Supercharge Your Funding Program with Smartphones
Interview with Dr. Greg Sanders and Adam Bricker from EZCard
(Archive)

Note: EZCard.com is a sponsor of SynerVision Leadership Foundation

SynerVision is using a new web based tool called EZCard and it’s the best thing we’ve ever seen for connecting early with our tribe! We asked Adam and Greg to come on the show to show you a new way of promoting your nonprofit to supporters.

Use this tool to raise funds, promote events, provide information to supporters about the work of the organization, and more.

EZcard’s mission is to elevate and empower all people and communities with affordable, digital technology, including tools for automation.  This enhances the bottom line of any business, school, or non-profit organization, and strengthens communities.  That’s what we’re all about!

Here are the presenters:

Dr. Greg Sanders is the Founder & CEO of EZcard, a simple but powerful, cutting-edge technology for smart phones.  Dr. Sanders taught sociology at the university level for 30 years and is, from one perspective, a very unlikely CEO of a software company.  He is not a programmer, and while he speaks 8 languages and plays 27 instruments, he doesn’t speak “geek.”  However, six years ago he had a clear vision of how to put the power of the smart phone into the hands of ordinary people, and EZcard was born.

 

Adam Bricker is a forward-thinking and innovative Fitness Philosopher. His ability to see what others miss allows for the creation of plans and strategies specifically designed to overcome obstacles that have previously prevented his clients from successfully attaining their goals.

When a person fails to achieve successful results multiple times in multiple programs, its almost always an alignment issue between their beliefs and their desired outcomes. The biggest barricade to their success can be removed, usually very easily, once it is identified. The process to identify these hidden self-image beliefs is what Adam has brought to the fitness industry and what makes Bricker worth talking to.

 

Read the Interview

Hugh Ballou: Hey folks, welcome to this edition of The Nonprofit Exchange. Russell and I are pushing 5+ years. I am pushing 73+ years. You can’t tell I have more hair than you do, Russell. How are you doing today, Russell?

Russell Dennis: It’s another beautiful day. I’m great. I just met with some folks in the local area. Applying the principle that none of us is as smart as all of us. We had our mastermind group. I got good help from them and was able to support my team. That’s what it’s all about.

Hugh: This is like a mini mastermind today. We have two masters. This is a company called EZCard. They are a mainline sponsor of SynerVision Leadership Foundation for 2019/2020. We are doing some pretty *audio issue* to help nonprofits all over the place. Without wasting more time, let me throw it to Greg first. Greg, tell me a little bit about yourself and why you’re doing the amazing work that you’re doing.

Greg Sanders: How are you doing, Hugh? Thank you very much for inviting me on today. This is really exciting. EZCard for me is applied sociology. I was a sociologist for 30 years, teaching at the university level, teaching 18-25-year-olds primarily how the world works. One of my particular interests was in group dynamics and organizations, how organizations can work in a more efficient way to bless the world with whatever it is that they do. Organizations get a bad rap. They are considered as bureaucratic, as being against people and all for the bottom line and all profit-driven. An organization can be infused with wholesome values, with people-oriented values, or it can be infused with greediness and ugliness. It’s really the people who make up that organization and how they collectively organize themselves.

You talked about the mastermind. The mastermind is based on the fact that everybody is there to help each other. If they are in a selfish way, the mastermind won’t work. It’s like Russell was saying. We are all smarter together than we are individually. But I have to be willing to listen to you in order for my intelligence to increase, and you have to be willing to listen to me. That’s what EZCard is. It’s taking available technologies and applying them in such a way as to reinforce group values and make groups work more efficiently.

Hugh: That’s really good. Let’s hear from Adam.

Adam Bricker: Thanks, Hugh. Hi, Russell. Good to see you again. Always great to see you, Dr. EZ. I served the last 24 years as a marketing strategist. I just thought in my head, If we could have this product on the phone that could reach out and deliver multimedia, videos, audios, texts, connecting everybody, keeping everybody connected, it would be so valuable for business. I wanted to create that. I had the pleasure and honor of meeting Greg, and it was already created. I was able to team forces with him a la the mastermind and deliver this impactful business strategy right through the phone.

