Join WG Content and Danielle Gentry-Barth, EVP of Agency Advancement and Veteran Services at Easterseals Redwood, for this 30-minute webinar on Winning the Hearts and Minds of Donors: The Key to Storytelling.

We’ll share how to capture the hearts and minds of donors and unlock more potential from your donor campaigns. You’ll walk away with ideas simplifying segmentation and creating unforgettable content that resonates with individual and corporate donors and charitable foundations.

You’ll learn how to:

  • Master a heart and mind approach to donor segmentation and content creation
  • Create content that captivates and motivates
  • Use best practices for creating donor content that is unforgettable
  • Turn impact stories into strategic assets using five key tactics

Watch the on-demand webinar video

This video was recorded on November 12, 2024.

0:00:01.4 Rebecca Sims: Okay. It’s 2:02, and we’re on the schedule, so I’m gonna go ahead and get started. Hello everyone and welcome. Thank you for joining us today. I’m Rebecca Sims from WG Content, and we’re excited to bring you the final webinar for 2024. Can you believe it? But before we get started, just a few housekeeping things; first, we’re gonna wrap up this webinar in 30 minutes, and we will save time for questions at the end. So, please use the Q&A button at the bottom of your screen to submit questions, if you have any. We’ve disengaged the chat, so you’re gonna have to use that Q&A feature to submit your questions. And we do encourage you to submit any questions you have. Today’s webinar will be recorded, and we will email you a link to the recording and a great companion piece to go along with it after we conclude today.

0:00:50.0 Rebecca Sims: So, a little bit about WG Content. If you’re not already already familiar with us, WG Content creates strategies and content for well-respected health systems, academic medical centers, and health related businesses nationwide. That includes working with donor teams. We help clients achieve their marketing and communication goals while building relationships, one word at a time. About today’s webinar, we have two fundraising and communication pros. They’ll focus on getting to the hearts and minds of your donors with simplicity. Please remember to put any questions you have in the Q&A, and we’ll look at those at the end. So, without further ado, let me introduce our presenters. Please welcome Danielle Gentry-Barth. She is EVP of Advancement and Veteran Services at Easterseals Redwood in Cincinnati. She recently led a $30 million transformational campaign that included a MacKenzie Scott Gift. Congratulations, Danielle. Her long tenure development experience includes many industries such as healthcare, social services, and higher education.

0:01:54.8 Rebecca Sims: In addition, she served as AFP chapter president and affiliate chair of Pancreatic Cancer Action Network. Danielle’s superpower is mobilizing teams with drive, compassion, and a good measure of fun. She has exciting news. She recently co-launched Mason Consulting Group, a full service fundraising firm, partnering with organizations to optimize results. And of course, we have WG Content’s very own and Lauran McHaffie, who’s on our business development and marketing team. She has multi-industry marketing and communications experience that spanned Indianapolis, Toronto, and Cincinnati, with expertise in building new programs and initiatives. Before having to WG, Lauran spent nearly a decade in human services sector working with Danielle. She led Easterseals annual giving projects, creating donor communications and inspirational initiatives, spurring donor engagement and enthusiasm. Take it away ladies.

0:02:52.0 Danielle Gentry-Barth: Thank you, Rebecca. Thank you all for joining us this afternoon. We will keep it to 30 minutes. So, let’s dive right into winning the hearts and minds of donors. Today, we’re going to explore these three areas, and we really have a couple of key takeaways that we want you to leave with. The first is simplification, just making it as simple as possible when you come to explore donor segmentation. And the second is making your communications unforgettable. That word unforgettable. It’s so difficult in today’s world. All this information is coming to each and every one of us at the speed of light. And we know that we have to find a way to capture our audiences and make them remember us. And it really does begin with simple segmentation.

0:03:53.2 Lauran McHaffie: All right. So, we are going to spend some time here just exploring that, what Danielle was talking about. But first, I like some facts. And so we’re going to share a few little things about our attention span. Each person, these are our averages, consumes about 15.5 hours of content a day. It’s incredible. We have about 17 milliseconds to capture attention, and that’s like a finger snap, maybe two if you’re a quick snapper. And 26 seconds. Once we capture attention for people on average will read content. Let me get my, I’ve got a.

0:04:35.1 Danielle Gentry-Barth: There you go.

0:04:35.2 Lauran McHaffie: Oh, excuse me. I jumped the gun on that one, didn’t I? Sorry. So I think, are we on course here?

0:04:44.5 Rebecca Sims: Yes, we got it.

0:04:46.4 Lauran McHaffie: I’m sorry. I’m sorry.

