and inefficient systems.
Speaker 2:I'm Dana Snyder, your host of the Missions to Movements podcast, and my path to philanthropy has been anything but traditional. This show is your weekly mastermind, designed to give you the ideas, insights and support you need to push the boundaries of what's been done before in nonprofit marketing and fundraising. Whether you're looking to build a magnetic monthly giving program, elevate your personal brand or create partnerships that amplify your impact, this space is for you. I'll bring you solo episodes and conversations with industry leaders offering actionable strategies and fresh perspectives that will move you and your mission forward. Let's turn your mission into a movement. Hello, welcome back to another episode of Missions to Movements. This one is very long overdue.
Speaker 2:Rachel Baerbauer has been working with me for years on different automations in my business and is a brilliant wizard. When you just meet somebody whose brain works differently than yours in the most magical way possible and you're like I need this so much and I don't even need you to explain to me how it all works, because it's just magic when you get the end result, that's Rachel. She's brilliant. You need a Rachel on your team, specifically this one, and Rachel has been known for her work as the founder CEO of Small Shop Strategies, but more recently, the nonprofit automation agency. And when I tell you she is literally going to blow your mind today and talking about automations, the mindset behind them, why it's so important, how much time it can save you, the personalization, etc. Etc. And we're going to dive into some specifics on how exactly she's helped me. If you have been someone that has attended a recent monthly giving summit, it will release a little bit of the behind the scenes of the magic of some correspondence you might have received. So with that, rachel, welcome to the show.
Speaker 1:Oh my gosh, dana, thank you. It's so good to be here and, yes, so overdue.
Speaker 2:So hello, so overdue. Will you give a brief, just intro to yourself and why the big switch into nonprofit automation agency? Oh gosh great question.
Speaker 1:Well, yeah, hi, I'm like everyone else. I'm a, you know, a fundraiser, a, a founder and a farmer. So those are kind of like my things. And I really started out this whole kind of business journey, teaching what I knew, which was how to be an executive director, and so I've worked with executive directors and I was a small shop, so I really learned how to do everything myself and just figure stuff out. There wasn't always like a simple solution, but just kept trying to figure it out.
Speaker 1:And while I was working with small shops and I love that side of things the space that was really bringing me a lot of joy and I saw like such a huge need and it was kind of like the thing that like people would just start coming to me and be like, hey, how do I do this or how do I do this? And then I started being like, well, you could do all of this. And then they were hiring me to do like bigger think through, bigger automation and workflows and stuff like that, and I've always been a big proponent of, you know, donor stewardship and so it kind of evolved. It wasn't like on purpose, I wasn't like this is what I'm doing, it just kind of evolved, and I mean I was laughing with somebody. I was like honestly, like cause I'm kind of lazy, and I was like you know, I think.
Speaker 2:You. That adjective does not correlate.
Speaker 1:It doesn't, it doesn't. But I'm like, well, there must be a better way to do that. And so then I just like the part of figuring out like, ooh, could I simplify this Great?
Speaker 2:That's how we are here and it's amazing. I'm so glad you are Okay. Just like break this down for somebody who might not even think of tasks that could be automated for them. What are some common things? Things, tasks that take up a lot of our time, that have the potential to be automated. Just like bring us into the world of the things that you work through on a day-to-day basis.
Speaker 1:Yes. So, as I mentioned, like donor stewardship is like the big place where where I live, but like automation can be. You probably already have a lot of automation like in your world that you don't even realize, but ways that we can bring it into our organizations are backing up Like think about the tasks that you don't like to do or the tasks that you like fall behind on. For me, where it started was thank you notes. I felt this like immense pressure to send really heartfelt, personalized thank you notes, Good place to be. I was like, well, I'll do that after I do this thing, I'll do that later this week. Friday mornings are going to be when I do this, going to be when I do this.
Speaker 1:Anyone who has been in a small organization or a big organization knows that you have just these constant fire drills or things that come up and then all of a sudden it's been a month or it's been a week or a month or six months and you haven't written that thank you note and I was like, okay, okay, I have to figure out a better system, not because I don't care, but because, like, because I just have so many other things going. Okay, so it's thinking about what are the things that you're falling behind on, or what are the things that are taking up a ton of your time Uploading and downloading spreadsheets.
Speaker 2:Oh my gosh, I have an example literally today of this.
Speaker 2:So we are recording this right off the heels of the second annual monthly giving summit and GiveButter was preventing a scholarship for the next round of the monthly giving mastermind five $1,000 scholarships and applications are still rolling in past the summit, although I had already created a Google spreadsheet.