Out of the goodness of my heart, I always like to help people. I thought if I made enough money in my business, I could help other foundations and nonprofits and donate. I didn’t realize I could actually help them through my business. Thanks to the enlightenment of Hugh, Russell, Danna, David, and so many other people, the nonprofits I met this morning at the networking at the chamber, I have a solution they didn’t know existed. I’m happy to be on the call today and share that with the rest of your audience.

Russell: It’s a remarkable system for those who haven’t seen it. I’m glad you will have a chance to showcase it. It’s really about telling our stories and getting our information out there. EZCard is a perfect tool for that.

Hugh: A couple weeks ago, Russell and Adam and I were together in West Palm Beach, Florida, before all the wind. I’m glad you’re back home and safe, Adam. We’re glad the storm went further out to sea and stayed away from damaging more properties. Welcome back home. We were together when it was better weather.

Actually we connected just about everybody in the room. We said, “Text this number with this code.” I’ll tell people you’ll find all of these episodes at TheNonprofitExchange.org. That’s five years’ worth of history of interviews with really great people. I will say that Russell and I were so excited about the EZCard because of the benefit that it not only brings us at SynerVision Leadership Foundation, but also the message we can share with others. Greg and Adam chose to sponsor us because they could see SynerVision as a hub for sharing this to organizations all over the place. We move around a lot. We do a lot of things. We impact a lot of people’s lives. One of the things that we really want people to be able to do better is engage their tribe. We were able to at this leadership symposium say, “Pick up your phone.” They had the schedule for the day. They had the profiles of all the speakers. They had information about joining our online community for community builders. They had SynerVision in the palm of their hand.

I will say I wear dual hats. Greg, you helped us out last week by getting the Lynchburg Symphony EZCard. I think we’re pushing over 100 people in some encounters. I pushed it out to the chamber of commerce, a reception for the symphony, at a veteran’s event downtown. People left this reception Friday and said, “Wow. I have the symphony in my hand.” They did not know when the concerts were, even though we told them. They forgot. They have it now, stored on their screens. We’re so excited about this. It sounds like an infomercial, but we want to share tools that we find along the way. Last session we had with another sponsor, WordSprint, about top of mind marketing. They mail our magazine. They use old-fashioned mailing. That is one way to get to people. We need multiple channels. The EZCard is just like people said: it’s easy. I’m just blown away with it.

Greg, you started this whole thing rolling. Where did this start and why?

Greg: That’s a great question. I’m not a programmer; I am a very unlikely executive for a software company because I can’t write one line of code. To me, that is the beauty of the EZCard. It’s not built for experts; it’s built for non-experts. I tell people if you can send an email, you can create an EZCard. You can modify or change information because my goal was to take the power of the smartphone, the world’s smallest and most powerful computer, and put that power back in the hands of the people. Why should it be locked up with the programmers who can know what PHP is and these coding languages are?

That is why I started this journey because I said I think what’s really changing in the programming world recently is the idea of user interface and user experience, what we call UI and UX. That’s why apps are so big right now. If I can represent your business on the home screen of a cell phone and can model what it is you do with your business process in a way where people can click and push once with their fingertip, and I can see the gas stations where you are, the prices, and I can get information, now it’s like a customized Google. I can go to Google and do a bunch of searches and find this and that. Why shouldn’t I go learn about you with some pre-packaged presentation? The problem is it costs 50 grand or more to make an app for a business. We brought that price point down to well under a thousand dollars or a couple hundred dollars for a business to have that kind of technology. That was my goal: make the technology affordable, make it so that it’s ready to use out of the box. Even though it’s a simple technology, they don’t want to create it the first time around. If you give them a shell, saying, “Here’s a digital whatever. Go and build it,” even if it’s simple, they won’t do it. That’s what our company does to make it easy. We create it out of the gate and say, “Here’s how you can go in, change your phone number, change your message, upload a new photo,” and it’s really taken off. People know how to plug in mid-stream and make that work.

