Andrew Chappell · Digital Lead, Action Against Hunger | The amazing results Andrew has obtained for Action Against Hunger are just a taste of the gamechanging advice he has for nonprofits that are ready to increase donations.
Quick, before we start the podcast: If you're a nonprofit marketer and you haven't seen what happened when Action Against Hunger added Funraise's pop-up donation forms to their website, do yourself a favor and take a look. (We'll wait.) The results they saw are so incredible that you'll immediately understand why Action Against Hunger's Digital Lead, Andrew Chappell, said it was the single biggest contribution to their successful revenue gains in 2020.
Of course, after working closely with Andrew and knowing how he achieved these amazing results for Action Against Hunger, it became obvious that inviting him on the Nonstop Nonprofit podcast would result in gamechanging advice for nonprofits ready to increase donations.
We also took a chance and let Andrew take the podcast-hosting reins—he brought some hard-hitting questions to the table, and we believe our CEO, Justin Wheeler, answered everything with the same kind of openness and thoughtfulness that Andrew offered during his interview.
Now, a warning regarding this episode: We can barely contain the guidance that Andrew offers, so get ready to take notes and set up your own smart opportunities for nonprofit growth, an immensely improved giving experience, and infinitely increased donations. You won't want to lose a moment after you hear what he has to say.
Hello, I'm Justin Wheeler, and welcome to this episode of Nonstop Nonprofit!
Quick, before we start the podcast: If you’re a nonprofit marketer and you haven’t seen what happened when Action Against Hunger added Funraise’s pop-up donation forms to their website, do yourself a favor and take a look. (We’ll wait.) The results they saw are so incredible that you’ll immediately understand why Action Against Hunger’s Digital Lead, Andrew Chappell, said it was the single biggest contribution to their successful revenue gains in 2020.
Of course, after working closely with Andrew and knowing how he achieved these amazing results for Action Against Hunger, it became obvious that inviting him on the Nonstop Nonprofit podcast would result in game-changing advice for nonprofits ready to increase donations.
I also took a chance and let Andrew take the podcast-hosting reins—he brought some hard-hitting questions to the table, and I think... I HOPE I answered everything with the same kind of openness and thoughtfulness that Andrew offered when I interviewed him.
Now, a warning regarding this episode: We can barely contain the guidance that Andrew offers, so get ready to take notes and set up your own smart opportunities for nonprofit growth, an immensely improved giving experience, and infinitely increased donations. You won’t want to lose a moment after you hear what he has to say.
Justin Wheeler Hey, listeners, thank you for tuning in to this episode of nonstop nonprofit super excited to dig into some questions with Andrew from Action Against Hunger. He heads up marketing at an organization based out of New York doing amazing work around the globe. Andrew, thank you for joining the podcast today.
Andrew Chappell Thanks, Justin. It's nice to be here.
Justin Wheeler Before we get too far into all things marketing, I'd love if you could share with listeners a little bit more about Action Against Hunger and how you got involved with the organization.
Andrew Chappell Sure. So Action Against Hunger is a global nonprofit organization, humanitarian organization, that fights hunger and malnutrition. It's been active for more than 40 years and works in over, nearly 50 countries. It typically serves about 17 million people each year. So it focuses both on acute treatment as well as prevention, as well as some innovative program practices around like sustainable livelihoods. At Action Against Hunger on the digital lead. So I oversee your digital strategy as well as our website, including CRO and SEO, as well as our paid advertising program. And in terms of how it came to Action Against Hunger, I started there in 2019 after working in the corporate space for several years. So I worked as a freelancer as well as a consultant, a digital marketing manager at startups, as well as places like Penguin Random House and Condé Nast. And prior to that, I actually worked in nonprofits for about eight years at an organization called The Rainforest Alliance. So from nonprofit to the corporate sector and then hopefully taking some of those learnings from the corporate sector back to nonprofits as I came back to Action Against Hunger.
Justin Wheeler That's awesome. What would you say are some of the maybe unique challenges that you experience running marketing, digital marketing, at a nonprofit versus a corporation?
