Lynne Wester
Hello. Good afternoon everyone. Or morning maybe for some of you. We’re so excited to have you with us. If you’ll just let us know your name and maybe the organization that you’re with. We are so excited and we’ll get started here in just a minute. So excited to hear from you. Just drop in the chat where you’re joining us from. Make sure you select everyone so everyone can see where you’re joining us from in the chat. Go ahead and type that in there in the webinar chat and we’ll get started. So excited to have all of you with us today.
I’m so excited to see all of you from near and far joining. It’s Lynne Wester, founder and principal of DRG. One of my focus areas for 2024 has been trying to find software companies that bring value to our space. We’ve talked to folks at Awarded. We’ve talked about Otter. We’ve already had one webinar with Josh, but here’s our second to talk with Josh from Storyraise. He and Jeff are the co-founders, and this past weekend we were able to spend a fantastic weekend together in Florida at a tech founder’s retreat. In 2025, I will tell you that there’s much more to come in this space because I really have found that the founders want our help and want to hear from you all about their products, about what you need from them in this space.
I just feel like it’s a wonderful fit, and even if the software isn’t for you, maybe it’s learning a few things that you can incorporate into your digital reporting or maybe it’s just having an hour of professional development with folks like you. We have a couple hundred of you registered today all over and we are so, so excited. This will be recorded at the end. Ashley will send out the recording and the slides and some links to some samples and just any conversation that happened as well. But for now, I am going to turn it over to Josh and let him take it from there. Take it away, Josh.
Josh Kligman
Yeah, thanks Lynne. It was a great technology retreat over the weekend and what I find is that there’s more and more technology companies that really do care and really do want to help and have a basis of nonprofit history and that happens to be my case. So again, I’m Josh Kligman. If we haven’t met before, I’m the CEO and Co-founder of Storyraise. I’m in Washington DC. Storyraise is a solution to create digital impact and donor reports with a focus on increasing donor engagement. I worked at a national nonprofit called 4-H for a little over 10 years before I founded Storyraise. Some of the learnings that I found while I was creating different reports from national impact and annual reports to more regional and local reports was that I only knew some of the metrics and I only knew some of the answers around engagement.
But how do you know if reports are moving the needle when it comes to hard metrics? Is the storytelling really a piece of that ROI (return on investment) in terms of people clicking through reports? Is it leading to more donor engagement in the forms of not just giving, but volunteerism and so on? Technology can be a big piece of that. Like Lynne mentioned earlier, we’ll show you lots of great examples in software, but maybe at the very least there’s nuggets and pieces that can be incorporated into your current practices and that would be a big help. So as I share my screen here, I want to start out by sharing a couple examples. I’m going to share a window here that starts out with an example from Goodwill International.
Now today, we’re going to talk about personalization. Personalization means two things to me: one is about the audience, and two is when you go deeper and you’re talking about personalizing things for individuals or specific groups of people. That has to do with audience segmentation, and we’re going to dive into that in a minute. When you’re talking about your audience in general, personalizing for your audience at its highest levels, just about customization and knowing who your audience is.
The first step with that is really about understanding your audience, and communicating effectively. Knowing who your donors are, and knowing what motivates the donors. That comes down to crafting the right messages, and having the right values and interests that your donors actually care about. When you’re personalizing for different donor segments, you could think about how some research we saw found that about 80% of donors say that personalized communication influences their reasons to give, and that’s because they want to feel included of course.
I’m going to scroll through here with this example of Goodwill, and in this particular example, I’m purposely showing you a general report because it’s personalized for an audience they already know about. This includes great things like multimedia in order to engage them. It’s not personalized where it says, “dear Lynne” or “dear Josh” at that level, but we’re going to get there with other types of examples. If I go to their next section here, the letter from the CEO, we could take a look at how this is organized. With Storyraise, all the reports are web-based, so that means it lives at a URL. It looks and feels like a report because you can scroll through a table of contents and it’s really focused on stories of impact that have to do with engagement. They know who their audience is really based on the stories of impact that they’re telling.
Those stories are showing how “we couldn’t have done this without you” and “here are the results”. It’s saying thank you, and it’s stewarding those donors. They have a different version they made for an international audience that talks to a different audience that’s telling different stories. We even see reports, and I’m going to show you one later, that goes into different languages. When you’re segmenting out those audiences, you’re telling your donors and other groups that we understand your perspective and where you’re coming from, and we could not do this without you. That’s a big leap over general types of reports that don’t feature people like them in the reports, and letting them be the lead in the story.
Another example here comes from a community foundation in North Carolina. This is the Coastal Community Foundation and it is very similar to Goodwill. They do a great job of understanding their audience when it comes down to impact stories.
