A Conversation with Tim Kachuriak of NextAfter
What makes people want to give? That question fascinates Tim Kachuriak, and is the driving spirit of his agency, NextAfter. NextAfter works with many leading purpose-driven organizations to help them connect effectively with their constituents and donors. Email marketing is a key driver for relationships and fundraising for most such organizations, and Tim shares some astute and surprising observations about what works best.
WHAT THE ROBOT HEARD…
Matthew Dunn
There he is hey Matthew, how are you? I'm good, Tim. How are you? Good, good, good, good. Good. Yes. Yeah. August already. It is. mid August already. Yeah, it's mid August already. That's right this. Like, wait a minute. No, no, we didn't get enough of it. You're down in the Dallas area, right?
Tim Kachuriak
Yeah, we're in the dog days of summer, man. It is like, just grueling. Yeah, 90 to 100 every single day. It's nasty is not a fun time to be in Dallas.
Matthew Dunn
No, I ordinarily don't get to complain about the weather because I'm up in the Pacific Northwest in Bellingham. Oh, cool. That's a great town, man. I love that place. Have you been here? Oh, yeah, yeah, absolutely. Yeah. You probably know lagless biogas Bible software. Yeah. Yep. I met with them. They tried to hire me at one point. Yeah, yeah. No, but yeah, Bob. I know. I've known Bob for a long time. Yeah. Great company. Big, big employer for this town, actually.
Tim Kachuriak
Yeah. No, but it's like a cool like sleepy little hippie town. And it's like, just tucked up there. You got Mount Hood. I mean, it's it. I love that town.
Matthew Dunn
I think it's a fun, fun place to hang your man of taste and discretion, but it's gonna be 98 tomorrow. Yeah. Oh, whoa. And you guys don't have AC units there. Yeah. Not generally. No, I
Tim Kachuriak
generally, yeah. Yeah. My wife is her. She grew up in Olympia. She went to school at U dub and her her folks live in Shelton Washington now. Yeah,
Matthew Dunn
yeah, actually. Yeah, I know. Sheldon pretty well, tucked down there, right up and around the peninsula u dub grad. It's where it's where I did the PhD was u dub. Okay, cool. Very cool. Yeah. Yeah. So what about you? Was it I'm trying to remember the college list in your LinkedIn profile by Bible college?
Tim Kachuriak
Now Robert Morris college, Robert Morris. Yeah, I guess it's Robert Morris University now but yeah, it was, uh, I didn't have a traditional college experience. Like I I I wanted to get out and work you know. So I worked at a country club all during high school in college and I did mostly night school, honestly. Yeah. And I just kind of like you know, kind of glad handled with like all the members and stuff and made lots of money and and, you know, probably lived kind of like a playboy lifestyle. You know what I mean? It was just like, you know, playing playing golf every single day and you know, Going to school when I can but yeah,
Matthew Dunn
yeah, you learn stuff no matter what you do School of school of life is the big one.
Tim Kachuriak
Honestly, what some of my best lessons were on the golf course honestly just hanging around all these members, I started a business out of college and like a lot of those guys became like my customers right away. So that was kind of a cool, that's nice, cool experience.
Matthew Dunn
Yeah, good for you. Well, um, two questions. One, make Give me the Give me the correct pronunciation of your last name because I hate getting that wrong.
Tim Kachuriak
That's okay. Do you wanna take a shot? It's pretty phonetic. Kachuriak That's it. You nailed it. That's okay.
Matthew Dunn
Okay, cool. Cool, too. I we tend to bounce all over the place like Stu, Stu swineherd, I think connected as we do it all over the place. And we end up talking about marketing and email and all sorts of other stuff. But are there any, any sort of focal things, we're gonna put a piece of content that hopefully is useful for your business? Any particular stuff you want to focus on?
Tim Kachuriak
Yeah, I mean, like, email marketing is a huge part of our of our business, working with nonprofits to help them raise money. I mean, it is the workhorse when it comes to driving Revenue Online. So, you know, we've performed like 3000 different digital fundraising experiments, and a ton of them have to deal with email. So anything that you want to talk about, like, I think we should probably be able to go explore it from a nonprofit fundraisers kind of perspective. So that's the angle we'll take
Matthew Dunn
This is Dr. Matthew Dunn, host of the future of email marketing. And my guest today is Tim Kachuriak. CEO of next after Tim, so nice to connect and talk. Thank you for coming aboard. Dr. Dunn. Happy to be here, man. Yeah. Tell us a bit about next after for starters.
Tim Kachuriak
Yeah. So next after is really three things. So we are a fundraising research lab or consultancy. And we're a training institute that helps nonprofit organizations get better at Digital fundraising.
Matthew Dunn
So
Tim Kachuriak
we believe digital is the future of fundraising. But you'd be surprised it's still an underdeveloped opportunity in this space. Now, did
Matthew Dunn
you ever do radio, you've got a great like radio voice go in there. I've done a few podcasts before. So. Okay, there. And I remember I noted the lead line on your LinkedIn profile, I'm obsessed with discovering what inspires people to give. Talk about that a bit? It's,
Tim Kachuriak
I mean, you think about it like that is the kind of question that can captivate somebody's imagination and energy for the rest of their lives. And I need that, or else I'm gonna go find something else to do.