Speaker 2:So in HubSpot is my forms right when they are populating, Google Sheets is where the list of all of them are, so that we can review them collectively to pick the five winners. So me or anybody on the team, manually going to HubSpot, manually uploading them into Google Sheets, is a time suck and I was realizing, oh, I am missing them. This isn't a full list because they keep coming in. I can see it in my email. So I just quickly knowing, putting Rachel into my brain, I was like I need to create a Zap and so I went into Zapier, which we can talk a little bit more about what that is, and that allowed me to say if and it connects HubSpot if someone fills out this form, then create a new row in this Google Sheet, Ta-da, and then now they are firing off automatically from HubSpot into Google Sheets and I do not have to touch it one more time and we don't have to miss any important applications and data that's coming through. So that's a real-life example.
Speaker 1:That's a perfect perfect example of something of like this was an issue. It was something that was like causing confusion or you're missing something, and it was very simple. And now you don't even have to have the like, the mental labor, like thinking about you know, cause we have all those things that are like running in the back of our heads. Yeah, why don't we take that off?
Speaker 2:Yes, yes, and that's huge. How do you think that? So, when we realize all these tasks that are difficult, when do most organizations come to you Like what realization is happening?
Speaker 1:Oh, when things are a hot mess, okay.
Speaker 2:So not like, hey, we want to build this thing. It's usually like already in motion so many organizations.
Speaker 1:Like the conversation goes like hey, yes, I can help you, but you need to promise me that you are not going to burn down all of the platforms that you have going right now until I can like help you. Like I know you're like ready to just like throw everything out the window, but yeah, so it's usually at a place with like extreme frustration and I get it.
Speaker 1:Like you're dealing with a lot of tech, there's a lot of language that you might not understand. You just know that you're not able to serve the people that you want to serve well, because you are having to deal with all of this inefficiency, and you know it's inefficient but you don't necessarily know how to fix it. So that's usually when people are coming or they know they're losing time, inefficiency with their systems, or they know that automation could help them.
Speaker 2:Yeah.
Speaker 1:But they just don't know how or what, or like where, to start, which is again fair where I come from.
Speaker 2:Yes, yes, okay. So I want to give some like a real life example of how all this breaks down and then some advice you have on how organizations can maybe overcome any hesitancies to invest in automations and putting those things into practice. And I'm a very visual learner so I hope, audibly, I can do this justice For the first monthly giving summit. I will just explain. So this was last September, for everyone listening. I had multiple platforms involved. Ringcentral was my production platform. That's where the event was hosted. If you have attended, that's where you were chatting. It was a system called RingCentral. That's where all the visuals, the chat, the networking, the expo rooms, everything.
Speaker 2:Then at that time I used Thrivecart as my actual registration because we had a VIP ticket. We had a free ticket and VIP and at that time I did not own RingCentral. I was working with NeonOne to use a license, so for us to have all of the To manage the financials, it was easier to have it on my owned platform. So, ringcentral, thrivecart. Add in Flowdesk, which is my amazing email platform, another separate entity and then we also needed to have custom information coming from Thrivecart. Like when I asked if you were there, I asked about your favorite pizza topics. I asked you how many? Pineapple and mushroom. Thank you, yeah, I asked a couple of questions to get to know you better. So there was four platforms RingCentral, thrivecart, flowdesk, google Sheets. There's one more. Oh, there was another one Letter Labs Slack, oh yeah, and Slack and Slack, yeah, okay, and Slack. Letter Labs was where I sent out talking about thank you cards. That was our partner on sending out automatic, not just thank you cards, but you're welcome to the event. As soon as somebody registered, there was a one week out correspondence that went out as direct mail and then there was a thank you that went out like a week or two after. Okay, all of those platforms needed to talk to each other. I'm not going to go through the complications of that, but all I want to say is equal Rachel and she created this magical flow chart of how I basically explained to her, from a business standpoint, what I needed all of these things to do, the timing of when they needed to fire, the information I needed access to, and she's like, got you Basically and you need that in your life because there's like I could not figure that out, or maybe I could have, but it would have taken me forever, something would have broken, I would have been frustrated and then again, is that really the best use of my time? No, so I want to give that one example.
Speaker 2:Then, this past year, I simplified massively simplified the platforms you did. You did so. Now RingCentral we have a license too. We did the registration in there. But this year we did a really cool partnership where if you attended in the registration, you were asked a question. It was like bonus, I will give you an introduction to a platform of mine that, if you were looking for a better solution for your monthly giving program, answer these questions. So it was either like yes, I would like this introduction. And then you had a secondary question which was based on your online revenue. Based on your answer.