I’ll show you one more here before we go a little deeper into personalization, and this comes from the Scarborough Health Network in Canada. Their ability to tell stories about patients that they’ve affected because of the gifts that were given is deeply personal. What they were able to do is think about family foundations that are supporting different gifts, then make spin-off versions of those reports. I think that’s the best practice that we’ve seen – where you can take one piece of content that you have and then make multiple use cases out of it. You don’t have to keep creating completely new content from scratch, but you can rinse and repeat. Here in the general report, it’s from the CEO, saying, “thank you so much, here are the stories”. When you get down to individual segmented audiences like family foundations that are helping, you could talk about the exact way that those donor dollars from that organization have been helping.
I just want to pause here before I go into really customized versions. I see a bunch of things popping up on the chat. I’m just going to take a look and see if there’s any questions here. If you have questions, I’m going to try to answer them in real time, so keep them coming
Here is an example of a report from United Way, and they call this “Creating Opportunities”. This is a United Way in Indiana, and this is their impact report. These are stories in the community that feature the people that are beneficiaries of specific programs and different gifts. The way this operates is a little different than the reports you just saw because there’s variable data involved. If you look closely where my mouse is here, it says “hello @first name”. These are variable data tags that pull information like names into a letter. That’s the first step that you could take to personalize reports.
What’s going on behind the scenes is that that data is being pulled automatically. If you’re spending a lot of time manually mapping data points, or if you are personalizing reports from spreadsheets with data tags, this is a way that you can map data using automation from a donor management platform, CRM, or maybe even a spreadsheet that’s all pulled into Storyraise. I think that the more interesting part about personalization here is not the names, though. That’s where it starts; when someone’s reading a report, and whether they notice it intentionally or not, they’ll start to feel like, “oh, this report’s for me”, and “that’s nice, they put my name in there”. But when the stories get specific, and they really can’t tell that it’s personalized, that’s the best personalization.
If you know that your audiences are segmented out based on interest level or giving level, that’s where you can start to tell different stories to different groups of people. But, you don’t have to create different reports for those people. I’ll show you exactly how technology can help with that today.
Let’s think of an example where I’m looking at Lynne on the screen. So Lynne, I’m going to use your name over and over today. Let’s say I know that Lynne is a gold donor for my foundation or my educational institution versus someone else who is a silver donor. I may want to start to show Lynne how her contributions and her gifts as a gold donor specifically have moved the needle through impact stories that I might not want to show other giving levels. I think the more interesting part of that is Lynne’s interest in a certain program on campus or maybe a certain event that I know she attended.
If you have that data sitting in a note in a spreadsheet, in your donor management platform, or in your CRM, that’s an opportunity for me in the background to say, “I want to show a certain impact story to Lynne that I don’t want to show other people that are interested, or giving gifts for a different program because I want to show them a totally different story”. We do that with a technology called stacking. We might have two stories that we’re building at the same time: one we’re showing to one audience, one we’re showing to another. At the end of the day, what that means is you could create one report, send it out to a hundred thousand different people, and as each individual opens it, you’re seeing different versions of it.
There’s the best practice, which is the idea of thinking about how you can customize impact reports, donor reports, any way you can say “thank you”, or newsletters to audiences. When everyone opens it, they see their own version of it – that’s the technology part of it too. You have your best practice part and the technology, and I say that because there are different ways and different technologies that you can think about that best practice and incorporate it. We try to make it really easy with Storyraise. As you go through this particular report that United Way put out, we see different stories that maybe one donor might see versus another.
Another report that United Way put out here did something. Another example, really similar throughout, where they use multimedia to grab attention. That’s a nice benefit of digital reports outside of personalization. Things like video or social media can also be personalized with the same method. It’s the same context that you may have one audience which might want to see a video that’s the result of a capital campaign that you had on your campus, but if someone didn’t participate in that campaign, you may want to show them something different. This could be just an article, a blog, or a different video.
Let’s take a look at what those differences look like here in reality. I have a sample on the screen here, and this is a sample that we created that is going to show us what it looks like for those various constituents. We’ll do a few variations of this, and then I’ll go into the actual report builder that we have. We’ll show you what that looks like behind the scenes and how the data from constituents is accessed and what it looks like in a drag and drop type system to easily build reports like this. I have this report already open for a mock constituent named John. We say, “dear John”, and everything else that you see on the screen right now is evergreen, so to speak. I chose to make it a little simpler and keep the same imagery here.
