Automation vs Authenticity: A Non-Profit Marketers Lessons from Mailchimp’s Marketing Success Season

Mailchimp’s Marketing Success Season was packed with tips on how to supercharge your marketing efforts going into the holiday season. But as with many international webinars led by tech companies, it can feel focused on corporate sales insights.

So, let’s step away from the corporate jargon and look at what non-profit and charity sector marketers can take away from last week’s sessions.

• Day One – Ready for Growth? Winning in the Age of AI.
• Day Two – Seasonal Moments & Authenticity
• Day Three – Keeping Customers: Micro-Insights, Macro-Impact to Building Lasting Loyalty
• Day Four – Growing Customers: Inside Automated Workflows of Winning Brands
• Day Five – Marketing Reinvented: The Data-to-intuition Revolution

Day One – Ready for Growth? Winning in the Age of AI.

On Day one, we met R “Ray” Wang who gave us a (very speedy) run-down of how to win in the age of AI. A massive topic to cover on the first day, and I felt that ‘winning’ was discussed predominantly in the context of sales. Now, the simplest way to translate this is to think, donors = buyers/consumers, but that would only give us a small part of the picture. As non-profits and charities, our customers are our volunteers, our champions in the community, those who benefit from health information we publish, families and loved ones, lapsed, and future donors.

One of the key takeaways from this session was how we can use AI and automation for decision velocity and speeding up the way we work. In a highly competitive world, one way we can use automation is to bring down customer acquisition cost through subscription models (i.e recurring donations) and ‘flywheels’ instead of funnels (turning your existing subscribers and followers into your biggest advocates).

So how do we apply this to non-profits? Put simply, we need to keep the people who already know about us interested. We need to turn our social media followers into volunteers, our email subscribers into regular donors, etc.

In practice: How to use email marketing software to achieve this

One way we can do this is by considering how we manage email lists and segment our subscribers. You might have one email list with all your subscribers, or you might have separate lists for fundraisers, donors, and volunteers.

If you have one email list, try sending a general newsletter with different topics, then track which topics subscribers click on. You can use this data to create different segments and then send more in-depth emails on these topics.

If your audience is already segmented, test adding in different topics. For example, let your donors know about fundraising opportunities. You might find some of your subscribers will fit in more than one segment. As they learn more about your organisation, their relationship and loyalty will deepen.

You could then try out automation features, for example, if a subscriber clicks on a volunteer-related story, we can automate a more in-depth volunteer feature to arrive a week later.

Day Two – Seasonal Moments & Authenticity

On Day Two, we had our first panel session as Adriana Bolton, Natalie Berg and Jess Cervellon took us through Mailchimp and Canvas8’s report – The New E-Commerce Calendar.

Adriana Bolton highlighted the different kinds of moments there are throughout the year: Advocacy, Sales, Celebration, Togetherness, Holidays and Entertainment.

We were reminded to really think about consumer motivation in these moments, who they are, and what the emotional triggers are tied to each occasion.

Natalie Berg reminded us to be authentic. Pick moments that matter, don’t try to hijack every holiday. Choose authenticity over reach, choose moments that align with your brand and opt out of irrelevant holidays.

It’s easy to use big holiday moments to achieve greater social media reach. But this is often a vanity metric. What use is reach if we are reaching the wrong people? This links back to what we learnt on Day One. Focus on those who know you already and develop them into repeat donors, not reaching thousands more uninterested people.

Finally, Jess Cervellon reminded us to keep conversations going before and after moments. Don’t shout about your wonderful volunteers in National Volunteer Week and then don’t mention them for the rest of the year. Again, be authentic.

In practice: Try this ‘Do I really need to jump on this moment?’ checklist:

• Does it align with my brand purpose and values? (for example, an environmental charity should avoid promoting moments that result in over-consumption)
• Do I have something to add to the conversation? (or will you just be posting a generic stock image and message?)
• Does it have a local or cultural relevance to my audience? (Global Days can be useful for bigger organisations but if you are not an international organisation, local events will resonate more.
• Do I have the time? (Don’t be afraid to prioritise. It is better to create an in-depth story from a particularly relevant moment than celebrate them all.)

In practice: Tactics to try on your next seasonal ‘moment’

• Test different subject lines that focus on different aspects of a holiday. For example, does your audience prefer an emotional headline, or humour?
• Focus on a hyper-local moment. Village duck race? Boxing Day dip? Focus on these, offer a unique take, and you will find yourself competing with less marketing noise.
• Keep conversations going – Consider catching up with a volunteer case study from a year ago. Share a catch-up with a fundraiser on how their race went and what they got from the experience.