Hugh: It’s so reasonable it’s like stealing. I talk to people at the symphony about the app. It’s like a business card. You don’t have to download anything. It’s the ultimate easy. I explain it to them. You helped me create this. I said, “Text this number and put in LSO.” Boom. They go, “Wow.” We’re on video now. For people who will be listening to this on the podcast, we will put some images on the home site, The NonprofitExchange.org. It’s just like ultimate easy. It’s there.

Russell, when you first loaded it, do you resonate with any of this? What was your thinking?

Russell: I thought this was absolutely marvelous. I was able to scroll through, cycle through, see our pictures, see the agenda, see the information on the event. It was all there. Plus information on SynerVision Leadership. You have your set information that is pretty much evergreen, your general information. You can add events and other items as you go through. You can capture information of people you meet at your event. There are ways to register and let people know they were there. It’s a marvelous tool. Easy to access, understand, and use. There wasn’t any confusion about how to use it. I was quickly able to navigate through there.  

Hugh: Let’s take some different channels here. We’ll talk about marketing in a second, but I want to talk about the funding piece. In 32 years of working with nonprofits, several themes come up. Communication is always a problem, but this happens with that. Leader burnout, but this helps with that because you have other people in the chute. Funding, board engagement, volunteer engagement. There is always funding somewhere in the mix. How does this help? Let me tell you my experience Friday night and then kick it back to you guys.

There is a channel growing your presence in. It’s the funding channel. I was at this reception with 45 people who were interested in the symphony. We have a lot of nonprofits like every town and gathering. People are always asking for donations. We did a soft ask, “Download this.” You should have seen the look on their faces. I now have a text I can push back out to them, which I am getting ready to do today, saying, “Thank you for this. Go here, and you can find out more about our schedule and how you can support our programs.” I found it to be a direct path to *audio issue* funding channel that you’re expanding with.

Adam is moving around. Go for it.

Adam: It’s not just a path to receive the funding. It’s a new source for funding as well. If you’re having an event, they can register on the card and pay for it there. If you have a product or registration, they can do that right on the card. Or like we did for Danna’s card where we made a virtual brick wall, they can do that right on the card and get their results, their contribution to the effort to show right on the card.

Hugh: Danna is doing a project called Memories in the Mansion for girls. The bricks are building the mansion. You had a visual for building the bricks. I wanted to add some clarity to what that was.

There is another dynamic besides those, the direct funding. There is a passive funding. You can share it with people and sign up to be an affiliate. It costs a little bit of money to be an affiliate, but you can share it. That way, it’s a win-win for everybody.

I teach nonprofits that there are eight basic streams of income. We always think of donors and grants. But the business earned income. One of those is to share as an affiliate, but you could also offer books and some of your products on there. How complicated is it to add in these business streams of income to what you’re already thinking about?

Greg: That’s very simple. When you think about nonprofits, I know two things about nonprofits other than they are doing phenomenal things in the work. Most of them don’t have a high tech person on staff who is going to do wizardry with their website and everything else. The second is they are usually overstressed, hardworking, and are looking for funds. That’s why we’re trying to address with EZCard. It is so much simpler to build an EZCard than to build a website. I was talking with an actual app builder, and he was saying they were still working on building their app and their website. The next day, we had their EZCard done for them. In a few hours, we get it up and going. If you want to add something, if you have something to sell, if you change your mind mid-stream, it’s so easy to go in and modify information. You can say “Save” and update in the EZCards in people’s hands, which is beautiful. That is the purpose. Life is too dynamic. It goes by too quickly. You want to have 150 people show up, and only 85 people show up. If this happens or that happens, you need to make adjustments mid-stream very quickly to have them come across with the professional presence.  

Hugh: Russell, you’re chomping at the bit with some questions. We haven’t let Adam talk much. Why don’t we give him one of your hard questions?

