We recently sat down with David Stanton, Causemo’s Product Director to discuss the way Causemo’s product is helping nonprofits connect more strategically with their supporters.
What are the most exciting aspects of the Causemo platform?
The thing that’s most exciting to us is the capacity to have a highly connected, personalized journey for anyone in your audience. Rather than going for an ask or signing up for an event, you get much better results when you put them on a journey. This has directly impacted the way we’ve developed the platform -- creating a personalized journey which includes multiple touch points with a supporter in a variety of ways based on the platform and device someone is using. Causemo makes it easy for organizations to continue to engage with their supporters -- both new and long standing ones -- so they can foster a relationship that works toward a common goal with their supporters, such as saving the whales or protecting LGBT rights.
What makes Causemo different from other platforms?
Causemo is purpose built for nonprofits; there are lots of products out in the commercial sector that nonprofits try to use with mixed results and often, lots of frustration. As we set out to build the Causemo platform, we consistently heard about the need for customized user journeys that are tailored to each person within an organization’s network. The challenge for most nonprofit organizations, however, is that customized journeys is not scalable with a finite staff and limited budget.
The Causemo platform absorbs much of the work involved in launching customized journeys to audiences by automatically delivering content based on the interests of the user, the platforms they use and when they use them. We take it one step further to give you insights on who these people are and what they’re doing, which can be used to inform the acquisition of new audiences.
What is most surprising about Causemo?
How granular you can get with the data, how personalized we can get with the journeys. And that it’s all automated and delivering results.
Are journeys time sensitive?
The notion of a journey is fairly ambiguous -- you can have two parts to a journey or 100 parts; it depends on what you’re trying to accomplish and who you’re trying to target.
If you have a group of lapsed donors, you want to get a longer journey in front of them because you need to re-establish that trust. If you have a group that’s passionate about a certain topic or cause, you want to get to your engagement goal as fast as possible because you only need a few touchpoints before you can put a donation ask in front of them. The platform is set up to accommodate various kinds of journeys. With the click of a button you could set up an entirely different kind of journey that may need adjusting based on needs. It’s highly integrated. You can deploy very complex sets of ads, custom landing pages and asks -- what feels like an extremely advanced campaign -- but takes less than 60 minutes. Moreover, the platform optimizes itself for each audience member.
What’s are the advantages of real-time reporting in the Causemo platform?
The platform optimizes in real-time, so it takes the guess work out of interpreting tests. It optimizes itself for the most effective result based on your goals and the user’s level of engagement.
How does the platform “optimize itself?”
We’re analyzing the data you gave us about your people based on their behaviors -- what they open, click on, and what they respond to. From there, within the Causemo platform, we watch to see how they interact with various content elements and optimize the content based on these variables.
While sending your donors various ads, email and/or social posts we can also serve them several kinds of creative. From there, we send you down a journey based on what you click on -- because that’s the one that resonated with you. It’s an extremely useful tool for nonprofits.
What is the Causemo product making possible for clients?
First, the personalization aspect: many nonprofits cannot convey any personalization making thier messaging lack meaningful connection. Causemo allows you to communicate with very specific messaging.
Second, you might think you have lost all your unsubscribes and lapsed donors, but Causemo allows you to get them back without it being invasive. The platform allows you to re-engage and cultivate these audiences to present opportunities and foster that relationship again based on where they’re at and where they spend their time.
What makes you most proud of the Causemo product?
I’m incredibly proud that we are a customer-driven product development team. You sometimes see a product that’s really cool and useful to the product developers -- they’re building what they think the customers want. Not us. We have continuous conversations with our clients and prospective clients to use their insights to shape the product. Tell us what your problems are and what you’re trying to achieve and we’ll do our best to build a product for you. That philosophy is built into our culture. We believe it’s the right way to do it.
Internally it doesn’t matter what I want to build; we build what our customers will find useful, will make their lives easier and deliver results. We love what we do and we love being able to help other people with the product. It’s so gratifying to see people let out a sigh of relief when they see the utility and effectiveness of Causemo.