0:04:49.6 Danielle Gentry-Barth: That’s okay. We got it. So, years ago, Lauran and I thought we were really onto something when we began to explore this simple but so useful way to segment your donors. But little did we know that this really, really genius man, Plato developed this theory long, long ago. And the theory is known as the dual system of decision-making. And what you see is this kind of emotion and reason, and they’re shown as two horses pulling in opposite direction. So, you have those people over here who are all driven by emotion and the folks who are driven by reason. And so people actually often make giving decisions in these same ways, charitable giving decisions, philanthropy, they do it through emotion and/or reason. So, remember, our first big takeaway was making it simple, keeping it so simple. And we feel like the easiest way, what we’ve seen in our careers.

0:05:54.8 Danielle Gentry-Barth: The easiest way to start that segmentation is by putting your donors into two general categories; those who think with their heart, and those who are more rationale, logic, mind-driven. In my 20 plus years in the fundraising sector, I have found that donors really do fall generally into these categories. You have those that are really making those philanthropic decisions based on their heart and their emotion and how connected they are to the mission. And then you have those who really think about their philanthropy through their mind. They want data, results, impact. This simplification and segmentation has provided really strong donor communication structure for each of the multimillion dollar campaigns that my team and I have led. And it’s also worked really well with annual giving, which Lauran will touch on a little bit this afternoon.

0:07:04.8 Lauran McHaffie: Yeah. And just further to that, this is segmenting this way. It can really help preserve your resources. So, a lot of folks in the charitable organization sector really are limited with resources, whether it be time or budget for sure, and also staffing. So, this has really helped simplify and make it more manageable. And then I have one more little statistic about attention span that resonates as well. On average, people check their phone 344 times a day, 344.

0:07:43.4 Danielle Gentry-Barth: Unbelievable.

0:07:45.1 Lauran McHaffie: I’m sure somebody’s checking their phone right now. That’s all right, though. So, we’re gonna just dive in a little bit to the art and science of communication. So this is our, the case for support on why it’s really easy to use heart and mind segmentation, but why it also resonates. So, and this comes from the social and neurological science. So first, from social science, storytelling. Stories are how we have shaped our communities and societies, quite frankly. And people connect with what social scientists call the logic of costs and benefits, which is more that pragmatic thinking as Danielle mentioned. Problem solving, those types of things. And then also the logic of similarities. So, that is more making decisions based on our values and empathy and compassion. So, that’s the social science piece. And then there’s also just a wealth of information and neuroscience.

0:08:45.5 Lauran McHaffie: When you are able to evoke through heart and mind stories, you’re more likely to fire up the brain. And it does it in very human ways. It’s actually something that is uniquely human. We do it with neurochemicals, cortisol, dopamine, serotonin, all of those help us engage and connect. And then there’s also something called mirror neurons. So there’s a neuroscientist, his name is Vilayanur Ramachandran, and he says, mirror neurons are one of the best discoveries in the last 10 years of neurology. They are a distinct class of neurons, and they allow us to create a brain state that mirrors emotion. So, I’m sure all of us in the room today have felt emotion when they see someone win an Olympic medal, or Danielle and I are criers. So, if you give us a good story that might evoke joy or even sadness, hope, any of those things, we’re very likely to remember it and talk about it at length. [laughter]

0:09:54.6 Lauran McHaffie: And then there’s another great resource. There’s a Dr. James Doty, and he wrote a book called Mind Magic among some other books. And he says, just to that point, what really fires up our brain is emotion. And when we tie emotion to an event or a thought, it helps us find meaning and purpose, which I think a lot of us are seeking for. And the great news on that is it actually embeds information neurologically. Great news.

0:10:26.9 Danielle Gentry-Barth: So, let’s jump in and get to know these donors a little bit, these segmented donors. So, here we’ve got our mind donors. They’re our logical people, the rational folks. We all have met donors just like this. These are the donors who really want facts. They wanna know about the return on investment with your organization. Their $1000 gift or their $10,000 gift is gonna make X happen. They wanna know the number of people you served, like, how does this scale and how many people are you reaching? They love those data points. They like to see your financial data. I’ve had a lot of those in my career where people just really wanna understand where you’re spending money, what categories, what staffing looks like in terms of salaries. These people also often wanna understand your key performance indicators.

0:11:25.5 Danielle Gentry-Barth: Like what are your five or so key performance indicators, and how do you collect that data, and how do you know that you’re being successful? They love to see that scoreboard. Like, tell me more about your success and how you measure it. Of course, the performance data, they’re driven by that performance data. At the beginning when we started this afternoon, Rebecca talked about my most recent $30 million campaign here at Easterseals Redwood. And as I sat back and started reflecting on this heart and mind segmentation, I looked at that list of donors. It was about 125. We had about 125 people who invested in the campaign, and around 40% fell into what I call the mind category. These are the folks that really want the facts, the results, tell me how you’re doing it, what’s my money gonna make happen?