Russell: We never stomp anybody in the quiz, so you can breathe easy. In looking at this tool, when you were thinking about putting something together, what were the main pieces that you wanted to include in that to make sure that it provided the most value?  

Adam: Can I share visually? Let me show you.

Hugh: For people listening, you will go to TheNonprofitExchange.org and be able to see. We will do a video clip of this on the website.

Adam: In order to see your card, just text the word “LDR” to 64600. If they wanted to do the symposium, this is the one that you mentioned before, you can see anybody who is on the card, so people not only can be prepared for what they are doing before they get to your event, but afterward, they can have a reminder as well. People can have their own EZCards as well.

To answer your question specifically. What were we envisioning? We wanted to take the nonprofit’s idea and put it in the hands of their people. Hugh mentioned a minute ago selling books. Danna has a book called Champions. If you click this link right here, you can order it on Amazon. You mentioned donations. If you click right here, you can donate through Hugh’s organization to Memories in a Mansion. Then we listen. We really like this and this.

Danna made it clear she was selling these bricks to raise funds for her meditation garden for these girls she is taking care of. There is a nice and peaceful place that is surrounded by these energy-enriched bricks. She said, “Adam, the least expensive I can do that for is $300. What if I had somebody who wanted something less expensive?” We made virtual bricks right here through EZCard technology, through Greg and his incredible staff over there. I want to mention Jerry because he put in time, effort, and energy to make these bricks happen. They are a message of love and support. They are paid for and all you have to do is come right down, click it, and it brings up an order form that allows you to pick what brick. It brings up an order form… There it is. That lets you put in your message, lets you donate, and takes the money right through PayPal immediately. As soon as you’re done, the message appears back on the EZCard. It’s an incredible technology that is helping everyone.

The final part, the thing that makes this the best for the fundraisers, is what is your greatest source of reaching fresh new donors for your organization? Your existing donors. Through this simple tab here, any existing donor can share your EZCard with their friends, their family, their connections who want to be a part of what you’re doing. We take and extend their reach through their donors to people they have never met before.

Russell: That’s a marvelous tool. That is a great walkthrough to show people how to use that. A lot of it is messaging. I think people get bogged down with the idea of how am I going to navigate this and link it to my social media and link it to a landing page and create this place where people can register? When people look at it and see how many functions it has, it can look pretty intimidating. How long does it actually take to show somebody how to use it and to actually put the content in there?

Greg: Can I take this one, Adam?

Adam: Absolutely.

Greg: So our record time in building an EZCard is, and I know because so far I hold the record, is seven minutes. What happened is that someone was at a business convention. There was a guy passing a bunch of paper handouts to a room full of people, and he ran out. Jerry Johnson, my tech and innovation officer, called me and said, “I have a room full of people who need this content. If I snap pictures of this document and text them to you, can you throw an EZCard together?” I got that all in on an EZCard with a simple main image, text this to this to get this information. Everybody in the rest of the room was able to get that information electronically, and the EZCard was done in seven minutes.

The Memories in the Mansion card with the virtual brick wall took longer because we were innovating brand new techniques and technology, which is one of my most exciting reasons to work at EZCard with my amazing team. We’re not just repackaging technologies that currently exist into a new arrangement. We are actually breaking new ground as to how to apply these technologies in new and useful ways. Every time I come up with an EZCard, we figure out a way to do it in a more simple way. A more complicated project like Memories in a Mansion may take three days because we have to do some thinking and some back-and-forth with the client. How does this look? Very rarely do we have to go to the drawing board and start from scratch. Usually, when we give you the prototypes tomorrow or the next day, it’s 80% there. We make a few revisions, and it’s done and ready to roll.

Hugh: Let me tag on that. There are lots of different kinds of organizations. This is the Lynchburg Symphony. Adam, click on “Concerts and Tickets,” would you? A lot of organizations have tickets to events. Click on “Purchase Tickets.” It’s Beethoven’s 250^th anniversary this year. We are doing an all-Beethoven concert in the fall at this historic theater. What it does is it sends us to a web page where there is a portal with the venue for buying tickets. If you just scroll down a little bit, there should be a window open. It will load.