Matthew Dunn
So I wouldn't have been on this quest. What are some of the things you, you know that you think you know about that right now?
Tim Kachuriak
Oh, gosh, I feel like we're just scratching the surface. You know, the big thing that I think we've we've done that may be different is that we've approached digital, and basically the entire internet as if it's the greatest behavioral laboratory that's ever existed, because it is right is Yeah, instead of asking people's opinion, yeah, like, we can actually go run these different experiments and like, see how they behave in real life in the in the wild? So we found that there's not one answer to the question, Why do people give? There's a number of different reasons. It's a collective of reasons if you will, right. And those reasons vary from generation to generation, by organization to organization by donor to donor, right. So it's really, really hard to kind of pin down like, one specific reason why people get but I'll give you a few examples, right? Yeah. So especially older generations, like boomers, GIS, they give out of a sense of duty, responsibility, it's the right thing to do. It's what they taught their upbringing, you know, going to church and stuff and putting money in the collection plate like that is kind of like their framework for, you know, this is my responsibility to kind of give back. Yeah, other people they give out of a sense of like, wanting to be part of something, this desire to belong, right. desire to kind of like, join a movement or be part of some sort of transformational change. Yeah. Some people, especially people that get to, to political campaigns, they give out of, you know, anger, frustration, right, there's a problem in the world. And like, I don't like what these guys are doing. I like what these guys are doing. So I'm going to give my money to them so that they can go change things, either back to the way that it should be, or to the way that I think it should be in the future, right? So there's these different kind of motivation sets.
Matthew Dunn
I'm just like,
Tim Kachuriak
but underneath all of it, there's things that we found to be effective, regardless of what the ingoing motivation of the donor is, right? So things that you probably talk about all the time in the for profit space are kind of like, you know, new, like lightning bolts that are hitting us in the nonprofit space, like the power of a value proposition, right through testing and experimentation. So like the simple way that we think about value proposition is that The donor, and who's our customer? Right? So nonprofits are the donors, our customer, they're constantly weighing the perceived value of giving a donation versus the perceived cost. Yep, they perceive more value than cost. They give more cost than value. They bail. Yeah. But it's not just at the like, you know, the, the, the macro decision to give or not to give, but it's at every single one of the little micro decision junctions that they encounter along the way. Okay, so I'll relate it to you know, your your topic does your right, so like email, right? So I send an email right? Now, the goal is emails to get you to go online to my website, make a donation, the first micro decision that somebody has to make is gonna open that email, right? Yeah, yeah. And if they make a decision to open, they make a decision to read and to keep reading, and then maybe to click, and if they click, they get to a landing page. And there's a series of decisions that they navigate content, copy images, video, whatever's on the page, if the content is compelling, if it's inspiring if it moves them in some way, they click the donate button. And there's still get a series of these micro decisions, even as the donor goes through completing the transaction. So we know by looking at all this nonprofit industry benchmark data that less than 25% of the people that click the donate button, on a nonprofits website, actually complete the transaction. Okay.
Matthew Dunn
That's pretty high percentage, anyway. Yeah,
Tim Kachuriak
yeah. But the reason why is because there's still a series of decisions they have to make, even at that final stage of completing the transaction. Right? Don't want to make a one time gift or recurring gifts, how much I want to get that's the one interesting thing about nonprofits is we don't have a fixed price. Yeah, that's true. Our price is determined by the customer, the donors decide how much they're going to give. Yeah, and what we find the biggest thing that influences both whether they give and how much they you're going to give is how effectively and forcefully we communicate their value proposition.
Matthew Dunn
So I want to go back to something you said at the beginning, actually finish that sentence. And let's reel back a little bit. Oh, that's good. We can go. Let's go real quick. Yeah, you were talking. I wanted to parse it a little bit you were talking about on the goal, the goal of the email you send to the beginning, you get them to click and go to the website on, let me counter argue, and I think you'll agree with me, that, that that's somewhere in the goal for the potential series of emails. But that perception, relationship, brand awareness, cause awareness. All of those things are also objectives for this message. You don't necessarily expect people to hit the donate button or click to the website on message number one, right?
Tim Kachuriak
In some cases, Yes, we do. Yes. Yeah. I mean, like, you know, the nonprofit fundraising space, it we're still kind of like very much locked into a direct response kind of mindset. Yeah. Because we don't have the luxury of like being consumer brand with like billions of dollars to spend in creating brand awareness. So I've got to go from like you meeting me for the first time. And to us like getting married? I mean, it's like that. That is like, you know, that's, that's kind of like the challenge. So if you think about how most nonprofit organizations have traditionally done, broad based fundraising, it's been through direct mail, right? I'm gonna go rent a list. I'm going to go send 100,000 a million pieces of mail, and I'm hoping for like maybe a 1% response rate. Yeah, yeah. Which is 99% failure rate. But yeah, that's exactly Yes. So what I'm obsessed about is like, Okay, great. So you can get your 1%. But like, what do I do to make the other 99%? Like, say yes, as well. And that's where, like the testing and optimization experimentation have become really, really, really, really important.