Of course, everything could be as different and as complex as you want. For the first time that someone is moving into web-based reports that are personalized, you can keep it simple and then you can get more advanced as you go. If I go to the next section in the table of contents here, this is where we get into the impact stories. This section, donor impact stories, has this lady on the left and a little article because you support this program. Underneath it, I want you to intentionally see that you can go to the next section or back to the other one. There’s not another story here. We’re showing one story to this constituent, John. Now, I’m going to change this to Sarah, and it’s going to refresh the page. With Sarah, we’re going to see what it looks like for her.
You can see how I built one report here, but the different constituents are seeing their version. So, “dear Sarah”, of course, and like I mentioned, everything else is the same here. It’s pulling in that variable data tag of the first name being Sarah. Let’s go to what I think is the more impactful section here, the second section. It’s the same kind of layout, it’s a different article, and it’s a different photo. You can see they swapped because I wanted to have this design for Sarah or constituents like Sarah, and it’s telling a totally different story here, and maybe even links somewhere else. There’s no other impact story below this on the bottom – it’s swapped out one for another, and that’s how the output really looks. With technology like this at Storyraise, we call the whole concept precision as you’re able to do that kind of targeting.
I’m going to take a look here behind the scenes in our dashboard, and I want to talk about some of the use cases that are out there for various types of personalized reports. The use cases that we see at Storyraise really align with what our clients and our customers are coming up with. What we do is we’ll build out different templates that align with that, and then allow brands and campuses to align their brand and their communications teams so that the reports are on par with your own brand guidelines. Your logos, brand colors, and licensed fonts all throughout really make it become your own report. In the background, you have a solution that’s really simple to use. We see personalization come alive through impact reports, annual reports, and various donor reports. Even when your counterparts in fundraising are creating a case for giving beyond just saying “thank you”, say, for end of year and event recaps, you don’t see event recaps and volunteer reports.
I see this less frequently but when I do, I smile because I think it’s really important you have alumni or donors come to an event whether it’s in person or virtual. What an opportunity when the event is over to create some sort of series of impact stories to show them. For every person that came to your event, you probably have 10 or 20 more that didn’t make it, and maybe even more. They’ll be able to see what they missed out on. If your event involves sponsors in any way, that in turn becomes a pitch deck and that can all be personalized too. We have different ways to say “thank you”. One I want to highlight that I’m going to go into is this idea of thank you notes and letters. As I hear Lynne talk about all the time, and rightfully so, the handwritten thank you note – I mean you can’t beat that.
We’re trying to find technology that can complement this. One of the ways we do that is through a digital handwritten thank you note that comes up on the screen and also videos. At Storyraise, we encompass all these ways to say “thank you” and reports in one portal, and be a one-stop-shop for these web-based links that you can send out to everybody. I am going to go in and show you maybe two or three of these behind the scenes – especially the thank yous. I think that’s a really good place to start. I want to show the constituent data and how that’s housed in this mock environment that I have here because that’s an important part of personalization.
Let’s say you have a donor management platform and in that platform you’re pulling in all this data from your platform of choice. I’m going to click on one here called “Linda Jones”. All this information is automatically pulled in and updated on a daily basis from the donor management platform here. The most important being the data tags that you care about which are going to define personal stories that you’re telling. In the examples I showed, I’d really care that Linda’s first name is in here and tagged correctly.
It says “@first name” – If Linda was to ever change her name or her email address, then I wouldn’t have to worry about manually updating this, and it will always sync it. Then here we can see that Linda is a gold donor, and if she was a fan of one program versus another, or one school versus another on the campus – all that information would be here. Not every little bit and piece that you want to personalize is sitting in your donor management platform. You may have gotten an idea five minutes ago when I said one audience could see one video in a report and another audience can see another. So where does that live? Well, you can easily add that into Storyraise and say, all my gold donors should see this video. Everyone that supported this campaign in the last five years should see this video on that report and you’re storing that and then I’ll show you how that’s used.
So Lynne, we have a question, please.
Lynne Wester
We have a couple questions I thought we could get to. The first one is “Is Storyraise compatible with Razor’s Edge?”
Josh Kligman
My favorite question of the month so far. We have three, soon to be five, integrations with Blackbaud. One is right here – you can sync to your Razor’s Edge or Blackbaud CRM account and pull in the data here. A second integration is along the lines of Blackbaud donation forms. Wherever you process gifts, if there was some sort of solicitation report where you’re making a case for giving and saying, “thank you so much, here’s the impact and we need your help”, why make the donor click an extra button that then takes them to another page and maybe even another page to donate? Do it all within the report! We seamlessly do that with all platforms through embedded code, but we make it really easy for Givebutter, Bloomerang, Blackbaud and soon to be Virtuous.
A third integration is along the lines of insights and metrics. If you’re in Razor’s Edge, in the marketplace as of yesterday afternoon, we now have a constituent tile. In one click, you can then start to create a personalized report for that donor because you see other metrics that Blackbaud’s providing you. We’re about to assign a donor engagement score that’s going to live there, but it’s also going to live here in this insights tab within Storyraise.
