Now is the time to be strategic and proactive. It’s one thing to be reactive at the beginning of a crisis. It’s the normal human response. But this is no longer the beginning. And ‘busy’ is often not the most effective modus operandi. It’s like checking your email endlessly throughout the day, while avoiding the priority work that’s a bit more difficult. You were working, but were you productive?

Planning and leadership around communications and crisis communication strategies will be key to your survival. Because communication is how we build authentic relationships. And without relationships, your mission is doomed. Because no one will know enough about what you’re doing, and why, to care to engage with you.

What was relevant yesterday isn’t necessarily relevant today. Or, if you’re in the business of emergency response, it may be more relevant. The point is this: You’ve got to actively communicate your current relevance.

Now is the time to double down on your integrated marketing and fundraising communications strategy. The key reasons people stop engaging with a nonprofit all have to do with communications failures. This happens, sadly, all the time. It’s why donor retention rates are abysmal in the best of times. And we’re certainly not in those right now. 

People want to help. People need to help. If you’ve got a way for people to help, it’s your obligation to communicate this fact. This is your unique gift to those who are searching for a way, especially in crisis, to bring meaning and purpose to their lives.

Sadly, I see too many nonprofits failing at their job as ‘philanthropy facilitator.’ They’re failing to communicate appropriately with their audiences. Why? I’m not sure. But one thing I’m observing is the lack of vision, planning and leadership.

Worst Types of Crisis Communication Strategies

1. The worst is NO communication. 

Beware of assuming people don’t want to hear from you because you’re not their top concern right now. You know what folks say about the word “ass-u-me,” right? Never, ever make assumptions about when, where, what, why and how your constituents want to hear from you.  The only way you’ll know is by asking them directly. 

Would you suddenly stop talking to your family and friends because we’re in the middle of a crisis? Of course not. They loved you yesterday, they love you today, and they’ll love you tomorrow – unless you cut them off. They want to know how you’re doing. They want you to ask them how they’re doing. Relationships are a two-way street.

Figure out your supporters’ preferred methods of communication by testing (today we’re seeing a lot of email, phone calls, Zoom, Facebook Live, Google Hangout, Instagram and YouTube); then… go for it. There are plenty of communication options. If you do nothing (perhaps because you lay off your development and marketing staff), you’ll be sorry. Make those folks the last you lay off. Or hire them back first. They’re truly ‘essential workers.’ Because out of sight is out of mind.

2. The second worst is TONE-DEAF communication.

In the face of the ‘new abnormal’ in which we’re living, acting as if this is business as usual will make you look out of touch. Take a good look at your website; some of your language may need to be updated. That spring or summer fundraising appeal you’d planned to send pre-pandemic may seem completely out of touch right now. As may your pitch to purchase a membership, subscription, tickets, courses, or anything else you generally sell to generate revenue. That’s not to say you can’t still seek to generate new revenue. You can, and you should. You just must do so in an authentic, relevant and innovative manner tailored to today’s circumstances.

3. The third worst is IGNORING THE FACT YOU NEED FUNDRAISING income now (assuming you do).

If you’re staring at a deficit, it’s your responsibility to ask for specific additional help to get you through this crisis. While it’s tempting to hunker down, focus on cutting expenses, and go into hibernation mode, you do need to consider how easy it will be to wake up again. Balancing your budget and staunching the bleeding for the short term may seem sensible. But, if you do this, what will you be waking to? Will your staff have scattered to the winds? Will your donors have moved elsewhere? 

What will happen to your mission, and those who rely on you – not just today, but for the long term – if you don’t generate the income necessary to fulfill your promises? Whatever your mission, if you don’t want to let folks down you must focus on increasing revenues. 

Since many nonprofits can no longer count on earned income, contributed income will be your savior. If… you ask. When you don’t ask, you don’t get. And since other nonprofits are asking, your constituents may switch their loyalties to those who gave them a ‘feel good’ pay-off at a time they really needed one.