Matthew Dunn
Yeah. And your digital, the digital domain, which you said, you focus on when we were chatting before we started here has a level a level of measurability that analog never had
Tim Kachuriak
never had that, right. I know, it's getting harder to measure, we're actually kind of going backwards in time, which is a whole separate conference, a
Matthew Dunn
whole separate conversation, right. But, um, but yeah,
Tim Kachuriak
but yet still today, we still can, you know, track certain kinds of behaviors that you It adds a whole layer and whole dimension of of targeting capability, and, you know, relevance that you can create an every sort of message based on these behaviors that people are illustrating through their behavior online.
Matthew Dunn
Yeah, yeah. No, abs? Absolutely. I mean, one of the one of the things that struck me a few years back, I think it was talking to a bunch of kids at a business school class at the university here, something like that. I said, like, you don't realize that I think there were marketing and business students I said to you don't realize that you actually signed up for the sciences. Right, guys? 10 years. 20 years ago, business class business was not nearly as much as science as it is now. That's right. That's Yeah, it just wasn't measurable in anywhere near that granularity, immediacy, like almost ridiculous flood of data and statistics that the digital domain is opened up, like, Oh, we didn't plan that, but wow, right. That's right.
Tim Kachuriak
No, that's right. I'm Like art kind of generates hypotheses and like science validates them right. So like, that's good.
Matthew Dunn
Yeah. Oh, you just froze. I'm gonna give zoom a second. Art validates our proposes, science validates, and then zoom standard for a second oh good go No, that's Yeah, that's well formulated, do you end up in conversations let's say with some of your some of your nonprofit clients particularly early in the cycle? Are any of them? Do they require a lot of education to get more comfortable with the level of measurability in the digital domain?
Tim Kachuriak
Yes, 100% 100%. So a lot of them have like basic kind of like tracking capabilities in place like they're using Google Analytics, but they're using it wrong, I use it, I usually like refer to like, you know, the average person, like you want to use 10% of their brain, you know what I mean? So it's like, you know, that's 10% of your Google Analytics. Yeah, yeah. Yeah. So that's usually one of the first problems we have to fix for them, right? Because you cannot optimize that what you cannot measure, right. So it's usually like, kind of like tying the wires together, and like, you know, connecting the connecting the dots so that they can actually be able to get, you know, clear visibility as to what's really happening in their in their program. So that's, that's you step one. And then step two, there's usually like tremendous leakage in their funnel, right. So like, there's so many people that are passing through their organization, but because they haven't, like taken the time to optimize the various different digital assets. You know, they're, they're just losing a lot of people. So there's a lot of low hanging fruit. And we show people this, and they get really, really, really excited. And that's when they start to divert some of their direct mail budget over to digital. And we're able to kind of help get them some some wins and move towards more of a digital first type of strategy. So that direct direct mail versus digital is I've lived in the digital domain way too long. Like that's still, that's still a viable tension. Yes. So up until this past year 2020, which has been kind of like a, you know, yeah. A bit of a huge sea change. Yeah. Digital fundraising has never crossed 10% of total giving Wow, wow, interesting. In 2020, it was 13%, of total giving big riding. So it's never crossed 10. And it was that it sailed past 10 to 13%. Wow. And last year, so Blackbaud, which is like the big donor CRM company in the space, they do this charitable giving study, and it's based on $40 billion that flow through their CRM system. Last year, in 2020, total fundraising revenue went up by 2%. Digital went up. Ellis was basically down. But digital was what really kind of carried the day a lot, you know, in 2020. And it was because a lot of their traditional tools were taken off the table. I'm not having fundraising events. I'm not flying around the country meeting with all my donors. I've got zoom, and I've got email. Yeah. And so now all of a sudden, digital is kind of like right in the forefront of what a lot of nonprofits are thinking about today.
Matthew Dunn
Right? Right. So So even in the non nonprofit and fundraising domain, we all just got booted, six to 10 years into the future based on the, you know, we got a violent shove into digital transformation, right? That's Yeah, yeah. And, and I imagine there are adaptations that are not just, they're not just technical, in in, in making that shift or in in changing that weighting of channels, because you can't just take your your paper campaign and hit print PDF and hit send, you would be surprised by how many even very large organizations do exactly that. And Matthew, I
Tim Kachuriak
mean, it's, it's really, really shocking. And so that this is, this is kind of like the big point we try to make is like, because the barriers to entry to any sort of digital stuff is very low, like any old fool can, you know, hit the send button, right? any old fool can go post anything online or make a blog post, the time and the level of attention spent on those channels is very, very low. Right. Right. And because it's cheap, right, and so we say, look, if you really want to be effective, you need to treat this thing with tremendous respect to you. Right? Yeah. And so it's, it's, it's a journey, for sure.
Matthew Dunn
Yeah. And and the level of the level of nuance and measurement. That really pays off. I'm guessing most of my hadn't been ready to do didn't realize that it was worth doing.