I’m going to pick a random report here. Let’s go with this – I’m in a demo count, we’ll see if it loads everything, but we have insights for every report and it’s really important first of all that you know that with Storyraise, you create a report, we give you a URL and the embed code, You’re going to go take that and use it to make it easy for your existing email platform to send them out.
You’ll be able to see who opens it and who clicks of course. When you come back to Storyraise, and soon to be in Razor’s Edge, you want to be able to see the data in terms of how people interacted with the report. We do that based on AI, and all these prompts are sitting in all our customer’s accounts. You can see where people were coming from, but you also want to see at an individual level for personalized reports, how each individual donor was interacting and engaging with the report. Then, we put that information back into a donor management platform like Razor’s Edge. You can see that there also, and they’re launching that ability in Q1. It will all talk to each other since no one wants to go to multiple tech platforms to see everything. If I can make it out of a regular day without having to search more than just in my Gmail for work and personal, then that’s a win. I wouldn’t want to go to 10 different places to search for information. If I can find the info I’m looking for in my own Gmail, then that’s a miracle.
Here, we try to make it easy. We have different prompts – what section in my report had the highest engagement? You could see that at a general level and then at a very granular level. Can you guess what the most important metric might be for donor engagement when it comes to reports? It’s really hard – I thought about this with my team for two or three months before we came up with it. I’m really interested in hearing what you think. What is the most important metric for you when looking at reports and seeing if people engaged with it?
I’ll just call a few out. I see the click rate. Okay, any others? I see some other questions here. I’ll come back to the question on open rate conversion rate. I think all these are right on to tell the whole story and it’s not satisfaction time spent, and it’s not one or the other. My first thought was time spent when I go back to August or September. I was thinking, and someone else said the section’s viewed and the content and they’re clicking on. I’ve seen three or four of these comments and I think that’s my number one answer. Lynne’s heard me say this a couple of times even this week, but with time spent, if my doorbell rings or I get a call my cell phone and I’m looking at a report and I walk away, on your end, you’re going to think that I spent an hour looking at your report and I may have not read a word.
Someone just said time can be faked if left open. It’s hard to tell with the users or donors of your report whether it’s real engagement or it’s just, as I described, when you just don’t know the answer. The number of times people click through there is really important, and it’s not necessarily clicks to go outbound and open a new tab to your website – it’s about clicks through all the different sections. Almost like they’re thumbing through a paper report – your old school 28 or 32-page printed report, right?
it’s like if you sat there and you watched someone flipping through that report, you can see where they’re clicking and you can see both generally and at a granular, personalized level what the most popular sections are. I think that’s a real nugget of information. If you have that information, you’ll be able to improve on your reports for next year, and before you go to lunch with a donor next week, you’ll be able to say, “I know they really were interested in that one program in section five”. You can really study it with your teams.
Lynne Wester
So that kind of leads Josh into Rachel’s question around what criteria could we use to know what someone’s favorite area of the organization is? It could be giving, but she wants to know if you can customize it by organization. What’s favorite at one organization could be different from a favorite at another organization.
Josh Kligman
You can take a look at any question you could think of in terms of the metrics and really dissect it. Let me give a really concrete example here, and I’ll show you some metrics that I think might really help. I’m going to refresh my page here and load insights for an actual report that’s out there, and it might help give a little more context to everything that we’re talking about.
Lynne Wester
That’s fantastic. Nothing like seeing it in real life, not just pseudo. We show a lot of screenshot examples, so it’s nice to be able to dive right into the platform. We did have one question about integrations. Are there any Tessitura integrations or what if it’s not one of the softwares that you listed that you already integrate with?
Josh Kligman
As long as they have an open API, then we take about five business days and we’ll connect to it. We don’t nickel and dime, we don’t charge extra for that. We just want you to be able to access your data and make great reports. We’ll assign a team to do white glove data mapping with you to get all that done from the connection to making sure that the first name is going to show up correctly. The worst thing is finding new technology and then realizing you have to go do it all yourself – we’ll do it for you, right? What’s cool about that is once you do it and once you have your template and data tags already in there, then you need to create another report for a totally different use case the next month or send a thank you and you’re not starting from scratch.
Here’s metrics on an actual report: I could see that there were 14,000 opens here. Here’s some views by region. If I were to click something like what sections were viewed the most, I haven’t clicked this before, so we’ll see if this even works. By the way, this is Sammy the Sloth, and this is Storyraise’s mascot. Sammy was with his slow friends in the jungle, but Mom wanted to speed up and be at a tech company. So Sammy came over with us and is teaching us to slow down and engage donors in case you’re wondering why there’s a sloth face here with the AI.
