Paul Sokol is an automation expert, a close friend, a pretty talented Eminem impersonator (proof), one of Monkeypod’s most popular guest authors, and the former Campaign Builder Mad Scientist over at Keap. In addition to all those things, Paul is also a dedicated musician, and has started a charity to help raise money for local music and arts programs.

Being the marketing automation nerds that we are, we recently got talking about some of the more unorthodox use cases we’d seen, and before long – we were talking about non-profits. Anyhoozle, I asked Paul to tell us a little about his charity, and the role Keap (formerly known as Infusionsoft) plays in it.

Keap for Non-Profits: A Monkeypod Case Study

Hello Monkeypodders! It is great to see you again 🙂

I’m Paul Sokol, one of Greg’s good friends, and just happen to work in the same space of automation. We actually met at Keap years ago (back when it was called Infusionsoft).

In any case, Greg was wondering about how I use Keap for my non-profit charity, and I figured why not write a lil guest post about it so everyone can learn?

As you are probably expecting, I’ll do a shameless plug of the charity at the end of this post, but for now the main context for discussion is a non-profit using Keap.

My particular charity is relatively new, less than 2 years old, but I’m still finding ways to leverage automation to save time and build a community.

First off, every year our charity partners with a local promoter for a music festival. I head up the marketing and promotion which means I’m using automated workflows that tell me when to post stuff on social media and automated emails to the bands with content for them to help promote the show. Really simple stuff. The post workflow is just a chain of tasks that say “the show is one month away, copy/paste this status and share it”, “the show is 2 weeks away…” and so on. Task. Complete. Task. Complete. I can live out of MyDay which is really nice.

The emails to the bands are basically the same thing. “The show is in a month, copy/ paste this to your page and here is your trackable band link”. I use hidden lead source fields on most of my capture forms (see an example). This way, I can create a unique lead source for different bands and see who does a good job driving traffic.

Regarding the ticketing checkout, the tickets themselves come through TicketFly so I position it as a two-step check out. First step is name and email which takes you to step 2; as far down the TicketFly funnel as I can get people. This builds a list for presales next year. Unfortunately, we haven’t yet implemented a cart abandon mechanism because getting data out of TicketFly is controlled by the venue we partner with. Just hasn’t happened yet.

Outside of the annual festival, on the charity’s website, the donation process is also positioned as a two-step checkout. Since all payments are going through Keap directly, we have implemented a donation abandon campaign, if you’ve been reading this blog for a while, you’ll know it as “The Nudge“. In addition to some emails, it has a task for me to personally reach out and try to “close the sale”. Like I said earlier, we are a new charity so the traffic to our site is basically nothing so the personal 1:1 calls are manageable. Once we grow that isn’t going to scale and we’ll have to find another way to add that personal non-email touch.

Speaking of donations, while it wasn’t automated, because all donations create an Order record in Keap I was able to easily pull a list of donors and send a hand-written thank you card at the end of 2015. Now that I type it out, that’s a great opportunity for something to automate! :::makes mental note:::

Besides accepting donations, the website also serves as a press release news board. Every press release lives formally on our website. Each press release page has a capture form so people can receive updates as new releases come out.

That’s how I use it right now. In the future as we scale, the plan is to build our list of donors and encourage repeat donations automatically. As we do more events, I plan to use the Opportunity module to track the process of event acquisition and execution. As we become more global, I could even see giving different regions their own affiliate codes to track where donations are coming from the most. I’ll even use it to filter out potential hires early in the recruiting process.

In other words, I’ll be able to use Keap for a good long time as my charity grows 🙂