A window with tickets. Right in the purple at the top of the screen, there is a “Tickets” button. What it does is it takes you to the ticket sales page. There is a place where you can choose your seat. There is a seat map there for pricing for the whole thing.

People spend so much of their lives on the phone. I had people buy tickets at the rotary last week. I just gave them the card. They didn’t know when the concerts were. They had just gone on sale the day before. We are pushing for sellouts of our concert. This is a good way to do it. I am tired of people saying, “We didn’t know Lynchburg had a symphony.” We’re curing that one person at a time. Just like you pointed out, they are sharing it with one another. So good.

Adam, marketing is not a long suit. This is your background. Marketing is not a skill of most nonprofit leaders. How does having this card help people market? Is there more than a do it yourself marketing? Is there a done for you program? Or do you have that ready yet?

Adam: What’s really great- The things that nonprofits are really good at is sharing. The EZCard is all about sharing, whether it’s sharing opportunities, sharing the card, sharing links, sharing information, or just sharing a link to get a ticket to enjoy the Lynchburg Symphony Orchestra. By sharing the card and teaching their constituents how to share, it goes viral. There is no reason that if you have the people on your board of the symphony, each person downloaded the card and shared it with 10 people, you might reach 2,200 to 3,500 people within a day, within a week. If you had a concentrated effort to get the word out that way, that’d be fantastic.

We do have other aspects of marketing they can jump into. We have a mobile marketing campaign that keeps people consistently updated through text messaging. We have an entire CRM contact record management program that is an option to go with the card that any nonprofit could plug into easily that goes in such words as, “Drip campaign” and “sequencing” and your funnel. Danna Olivo knows that real well inside and out. She strategizes with you. We will be working to teach her how to use our system.

I also want to push over to Greg for other aspects of marketing he can share with you.

Hugh: Before we go there, I want to tag on what you just said. One of the goals of The Nonprofit Exchange is how to highlight sales strategy, sales funnel, drip campaigns. Highlight those because they are certainly appropriate. We are running a tax-exempt business. We have lots of rules we have to abide by. But we have a business and need those streams of revenue. Really it’s about changing the mindset of scarcity. We can’t send money on marketing. We can’t pay good salaries. We can’t do this. We can’t do that. Baloney. If you want to be a healthier organization, we need to create some positive cash flow and some retained earnings that we can put back into the services we provide for the community. All of those things you said very carefully are business principles that we encourage nonprofit leaders to install in their systems and their organizations. I wanted to highlight that if that’s okay. Let’s hear from Reg.

Greg: Sure. One thing when you are designing a website, what they call the wire framing of the site or the organization of the site is important. A lot of times, people don’t really know how to organize the information. There is a piano lesson going on in the next room. I hope that’s not too distracting.

One of the great things about the EZCard is it is based on a tab system, kind of like file folders in your file cabinet. I could take file cabinet #5, take it out, and move it into the first position. I could take it out and put it in a whole different file cabinet. It helps people think through their marketing because you can start with only one tab, three tabs, or five tabs, and you can start moving them around.

Would you go to the Greenville card? I just came from a meeting with my community leaders, and this is something that would be interesting to nonprofit leaders, especially if you are networking with other people in your community, including nonprofits. You can see here we have a second tab called “Emergency: Click to Dial.” When we made the EZCard for our town, I felt that it was very important for people to know how to call the fire department or any particular suicide hotline or something like that without having to dig through the number. You can certainly go to 911, but they would have to reroute your call, explain what you are looking for. Or you can call the number directly. That tab had to be lower down on the EZCard, but I decided to move it up to the second position.

This is where the marketing makes a lot of sense. Open the town directory. We decided we wanted to drive more business to our local community. If you click on one of those, you will notice it drops down with a tagline for the business, a description for the business, the business address—if you click on that, it opens up Google Maps on your phone to take you to that place. These are resources that your nonprofit could bring to their community and earn a residual affiliate income by sharing our technology not only with other individual nonprofit organizations, but even with your entire neighborhood or community. We are trying to explore the community partnership model, where like Russell says, we are all smarter together than we are individually. You could have a Preferred Vendors tab on your nonprofit card, and you could say these are some of our key supporters and donors. You give them added value by giving them visibility on your EZCard. That could be included in a sponsor package that brings money into your organization.