0:12:25.2 Danielle Gentry-Barth: And what’s interesting is that every time I was preparing in advance for these meetings, either as a cultivation meeting or in an ask, I was really trying to determine what materials these folks would need. Very different than my heart folks, who need a story, they wanna meet the client, et cetera. These people really wanted to see 990s or annual reports. They wanted to see all the data, bring the budget, what’s the pro forma budget for this project you’re in? So, preparing those and having whoever was in that meeting along with me, prepared to answer a lot of the detailed technical questions that they always ask. Let’s move to the heart.

0:13:15.5 Lauran McHaffie: It’s coming. There we go.

0:13:16.9 Danielle Gentry-Barth: Okay. There we go. Here’s our heart folks. And a lot of people are just like, Lauran and I, we fall into this category. So the other, like I said, of the $30 million campaign, 40% were in that mind category. The other 60 were in this category with Lauran and I. Make a lot of decisions based on emotion. Like just connect, wanna connect with that mission, want to feel it in my bones. These people love a strong mission story. They want to see the video. They want to hear about the impact on the individual life of the person you’re served. They like to hear about the lives of the people you serve and you support. Right? Tell me more about these people. Tell me their details. How old are they? How many kids do they have?

0:14:05.9 Danielle Gentry-Barth: All of those kind of things. They really wanna get down in the dirty there. A lot of times these people cry, very emotional. Like, again, Lauran and I, we’re those people, right? We feel it even on the joyful side or the sad side. Like, we just feel it and they wanna feel it, and that makes them feel connected to the mission. These are folks who love anecdotes. So you’re giving them a lot of those anecdotal stuff, not necessarily giving them all the facts that the logical people need. And here at Easterseals Redwood, when we were bringing people in to talk about the $30 million campaign, what it was going to do, how important it was, oftentimes we were inviting clients to be part of those visits or those meetings, either purposely like, Hey, can you come on this call with me? Can you be at this meeting with me? Or scheduling time for our donors when they were in the facility to see clients in action, because we knew that really worked.

0:15:15.5 Danielle Gentry-Barth: As Rebecca shared, I spent a good part of my career in the healthcare space, and I found that I had the pleasure of working with two, in particular, two grateful families, grateful patient families that just always come to mind. And they actually fell in complete different categories. One family, the entire family was like that heart, gosh, tell me all the details. How is this saving lives? What is this doing for heart health in the city? And then I had this other family, which a number of them were in the heart category, but the key decision maker he was the grandfather, was definitely in that logical kind of brain side.

0:16:03.0 Danielle Gentry-Barth: He wanted to know all the details, all the stuff, so much technical stuff that sometimes I couldn’t answer it. So I was bringing people along with me, including my CFO, who could answer those questions, to really put his mind at ease and to make him feel like he was giving where he needed to give. What we think here though is at the end of the day, what’s really important to remember is that this simple segmentation, this very, very simple segmentation can be used on all types of donors; your individual donors, your corporate donors, your foundation donors. Because at the end of the day, there’s a person behind that decision, one individual person or maybe a few a group making the decision. So, kind of figuring out which side they fall in so that you can speak to them, cultivate them, nurture that relationship.

0:17:02.1 Danielle Gentry-Barth: And we’ve also found that this segmentation works for any kind of giving, not just $30 million campaigns or $1 million campaigns or $1 billion campaigns. It works for annual giving, it works for special events, it works for capital and other types of fundraising things that you’re doing. People make decisions to fund your organization or not. So we wanna be unforgettable, and we want them to feel and be spoken to the way they need their information. So we feel, Lauran and I really, that it’s our responsibility to understand the motives of our donors. And generally speaking, they fall into one of these two categories.

0:17:51.6 Lauran McHaffie: Yes. And we thought actually that our friend, Mr. Pascal, from the 17th century wrapped it all nicely in a bow with his quote, The heart has its reasons, which reason does not know. So, whether you are a decision maker, a heart-centric decision maker, or a mind-centric or pragmatic decision maker, we do have a neurological capacity to connect. And so as long as you, as we hear or see or listen which is the same as hear, to a story, and then it contains anecdotes and facts that make us feel emotion, then our brain reacts neurologically, and we are likely to store that in our memory bank. Which again, are those Danielle has said this over and over, that we’re really trying to become unforgettable, break through the noise and be memorable.

0:18:49.3 Danielle Gentry-Barth: Yeah.