Best Types of Crisis Communication Strategies

1. The best communication is easy to understand. 

Get to the point right away. Don’t make the reader scroll through three paragraphs of introductory text before they know why you’re writing to them. This is a situation where facts matter. Maybe followed by a brief, illustrative, compelling story. If you’re used to leading with the story, in a crisis you probably want to lead with the realities of the situation you’re facing.

Try to resist editorial and opinion. It may make you feel good, but the fact that you’re worried or optimistic is not as meaningful to your constituents right now as the reason you’re writing to them. 

Begin with the SMIT – ‘single most important thing’). TIP: Anytime you write an appeal letter, read through your top paragraphs. Keep reading until you get to the point. The real point. Cross out the beginning paragraphs. 

2. The best communication is specific – both in terms of purpose and amount. 

Be transparent about why you need help right now, and how you’ll use that help. Make a clear case for support and/or action. This will seem timely and urgent; therefore, more compelling than “In these trying times, we need money now.” Consider, instead, establishing some type of “Coronavirus Response/Resiliency Fund.”

3. The best communication is easy to respond to. 

Be guided by the mantra of ‘user-friendly.’ Some folks won’t want to go to the mailbox now. Or they won’t have stamps in their home. So if you’re snail mailing appeals, include a URL they can use should they prefer to give online. 

Dedicated donation landing pages are important. They reassure would-be donors to your emergency appeal that they’ve landed in the right place. If you’re emailing appeals, be sure the donate link doesn’t send folks to a generic donation form with pre-crisis language. It will confuse them and stop many dead in their tracks.

If staff make phone calls make sure they’re set up to take credit card payments over the phone. This ensures you get the gift right away, and relieves donors of the obligation to go online or dig out a checkbook. 

Closing Thoughts

You are a conduit for enabling people to act on their most cherished values. As a philanthropy facilitator, your job is to offer people the opportunity to find joy, meaning, and purpose. 

Now is your golden moment. Donors are an integral part of your mission; you serve them as much as they serve you. If you fall short right now, you’ll short-change those who count on you to find fulfillment. 

Be transparent and authentic and reinvent your relevance. Reshape your case for support to incorporate today’s challenges. Name the elephant in the room rather than sticking your head in the sand. Show your best, not worst, self. And invite your supporters to do the same.

NOTE: These crisis communication strategies are fundraising and marketing 101 basics. They hold true in good times and bad. You cannot go wrong if you adhere to this advice. 

• Be Clear. 
• Be Specific. 
• Be Relevant. 
• Make Giving Easy. 

This advice just happens to be more important than ever in times folks are stressed. Don’t make people work too hard in order to understand what you’re asking of them – and how it will make them feel good.

Are you ready to enact your fully developed crisis communication strategies? You can download our free nonprofit crisis communications plan template to get started.

The post Best and Worst Nonprofit Coronavirus Crisis Communication Strategies appeared first on Bloomerang.

Or should they go the other way and promote legacy giving aggressively, seeking to get into donors’ wills before they succumb to COVID-19?

There’s no doubt about the fact that people fear death. Which makes it somewhat of a taboo subject for many. No doubt this contributes to the fact most media about COVID-19 deaths stick to numbers, not stories.

In fact, there’s a field of experimental psychology, “Terror Management Theory,” focusing on how people react when you remind them about death. There are hundreds of experiment results and many books and papers on the subject. Suffice it to say death is a problem. Seasoned planned giving experts Michael Rosen and Dr. Russell James break the results down in their recent whitepaper: Legacy Fundraising: The Best or Worst of Times?

What happens when you promote legacy giving, reminding people of their own mortality?

It turns out there are two principle ways folks respond when confronted with their own mortality. It’s essentially either ‘approach’ or ‘avoidance.’

1. Avoidance

If you send a legacy giving appeal to folks who don’t want to think about death (it’s not happening to me any time soon), they will simply ignore it.

GOOD NEWS: These folks won’t pay a lot of attention to your appeal. They’ll delete it or toss it. It’s highly unlikely they’ll stop giving to you during their lifetimes because you had the temerity to reach out to them about legacy giving. This is a LOW-RISK strategy.