Speaker 2:Rachel had helped me craft these customized emails based on the answers of why you were attending the summit and the problems, challenges you were up against and what you wanted to learn, all coming from the registration. And you either were introduced to GiveButter or FundraiseUp based on your answers. And then those emails got drafted into my info at inboxcom, separated for those for GiveButter, those for FundraiseUp. And I will tell you I manually went through and looked at the websites to make sure that you did not already use that's the one manual thing about this that you did not already use that platform. Or if you did, I was like, why don't you like this platform anymore? And sent out those emails. And there's a configuration in between of how that happened.
Speaker 2:But it was pretty seamless and magical and was able to be done in a mass way, because with 4,700 registrants, there was no way I could manually go individually through, but it was a way utilizing data that I was asking for was able to customize an answer and provide personalization. So that's a long explanation, but if you were on the receiving end of that, I hope, and our attention was that it felt personalized to you. Your name was in that email multiple times. It was drafted in a very in-my-voice way. It was with the answers that you provided. We even had the amount that you listed in your answer. Right, it was all designed to help expedite and automate a process at a personal level. And so, rachel, that Did I miss anything first?
Speaker 1:off. No, I'm like very impressed you explained it so well, like that was brilliant.
Speaker 2:Well done. Thank you. Those are two examples. In an event perspective. Do you have another one that can maybe lend a different view? For, like, a nonprofit you've worked through, maybe on a stewardship basis or something?
Speaker 1:Yeah, no, I think that you know what we did with both years. You are saying RingCentral and you're saying ThriveCart. Well, those are platforms that, like, you're using as a business email to a donor based on their gift, or like setting them through like a journey based on actually OK. So when I work with clients, I typically set up five workflows. One of the workflows is asking for a second gift, and I had an organization that their like gift range was huge, so it was like a $25 gift and then like a 20,000 and then like a 5,000, like they're pretty had donors kind of like at each of those levels but like not a lot in between. And so what we did, which I thought was really fun, is so we wrote our emails and then we had a different like ending of like okay, for the $20,000 one, it was like hey, I'd love to schedule a call with you, cause you're not going to ask for $20,000 in an email. Same for the 5,000. So three different versions of kind of the same email.
Speaker 1:And then what I did is I segmented the audience and this is in their email marketing platform. I segmented the audience based on their total giving and used custom fields One thing to just kind of go back. When you are doing this kind of thing, you have to think in like like you can't make everything absolutely like customized or like it's going to turn into something that's like unmanageable. So you have to think of like different data sets that you can use to kind of be like okay, here are these versions you can use. To kind of be like okay, here are these versions. So when I say that I segmented them, I basically I came up with a couple of groups of like total giving under $300, total giving under between this and this and total giving. So there was like four or five different like segments buckets.
Speaker 1:Yeah. So then I took their total giving from their CRM, which was Bloomerang, and put that as a custom field. So then when that donor went through that workflow, it then said, oh, because of this custom field, they're going to get this email with this offer that matches their specific needs, and so it's things like that. That was like, okay, I need to solve for this organization that has like a pretty wide range of donors that they want to touch base with, and it doesn't make sense for a $20,000 donor to be asked for $25.
Speaker 1:So, we had to solve for that. So I mean, that was a little complicated to explain, but like that's a very real thing that an organization is going to have to think about and in your case, we all want to make sure that the information that we're sending an email, that we're sending is personalized is like feels like it comes from you, and automation can feel like I. Like feels like it comes from you and automation can feel like I think people think sometimes like Ooh, that's very robotic and I can tell that like no, but even like internal things.
Speaker 2:So I'll give another example of automations that I'm working through in my business is automations of this podcast. So, yeah, yes, so I am a small team and through HubSpot, zapier Airtable, like I think there's maybe four platforms that, all in, we use for the show. Maybe that's a lot, maybe there's five, and some of it will remain a little bit manual, like me hitting obviously record on this and right, yeah. But the pre side of moving people through the process of their guest application comes in through my website how that gets moved through a flow, how the questions doc gets created, how they get sent a form to sign off as being all of that by doing a quick trigger push to say approved, pushes them through a process when it's been set up. So what I think is so vitally important, especially for small and large teams, no matter upon your staff, is this Setting up automations is an investment that, once you can have a foundation set up and it is rocking and rolling until you need a new one.