Andrew Chappell You know, I think a couple of the unique challenges there, I would say at a nonprofit and there's sometimes at a nonprofit there, I think we all know we deal with a shortage of resources. We're all wearing a lot of hats. We're trying to do a lot of different things. Coming back from the corporate sector, to nonprofits, I noticed that we had some data gaps. So there were a lot of things that we didn't actually know and that we needed to find out as a challenge. And then I think one of the other challenges we face, and you might have a similar experience as a digital marketer in nonprofits, is just sort of selling the value of digital marketing at the nonprofit in the nonprofit space. I think there's still sometimes a sense that, you know, we don't want to run ads. We're not advertisers, you know. So I think showing the value of digital marketing is also one of the challenges.
Justin Wheeler How is that been? Because I feel like we've been working, Funraise has been working with Action Against Hunger since 2017, maybe. So I'm a little ahead of your time and I feel like, you know, at least since 2019 onward, I've seen a lot more on the digital front. I've seen a lot more ads like how has that transition been for the organization and how is sort of the results kind of followed as you've gotten more into the paid media and the other sort of marketing efforts you mentioned as part of your role?
Andrew Chappell Yes. So we ran our first pilot in digital advertising in 2019. That's when I came out and they sort of brought me on to manage that and run that. Previously, like a lot of nonprofits, I think we were invested heavily in direct mail rather than digital. So coming on in digital, there's the process of sort of getting your creative in line, figuring out what's going on with your donors, figuring out how to target them in that launching at all, which can take some time. We also Action Against Hunger, we're sort of struggling with low brand awareness. So we were founded in France, very well-known in France. In the US, our brand awareness is much lower compared with other actors in this space. So we kind of had the two-fold goal with our digital program of bringing on new donors, as well as raising brand awareness and increasing our reach and introducing the organization to donors as well. So those are a couple of the things that we focused on there. And we found that as we sort of ramped up the digital program, our results were very good. We were able to quickly add new donors and then we increased our spend. And then at 2020 we had our highest revenue year ever, largely due to our efforts in digital.
Justin Wheeler Definitely saw a huge increase in your guys' online revenue as your tech vendor, which was really cool to see. Which kind of leads into this next question you know, I've worked with and talked and talk with a lot of nonprofit organizations and a lot of times, you know, big or small, I see sort of this silo between marketing and fundraising. And so how does Action Against Hunger sort of look at the function of marketing, the function of fundraising? How do those teams collaborate, work alongside each other? I'd love to understand sort of the way you guys sort of operate internally within those two teams.
Andrew Chappell Yeah. So, you know, I think I'm pretty bias working in digital, but to me, marketing is fundraising. I mean, marketing and fundraising is marketing. Marketing is telling the story of the organization. It's introducing yourself to potential donors as well as acquiring new donors. So it is a direct ask, you know, direct marketing, fundraising. We do have other fundraising activities. You know, one of the things I think that the last year maybe has thrown into stark relief is just the importance in the power of digital fundraising, because I'm sure a lot of nonprofits experienced this, in the last year due to the pandemic, some of your other sources of fundraising were no longer viable. So if you were doing, for instance, face-to-face fundraising, which you might be familiar with, where kind of on the street asking for donations, you couldn't do that anymore. Or if you depended on a big gala to fundraise for, it wasn't, it wasn't an option. And so, you know, digital fundraising became the way to fundraise in 2020 and we were fortunate that we had invested in it and that we were ready for that. I think going forward that will become increasingly, you know, sort of the way forward for fundraising.
Justin Wheeler Yeah, definitely. I mean, the economy is turning more and more digital every year. The pandemic accelerated the necessity to be a digital-first, virtual first sort of fundraising strategy as a nonprofit organization. And I loved the first thing you said in regards to the question I asked fundraising is marketing and marketing is fundraising. That tells me a lot about the way you look at marketing and how Action Against Hunger treats marketing. I think it's the right way to go about it. I mean, those two functions cannot be siloed. And when they are, that's when you see a breakdown in sort of results, understanding and so forth. So love that those things are top of mind. You know, you mentioned Action Against Hunger has low brand awareness. What on the paid side are you able to do to sort of help increase that brand awareness, at least here in the United States? Or I should say, how do you think about digital marketing differently for brand awareness versus fundraising?