2. Approach

If you send a legacy giving appeal to folks who are comfortable confronting their inevitable death (it happens to everyone), they may see this as an opportunity to assure their values live on. It’s a form of assuring their immortality.

GOOD NEWS: Just as these folks may leave a legacy for a friend or family member, assuring their memory lives on, they may just as willingly consider a legacy gift that memorializes other parts of their identity. Like the values your organization enacts, which values they share. This is a HIGH-REWARD strategy.

What happens differently when you promote legacy giving when folks people know are dying?

1. More Avoidance

In the fear of death experiments, social scientists found the more personal death reminders people received the more avoidance they exhibited. Many folks today know someone who has contracted or succumbed to the virus. It feels personal. And the confrontation with a death reminder is daily. So the fact that COVID news is layered on top of any legacy giving messaging you may send means more people may react with an avoidance response. Add to this the fact the times in which were living diminish the sense of emotional wellbeing people have; when folks feel a sense of diminished blessings they exhibit less generosity towards others.

GOOD NEWS: Even if people react this way, they’re still unlikely to stop giving to you otherwise simply because you broached the subject of legacy giving. You may get fewer folks opening your emails or letters, so you’ll want to adapt your strategies and expectations accordingly. This is still a LOW-RISK strategy.

2. Enhanced Approach

Because people have a more heightened sense of impending mortality than usual, many are doing whatever they can to increase their sense of autonomy and wellbeing. They can’t control the virus but can control how they live with the virus by taking preventive measures. Besides wearing masks, socially distancing, and/or even trying out untested treatments, people can connect with like-minded individuals and organizations to try to make a difference and enhance their sense of wellbeing.

GOOD NEWS: When you offer people the opportunity to take some control over their situation by making a meaningful philanthropic gift you also offer them the opportunity to feel better emotionally and psychologically. This may be perceived as especially significant during times like these when people feel loss of control in so many aspects of their lives. Layer on this the fact that people feel isolated and disconnected from others, and the opportunity to connect with your cause may strike a particularly resonant chord. The people who do take the approach response may actually approach with more receptivity because all these things are top of mind. This is still a HIGH-REWARD strategy.

When people feel a diminished sense of wellbeing they’ll seek to do something to feel better.

There are many factors affecting well-being. If a doctor can help you feel better, you’ll likely feel grateful to that doctor. In fact, this is a foundation of hospital ‘grateful patient’ fundraising. If a religious congregation can help you feel connected and supported, you’ll likely feel grateful to that congregation. In fact, this is a key tenet of faith-based fundraising. But you don’t need to be a healthcare or religious charity to help people feel better.

One key contributor to wellbeing is a sense of meaning. If you can help a donor develop a sense of purpose, agency, and significance, they’ll likely feel grateful to you. That gratitude may be expressed in the form of a legacy gift.

GOOD NEWS: By now you’re likely familiar with the MRI experiments showing when people even contemplate giving they receive a dopamine rush that lights up the pleasure center of their brains. Giving offers people a ‘warm glow’ feeling. This is something legacy giving can offer to folks.

It’s increasingly understood: giving is good for people.

All giving, whether to friends, family or even strangers is experienced as pleasurable. Non-charitable or charitable, legacy giving included. The same feel-good chemicals of oxytocin, serotonin, and dopamine – known as the “Happy Trifecta” — and endorphins are released.

When folks are feeling powerless – as is the case today – giving can give them back their power. I, for one, have never thought more about the importance of safeguarding democracy and civil liberties. I am so grateful for the organizations fighting on this front, and for the people who left past legacy gifts to assure these institutions would live to fight another day. Would this be a bad time for one of these organizations to approach me for a legacy gift? Or a particularly good time?

“All it takes for me to move from defeat to victory is to give away some money. It’s the best deal I can think of.”

— Jeff Brooks, writing for Moceanic

Ask aggressively, but don’t hit folks over the head with a hammer.