Maybe because I’m sharing my screen, but if I were to say how much time was spent on this section versus X section, it’ll pop up and I’m happy to dive deeper with anyone in this offline, but I might be killing my computer right now also using AI while sharing my Zoom. Are there other questions, Lynne?
Lynne Wester
Yes. We have one who said they may or may not have some old school folks who appreciate printed annual reports. Can you use this technology to eventually turn it into a PDF? They just wanted to know, not that anyone at any organization would have any old school folks, but just in case.
Josh Kligman
Just in case, you actually are creating a PDF at the same time that you’re creating digital. We’re the only platform that’s going to do that when you’re in the report builder, and that’s what I’m looking at right now. If you take a look at this impact report, this is the preview for desktop and this is the preview as I’m building it in real time for tablet. By the way, all my sections in the table of contents are on the left and all my design blocks are on the right and I can drag and drop them in and then you’re clicking and editing from there.
You’re seeing a tablet view right now. Here’s the mobile view PDF’s. Next, I’m going to answer your question. Here’s the mobile view so you can see what it looks like on a cell phone, and everything’s mobile responsive because the worst thing is opening a PDF with lots of assets on it on your cell phone and having to pinch and zoom in and you can’t really see everything clearly.
Here’s the PDF version – PDF and digital I should say. Web-based applications are not apples to apples, so if your text is really long on one page on a website, you just keep scrolling forever. But, there’ll be a cutoff point at some point on a PDF, so we give guidelines as to where those cutoff points are. Now, I’m going to open up this PDF preview and I’m going to show you exactly what this looks like when you print it out. The images are digital or compressed, so it loads fast. When your donors open up a PDF, which they can on their own or when you open up a PDF, it’s high resolution and it’s full bleed and you can see exactly how it comes out. I didn’t do anything except make a digital report, and now I have this really great landscape or portrait report. This is more like 8.5 by 11. You could go print out and you’re on your way – that way you don’t have to go create a totally different report.
Any other questions that popped up, Lynne?
Lynne Wester
Just one last one. Our friend Jared works at a small organization and he wants to know what the minimum number of donors on file is to see a return on investment. Are they too small for a platform like this? Maybe you could tell him about some of the smaller organizations you have on the platform because he doesn’t want to waste resources as not every organization is large.
Josh Kligman
There’s the idea that if you haven’t done personalization before that’s like this, you want to make sure that you have some scale so it’s worth it. That United Way example that I showed from Indiana, I think they have several hundred, maybe closer to a thousand different stakeholders that are receiving that (report). I have large institutions that say for some of their major donors, they want to send some reports where each and every bit of it is totally different. In that case, the personalization with scale doesn’t make sense because so much of the report is different, so we’ll just send out 40 at a time. For everyone else, there’s an opportunity to personalize it.
A hundred or less might not be worth it unless you had another segmented audience where there were at least a hundred that you were going to send it to. I think it’s something you can experiment with. We built it to solve the pain points of organizations that are currently personalizing reports because of the manual process. I could see the argument that I could speed things up, but you want a decent sized list to do it.
Lynne Wester
My understanding also is that you have dynamic pricing. If they are a small nonprofit with under a certain amount on their 990, you’re pricing it appropriate to their resources which is really important as well. Something that Josh, Jeff, and I talk about a lot is that we want to make sure that this is accessible regardless of the size of your nonprofit. Jared, you can also talk to them and they’ll look at your 990 and then pricing is based on how small or large your organization is. It’s not all the same.
Josh Kligman
Exactly what Lynne said. If you’re a small nonprofit, we will help you out. We work with smaller organizations and very large institutions doing complex versions of these. Someone just asked about a 10 year study of community reports with various types of data from different people in different regions that are interested in different programs. That comes down to dynamic searching that’s powered by AI and visual storytelling and telling the story behind the numbers for community reports. A whole different use case that, before a month ago, had not necessarily been heard of.
But at the same time, it comes down to what our bread and butter is, which is using technology for interesting storytelling to increase engagement. If your engagement is increasing, then that’s one piece of the puzzle. As you all know, that ties into donor retention and increasing the donor retention. We’re trying to do our part with our knowledge from our own nonprofit work to increase that donor engagement.
We will dive into this a little more at the end and we’ll put a link up, but I just want to also share that we have an e-book that will provide to everyone that’s on this call that dives into the six steps of impact report success. This goes through even more best practices that we’ve seen in all types of nonprofits, foundations, and educational institutions to focus on enhancing donor retention.
