Marketing plan · Sep 2026 to Feb 2027
Marketing plan · Sep 2026 to Feb 2027
September 2026 through February 2027. Two tracks, four live events, one real budget ask, and eight decisions that need you.
Every number on this page traces to a campaign record, a meeting, or a named outside source. Anything I could not verify is in section 13.
The Salesforce campaign finished on August 19 and the Geocoder invite went out on August 13. Between them they answered questions the August draft was guessing at.
The NonProfit Times webinar drew 741 registrants. Only 102 came from a Civis email. Roughly 85 percent came from the publisher's own audience, people who were never on our lists.
You have described them as drawing "20 people or so." The real figures are 27 and 30 attendees off about 100 registrations. That attend rate is normal against the industry aggregate of 32.6 percent. Registrations are a third of average, and across 800,000 webinars, attendance tracks the size of the promoting audience.
13,844 messages to 4,002 prospects: 20.8 percent opens, 3.05 percent clicks, no demo requests. Then the part that matters. Of the 116 people who reached the landing page, nine scrolled and none submitted anything. Three weeks later Geocoder repeated it on a warm technical audience: 1,340 opens and 112 clicks produced eight registrants.
Christian Appalachian Project, DaVinci Direct and NNE all came in through this year's marketing and none has a technical person. But in a survey of 300 nonprofits, 45 percent controlled all technology purchases and only 3 percent were development directors. The fundraiser feels the problem. Someone else signs.
Both run every month. When capacity forces a choice, non-technical wins. It is the gap you identified and it produced all three current opportunities.
Development and fundraising directors, executive directors, agency principals. Plain language, short emails, simple pages. Bridge Tech drew 200 people to sessions you called basic, at roughly 70/30 women to men.
Data staff, analysts, ops and admin roles. Already served, and performing: the May training emails ran 34 to 37 percent open and about 4 percent click across roughly 4,500 sends each.
September and December have no live event on purpose. A one-a-month cadence optimises the format that does not scale, and it is more than one person can build well.
Build month
The big one
Election blackout
Reuse month
Restart
Second partner event
You recommended this in July: "one of these every quarter, 8,000 bucks a pop. It's expensive, but it's much better than doing the webinars that we're doing right now." The evidence backs you, and the market price is knowable.
$16,000 to $22,000 total. Your quarterly cadence, at the price you named, and the only line in this plan that needs real money.
Their published card is $10,000 and covers producing the event, a moderator, promotion to 300,000 nonprofit executives, and handing us the registrant data. We bought below card.
First step: confirm current pricing. One phone call, and it is the highest-value action here.
Expect roughly 700 registrants each and about 175 live, since a rented audience attends at a lower rate. The recording adds about a fifth more views, never a second audience.
And the argument against, which Dan will find anyway. The last time Civis ran these, some years back, they produced roughly 565 and 600 leads and converted to zero sales. That is on the record.
The difference this time is that there is a plan for the names. Your own answer holds: give it three months before judging it.
Round one was worth running. It produced 1,438 people who opened, 772 with repeat engagement, a call list of 127, and a clear answer to a question we had never tested.
One thing to do, above the fold, costing less than the current ask. Nobody in 4,002 people wanted a demo, and we asked all of them for one.
Across 20 million cold emails, campaigns under 50 contacts reply at nearly three times the rate of campaigns over 1,000.
Strip mail-security traffic first. More than half of round one's clicks came from scanners, so the real figure is about half what we reported.
Both big sends this summer hard-bounced around 7 percent on their first touch. That damages sending reputation.
I argued the opposite on August 10 and said an AI name would get us more attention straight away. I had no evidence for that. I went looking afterwards and it points the other way, so this is a correction.
Our strongest asset is that we are already inside these organisations' data. The most common thing buyers said in a set of procurement interviews: "We're more likely to wait for our existing partner to add AI than gamble on a startup." A rename trades that away.
The migration was approved on August 10 with two conditions, both in progress. Two corrections follow: one removes a cost we thought we were paying, one makes the hardest part easier.
The proposal argued we should move platform and domain together, because every domain change costs search traffic and doing it twice costs twice.
That does not apply here. Moving off Webflow while keeping our domain and our URLs is not a domain change. Google sees the same addresses, faster. There is one search dip to pay and it belongs to the domain move.