Success in fundraising is all about how you frame what you’re doing. Legacy fundraising should always be respectful. In fact, all fundraising should.

Is your ask suffused with joy or clothed in apology?  When you understand giving is good for people, then ideas like “sorry, I need to twist your arm” or “it’s time to hit you up” naturally fall away. And these are the regretful approaches that seem particularly odious right now when there’s a surfeit of bald aggression on display.

Don’t begin your appeal with “Worried you may die soon?” Of course, that seems obvious. But if you dig for the reasons folks in your organization may feel uncomfortable asking for legacy gifts right now, you’ll find that’s how they view any such appeals. Their own discomfort with death – their personal ‘avoidance’ attitude — is seeping in. And, naturally, that’s not what you’re going to do. It’s okay to be direct, just not crude. Some folks might call that “aggressive,” but this doesn’t mean hostile or antagonistic. It’s simply being assertive. In a way that’s helpful for everyone.

Remember, you’re not begging, nor are you taking something away. You are giving something by offering a way for people to make a meaningful, ‘feel good’ transfer from their financial portfolio to their social portfolio.

People are making wills right now more than ever.

People visit their attorneys when “death becomes real.” Usually, it’s difficult to persuade folks, even those willing to consider a legacy gift, to visit their attorney during times they’re not thinking about death. Most folks consider writing or changing, a will during life cycle transitions, such as birth, marriage, divorce, widowhood, or illness diagnosis. Sometimes it happens as people are about to engage in something risky, like flying overseas, climbing a mountain, or parachute jumping. Right now we’re living in one of those transitional cycles.

No matter what you do or don’t do, a lot of folks are calling on their attorneys. Now is different. Google search results for “will planning” are higher than they’ve ever been. Essential workers are writing wills in droves, and attorneys are even volunteering to help them. Mostly these folks are thinking about protecting their family and loved ones. But… some of them love your cause too! And most good attorneys will ask clients if they wish to make a charitable bequest.

What happens when they get to the subject of legacy giving and your donor goes online searching for charitable beneficiaries? If you’re not actively promoting legacy giving, people may not know you’re set up to accept and manage bequests. So, at the very least, make sure you’ve got this information on your website. And don’t bury it! Go to your website and pretend you want to leave a bequest to your organization. Can you figure out how to do so? How many clicks does it take to find what you’re looking for? Do you offer useful information like suggested language to include your charity in their will? Or how to name you as a beneficiary of a retirement plan or insurance policy? If it’s a difficult process, now is a good time to make the experience more user-friendly.

It’s better to be active than passive. Your goal is always to be top of mind so folks think of you when charitable giving comes to mind. Donors need to know you make an impact. They need to know you’ve been around a while (10 years is enough), and will continue to serve. They need to know other folks like them do this sort of thing – which is why telling legacy donors’ stories are so powerful. More than once I’ve had a donor call me to say: “I saw Joe and Mary made a bequest/set up a memorial, and I want to do that too.” Similarly, I’ve received calls saying: “I had no idea the Loans and Grants Program was established by a 1948 bequest that grew to today’s size; I’d love to do something similar.” Here are some simple ways to promote legacy giving.

Here’s why you should promote legacy giving – at ALL times.

People are always dying. Sometimes more than other times, but no one is immune to death. Not every one of your supporters will choose to look it in the face at any point in time, but it’s not for you to decide on others’ behalf whether they may or may not wish to consider the ramifications of their own mortality. Any more than it should be your decision whether to ask your constituents for an outright gift or not.

When you make excuses on behalf of others you do no one any favors. It’s presumptuous at best. And, arguably, downright stingy. Dr. Adrian Sargeant and Dr. Elaine Jay found 88.7% of donors indicated they believe it is appropriate for nonprofits to ask for legacy gifts. In fact, donors encourage organizations they care about to communicate with them regularly and through different communication channels. They understand their attention spans are short, and what interests them today may not be what interested them yesterday or tomorrow.

Don’t be shy about asking for legacy gifts!