Like I talked about, I wrote it with my co-founder, Jeff, who Lynne has mentioned a couple times. Jeff Rum is also here in the DC area, and Jeff has run in the past, before Storyraise, three agencies focused on digital marketing and campaign work for nonprofits and community partners. He saw this need for better tracking, recording, and engagement when it comes to the world of reports, and that’s what we based this on. I’m more than happy to share this with everybody else.
I’m going to share something that I mentioned earlier, which is a report in a different language. Technology gives you the ability to segment those audiences and think about French or Hebrew, which on the screen is tough because you’re writing the other way. We see organizations, especially in Canada, where they have two reports.
I talked about Goodwill creating an international version. I think that one’s also in English, but it’s got a different focus in terms of the Goodwill locations. I talked about this one, which is in a totally different language, so unfortunately I can’t tell you whether this is hitting the mark or not. I don’t know what it says, but I know the point, which is that they’re thinking about who they’re really talking to.
I’m going to go back to something I promised to share here before we open it up for some other Q&A, which was the idea of saying “thank you” and personalizing that. We went off here into metrics, so give me one moment. I’m going to get back to this “thank you” area and show you exactly what that looks like. We have two types of thank you reports and or thank you kind of notes this one. When I click this, it’s going to open a preview here so you can see exactly what it would look like if it was produced. I think that’s exactly what I want to show you. The engagement here goes even beyond personalization. Video in the background is really unique and grabs attention. Of course you could see where you can put the person’s name and then maybe there’s a letter. But what I really like is this right here, and this is what I was talking about: compliments that can’t be replaced with a handwritten note. And if you look closely here, let me see if I can highlight this with my mouse.
There’s a first name, that’s a data tag. I can write, “Dear Lynne” and, “Dear Josh”, and for different types of donors, it could say different phrases. When you’re building, you’re just typing out in plain text – this is really just a font, and different audiences can see different texts. What I think is great is a template we’re launching that doesn’t have a table of contents. You’re not scrolling through anything. Maybe there’s some images like this, but it’s really just a quick “thank you” and not much more. I’m going to go back and show you something really similar, but a video version of this that we offer, and it’s probably similar to things you did today, but you can give a little more context going beyond the video, which would be the idea of pairing it with an impact story that the audience would care about and personalizing that. If you were to say “thank you” or describe anything to anybody in a video, there’s things that could come after the video which could be stories of impact that could be about something they supported, an event you have coming up, or something you want to invite them to. You can get really creative with what that looks like and go a little deeper with the storytelling.
Lynne Wester
We have a question from Dara. She wants to know if, and we haven’t even spoken about this, Josh, but is there a world in which this could be used for a holiday card?
Josh Kligman
It’s funny, when I was at 4H, the nonprofit I worked at, I used to create, and this was when I first started there, but digital holiday cards and they had animation in them. Yes, so we have, this is not live, I’m kind of in this demo account here, but we’re working on this kind of invitation, which is, I thought of this because there’s a Christmas tree in the background and these people are at some kind of holiday event it looks like. it’s just a matter of the content that you put in there. Iin real time, in five minutes from now, I could probably build a holiday card by putting in the right image in the background saying happy holidays or whatever I want to say and “dear @first name”. Coupled with an impact story, I think that we just put out a blog and a couple of social media posts about this idea of what to do after this giving season, not just giving Tuesday. If you think of the end of year, what’s the impact that’s coming out of that? Could you do a start of 2025 report that shows the impact from the giving season? It’s almost like a follow up on “happy holidays”. It’s like during holiday time, here’s the impact that you made.
In a strategic juggle, you could put together a calendar of all the ways you could say thank you and show impact throughout the year and then use all these different templates to do it. I just thought of that now.
Lynne Wester
We’ll write that down. So we’ve got some questions flying in from folks. I think one of the big ones is how do we deliver this? So we’ve got two questions about what sender does this come from? How do we ensure these don’t go to junk? Do these pieces embed in an email? Do we have to switch systems? How does that part work? So I think it’d be great if you could show them that first and then I’ll go into some of the other questions. How do we get this in the donor’s hands?
Josh Kligman
Yeah, let me show you exactly what that looks like. And I’ll open this up here. I’m going to open up a draft report in the builder, and I’ll show you exactly what it looks like when you click the publish button and the URL that you get and how you get it in the donor’s hands. I’ll talk to it while I navigate to that part. Everything is based on clicking a publish button at the end of the day, so you’re collaborating with your team. You can see what it looks like in preview mode as you go, and then you click the publish button Storyraise gives you one URL. If you’re creating a general report that’s going to 50,000 people, you’ll go to your existing email platform and take that one URL and send it out and you make a nice email, you link to it and they open it up. In the background Storyraise is hosting it. If you want to have that link be to your website, great, we’ll give you an embed code or you can have that URL forward to your own domain.