Hugh: Whoa, that’s huge. Whoa. That’s huge. This tab directory could be a sponsor directory. We are selling ads in our static booklet. When you go to a concert, you have a concert booklet. We have some ads in the middle that we put in the concert program. We could offer a bonus ad for an extra fee on the card. Wow. Webinars. You got a tab for engagement here. Russell, that was our last sponsor directory. There you are. People could add themselves, like we did a directory for the attendees at the symposium. You could also add your key staff and officers for the organization. There is our brother, David Gruder. He is one of our SynerVision WayFinders. We work together on many things.

Russell, what’s on your mind? He is quiet, so he is brewing up stuff to say. Russell, what do you see in there?

Russell: It’s a remarkable tool. One of the benefits is to build relationships with sponsors. That is one of the places you can put their information. You can share it. The reach extends exponentially. It extends faster. This is part of the power and the beauty of it, having people in there. Other organizations that you partner with, people you highlight, you can put information about your board members and your team members. All of these things help draw people to you. By being something that is easy to access, understand, and use, it increases the chances that all of your information will go viral. As you’re sitting, Adam or Greg, as you are sitting and thinking about the best way to deploy this for nonprofit agencies, if you have a small one that is just starting, how would you actually help them do that? What steps would you walk them through to put this together and do it in a way that is affordable yet still give them the bang for their buck and help them expand so they can add new features?

Greg: Let me get it started, and I will throw it to Adam. We have four different packages starting as little as $50, $10 a month. That is on the low end. We go all the way up to a pro package with five EZCards for different events or facets of your organization. That is $1,000. We go from $50-$1,000. The monthly plan. If you want one EZCard and want the premium package, you build it, we deploy it with mobile marketing, you could get into that for $130. That is something an organization could do. Put a sponsor directory on your card, and charge people a certain amount of money to be visible on your card for the whole year. You have just paid off your technology and are making money.

Step one is build their EZCard. We build it within two or three days. We deliver it. It looks beautiful. If they have a great looking website, we connect to it and drive more traffic to it. It’s great to have a website, but you need people to go there. The EZCard is a gateway and a single entry point that drives more traffic to their website. If they don’t have a website or it’s out of date, by George, we can build an EZCard for them and a couple days later they will have a mobile website in the form of an EZCard, which looks fantastic.

Then we work with our InfiniTrack system. We haven’t talked about our InfiniTrack system. But when Adam talked about sharing the card with other people, every time I share Adam’s card with you, Adam gets an email that says, “Your EZCard has been shared with Russell Dennis and Hugh Ballou with contact info.” When you pass along Adam’s EZCard to someone else, or I pass along Hugh’s symphony card to someone else, the symphony gets an email, and it also gets dropped into the contact manager of the EZCard back office. Now I am building my list. A small start-up nonprofit, your most valuable resource is your list of supporters. This grows your list of supports virally, starting with you, moving out to your most loyal supporters. They love you. They have your app on the phone. They share it with others through the InfiniTrack system. Now you get notified that the app is being shared. You put it on social media. “Text LSO to this number.” Everyone on Facebook is now texting in. That information gets captured by InfiniTrack. Then you go to other steps of marketing. Let me turn it over to Adam as to what happens next.