0:18:52.1 Lauran McHaffie: Do you have anything to add to that, Danielle, about the…

0:18:55.8 Danielle Gentry-Barth: Yeah. As I’ve stated I know I’ve said it a number of times, but over my career now, I found that this simplified segmentation has really provided a good foundation for me and my team, Lauran and I, when we work together, as we think about attracting, engaging, and stewarding our donors, I mean, at the end, we wanna speak to them in the way they need to be spoken to. So, we’re trying to figure out what it is, what makes them tick, what’s the trigger there. And we know we’re not crazy. We know there are thousand ways to segment. I mean, you can do this by age or interest or zip code, and the list goes on and on, but a lot of us don’t have the resources to do that. We don’t have the time to do that. So, this is a great place to begin any of your segmentation, even if you’re new to a development team or a communications team, and you’re trying to think about how do I understand my donors and their motives? This is a great, great place to start.

0:19:57.9 Danielle Gentry-Barth: And like I said, if you’re like most of us and you have limited resources, we think, man, what a better place to start. There’s not a better place to start than saying, okay, which category do they fall into? And so I can develop some nice communications for the heart and the mind. And so one of the things that I always recommend is that if you do have your top list of 50 donors, 25 donors, whatever that top kind of donor list or portfolio you have, is putting them into those categories. Going through each of those people, even if they’re foundations or corporate donors, figuring out who’s the person behind that foundation and putting them into each category, so that you can have those individual conversations with them in the way they need it, or it works for mass communications. So, I think that’s a good thing to just keep in our heads as we’re segmenting.

0:20:57.5 Lauran McHaffie: Yes. And we’re gonna move on now just to have a quick chat about creating assets with that heart and mind. I just wanted to add on to one thing that Danielle said. So, when I was at Easterseals Redwood, I was the lead for annual giving. And because we had three distinct service lines, we really had to employ using heart and mind content in the same pieces, particularly for our mass communications. So we would use that type of content development for all the communications, whether it be peer-to-peer, event planning monthly president’s council, any of those things. And then would use our A/B testing for email campaigns using subject line to sort of get to know our donors better and to see what was resonating with people. So that was just a real great way for us to actually utilize the resources that we had and quite frankly, not go crazy.

[laughter]

0:21:53.9 Danielle Gentry-Barth: You go crazy once in a while.

0:21:54.2 Lauran McHaffie: So, next step. We are going to chat a little bit about a piece that Danielle and I put together just for the purposes of our discussion today. And we’re calling this a why it matters piece. And this is really we all have these, a digital or a print piece at our fingertips that we can use over and over again. It’s an evergreen piece. It has that boilerplate information in it. This mockup is really paying homage to a another phenomenal book that Danielle and I use it as resource. A lot of folks that I know in the marketing field do as well. It’s called Smart Brevity. It’s just a fantastic book, but we’ll share that resource at the end. But to quote something from that book, Most people are too busy to understand not just what is important, but why it’s important. So, our job as communicators and marketers, and fundraisers, is to tell them what, why it is important. So, we’re really gonna drill down into this just a little bit about why clear communication helps us. Remember, we’re looking for that evergreen piece. We’re looking for that brand voice, so people get to know and trust us. You wanna give them the rundown here, Danielle?

0:23:07.2 Danielle Gentry-Barth: I do. So this piece, like Lauran said it’s our evergreen piece. It’s printed, we can use it digitally. We can pull it apart and use chunks of it. We can use it as a collective here. We think it speaks to both heart and mind. So, we’ve kind of put that in a pinkish orange, peachy color for you, just so you can see the parts that we’re talking about. But first I think the first thing we wanna say is that imagery really does matter. There’s so much research that says, put an image of a face next to something and people remember it. You remove the image, you’re less likely to read it, and you’re less likely to remember it. So, always put the imagery there, make sure it’s strong, it speaks to your mission. We under that why it matters, you’ll see we said direct and tell me more.

0:23:58.0 Danielle Gentry-Barth: That section is really succinct, and it’s telling people why this is important, the reader, why this piece needs them to pay attention to. Underneath that, we have this section that speaks to the heart, so it’s a little more emotional there. We’re kind of pulling on some adjectives and some strong, like connect to what we’re doing here. The next section, the more details for impact, is that we’re trying to give you all the details you need to understand why this mission is important, why your gift will make a difference, what it will do. We have the buy the numbers. This is for the logical, rational people. They want numbers. They wanna know how many people you’re serving, et cetera.