So Dan's sequencing costs nothing, and deliverability sets the timing. Which is right.
Dan's biggest worry was keeping email history and running both domains. Google's own documentation advises against changing a primary domain and points to adding the new one as a domain alias.
Everyone keeps their mailbox, all history, all files and calendars, and gains an address at both domains. No migration, no cost. Worth doing now whatever we decide about branding.
Sending reputation does not transfer. Dan is right about that, and rebuilding it takes about eight weeks of slowly increasing volume.
The extension is fine. No evidence a .ai domain delivers worse, and Google treats it as a normal generic domain. The risk is "new," not ".ai."
Never change two things at once.
Hold the domain and add it as an alias. Cheap, reversible, preserves everything, buys the option.
Split marketing mail onto its own subdomain. Dan named this himself, and given we hard-bounced 7 percent twice this summer, it has a use today.
The platform migration, same domain, same addresses. The lowest-risk form of a site move.
The domain move, if it proceeds, once the new setup is boring. Any brand change separately again, staff first.
Plus a few politically timed in February and March, several at risk, and a health dashboard showing mostly yellow on usage. Account management owns the outcomes.
September and January. A what-shipped-recently note, training links for low-usage accounts, and one-pagers on request. January targets the political renewals, whose budget conversations start before election day.
Retention arrives as urgent one-off requests and quietly eats the prospect calendar. Keeping it request-driven is the mitigation. If Dan wants more, something comes out.
You said it in August: commit to a plan with dollars and everything. Here are the dollars.
| Item | Amount | Status |
|---|---|---|
| Two partner-distributed webinars October and February |
$16,000 to $22,000 | Needs sign-off. Confirm current pricing first |
| Website visitor identification tool | Unpriced | Needs the vendor name from you. Quotes by end of September |
| Conference lead capture, 2027 events | $299 to $500 each | Actual 2026 pricing. Approve while booths are planned |
| Museum membership conference | Unpriced | Gated on the Whitney case study, per your position |
| Inbox placement testing Confirms our mail arrives |
Small, to price | About one sender in eight does this |
| Domain registration and alias | Roughly $200 | Two-year minimum. The mail alias is free |
| Everything else Four live events, the cold rebuild, the migration, monthly notices, the weekly report |
Time | Already paid for |
Your framing is the right one. This is infrastructure, it is continuous, and much of it is hard to quantify. No invented benchmarks and no borrowed industry averages.
How many of the 16,022 qualified prospects got a touch in the trailing 90 days. The awareness number you keep pointing at, now with a denominator.
Clicks, page visits and scroll depth, scanners stripped out. Today: 1,438 who opened, about 217 who plausibly clicked on purpose, 9 who read a page. The gap is the point.
Registrants plus live attendance plus 90-day recording views, per event.
Who owns each, and what came back. Counted by hand until there is a pipeline stage for it.
Open opportunities whose contacts touched a campaign in the prior six months. Directional only.
It comes out of the report. The nonprofit sector's own benchmark study dropped it in 2023 and called its last figure "a lie," because Apple generates opens nobody made. We keep it as an alarm. It stops being a goal.
This document is the straw man. These are the agenda.
$16,000 to $22,000 for the window. Your recommendation, at your cadence, at your price.
The senior bizdev posting, which does not exist yet, and the lead generation partner. The marketing question inside it is open: whether they lead with Civis, what collateral they need, and how we avoid double-touching the same names.
The one I most want an answer to. Our March profile calls an in-house data team "the primary qualification bar." All three of our best near-term opportunities fail that screen, and one live customer's evaluation stalled on it.
Recommendation: AI in the products and the proof, not the company name. Hold the domain and add it as a mail alias now, because it is cheap and reversible. Evidence in section 7.
Section 9 scopes it as collateral on request, which is what one person carries. More means something comes out.
You offered to find what your previous company used. With a name I can have quotes by end of September and it live by mid-October.
Your position is that it is not worth exhibiting without the Whitney case study. The rest of the case has strengthened: a customer is the event's top sponsor, building a museum-industry product on our platform. Does the case study ask get real pressure now?
Give AI tools away and earn on services is three different proposals: a sales observation, a free tier that drives adoption, or services as the profit engine. They produce different October campaigns.
Several of these are one phone call or one file away.