Adam: I attended the Leadership Empowerment Symposium. What I learned there is a lot of people get into running a nonprofit for a mission. They want to give their money away. But they don’t take the time to understand. Let me say that I get this right. They need to pay the staff, they need to keep the lights on, they need capital reserves. If they don’t have those three basic fundamental business properties, they won’t be able to successfully fulfill their mission and donate all that money. What we do is give them a tool that allows them to cover each one of those steps with the knowledge of what they learned on the airplane. If that oxygen mask drops down, take care of yourself first. We help take care of them. From working with us, whether it’s me, Greg, Jerry, or any one of our staff, we end up in the preparation of the card fleshing out things they don’t know that they don’t know. By doing that, we are able to build a rock solid foundation so they can get their message out in a clear, precise way through active technology while building a list that is going to drip on and remind them what’s going on. With this last reminder to you guys, I want you to know that if I sent you my card today and updated it, I sent you an update next week, when you go back in, you will see the updated version. You don’t need to download it again.

Hugh: Let’s be clear. They can go to the SynerVision card. There is a tab on there that says “Get your own EZCard.” The number is 64600. For SynerVision Leadership Foundation, it’s LDR. It’s short for Leader. You can click on that tab and get your own EZCard. You can go and get your own. You can find out more. We are building it out. This was the first iteration of it. More of the upgrades are back in my hands. I need to do some work on that. It’s a powerful tool. Whether you are listening on the podcast, the number is 64600. The letters are LDR. That’s short for Leader. We want to make it as easy as possible, but no easier, as Einstein said. If you say “Get your own EZCard,” there is a tab at the bottom. You click on that and click on EZCard at the top there. It takes you to that sign-up place, and you can get you one.

I would be bold to say we have not even begun to scratch the surface of the features that are already available. I am getting a list of people who have signed up, as I discovered yesterday. It comes to my email. I am real pleased. There are people in an audience that we don’t know. This is a way to get them in your system, and you can follow up with them. I don’t know about you guys. When I finish going to an event, boom, it’s instant. Russell, you’re smiling there. Chime in.

Russell: The thing I love about this. You find out things on the fly. Even during our event in Fort Lauderdale, we were able to make some adjustments and add some things to this. It’s done on the fly. When you set one of these systems up, you’re not on your own. You have some support to put some things together and get things done. The first thing somebody is going to think, when you look at a piece of technology like this and see the different functionalities, well, it must have taken a long time to pull all this information together, or it’s really complicated to do this, they start thinking in terms of building a website or a social media page. This plugs into other things. Talk a bit how they can leverage their social media feeds and some of their content so people can access it through EZCard.

Greg: We can actually mirror the content of a Facebook page on an EZCard tab. It’s great. They don’t have to leave your card to watch a video or see what your stream is. I don’t know if you want to show that. There is the Lynchburg Symphony Orchestra Facebook page. It’s embedded on the EZCard. Not everyone has Facebook. Isn’t that great that you can go right in and see the content there without having to get lost in the noisy environment we call Facebook with the millions of people saying whatever they are saying and marketing what they are marketing? You have a controlled environment. You are pulling social media into your controlled environment without leaving and going to the messy marketplace. It provides a professional experience and also a very simple accessibility for the user.

Hugh: A good marketing principle is you don’t want people to leave your site. They can do Facebook without leaving your site. There is our executive director and the conductor.

Greg: I love this staff slideshow directory. Isn’t it beautiful?

Hugh: In the SynerVision card, we haven’t done it yet with the symphony card, but I made updates to my website, and it’s updated on the EZCard. It’s drawing the source from the website, just like Facebook. I noticed some of it is updating when I update the pages. We have new blog posts on there. There is no going to the app store and downloading a new app. It’s just automatically updated.

Greg, I heard you say it goes into your CRM program. One of the biggest gaps I see in nonprofits is we don’t manage our database system of contacts. We have people give us money. We have people who come to performances. We don’t put them into our communication system. What we learned last week from Bill Gilmer is that to keep donors donating, you keep the

there is consistency.

Maintaining this relationship building. Any more comments on the database management?

Greg: Do you want to take this, Adam? Go ahead.