Speaker 2:It's investing in the infrastructure of what you do and allowing you to do the things. That you should be focused your time on the things that cannot be automated, like you being out in the community, you speaking at an event, you sharing your story, you going out and meeting with a corporate partner, but all the other things most of the time we can put some sort of level of automation on. So sometimes you're just about to lean into this. Nonprofit leaders anybody might think that automation is going to feel robotic or impersonal, and I think we kind of explained a little bit about this in my email for the monthly giving summit. But how do you work with organizations on overcoming that thought and then the things that, in practicality, that you utilize to make it not feel that way?
Speaker 1:Okay, a couple of things. I think it's like breaking it down right. So, number one, you got to keep it simple. I mean, you can automate like so many things. I can hear my Roomba going up in my bedroom right now that I schedule to go off. Okay, that's automation. So there's like little, little tiny things that you can automate all over the place.
Speaker 1:But what I like to like when I'm working with organizations, I really like to like let's keep it simple, so I focus on the first hundred days of a donor's journey and by doing that, once you have that, then you can expand. Like let's start small.
Speaker 1:You have that, then you can expand, like, let's start small. So a hundred days for your monthly giving community. I did a package where it's a year of touch points for monthly donors. Okay. So thinking just like, okay, what's like one problem I can solve. Then you break down the. So you've got it simple. It's going to be simple. You're building foundation, you're figuring out your tech, you're making sure everything's connected and then you're thinking about, like, what's actually going out to if you're automating personalized communication, making sure that you're not like writing and, you know, throwing in chat.
Speaker 1:Gpt. Like write me a thank you note? No, like, how would you write a thank you note? Gpt. Like write me a thank you note? No, like how would you write a thank you note? Take one of the thank you notes that you have written and where you put the first name and where you put something else personalized, leave those open. You know. Like, think about how you can insert those data points. But like, use your own voice and so that's something that's really. It's really important to me to feel personalized and to make that feel authentic to the organization. Can you share like two examples of the?
Speaker 2:things that you're talking about. So a month, a year long of touch points for monthly donor. What are an example of like two automations and I will link, by the way, to what she's talking about in the show notes.
Speaker 1:Yeah, okay. So a couple of simple ones. So one sometimes you just need the reminder of, like, that's what a donor needs. And donors are coming into your you know they're signing up as monthly donors at different times. So it's coming up. What does a year look like as a monthly donor? So month one they get an email from the executive director welcoming. That's automated. It's a draft email sent to the executive director's inbox. The next one is a phone call from a board member. Okay, well, board member needs to know that that's. We love our board members, but like they're not that proactive all the time, so we send an automated email that says, hey, dana has been a monthly giver for two months. An email that says, hey, dana has been a monthly giver for two months.
Speaker 2:Can you give her a?
Speaker 1:call. Here's her number Automatically sent. Great, then, month three is we're going to send them a handwritten thank you note. Well, there's some really awesome platforms that you can send handwritten notes. They're actually handwritten. Send that out. So it's really determining, okay, what are these touch points that you want? And then sometimes it's reminders, but it's reminders with the exact information to the board member to do that, so it makes it frictionless for everyone involved.
Speaker 2:So those are just a couple of examples I mean you can get as creative as you want, but it's basically like setting up that trigger cycle so that you're not having to constantly be the one thinking about it all the time we're coming to like the end of our conversation. What would be an idea right now if a nonprofit could automate one process to free up their time? What would it be today and why?
Speaker 1:Oh my gosh, okay, well, okay, I made a math problem and I know we are like this is like a very like detailed thing, but do we have time to share it? I'll go fast, go for it. Okay, I did. I even wrote it down because I was like I don't want to mess this up anyway.
Speaker 1:Okay, so we both know that, like donor, retention is a thing that organizations are struggling with, and so I want to give this example that just exemplifies, like, why automation can be so powerful. So, if you are an organization that raises $500,000 a year now I'm going to use incorrect information because I'm trying to make the math easy here so you raise $500,000 fundraising, okay, you have a retention rate of 50%. That means you keep 250,000 a year approximately and you lose $250,000 a year because of donor attrition. Right Now, let's talk about your staff real quick. So you, on average, somebody is wasting about two hours every single day because of inefficient systems. Okay, that means that that's like 520 hours a year on inefficiencies. Okay, now if that person makes $25 an hour, that is $13,000 lost in labor costs or because you're uploading and downloading spreadsheets.
Speaker 2:Right.