Tim Kachuriak
No, they've been blasting people forever. Right. You know what I mean? And I just I, it's one of the first things that we try to teach people like them if you really want to optimize your digital fundraising. Yeah. You have to humanize it. Right? Yeah. You've got to humanize it because people give to people not to email machines, not the websites, not to direct mail campaigns for that matter people give to people and the more that you understand that the more you can use you'll begin to see the ways to adapt that to make it more human. Yeah,
Matthew Dunn
yeah. Yeah. I had a I had a chat with the with the gen at a nonprofit called smile direct. Yeah. Okay. Yeah, they do great. Great organization. Yeah. Yeah. And, and, and it was interesting, like, they're very methodical about what they do. And he talked about how they, I think he used the word curate how they keep track of the stories, particularly if their successes, yes. And, and can continue to make those the focal content in their fundraising because it you know, it moves people touches people moves
Tim Kachuriak
well, stories is our currency. And actually a lot of ways stories is our product, right? So like, I like to say, like, you know, our product is the impacts that we deliver to the marketplace, and like our customer is the donor, right? And so like, that's really the things that we have to work on is how do we innovate on the product delivery side? Like how do we get better at, you know, solving the problem of a cure for cancer or fixing, you know, people that have like deformities, because of, you know, maybe poor drinking water, Whatever the cause may be? Yeah. And so then that's what ultimately is going to drive the effectiveness of, you know, the customer purchase, right, which is a donation.
Matthew Dunn
Yeah, I like that product, his story. And I wish, I hope a lot of email, marketers listen to that. Because even in the for profit domain, it's, it's, it frequently gets just completely dropped left on the floor. Yeah, we had a, we had a, we spent some time working through a proof of concept with a prospective customer for campaign genius, my company, and they wanted to take real time content, and do a lot more personalization of their email. But I won't name names or lovely folks to work with, but that they didn't change the box of what they did in their email at all, like this tiny modest, will put their name here, and that's going to change everything like, wow. And I was honestly surprised when you didn't move the dial very much like you're so you're, you're so us centric already. In what you send out, you know, sticking my name on, it doesn't mean it's still not mostly about you, I actually said, Guys measure the pixels, like measure the number of pixels that are different, because I did and you're like, You're, you're hoping a 3% change is gonna make 100% difference. It's not going to
Tim Kachuriak
Sorry, no, if you test small, then the results are small, right? Yeah, we usually advocate for like, starting with like a radical redesign, like, let's blow up our presuppositions, right? Let's go. Like if you have a highly designed email, which is what most nonprofit fundraising emails look like, we advocate for stripping all that away, get rid of the images, get rid of the graphics, get rid of the buttons and even rewrite the copy. So it sounds like it's coming from one human to another human. Yeah, we've run that test with dozens of organizations we've done in different countries, we've done in different languages 234 500% increase in donor response by just making that one simple little design change,
Matthew Dunn
which is not that simple. A design change, right? Because it really is a blow everything up. And I would imagine, but it's easier.
Tim Kachuriak
It's just it's just a text based appeal versus you know, having to go get a designer and create your video and all that other crazy stuff. Like we're just like, Look, just just write it like you're writing to a friend.
Matthew Dunn
Yeah, yeah. Yeah. Yeah. The voice, the voice and the power of language, probably to tell the story, which is you said, exactly. Is the product. And getting people to stop and read. Take some craft. Yeah, I
Tim Kachuriak
mean, copywriting. copywriters are in there. Keith, let's put it that way. Yes.
Matthew Dunn
Yes, they do. It's a it as we see more and more AI and machine generated language. I was just reading an article this morning about you know, yet another platform, it's like plugging the keywords and write the article. It's like, No, you won't, you will read something I'll read or that anybody will read, right? you'll, you'll just speak English. And eventually, the waterline will keep going like this, and it'll get harder and harder to get me to actually track through that.
Tim Kachuriak
Exactly. But like, it's, it's also kind of like, there's some interesting, you know, research being done like in the area of neuroscience, right. And they talk about, like, the impact of story. So like, first of all, as it relates to nonprofit fundraising, there's a chemical released in somebody's brain when they give a donation, right. It's oxytocin. Exactly. It's the compassionate kind of neurotransmitter. It's the bonding control transmitter, right? It's, it's, it's this really special stuff. So I'm like, Man, that's great. How do we start dosing our donors with with oxytocin? I came up with a whole bunch of like, illegal ways to do it, but there's actually a very legal way to do it. Because like oxytocin release can be triggered by effective storytelling, right? Yeah. Yeah. And it's it's just fascinating kind of So and I'm sure it's true on the on the commercial side as well, right, like, you know, effective storytelling like people, they don't buy products for the benefits and all that stuff. They buy it because it's, it's part of their identity. It's because they like they, they they see themselves, you know, a certain way in the world, they want to demonstrate that by, you know, having this thing or making this purchase or going on this trip, or whatever that thing may be. Right. Yeah. Yeah, I think that storytelling could be really interesting thing to add into, like, you know, I think there's a lot of things, let's put it this way, I think there's a lot of things that commercial marketers can learn from the nonprofit space. And I know that we have a ton to learn from the commercial space. So this could be a cool partnership.