Andrew Chappell Yeah, so sure, I can speak to that a little bit. So particularly in Social, about eighty five percent of our budget goes to direct acquisition. So it's just used toward getting a conversion. Ten percent of our budget goes to awareness-raising and then five percent goes to Legian. So that 10 percent we put toward awareness-raising. What we do there is we actually create different creative meant to just sort of introduce users to the organization, kind of raise our profile. And we also optimize for clicks in Facebook there. And what that does is you sort of get in front of a different audience. So when you're optimizing for clicks, Facebook's algorithm may be showing it to a different audience than if you're optimizing just for conversions. So we're really just trying to get in front of as many people as possible, their drive as many people as possible to our website, and then they enter our marketing program. So then they're being shown display ads. We're targeting them and we're cultivating them to become donors. So we served about 50 million impressions in 2020 and there's the kind of the primary benefits of that, which is bringing on new donors as well as getting in front of new people. There are secondary benefits to that that are a little bit more intangible and a little bit difficult to measure. But we did, for instance, see, because we had our ads and our organization, we're telling our story to so many more people. We saw, for instance, a large uptick in corporate partnerships more than ever before. So we were getting approached by potential corporate partners like we never were. It led to some marketing opportunities and some kind of synergistic marketing with big brands that we may have never worked with before. So, yeah, it's bringing on new donors as well as getting out there in front of people.
Justin Wheeler That's what I love about marketing. There's oftentimes there can be sort of this over complication to attribute every single dollar to a donation or a conversion, whatever it might be. But sometimes at the end of the day, you obviously can't do that. And being able to reach 50 million people through paid media and then to see sort of other functions of the business benefit from that through partnerships and so forth, that's when, you know, marketing is working. Right. And that's that's when you know that, again, you can't necessarily attribute every single dollar back to a specific result. But when you start to see the organization being lifted up in ways like it hasn't been for, that's when, you know, your efforts are making a big impact. When you say a large portion of your budget goes to conversion, or acquisition, is sort of the goal a donation immediate or is it collecting an email address, nurturing and then ultimately convert to a donor? Sort of what does that funnel look like for you on the acquisition side?
Andrew Chappell Yeah, so we have we have a multilevel funnel that you might be familiar with. So we have that prospecting audience where we're really just trying to drive them to the site, get them, show the video, tell our story, get them, get them sort of interested in us, kind of warmed up. And then they'll be showing that retargeting later on to sort of hopefully cultivated into a donor. We also, of course, have direct asks that we use to just kind of bring new donors on. One of the nice things about Funraise is as we make that direct ask and we get that donation, we can actually collect the email address as well. So we can then if they do become a donor, we can then turn them into hopefully repeat donor, hopefully a loyal supporter down the line because we can start to send them emails and kind of steward them that way.
Justin Wheeler Yeah, that's awesome. I know we just launched a case study with you and the organization just sort of based on some recent success around conversions. Can you share a little bit with our audience the test that you ran? I think I think this is so important to always be testing for optimization, especially if you're spending a good amount on paid media. You want to know that it's working and you want to make sure that conversion rate. Is as optimized as possible, so you share a little bit about the test that you guys ran and sort of some of the results that came as a result of those tests.
Andrew Chappell Yeah, sure. So, you know, the landing page and whether that's converting is a pretty critical element of any fundraising campaign. In this case, we're always testing. So we're trying to improve the landing page. We're trying to convert as many users on site to donors as possible. And this case, this test that we ran, one of the really cool things about the fundraising forums is you can open them anywhere so you don't necessarily need to send a user to a traditional donate page. So what we asked is, you know, what if the donor, what if the form just opens right off that donate now button in our or navigation that many nonprofits have, rather than the sort of traditional route, which is to send a donor to a donate page and then try to make the conversion there. With this variant method, the donor can make a donation anywhere there on the site. If they're inspired to give right, then they can open the form and they can complete that transaction as quickly as possible. So we ran a test in early 2020. What we actually saw at the end of the test, the results were pretty amazing. We got a seventy eight percent lift in conversion rate, so we jumped our conversion rate from thirty eight point three percent to sixty eight point three percent. One time gift conversion rate increased eighty eight percent, total value increase of twenty three point three percent for one time gifts and sixty five point eight percent for monthly gifts. So all of that is just to say it was really a game changer for us. It contributed, I think, to tens, if not hundreds of thousands of additional revenue during the year just because we were losing donors on that donate page. Of course, you also want to test and iterate on your donate page to keep that from happening. But just really pretty critical game-changer there for us.