0:24:43.4 Danielle Gentry-Barth: We have that there. Then we have the, you’ll be part of the big picture that’s really about what is my gift gonna do? Why does this matter. If I make this philanthropic gift, how is it gonna change things? So we really want it to speak to that, you’ll be part of the big picture. And then of course, at the bottom we have the call to action. We kept it simple. Use this code to make the American dream come true today. So, people just know right away what you’re asking them to do. And this is about work. You see that you make the American dream a reality for thousands.

0:25:23.0 Rebecca Sims: That’s so good, Danielle. Thank you so much for mentioning the importance of the visuals too.

0:25:27.5 Danielle Gentry-Barth: Yeah.

0:25:28.8 Rebecca Sims: And I just wanna be respectful of the time. It is 2:27. We do have one question. I believe that there’s one I see in the chat, in the Q&A. Someone is asking if you all could please share some tips for repurposing.

0:25:45.0 Danielle Gentry-Barth: Yeah. I love that they asked that. So, we have these samples right here that we’re gonna share with you. There’s the website examples. There video samples here. Back to that Why it matters piece. All of these can be repurposed and reused, and we really encourage that when you are beginning to create an asset, think about how you can use it many, many, many, many times. So that you’re not recreating every single time that you start something. So Lauran, I think you wanted to share a little bit about the content brief that you’re gonna share with folks afterwards.

0:26:23.8 Lauran McHaffie: Sure. Yeah. And it’s just, further to what you were saying about the repurposing. We’ll share this deck with you, and it has some links for these videos and also for the websites. But the Easterseals Redwood Military and Veteran Services animated video, it’s a great example of repurposing. There were still images that were used for that was used in a PSA, there’s a longer version. A lot of those iconography, things were used over and over and over again. And I think, Danielle, you said you’ve used it in several different capacities. All right. So, just.

0:27:03.7 Rebecca Sims: That’s great advice. Yeah.

0:27:06.0 Lauran McHaffie: Oh shoot. Military would have show it for us.

0:27:07.9 Lauran McHaffie: Oh. Okay. It’s about time to wrap up, but let’s.

0:27:12.6 Rebecca Sims: Is it a quick video? Let’s go ahead and show it, and then if there are unanswered questions, we can get address those later after the webinar.

0:27:20.1 Lauran McHaffie: Okay. Well, I was just gonna show these quick resources if I could just to, so these will come in the deck for you. So we have the resources for creating unforgettable content. Here’s the lovely books that Danielle and I referenced. They’re great. Those links will be in there. We’ve got this checklist. Danielle and I did this presentation very a lengthened version at the Bridge Conference in DC this summer. And we came up with this checklist to help you create or use every time that you’re creating content, and really kind of keep you on with those guardrails. And then also use your time wisely. And then as Rebecca said earlier, this is that great companion piece that takes a little bit deeper dive in showing how to write a compelling content story, a compelling impact story, rather.

0:28:12.8 Rebecca Sims: Perfect timing. It’s 2:30 and time to wrap it up. Lauran and Danielle, thank you so much for joining us. As I said, you will receive the recorded link to this recording and that companion piece along with some of the resources in your email. Thank you all for joining us. We’ll see you again in 2025. We can’t wait. Please make sure to fill out the survey. We appreciate you. Thank you.

0:28:37.9 Danielle Gentry-Barth: Thank you.

0:28:38.0 Lauran McHaffie: Thanks guys.

Danielle Gentry-Barth, EVP Agency Advancement and Veteran Services
Easterseals Redwood

Danielle Gentry-Barth, EVP Agency Advancement and Veteran Services, Easterseals Redwood, is an expert fundraiser with 20 years experience leading teams to record breaking revenue growth. Pulling from her experience in healthcare, social and veteran services, Danielle will share insights into delivering impact with individuals, corporate and grant partners.

With her leadership at Easterseals Redwood, her department has: increased annual giving every year, re-imagined their fundraising events, received a multi-million-dollar gift from MacKenzie Scott, and most recently exceeded their goal for a transformation capital campaign.

Lauran McHaffie, Client partnership coordinator

Lauran McHaffie, Client partnerships

Lauran exudes energy, whether she’s presenting at a conference, hosting a WG Content webinar or finding new, creative solutions to help clients reach their goals.

A member of our business development team since 2022, Lauran came to WG Content with a diverse background in marketing and communications that encompasses healthcare, higher education, philanthropy and wellness. Tenacious, creative and optimistic, she has a knack for building rapport and encouraging collaboration. Lauran asks excellent questions and listens well, making it clear she’s genuinely interested in what you think.

Lauran earned a bachelor’s degree in advertising and marketing from the University of Alabama (Roll Tide!) She is a sought-after pickleball partner and, as a certified fitness instructor, has provided personal training since the days of leg warmers. Cooking is her love language.