If it’s personalized, we’re still giving you one URL and automatically our system will put a little tag at the end of that URL, which is every single person’s email address. And I apologize you’re seeing a white screen, but I have maybe 500 tabs open. And then when I share on Zoom, that’s what’s going to happen. When Susie and Jane and Bob and Tom, all your donors open that email, we’ll know it’s for them. And you can test that ahead of time by, I could probably actually just do this right here. You could test that ahead of time in a preview mode by typing in the name of the constituent and spot checking every single one of you want to, and see what it’s going to look like from. That’s how you can ensure. I’m going to click the share button right here, and I’ve already published this one and demo mode here. You can see it says republish. Here’s the URL. Some CRMs might require a slightly different URL, and we’ll work with you on that, but you can also generate your PDFs here. You could see samples from different constituents. And then if you want to embed it on your site, we’ll give you the various codes and test with you to make sure it looks right. I hope that answers the question. There’s a lot of nuances there based on everyone’s individual platforms, but it’s pretty easy.
Lynne Wester
And then how often are you guys making new templates for clients to use?
Josh Kligman
Well, we’re about to launch five to 10 new ones. Some of them you got a glimpse of right now. I’d say today or Monday, probably Monday. We base all our new ideas on feedback because someone says, oh, we want this or we need that. So if there’s something you need that you don’t see, it’s very likely someone else needs it and we’re very likely to build it. We’re a pretty nimble team. Once you have your own templates, or if you build your own templates too, you could save them. And that could mean a full report and you save it as a template to use it or just one section in a report that you want to use in other reports or maybe just one little design block you saw on the screen, you’re like, oh, I nailed it. I want to use this one as my marquee way of sharing stories for my whole team. Every time we make a report, you could just share little pieces of that. So you’re kind of creating your own resource library so that you just get faster and faster.
Lynne Wester
When you put a video into a Storyraise into a report, when you link, does it open a new window? Does it keep you right there? I think we really want the videos to be embedded so that it stays there. Can you show people that?
Josh Kligman
Yeah, it keeps you right there and you’re not leaving at all. Let’s say you have a video on YouTube or Vimeo or Facebook, all you’ll do is go and grab the embed code there and then you’ll place it in line within the design block. That could be full screen like you saw in one of the examples I showed before or a little bit smaller, and you’ll click play. I’ll show you how it looked when Goodwill implemented it here. I think they had it in their first section. So I’m just going to go back to the front. I saw a nice example from the University of Michigan Alumni’s Association also where they had a report. The display was really similar to this, so I’m not leaving at all. Let me mute, make sure it’s muted. It’s going to play. It’s pulling this from the source, which is YouTube. It could take over the whole screen, it could take over a smaller part, but we have a design block called video where you’re just pasting in the embed code and then it’ll do the rest of the work. And that’s it. We really don’t want donors to navigate away from all this storytelling. We want them to stay in one spot and all be on the umbrella of your brand.
Lynne Wester
Awesome. And then we have one question. I don’t know if we even have an example. I know you and I have been talking about this, but can you please show how this could be used for endowment reports since these are highly custom individual reports with personalized financials? I don’t know if we’ve mocked that up. You and I had talked about a scholarship, but since the question was asked, I don’t know that we’ve done a financial report.
Josh Kligman
I do. I do have an example because it’s so similar. Okay. Actually, this is the perfect screen here. Let me get my Zoom video. I don’t want to look at my face the whole time while I’m showing this. So here’s this section called about your fund and for endowment. How this looks is really going to pull information specific to the funds from another source. So let’s say you used Blackbaud or fund Miner or your information sitting in spreadsheets, whatever it happens to be for your actual fund information, you’d have the ability to pull the name of the funds and the description of the funds, financials from the funds. If you’re, let’s say a school and you have different beneficiaries of that fund, you could put information in there. And it’s all really seamless and all automatically plugs in today. I know a lot of schools have to send a link out and they get individual information from all the students cobbled all together.
But here it’s all automated. So this is being, this information right here is being pulled from another source, the name of the fund, the description of the fund, and when I scroll down, you’re going to see one after another. That’s because I have them all lined up in the background, but Lynn’s only going to see hers, and Josh is only going to see his. Here it has, and I’ll show you what this looks like when I hit preview mode, but here it’s showing the different fund information. Underneath, I’m ready to show information about the actual beneficiaries. And we have the ability to create a link that you can send out to students and they will upload if you want a video, their headshot maybe. Maybe you don’t even care about the individuals, but you want to show impact stories instead. But all this can automatically populate. And then the right donors that gave those gifts would just see the people or the schools that they benefited from. I have this example here in preview mode.