Matthew Dunn
Well, the commercial space, and I mean, I, in some senses, I get to sit on sit on the side of it, because as a as a technology vendor to those marketers, I see what they do. But but the tech, you know, the technology itself isn't inherently for one or the, you know, for one or the other. They're guilty of they they've been commercial email marketers frequently guilty of, of still doing a lot of blasting, as you said, early on, I'm frequently guilty of being on such a hamster wheel of production. That that, stop, blow it up, rethink, like, and humanize yourself is someone's too much work on, they tend to have and I'm guessing I'm guessing your larger nonprofits and clients have this as well. The brand police play way too big a role, you know, it's got to look like this and have that fun. And by the time they get one HTML template crafted, that delivers that they're scared to death
Tim Kachuriak
mutation. I know. Right? Well, that and that's, that's where we suggest to our clients to use testing as both a sword and a shield. Like what I mean by that. So like, it's a shield in the essence of like, you know, the boss wants to go change everything, right? He's gonna go bet the farm on we're gonna go in this direction, we're like, no, let's go test that. Right? Yeah. And then you go test it, and you bring it back the data and say, Hey, you know, this kind of like actually reduced our conversion rate by 75%, you still want to do that? No, no, right. So like, that's the shield. And then the sword is like, all of these entrenched, you know, sacred cows, you can go slay them and just destroy them with this sort of testing and say, Look, the old way of doing things is gone. And this is the new way, we're going to test it first. Because, you know, we want to validate the concept, but it's pretty hard for people today in today's world to argue with data.
Matthew Dunn
It really is. It is but here's where I see. I see an overlap between the the nonprofit and the for profit email marketer. Both of them don't tend to allocate the resources required to actually be able to test there there are companies like us Matthews why they heard like, you know, I mean, it, it really is kind of baffling. You look at you look at the the digital digital monopolies that have been effective at growing Google is immediately the one that jumps to mind. And, and and there's a willingness to invest in that, you know, that invisible, humble looking r&d called count, we need to have enough people to send two versions, so that we can a B test, we need to have enough time to come up with two subject lines that we think are killer or two layouts that we think are great, so that we can then get the data back to say which one is better. And I and I see a lot of crap, we barely got this one out the door. And we're on to the next one. Like, when do you actually have time to test the stuff tested in email is relatively modest to my mind.
Tim Kachuriak
Yes, I mean, much. That's right. People resort to kind of things like subject line testing, or maybe center or time of day, things that are like kind of easy to control. Yeah. But if you really want to move the needle, you got to you got to get at the meat of like the message, the value proposition, the story, you know, like, adding different emotional cues and priming and framing and all these like different kind of behavioral economics kind of concepts. Yeah, yeah. And you're right, it does. It takes time. It takes effort. It takes
Matthew Dunn
time and effort. Yeah. And it clearly would pay itself back. It's the most that's the most effective of the digital marketing channels. But because it's cheap, which you said early on. I think there's a tendency to, you know, to and while it's, you know, it's cheap, it's free, and I already know how to send an email. So you guys get this much to work with, you know, good luck. Bring us the numbers back. Oh, right. Yeah. And on the on the longer haul, that relationship, that long term relationship side of email marketing, because the inbox is a fairly intimate channel to be fair. Yeah. The less look, you know, the less you invest in that. I suspect the After the decline, the turnout of the list and so on
Tim Kachuriak
big time, I'll give you an example of that exact thing. So we had this organization, very large nonprofit organization, if I mentioned the name, you'd probably know them. They approached us, they said, Hey, we're in trouble. We need some help. So our email engagement and response rates have fallen off a cliff. And we have no idea why. Right? And so we took a six month snapshot of data. And we looked at their email send volume and other other than like, the the time around, like urine fundraising season, which is like the big, big heavy time for a lot of nonprofits. Yeah, they were sending a consistent volume of email, right? Okay, then we overlaid two additional pieces of data. One was the percentage of people that delete the email message before even opening it. The other one is the percentage of people that open and read the message. And what we noticed is the red line, the number of people that deletes right before even opening was consistently above the green line, which is the percentage of people that opened and read. And those those those two lines were getting further and further apart as we kind of stretch out that six month time window. And then we overlaid another piece of data, which was the average inboxing rate of their messages. Okay, at the start of the six month window, they were receiving on average across all the different. ESP is like, I think it was like 78% average weighted inboxing. Okay, yeah, by the end of that six month window 38%. And so we said, you need we said, you guys are sending too many emails, you need to slow it down. They were sending two fundraising emails per week. A week. Yeah, right. Yeah. And they said, thanks. But no, thanks, we can't do that we have these aggressive revenue targets, we have to hit we have all this pressure. And we can't afford to not keep sending these emails, because every time we send an email, we get revenue, right? Regardless of how it's declining. And we said, okay, well, how about you send more? This is okay, now you're talking, right? Like we said, okay, we want you to send one additional email every single week. But this email cannot ask for money. The only thing this email can do is provide value back to the donor. Now that may be in the form of like giving them a special piece of content or report on what's happening, or ask them a question or send them a certain, you know, it's it's basically engagement kind of content cultivation content. Yeah. Yeah. So we ran the experiment for six months, they did they put that that in place, and their email response rates went up by 80%. Wow. Across all their segments, the donors, non donors, and lapsed donors, their average engagement in email went up over 100%. So meaning people are opening and clicking. And again, this is not by sending any more appeals. This is just by adding a bit of cultivation content. So the problem of email list hygiene is a huge, huge, huge problem in our space, because we are constantly blasting because we don't have any, we don't think we have time to do any sort of brand, kind of content or value add content, but that's the big difference maker it for a lot of these organizations is adding that into the mix.