Justin Wheeler That's awesome. Yeah, I always say that every page is a donation page. Right. Like, as you mentioned that traditionally, and what you still see a lot in the market today, is organizations send donor a couple of clicks into a new page, more content. Sometimes the form is below the fold. You've got to scroll just so many distractions and opportunities for the donor to abandon the intended sort of action that they came to take. And so I love that sort of your tests proved out what one of the core kind of components we've built here at Funraise. But yeah, every page is a donation page. Every page inspires a donor a different way. And and we, I often refer to it as contextualized giving. When an individual is compelled by something, there should be no distraction to get them to convert it to donate. And so it's amazing to see those results and to hear sort of that success. And congratulations on on running an effective test.
Andrew Chappell Yeah, thanks. I mean, I think it was probably the single biggest contributor to our successful revenue gains in 2020. One other kind of interesting thing that we did with the Fundraise forms is we created what we call a contextual CTA. So it's a button that can be dropped into any content piece, any story. You can customize the copy on it so that it's in line with what the content piece is and then if a donor is inspired to give while reading through, you've got this sort of button right in the content piece as well, which again, you can just open the form. Another thing that was helpful to us as we move to v2 Funraise forms and we increase the amount of payment forms we accept. So we were able to at Apple Pay, we were able to add PayPal recurring gifts and providing these additional options for donors too was really helpful in terms of increasing revenue. We added more PayPal recurring gifts that we didn't have before and so on, or Apple pay gift sales was great.
Justin Wheeler Yeah, awesome. That's good to hear. Yeah. Giving donors the ability to give through the method they want to give is certainly important. I hope to see you guys get that bitcoin up on their soon to as well to start accepting some of that bitcoin money. That is great to hear. Any other sort of outside of sort of the optimization of that conversion. Any other tips or tricks that you've learned over the last couple of years being an Action Against Hunger as a marketer that you've seen help increase sort of the results you're looking for, anything that you think would be worth sharing with our listeners?
Andrew Chappell Yeah, I mean, I have a few. So I think for a successful fundraising campaign, you're really looking at three elements there. So you've got your creative, you've got your targeting and then you've got your landing page. And I think sometimes you run campaigns where you're not necessarily driving people to landing page. Most of the time you are. It's really important that all three of these things are sort of working well together and that they're all optimized. So I think it's important to kind of look at your metrics as you're running these campaigns. You know, you might see with your creative, if you're creative, you're not seeing very good engagement. You're not seeing a high relevant score at Facebook. You're not seeing a very good click through rate. You might have an issue with your creative. So your metrics can kind of inform where in that journey you might be going wrong. If, for instance, instead you're seeing high engagement on this ad, you're seeing a high click through rate, but then you're just not converting, then you might want to look at your landing page. So those are some of the, some of the sort of, you know, when you've got each element there working and kind of firing on all cylinders, that's key to a successful campaign. You're engaging them, you're driving them and you're converting them. Another thing that's worked really well for me and my experience is just video. So I'd recommend, especially in social that you, if you can, because not all nonprofits have the resources to produce it, but if you can produce video, it's dynamic, it's visual, it gets users attention right in the feed. And in my experience is the best way to tell your nonprofit story. You take them there, you take them on the ground, you show them the work you're doing. You sort of transport them that way and you get them engaged. So I'd say video. And I'd also note that most of our donors are coming from mobile. So make sure you're using the video. You're optimizing in an aspect ratio that looks great on mobile, takes up the most owned real estate there, or device real estate, that can help as well. So those are a few of the tricks, a few of the tips I can give there.