Adam: I’m going to take the lead for you just to explain how powerful data is. The richest companies, the richest people in the world has shifted in America recently with the owner of Facebook rising up toward the top. His company is just about data. AirBnb, Uber, they are just about data. They link everybody together. Uber doesn’t own any cars. But they are the #1 transport company in America right now. Amazon, it’s all about data. Some of the biggest, most successful nonprofits, United Way, Red Cross, their data management is impeccable. You get those messages quite consistently. Whatever pillars you are building for nonprofit management, that database component needs to be at the top of the list. We have one of the most powerful yet affordable systems because of the way Greg has set it up. I’ll hand it over to you so you can share that, Greg.

Greg: Thank you. You have to think about your lead management and your database in terms of a funnel. How do people enter into your system? That’s where EZCard really shines. If you’re on your phone, they are going to see you multiple times a day as opposed to in their email inbox or some place in their office underneath a stack of business cards. That is the top of the funnel.

The InfiniTrack system, where they share it with other people and it captures all that information, that is unique. That is a proprietary technology that will put lots of people at the top of your funnel. You want to connect it with email automation, text messaging, and a customer relationship journey, which is what CRM stands for. We have what we think is the best CRM in the business. It has an event management registration. If you’re doing events, you don’t need to use EventBrite if you don’t want to anymore. You can register them right through the EZCard and take their payments for the event. We have a learning management system if there are skills you want to teach your staff, volunteers, or employees. They can have modules for learning things right in our system. We can track obviously if people open their emails or not. What happens after that, we call that a customer journey. You can set it up on the screen on your computer. If they open an email, I want this to happen. If they don’t, I want this other thing to happen. Once the system is set up and in place, it’s a machine. It’s processing. It’s assisting you in developing relationships, growing that database, and strengthening the relationships with every single person in that database.

Russell: A funnel is something that you need because you are building relationships all the time. It’s about that relationship building and nurturing it along. Once you get people who are donors or servant leaders start doing work with you, you’d like to see them continue. You’d like to see that relationship expand and grow. There are so many tools out there that it can get confusing, especially a good CRM. The InfusionSoft and the SalesForce. These things can be intimidating. The tool is only as effective as your ability to use it. In terms of tracking the donors, we already talked about how we tracked some of that journey. Just how powerful is EZCard? Give some examples of some types of tools that by switching to this, you can actually eliminate and still get your message out there more effectively.

Greg: That’s a fantastic question. Let me tell you the experience of my business coach, Bubba Mills. He runs Corcoran Coaching. He has offices across the country. When I talked to him and told him we had a CRM that is a part of his system, he said, “I am a guru of CRMs. I have studied CRMs. I know about all of the CRMs.” I said, “Have you seen this one?” I showed it to him. He said, “I have never seen that before.” He studied it with his staff for 30 days. He had another major CRM. He studied it for 30 days. He said, “If I have your system, I can get rid of these other five products I am paying subscriptions for, for the sales funnels?” I said, “Yes, you can roll that under one house, and you don’t have to pay people to get the data to talk to each other.” Not only was it simpler for him, but he also saved hundreds of dollars because now he has a single solution that is more powerful and it is integrated. You don’t have the time to be a programmer or work with your programmers for hours in a day to keep everything connected. So yeah, I think we have a fantastic solution from the top of the funnel all the way down.  

Hugh: We’re headed to the top of the hour. We have covered a lot of stuff. I am going to give each of you a chance to have a parting thought with people. What is the important thing you want to leave with people?

*Sponsor message from SynerVision’s community for community builders*

Greg: Thank you. To wrap up, it’s been a big journey for me from grading papers at the university to actually rubbing shoulders with people in the trenches trying to run their businesses and nonprofits. It’s been a lot of fun. I just want to thank you for the opportunity of letting people know about EZCard. Our mission is to bring affordable technology to help groups and communities. If we can do that, we will sleep easy at night and feel like our lives have a lot of meaning. That is my closing comment.

Adam: Thanks for having us on. It’s my absolute pleasure. If your audience likes formats like this, we are introducing a format to introduce people to EZCard. Hugh, I’d love for you to participate in some of the content for fundraisers as well.

Russell: Great, thank you. This has been enlightening. I love to have great tools. I’m a tools person. Easy to access, understand, and use are the three criteria I look for. I look forward to running into you again.