Matthew Dunn
And and and so not always just saying, click to our website and donate. That's right. Right. But But like, keep keep that, you know, cliche, cliche phrase, but keep the keep the relationship component to it. Wow. Yeah. Was it a, was it a lot of, you know, knocking heads and brainstorming to figure out how to meet there, we need to keep going and and try and rectify the drop at the same time? It seems like a great solution.
Tim Kachuriak
Yeah, it was. And, I mean, the cool thing is this organization to their credit, they they were open to testing, right? They're open to to running the experiment. And it was a longitudinal experiment, and it took place over six months. So it was a pretty big commitment. Yeah. But I think their backs are against the wall. And like they, they didn't see any other solution. Right. So yeah,
Matthew Dunn
you're gonna you're not gonna meet the fundraising goal if the lines keep diverging. Exactly, as you said. And and if the, you know, the inboxing percentage keeps keeps dropping like that. And that would have been, that would have been a tough experiment to run in paper mill for Yeah, that's right. Yeah, take yours. Yeah, yeah. Yeah, exactly. Well, there's there's a book I've noticed that I find myself citing it like every three or four conversations with people on this podcast, there's a book called The social life of information you have run across it. Now. Oh, you, you you you would I think you'd really like this A. JOHN Seely Brown and Paul do good. I'll send you I'll send you a link when we're done. JOHN Seely Brown was head of Xerox PARC for a good number of years. Okay, like so birth of the computer kind of place. But the book was written before Facebook existed. And they were trying to understand how we how we learn from each other and how Organizations, you know, make knowledge move across the organization. And the surprise to that, which won't surprise you at all, is it's not the paper manuals, and the knowledge management systems in the documentation. It's people hanging out and telling stories to each other. Yeah.
Tim Kachuriak
One of the ways that we try to actually foster that, and next after is that we provide lunch to all of our staff, right? So we have like, a huge waste of class, a office space, this huge lunch room where everybody sits down, and we bring it up every day. Yeah, like, that's the time where like, ideas are happening back and forth. Like I just, I just got off, we had lunch. And one of our guys who is like one of our search engine, guys, or whatever he was doing this, he's researching the G, G, what is a GTP? Three thing or whatever this like, ai knows all that stuff. And he's like, show me all that. But like, I never would have, like heard about that, unless he would have came and you know, had that conversation at lunchtime today. So it's like, I think that there's value and creating moments for people to be able to have those have those conversations. And and, and that's one thing that has gotten a bunch of pressure in our get a massive kick forward to get you know, to digital remote work from home, how
Matthew Dunn
you grappling with that, in terms of your organization. That's a tough
Tim Kachuriak
well, being in Texas, I know that, you know, like, we're in the news a lot. Like, yeah, let's go, you know, but we were back at the office pretty early, honestly. And we came back in stages, like, you know, leadership team first, and then it was open to people if they wanted to come back and now and, yeah, but pretty much everybody's back in the office now. And, you know, I think everybody's vaccinated. So I think we're, we're in the safer zone, or as safe as you can be, I mean, whatever, but like, yeah, yeah, I mean, that's, that's a big challenge of working in today's world is just the physical separation. There's there's value in proximity, honestly.
Matthew Dunn
Yeah, absolutely. There may have been the same social life information book, but I remember reading about a company that now steady, and I think it might have been socialized information on Louis J. Sullivan invented the basically invented perfected the skyscraper in Chicago, back in the teens and 20s. And inadvertently destroyed collaboration to a great extent. Because when you've got buildings under under five, six storeys, where people go up and down on a stairwell, you have stairwell conversations. And when you get an elevator, nobody has conversations in the elevator, and that's right. One company that I read about was like deliberately kept their building height in their office buildings, and made sure they built around stairwells for the same reason to allocate that lunch room space. That's fascinating. Interesting, right? Because, you know, you bump into the guy, and oh, hey, Fred, and you know, blah, blah, blah, r&d. What do you guys working on? Oh, wow. That's fascinating to maybe we could use it right? You don't have those in elevators and you don't have zoom? Which is a real problem. No, you're in, you're out. That's it. You're in, you're out? Yeah, it's in? it's intentional. There's an agenda. very transactional. Yeah. Yeah. And you've got all these screens and distractors and peripheral information and actually having the conversation and focusing on the conversation. Yeah, and I don't have pants on right now, Matthew. And that's certainly Forbes. That's awesome. Well, kudos to you for getting, you know, for for building a company in a culture where people are back in the office, because not all companies are having an easy time with that. Yeah. Yeah.