Speaker 1:That is $263,000 a year of money that you are losing. Here's where it hurts my heart. It is $22,000 every single month because of donor attrition, bad donor retention and inefficient systems. And so by investing $30,000, $50,000, whatever it is, sometimes it's a lot of money to invest in your systems. It's sometimes it's a lot of money to invest in your systems, but for every dollar that you're investing if it's 50,000, like it's you're getting back $5. So I don't know about you, but when I was a small nonprofit like, I didn't have $22,000 to lose.
Speaker 2:Like that is so much money, yeah, but it sneaks up on you because it's not automatic like that and not looking at it in like a full picture context like that usually, until maybe you get around to like the end of the year budget.
Speaker 1:And you're like oh my gosh, where did like? Why aren't we raising as much? Because you have all these donors that didn't give again.
Speaker 2:Right.
Speaker 1:And so, in answer to your question of like what's like the one automation, I'll just give my favorite automation, which is called the one minute Thank you. I dubbed it the one minute Thank you and it's basically taking the. You know, whatever your online fundraising platform is, or your CRM, and you connect a zap that sends a draft email to your inbox to executive director, development director, with a very personal email. So copy that email that you would write to a donor that just says thank you so much and it lands as a draft in your inbox and so you can change it to be personalized, whatever, but it quickly gets something out to the donors so that they know that their gift was received, that you're doing what you said you're going to do, and just like making them feel good, like, oh my gosh, I just got an email from a real person, like it's coming straight from your inbox.
Speaker 2:And what I would say is like your inbox, as in your Outlook, your Gmail.
Speaker 1:Yeah, yeah.
Speaker 2:Yeah, yeah.
Speaker 1:And you know that's a very techie thing, but like it can make a difference.
Speaker 2:And Zapier, just for those of you who are like wait, what are you guys talking about? It's a connector tool that essentially most platforms out there connect with these days. I would say it's rare if they don't. I'm not going to get into the complexities of if it doesn't. There are ways to work around that too. The Zapier is probably the most common. It's really reasonable. They start with a free plan and then it's based on how many Zaps you send, so you can go up or down. I scale mine so for the summit it's obviously going to go up, go way higher, and then now I just like bumped it back down again so it can ebb and flow with you too, as you have like certain campaigns or moments going.
Speaker 2:I would say highly, highly, highly recommend schedule a call with Rachel Like explain what it is that you're currently doing, where you think time is lost, where missed opportunities are happening. It could be in places that you don't even see right now. I just cannot overexpress the value of something like this, because the other side feels it, the amount of response. I got a personal card sent to me last year because of my outreach to a nonprofit that I had never met A card back I received. Anytime I've jumped on calls with organizations. They still have the physical card that I sent them, that was sent through the automation. They're like I love this. Or it's the emails that are sent out that they're so grateful of, and it's because there is thought and intention behind the automation. You're just making it easier for yourself for it to all be possible so that the thoughtfulness is expressed. And here's my thing it's better for the thoughtfulness to happen in an automation than not at all.
Speaker 2:I completely agree, because it's your intention and your heart behind it, and the automations can have your branding and your personality and all of that impact into it. So anyways, I digress, rachel, is there any resource that you want to direct them to and how can they get in contact with you directly?
Speaker 1:Yeah, I mean, if you are like an automation newbie and you're like, oh my gosh, this call sounded cool but like wow, this kind of went over my head, I have two things. I have an ebook that you can download. It's on my website and I'll make sure Dana has it for the show notes. And then I also turned that ebook into an email course. It's kind of fun. I help you create like some little emails and stuff that you can use. I go through those five automations that I use. So it's free, go grab it, go have fun, schedule a demo with me. But if you can't work with me, but go have fun, schedule a demo with me, but if you can't work with me, I get it and I don't want you to feel stuck. So I mean, the ebook is a lot of good information because go figure it out. And if you are nervous, like Google, that shit, I've learned so much from Google and YouTube and it's possible.
Speaker 2:It's possible. Rachel, thank you so much for being here. Thank you so much for everything you do.
Speaker 1:Rooting you on girl, I appreciate it, thank you for everything you're doing and we're so lucky to be in this community and do the work that we do. So, yeah, we are.
Speaker 2:Yeah. Thank you Agreed? Thanks, rach. Thank you so much for tuning into today's episode of Missions to Movements. If you enjoyed our conversation and found it helpful, I would love for you to take a moment to leave a review. Wherever you're listening, your feedback helps us reach more changemakers like you and continue bringing impactful stories and strategies to the show. Don't forget to hit that subscribe button, too, so you'll never miss an episode, and until next time, keep turning your mission into a movement.