Justin Wheeler Yeah, that's super helpful. And let's talk a little bit about budget, because obviously when you're distributing content and you're trying to get good results, you've got to pay for it. Nothing's free. How do you go about budgeting for paid media? And is it is it a percentage of revenue? Is it OK, here's the goals from from the executive team. Is so much budget going to need to achieve it? How do you plan sort of your media budget for a given year and what sort of return is expected from your team as a result of that budget?
Andrew Chappell Yeah, so our budget, you know, when we first started with our pilot in 2019, we ran what was pretty much just a test pilot to see how we would do there. Our budget increased from 2019-2020 by sixty six percent and then again by forty percent based on the results. So what we do is we actually project out. So this is another thing I should add here. So it's not really enough just to look at the performance metrics of your ad campaign. It's also really critical that you understand who your donors are for targeting purposes, but also that you understand their behavior. You need to understand their giving behavior when they're giving how much they're worth generally on average, how long they're retained. So there's a lot of data and analytics that go into running sort of the successful campaign there. So what we do is we collect that information and it's some data analysis. It takes some time. And then we know, for instance, an average donor is worth this amount, which means we can acquire them at this amount, which means that into the future, projecting out, that will be worth this amount to us down the line. So we have those revenue targets and then we budget accordingly based on trying to hit those revenue targets into the future. And you need to leave yourself some wiggle room there. And I think you need to also make it clear always to the executive team that it is a projection. And so you may or may not get there. Hopefully you do. Hopefully you do. And another thing I would I would know is when you see some success, make sure that whether you're running it yourself or working with an agency, that you can scale that effectively. Because a common mistake that I've seen in my own career, as well as at other nonprofits, is you start to have some success in your paid media and then you sort of everyone says, this is great, it's working great, let's put some more funds into this. But then you don't you're not able to scale effectively because you can't just put as much more budget as possible into something. You might find that you're conversions in that audience are no longer there. So it's important to scale efficiently, make sure you're still hitting your CPA and also think about not just scaling vertically in terms of putting more budget into the ads that are working, but scaling horizontally in terms of finding new audiences, finding more audiences and expanding the amount of audiences that you're getting in front of. So that's what I would I would say in terms of budgeting, just make sure you know what your goals are. And really you have to have that understanding of your donor behavior. Otherwise you're sort of flying blind. And I think that's a mistake a lot of nonprofits make is let's just try some ads. We don't really know necessarily what our donors are worth, how often they give, how long they stay on file. And you're sort of flying blind if you don't know that.
Justin Wheeler Yeah, so in terms of the acquisition, the paid budget, you've obviously got a donor file, you've got you've got a huge file of donors. And so how much of sort of the paid media goes to targeting those donors? You already have their information and trying to get them to donate versus net new acquisition of new donors they don't even have in your file. How do you separate sort of the budget, if at all, to kind of accommodate the two different audiences?
Andrew Chappell We don't currently have a budget set aside for retention. Although you will find, I think, as you run paid advertising, that you're not just acquiring new donors, but that you're actually reactivating donors that you may not have been engaged with for a while. So one of the strategies there, as we pull a lapsed donor file from our CRM and then we try to show our ads to donors who we know have given in the past and a lot of the time we bring them back on. And in some cases, we've even brought back on major donors. Another strategy for retention, I would say, so your retention budget versus your acquisition budget is you can often just use posts that are working in your organic, social. And a lot of the times with Facebook's algorithm that those organic post, depending on the size your audience, may not be being seen. You can take those successful organic posts people are engaging with and just turn them into retention ads because, you know, your audience is engaging with them. You know, they're liking them. And then you just show them even without an ask, just to kind of retain them. And then we also use email for retention as well. So that answers your question in terms of. Yeah, because our budget.
Justin Wheeler No, it definitely does. One last question here and then I know you have a couple of questions for me, but I hear a lot of organizations say that digital fundraising media spend its low dollar fundraising. It's only going to attract sort of the annual donors individuals, not not the major donors and so forth. Is that is that true in your guises efforts or are you seeing a pretty diverse demographic of donors giving through your marketing efforts?