Tim Kachuriak
I think I think it was because, you know, we, I mean, we're a smallish company. I mean, 40 ish employees and stuff. So like, I think, you know, there's this camaraderie that has been established through the lunch room program, honestly, I think that that's been like, the biggest thing that's really helped aid our culture, because we don't have a lot of the cattiness that you see and a lot of other like office settings. Yeah. And, you know, you sit down next to somebody different every day, you know, so it's just kind of like I get to know I get to know all my staff and they know me and it's like, it just it's a really it's a cool kind of vibe.
Matthew Dunn
Nice love. Nice. Nice leveler and really, for the benefit, not that big investment.
Tim Kachuriak
In the grand scheme of things, yeah, consider the amount of money that like companies waste on consultants and like all these crazy programs designed to kind of foster engagement that everybody rolls their eyes at like oh, great team building 99. Again, he already made like, so it's it's kind of a cool, it's a way to do that.
Matthew Dunn
And as a human, you know, a human you know, story, donor level you break bread together is like, that's a pretty fundamental thing. Like we're wired to do that and it matters a great deal. Yeah, man did I miss it during the pandemic, still Like we're not fully fully out of in terms of our own behavior, like I'm really gonna board with me.
Tim Kachuriak
It's probably good for for podcast bookings, though, right? So I'm sure that you got a lot of podcast conversations reported during the pandemic,
Matthew Dunn
you know, interesting because I weeds we didn't start the planning for this future of email until like, circa September or so. And then we didn't really get it up on its feet and started having guests come on board until January. And someone asked me the day were like, Oh, is this really paid? You're asking the business question, or has this really paid off? You know, what's the ROI? And I'm like, you know, I don't really know. And I'm not sure I actually really care. Right this point, because what's what what's, what's, what it's become is a terrific conversation. opportunity to have lunch, so to speak. Right? Yeah. Like, yeah, you know, would we have would we have met been able to, you know, talk for this length of time? Not if it evolved airplanes and why, like all that other Ms. Yeah,
Tim Kachuriak
we could have bumped into each other a conference or something like, Oh, yeah, call me something. You know what I mean, like that, that might have happened. But yeah, this is this is this does create a new opportunity for those conversations, right?
Matthew Dunn
It does. And that that's, its, that's its own. That's its own best reward, like the rest of it. Like, you know, what will happen? What will happen will happen, but, man, there's a whole list of people like, wow, I had the best conversation with a guy. I'm gonna do another one tomorrow. Yeah,
Tim Kachuriak
you know, Gary Vee talks about like, the, the reason why he does all these podcasts. And he's like, you know, because it forces me to think you know what I mean? Like, first of all, I get to refine my story, I get to refine my message. But sometimes people ask a question I haven't thought about before. And it takes me in these different directions. And all of a sudden, like, the synapses start firing. And I'm like, I've got this new breakthrough. Right? So I think it's like, there's value in that like, just, you know, continuing to meet people and networking. I mean, that that's like, not a new concept. But this has created a new venue for networking and conversation
Matthew Dunn
and a venue without the, without the false intentionality. of live net that live networking frequently has, right like, like, conferences where someone's sort of cruising, looking for the bad so they can get so they can strike up a relationship just hit me off like, no, you're not, you're like, you want to talk to me, because you think X, Y and Z, are you like we're not actually talking? Right? We're talking past each other. And that's kind of a massive bore by comparison.
Tim Kachuriak
Yeah, no, that's true. That's great. That's right. Yeah. carrier in that aspect. Right.
Matthew Dunn
It is, but I think it's, I think, and I'm just formulating this, as we talk it, it may be more useful in those cross company cross organizational settings, like the two of us talking, then for two colleagues within a company to have this as their sole means of connection. And I mean, you sounds like, it sounds like you're you're already there in terms of how your own team works together, you know, back together, having lunch together and stuff like that. Was there a sense of, of a bit of relief, and Yay, we're back as people started coming back into the office.
Tim Kachuriak
Yeah, for sure. I mean, again, just just because of like, the nature of our culture, I think we all missed each other. You know, we tried to do the virtual lunch thing, which was like a disaster. on virtual beer. No, yeah. So just like it just stopped happening. And I think everybody like felt that that void of this thing that was missing from their day. And, you know, when you work from home, you lose all sense of reality of time, and you know, space and everything. And sometimes you just sit down the chair, and you're cranking all day long. And next thing you know, it's like dinnertime, right? And you haven't even got up other than to go to the bathroom or something. And like, that was what that's honestly the reason why I started doing lunch. Like when I started my own business, I used to work at other agencies, and it was like, there never be time for lunch. If anything, I'd run down to the third floor coffee shop, grab a crummy sandwich and like eat at my desk and yet another conference call. Yeah. So I'm like when I start my own business, like I'll know that I've arrived when I can have lunch every day. And then I started adding staff and we just kept going out to lunch every day. Right and then as it got too big, we started bringing the lunch in and it just like it's good for people physically right to take that break to feed to have yet to have sustenance right so that then it breaks up the day so well I mean, like you know, the morning then you focus and crush it like everybody blocks at noon you know time to make sure that they're available and then you get the rest of the day and you feel energized and charged and ready to rock.
