We've recently signed up to use Drip, marketing automation that doesn't suck (their tagline), and so far so good. In fact, I'm pretty impressed with the onboarding and flexibility in setting up of the account, along with all the integrations available. In addition to the ease of setting up automated marketing workflows and communicating with the right supporters at the right time, Drip offers something a little extra for nonprofits through it's integrations with a number of payment gateway providers - the perfect chance to nurture existing supporter relationships and turn those one off donors and supporters into regular givers.
Drip is quite like Autopilot, another great tool worth checking out. Funraisin currently has an integration with Auotpilot and are soon to release an integration with Drip.
Trialists are your Recurring Donor opportunities
The world of SaaS refer to customers (subscribers to your product) and trial users (trialists who haven't yet committed to a paid subscription plan) and there's a ton of information out there on setting up, lead scoring and monitoring trialists to convert them into paying customers. This proven, bench-marked knowledge from the world of SaaS is gold for nonprofits as the ultimate aim is the same - become a software subscriber / become a regular giver.
How to identify a nonprofit 'trialist'
Every organisation's different but you can start by looking at a few different things. For example, start with looking at the actions performed by a user on your website. This should be someone who has signed up to receive information from you (it could be they gave their email address to download a particular report, RSVP'd to an event, registered as a fundraiser, etc). In any of these actions, using a tool like Drip, you can send an 'event' so that you know they’re in their 'trial'. This 'event' is recorded against that supporters profile. Make sure you've got your automated marketing tools' snippet of tracking code on your site so that their record will also be updated with their site interactions - or if you're a Funraisin customer you're probably already familiar with monitoring the interactions your donors and fundraisers have on the site (it's now just a matter of sending those 'events' into your automated marketing tool).
You'll then also want to make sure they are not tagged as a Recurring Donor, meaning they haven’t converted yet. This way you know they’re in their 'trial' period.
And finally, you can add an extra check that they haven't performed the action of cancelling their ongoing donations. This is again a call that would be made from Drip to your payment gateway.
By performing these automated checks, you're calling out all three of these criteria from Drip at the appropriate point, allowing you to keep track of all of your trialists in an easy-to-create segment.
Using this segment, you can now setup an email broadcast, or automated campaign, that just targets 'trialists' and automate it so that each day it ticks over and as new 'trialists' come into your database they go into the nurture sequence you've developed (or are planning on developing!). This nurture sequence should reinforce the amazing work your organisation does and the impact it has - it should also have identifiable goals and milestones which can push 'trialists' in and out of the journey based on how they interact with your content and what actions they perform.
More on nurture sequences soon!