Andrew Chappell No, in our case, it's not. Your average gift is often going to vary by channel. So that's an important thing to measure as well. In terms of what level these donors are at by channel. You might have, for instance, lower dollar donors coming in on social than you do and some of your other channels. But we've seen donors come in across our entire all of our giving levels. So we've got low dollar individuals, we've got some mid-level donors, and then we have major donors coming in as well. I'd also say don't be afraid to go after those new major donors in your acquisition. So there are targeting you can use and Facebook, for instance, where you can target by income level or lifestyle or some of these demographic, perhaps different cultural interests. So you can actually go after major donors in your acquisition as well. So don't be afraid to do that.
Justin Wheeler Got it. And to your point earlier about sort of the analysis, a lot of times in my experience when I was fundraising, we would acquire donors. I mean, typically people when they give the first time online for the most case, you know, it's not going to be at their full capacity. Right. It's it's I saw this ad or I remember this organization and I'm going to make a contribution because it's compelling. And if you're able to analyze the data and we help organizations do this, to Funraise is to provide wealth information specifically. So you understand, OK, this person gave a hundred bucks, but they actually have the capacity to give ten grand. OK, so we're going to we're going to nurture this donor. And a little bit differently, they're going to go to our major gifts team to really start building a relationship. And so that's another really effective way. I've seen digital use specifically paid advertising, its uses, as you do, grab high net worth donors who are giving below their capacity are able to obviously upgrade their giving as you build the relationship. And so I definitely agree with sort of the approach you guys are taking and have experienced that as well.
Andrew Chappell Sure, yeah, one of my questions was just sort of what inspired you initially to found Funraise and what sort of gaps or discrepancies did you see in existing fundraising software that you wanted to solve for? And a secondary question there is do you feel like you solved them or are there more to kind of go after in the future?
Justin Wheeler Yeah. No, we're never done innovating. We're never done building at Funraise. Lots more problems that we can solve and lots more product that we can ship to our customers to enable them to continue growing. So we're never done there. But in terms of what inspired me, So I spent 12 years fundraising. I started two nonprofit organizations raised raised about a hundred million over the course of those 12 years through digital fundraising campaigns and used everything and even built our own stuff for different campaigns. And the initial sort of like challenge was we were using a giving form or giving page that was redirected off of our domain. We had very little control of and we couldn't control the branding and it didn't feel proprietary to sort of our organization. And so that was sort of the first, I think that like more nonprofits, bigger and small, want to really own the donor experience, we want it to look proprietary donors don't care about third party tech vendor. They really care about the brand they're supporting. And so that just the lack of customization was like the first sort of problem I wanted to solve. And then also just the the intelligence. So when we launched Funraise, we launched just as a giving form. And we called it like the smart giving form because a donor would come in and give five, maybe five pieces of information about themselves and we were able to produce 10 to 15 more attributes that would make you a better fundraiser and also save you time. As as a former fundraiser, I would spend lots of time doing the research, trying to understand people's ability, capacity, and it just took so much time. So we really wanted to try to automate that as much as possible and make that into the payment flow as part of the donor journey. And then lastly, just the amount of friction that you often see. I mean, it's for many nonprofits, it's easier for their donors to buy toilet paper on Amazon than it is to make a contribution on your website. And I did not want to see any more bad giving experiences because organized nonprofits are solving the world's most important challenges, and we shouldn't add a layer of friction to a donor. And so at the end of it, it was wanting to build super smooth giving experiences. And then also a lot of organizations are using three, four or five different pieces of software. And so our goal was also to help consolidate that and try to do as much as possible within the Funraise platform so that you're not having to spend a bunch of money on technology that ideally could be done in one place. So that was really the the initial sort of inspiration to get the company started. And as we've grown over the last six years, you know, working with thousands of nonprofits really are our focus now is, as a company, is how do we help our customers, our prospects, really raise more money online. And so where we're headed from a roadmap perspective and from a product perspective is more payment features, more opportunities for nonprofits to engage across multiple channels to really utilize just the the acceleration of the digital economy for their own growth opportunities. And so that's really where our focus is a lot more on the payment side, FinTech is a big play that we're bringing into the into the platform to help organizations leverage some unique opportunities there as well. So from a high level, that's who we are, what the inspiration was and where we're going as a company?