Matthew Dunn
Yeah, and and i would guess you you go a long way towards snapping the perpetual screen connection with that lunch as well because that's that's just insidious and you know, back to the zoom thing for a second. Aside from one on one, it's it's a bit difficult to get people to stop multitasking for Sure, yeah. My, my, my wife is a paraeducator works with with kids on the autism spectrum in schools. And when the pandemic first hit school system, he did a wonderful job, you know, adapting, you know, he's going to be at home, we're going to keep having meetings. And she would she would have two hours of zoom meetings. I am beat. Yeah, that's, that's gotta be brutal. Oh, yeah. Well, I said what I said, you're doing it on a notebook screen, which means you're looking at 24, postage stamp size people that's exhausting for your brain just that is Ooh, well, yeah, I
Tim Kachuriak
remember reading something about like how, you know, like, most communication is like 10% information. And like, you know, the rest is like some sort of nonverbal, whether it's like our intonation and stuff and like, or it's like body language. And so if you're trying to kind of like your brain is wired to kind of like, what it is that and if you're looking at 24 of them, it's like, it's overload. Like, it just fries. It fries, your ability to process.
Matthew Dunn
Yeah, overload. It's also I mean, this is this had been an area of study of mine for quite quite a long time. One, our brain is wired to do that we actually have parts of our brain that specifically focus on eyes, like we're wired to do that it's not even conscious to and this one intrigues me. There's some gender to it, guys sitting side by side, having a conversation left to their own devices will tend to end up at a right angle. So this face to face thing is a bit unusual for us, we wouldn't necessarily talk at this 180 degree angle, if we were sitting at a bar or having lunch, or something like that women are I think a little more, they tend to be a little more face to face in one to one. Conversations. That's fascinating. Yeah, isn't it? Is this gonna it's kind of interesting. It makes a little bit of like, quasi evolutionary sense, you know, because you can watch the horizon for saber toothed Tigers or something. Yeah. That's interesting. Okay. Yeah. Glad to see to see that. See if that validates in, you know, what you see in, in personal behavior, but for sure, this full focus, lights are on cameras are on did a thing like it's a big shift. You know, we're making it but it's still a big shift. Well, so what's next for next after? Great question. Have you been on here? What's that is had to have been a good year? Oh, my gosh,
Tim Kachuriak
yes. We're growing like crazy. I mean, like, that's the hardest thing right now is just kind of staffing up our team to meet the demand for what we have to offer to the marketplace right now. So Wow, that's, that's a, that's a big challenge. But beyond that, there's two things that I'm kind of really excited about. Number one is, we formed a partnership with the Institute for Sustainable Philanthropy In the UK, they are home to the world's first two PhDs in philanthropic psychology. And so they're developing a lot of like, the academic research about around why people give and all this kind of stuff. And like their main thesis is that there's different ways of approaching fundraising. One, which actually does harm to the donor. So it's actually not good for the their long term well being. And there's other ways that may not yield as many results or, you know, revenue today, but actually builds up the well being of the donor and leads to better lifetime partnerships, right. So churn or, or attrition is a big problem in our space. And so like, I think a lot of their science kind of is going to fix that. So we appointed the next after a fellow at that Institute, that's actually taking a lot of their research and adapting it into things that we can test online with our, with our clients. And so that's a really exciting thing of like testing all these different theories and stuff, and like bringing them home, to be able to validate them.
Matthew Dunn
So you may be, you know, helping the the data and science into their research sounds like Oh, for sure.
Tim Kachuriak
That's why it's a great partnership. Yeah, they're, they're excited to have us, you know, kind of come alongside and that's, that's
Matthew Dunn
actually that's wonderful to hear, because nobody benefits from this being done poorly. That's right. That's right. And, and, and, you know, the lifetime Long, long term thing versus turn, like, I've got, I've got time, I've got time at four different higher ed institutions way too much time in, in school. And it's a surprise which of them are good at the alumni fundrise reaching out reaching them are not as good, right at the fundraising outreach in which have I've kind of bozo filtered because they were so bad at it like that. Like, the smaller guys are sometimes better at it because they they've kept it much more story person to person relationship based. And it's not just, Oh, Hi, this is so and so and I'm an undergraduate in your old department and we want your money right? What else is new? Right? Yeah, well, yeah, what else is new? Well, Tim, it has been a delight to connect and talk with you. Thanks
Tim Kachuriak
so much for making the time. Dr. Dunn anytime you want to talk, email fundraising. I am your guy. So have me back.
Matthew Dunn
We'll we'll do that. We'll we'll wrap it up. I'll hit the end record. If you're listening. My guest has been Tim Kachuriak, CEO and founder at next after so if if you have a nonprofit that you think needs help with their digital fundraising, send her the next after calm. Thanks, Tim. Awesome. Thank you.