I’m going to click stop sharing, and then I’m going to share a different window here. I think that’s the best that Zoom’s going to allow me, which is great. And we can see this in action. Let’s see here. Okay, here it is. I’m going to show you two tabs in a row for two mock constituents. This is exactly what I just showed you. This is just a mockup. This is not real information, but this one’s for a constituent named James Wilson. So you can see here on the bottom that it’s for someone named James. And just so you can see the difference, here’s another one for Linda Jones. As I scroll down in Linda’s, it says, dear Linda, of course, the other one’s going to say, dear James, it’s this next section that’s going to be most interesting. So Linda is supporting the Cindy Smith fund.
Here’s the description of the fund, remember Cindy Smith, because I’m going to show you a different name fund than the other tab. And as I scroll down, down, it’s pulling the fund information here and what the value is. And then here are some students that it’s supporting. So this information gets automatically plugged in Jane. And then so on, I’m going to go back to this other tab I showed you for James. Of course, it says, dear James, and when I go to the next section to show information about the fund, it’s not the Cindy Smith fund. It’s a different fund. So again, it’s all from one URL. I sent that to everybody. I’ve prepared it in the background to pull all this data, different fund information. Of course, this is specific to just that other fund, and it’s showing a totally different student here. So that’s how that could work for different types of fund reports or similar for different scholarships.
Lynne Wester
That’s great. So folks, we have about five or six minutes left. I know you’ve seen a lot. Some people are asking what sources would the material for the endowment reports need to pull from? For example, Josh, as you and I have talked about the financials, the donor and the student are all living separate places, but you can pull from multiple sources. So that’s not an issue the way it used to be, correct. So that should take care of Stephanie’s question. Good to hear from you, Stephanie. So it’s absolutely possible to pull from those sources. But anything else you want to tell us about personalized reporting before we close out? And also we have an opportunity if you want to hear more or if you want to talk to Josh directly, you can put your name and email address in the comments, and we’ll pass along your contact information to Josh.
Again, as many of you know, we’re protective of you and your data, so we don’t give list sell lists. He can’t even buy it with queso and a margarita. But if you want to hear more about the platform, you can just send me or the hosts and panelists a private message with your name and contact information. And then Josh can follow up with you directly and you can do that privately or publicly. But we don’t give our lists out, but we give you the opportunity to connect. And we’ll also put Josh’s information in the follow up. So yes.
Josh Kligman
Yeah, thank you, Lynne. I mean, I just appreciate everybody’s time here and all the questions. I think that with personalization, I mean our top priority is making sure that we can help make reports that are different and move the needle and that are connected to metrics at the end of the day that say, Hey, we have a team that invested all this time and energy into telling great impact stories and saying thank you, and here are the results even beyond the donor dollars. We’re committed to that from the very beginning. This is not a tool where we say, Hey, here’s your access. Go. We care and show that during the onboarding right away and the continued ongoing support that’s dedicated for each one of our customers. So when it comes down to personalization, there’s a lot of different, I think paths and nuances that different organizations have and that we’ve seen. There’s use cases we probably haven’t even thought of yet. I think we talked about one or two of them here. So all very, very interesting. And we’re also here to learn,
Lynne Wester
And my friend Julie at Conestoga College is bragging on how the support has been. She’s been a long time DRG follower. So great to hear that you’re having a good experience, Julia, Julie, that makes us really happy. So again, trying to bring you tech that actually understands your situations and how it works. And so just thrilled to partner with Josh and others, and you’re going to see other folks come on board. But we’re also going to bring Josh and Jeff back in early 2025 to talk more about the platform and just the more folks we get on the platform, the more use cases we have to share samples. And so if you ever need samples or just need, and that’s the other thing, if you just want to talk to Josh about what’s happening in the world of reporting and online platforms, he’s happy to take that.
You don’t have to be like, and we’re going to buy, going to buy. It can just be having a chat about the world that we all live in and that we love. So that’s always an opportunity. I want to say thank you to Josh, thank you to Ashley, thank you to Madeline on my team who’s in the chat, all of you for supporting and then all of you for coming. This is a great opportunity for us to share as a community and learn about common things. And if you weren’t able to get your question answered today, go ahead and email Josh at Storyraise and he will answer some of those specific questions that are directly to you. We will take care of that. But thank you everyone. It’s a long weekend after, a long, long week for some of us, and I hope you do some self-care, hug your doggo or your kiddo or your family, and just know that the work you do matters out in this space, and we’re grateful to each and every one of you. So enjoy yourselves, but also have a meaningful weekend. Thank you.
Josh Kligman
Thank you all. Thanks Lynne.