Andrew Chappell Yeah, that's great. And I think that's so new. You know, there's so many one of the things and I think this is actually true across both the corporate and nonprofit sector is there's a lot of data and system fragmentation and systems siloing. So having a system that can kind of do a lot of what you need to do is great. One of my other questions for you is just in terms of the innovations, things coming down the road, there are many things that relate directly to digital marketing, in my experience with Funraise, beyond the form opening, which was a huge kind of game changer for us. Another thing that I worked with you on is that we didn't know very much about where we're coming from. So we were kind of, you know, I used the kind of the metaphor, oh a boat like we were sort of just taking all of our donors and putting them on the same boat. So one of the things I implemented when I came on was just UTM tracking. And I talked with you all at Funraise. I said I need to be able to track these donors. So we were using JavaScript on the site to kind of pull the UTM in and then send it somewhere to our our various tracking devices and Funraise immediately responded. Within two weeks, I was able to collect as UTM fields in Funraise, which is great and has been super helpful for us in terms of knowing where donors are coming from and therefore what they're worth and their behavior and cohorts going forward. So I guess just what are you all thinking about in terms of additional innovations in digital marketing that might help marketers going forward?
Justin Wheeler Yeah, I know that's a great question. So. One of the obvious is just more more functionality around sort of our email capabilities. Like today, it's like pretty standard when a donor does this, or pretty standard to a few different kind of components of Funraise. And while, like, you know, we're not trying to maybe replace your like enterprise, ESP there should be automation's that you can build in a trigger within Funraise when something happens. Right. We're currently scoping out a lot more sort of email functionality that I think will give marketers the ability to create easier automation's based off of donor behavior. Or, you know, for instance, as an example, like low hanging fruit, abandoned cart opportunities when someone enter some information but then leaves the form, making it easier within Funraise to actually go after and acquire that donor, maybe serve and add to them or or be able to email a few times, create an email journey. So thinking there about about that also like we do have like a Funraise aware script, which I think you've probably injected in the head of your website, but expanding sort of the capabilities of what that can do and what type of information that can collects on your web traffic and how that relates to different programs within fundrise that you could run, whether it's donor acquisition, retention, recurring donor program, things of that nature, such as more enhancements around the Funraise aware script that's that's on the site. Those are top of mind because there's things we're actively discussing today. And we've talked about tighter integration, sort of with like Facebook ad studio and other sort of ad programs, bringing that into the Funraise platform that all these sites have APIs where you could you could bring that in and really live in one place. And so outside of that, I'd love to speak with you more and see what other ideas you might have or what are some pain points that you have and how we can help drive even more success for you guys in the coming years.
Andrew Chappell Yeah, that's great. I mean, one of the things I really appreciate about Funraise is that you all are always constantly innovating and you're kind of on the cutting edge of what's happening there. Even just to circle back to the suggestion around crypto. So, you know, Funraise allows you to accept Bitcoin, which is great. And one thing I would say to four other nonprofits out there, we started accepting crypto just at the end of last year, and it's really been a huge revenue driver for us this year. There are concerns around that, of course. If you're an environmental nonprofit, you have to decide if it's right for you in terms of the environmental impacts, which we hope to see improvement on. But definitely consider it because there are a lot of donors out there with a lot of wealth and crypto willing and ready to give, and they just need a place to give. So think about it. Hopefully we see improvement in the environmental impacts into the future.
Justin Wheeler Yeah, absolutely. And I think with with Elon Musk's call out there in Bitcoin, I think we'll probably start to see some better practice there. But you're totally right. It's a totally new asset class. Right. So when you're going after crypto donors, it's a different donor demographic. It's net new donors for the most part. So it's definitely an interesting audience to to target for sure. Andrew, thank you so much for joining the podcast and sharing. I know that you're busy ending hunger. And so to carve out 30 minutes to join us on the podcast, we really do appreciate that.
Andrew Chappell Thanks for having me, Justin. It was nice to be here today.
Justin Wheeler All right. Have a good one. Talk soon.
Thanks for listening to this episode of Nonstop Nonprofit!
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