Day Three – Keeping Customers: Micro-Insights, Macro-Impact to Building Lasting Loyalty

On Day Three, we looked at loyalty and Mailchimp’s Commitment Spectrum, which shows how we can view supporters on a spectrum instead of categorising either ‘committed’ or not.

The biggest takeaway from this session is that only 13% of loyal customers fall into the ‘fandom’ category. Many more are loyal to brands because of convenience and habit. This once again highlights the importance of those repeat donors, repeat volunteers and long-term supporters who may fall into the ‘habitual’ and ‘dedicated’, but may not shout the loudest. The donor who has given a ‘small’ amount for many years but has never responded to an appeal, or the volunteer who quietly does their weekly shift but doesn’t mention it to anyone they know or post on social media.

By focusing our efforts on the middle of this spectrum, we can increase commitment, likely for a lower cost than finding a completely new supporter.

The session mentioned that companies often rely too heavily on offering discounts to committed customers. However, if a customer is already habitual or dedicated, this may do little to move them along to being a fan.

If we look at this through a non-profit lens, we can compare a discount email with a generic appeal email, asking for increased donations, just because it’s Christmas, with little added value. So, what does engagement look like in different pillars of the commitment spectrum?

I have added my ideas below on how a non-profit might move its supporters along the commitment spectrum.

In practice: increasing supporters commitment

I have added my ideas below on how a non-profit might move its supporters along the commitment spectrum.

Day Four – Growing Customers: Inside Automated Workflows of Winning Brands

Day Four, and on this panel, we have some non-profit representation from Theresa Vo from The Center for Open Science. 🙌

We heard a lot more about when to use AI or automation and when to introduce a human touch. Anthony Bingham from Visualsoft advised us that it’s essential not to focus too much on what other companies are doing with AI, especially those with higher budgets or large tech teams.

He suggested starting by looking internally at your own systems and processes, where are the pain points, and where are staff spending too much time. Think about how you might be able to automate those boring, time-consuming tasks and free up more time for good creative and strategic decisions, storytelling and donor stewardship.

 When using AI in the non-profit world, it is even more important to keep that human touch. Ensure you use your human team to check for local dialect and cultural references. This ties back to the suggestion to use local seasonal moments in day two. We must keep our audiences at the forefront of our minds, and we understand them better than AI can.

In practice: how to use AI and automation: (if you want to!)

• Summarising meetings and action points. A lot of meeting software already has this in-built. It can be a real time-saver.
• Start with the built-in AI tools in the software you already have. Try Hootsuite’s AI to generate post ideas and hashtags, or MailChimp’s AI to generate first drafts of automations.
• Use Photoshop or Canva’s AI tools to make stock photos feel more on-brand by changing colours and backgrounds.

And finally, I loved one of Sharron Harris’s key takeaways from this session: Know your ‘Why’. You should understand what your purpose is for using AI tools, and have a clear vision of the outcomes you expect.

Day Five – Marketing Reinvented: The Data-to-intuition Revolution

In Day Five we heard from Tiffini Bova, who highlighted the ‘customer success gap’. 75% of companies think they are listening to customers, but only 30% of customers agree.

Let’s assume this is similar for non-profits. How do we address this gap? One way is to ensure supporters do not have disconnected experiences.

Your fundraising and communications teams need to be working together and understanding the messages you are sending out. There should be oversight of every interaction a supporter might have with your organisation. Having good brand and style guides can help with this, but internal communication is key.

And, data is a key part of this, too. With more and more data available, we can start to build a picture of our supporters, but this needs to happen across teams. For example, how many of your current volunteers donate to your organisation? Which demographics of volunteers are more likely to donate or take part in a fundraiser?

The webinar discussed the shift from reactive customer engagement pre-2010, when an organisation would speak to supporters who reached out to them, to proactive engagement between 2010-2020, when technology and permission marketing allowed us to reach out to people more. We are now in the ‘predictive’ era, in which we can use data to really start to know people. We can guess what our friends might do because we know them, and with sufficient data, we can do this for donors too.

In practice: Identify disconnected supporter touchpoints

Create a customer journey map with all the possible touchpoints a supporter might have with your charity. Work with other teams across the organisation to build this and identify which teams are responsible for each touchpoint. Discuss together which areas might currently feel disconnected from a supporter’s perspective.

Final thoughts

It feels like attitudes to AI are maturing, with a lot of the themes in these webinars focusing on the limitations of AI and automation and when to add a human touch.

However, there are lots of useful ideas that non-profits can use to embrace deeper personalisation and increase efficiency, freeing up time for better human donor engagement.

Whether you choose to use AI or not, we must understand it and make conscious decisions on when and why it is appropriate for our work.

Any questions? Or need support in implementing any of these ideas? Get in touch with me at hello@jennybrodie.co.uk.