My Mom always said, “You can’t take it with you.” There are others who subscribe to that same philosophy, and who may be looking for places to leave a piece of their legacy. Would you deny them this opportunity?

Legacy giving seizes victory from the jaws of defeat. Whether folks close to you have passed away, or you’re confronted with death and dying on a global scale, or you’re simply afraid of dying yourself, legacy giving can:

• Create happiness
• Promote wellbeing
• Instill a sense of autonomy and power
• Offer purpose and meaning
• Provide tax benefits

I’ll leave you with another beautiful quote from Jeff Brooks, who writes about the numerous ways giving yields financial, emotional, psychological and physical health benefits, not to mention creating habits of virtue:

“Giving makes the whole world just a bit better…

Think for a moment about the impact charity has on society. Not just because of the important causes it funds, but because of the millions of healthier, happier, more involved donor-citizens it empowers. The whole world is better because of those donors and the way they live. If charitable giving weren’t happening, our world would be darker and bleaker, more broken and brutal.”

Help your donors to eat the stars.

The post Should You Aggressively Promote Legacy Giving When People Are Dying? appeared first on Bloomerang.

It’s too early to think we are out of the storm completely. But as the Coronavirus appears on the back foot, it’s a good moment to take stock of the damage it’s done and consider the financial opportunities of volunteer re-engagement and new funding currently available.

The challenge of human resources: volunteer re-engagement

A recent study by Fidelity Charitable – the USA’s biggest grantmaking public charity – reported that two out of three volunteers had reduced or halted their participation at a nonprofit to which before COVID-19 , they’d previously offered their time.

The good news was that the survey indicated seventy-five percent of those questioned who stated they had pulled away from their pre-pandemic volunteering roles, were aiming to get back to the grindstone, once life returned to normality.

A renewed focus on wellbeing and retention for volunteer re-engagement

A pre-pandemic study by the Urban Institute – a research center based in Washington DC – also found eighty percent of nonprofits relied on volunteers, but did not have the knowledge to engage and adequately manage them effectively.

This shortfall of volunteer management is an area worth attention now, especially in light of the two-thirds of volunteers having stepped away from their previous nonprofit duties. I’ve added an extra few cost-free ideas to help manage volunteer re-engagement at this critical time:

• Formal volunteer retraining: Having a system created to help guide the volunteer into the ways and methods of your nonprofit. A booklet or PDF created to help inform the volunteer on the general background and vision of your organization. Plus giving them an idea of where volunteers can constantly make the most impact.
• Being specific about the individual: Sending the volunteer general emails about donor drives that go out to everyone, undermines the personal relationship between your nonprofit and those working within it. Make sure the volunteer communications are something unique and personalized to them, avoiding the generic. A small personal touch is an appropriate reminder of how valued they are.
• Teamwork and vision: Giving the volunteer a chance to feel fully engaged as part of something bigger.

Renewed efforts should be taken to keep individual volunteers included and valued within the whole team now. Try implementing paid/non-paid staff brainstorming meetings/Zoom calls. They offer the volunteer a sense of friendship alongside their service. This is a great way to ensure long-term volunteer re-engagement and loyalty to the nonprofit’s vision.

Rebuilding the financial base: resource opportunities for post-pandemic grants

The pain of the pandemic has been crippling to many. Reading the headlines it seems that the government has stepped in to help the nonprofit sector survive. But many cross-state surveys indicate governmental funding has been no more than one-fifth of overall need.

A typical example comes from Calnonprofits, the association for Californian nonprofits.

Their survey reported that only thirteen percent of charities they contacted had raised twenty percent or more from government pandemic aid during this difficult period. That’s barely one in ten.

Fortunately, there are other multiple opportunities for support both inside and outside the US to explore. Here’s a useful list of resources and access points to help your nonprofit today.

Grant opportunities for U.S. based nonprofits

• The Community Foundation Public Awareness Initiative
  Offering a state-by-state guide to community foundation grant programs.
• (CARES) Coronavirus Aid, Relief, And Economic Security Act
  Initiative for nonprofits and businesses both at federal and state levels.
• The Chronicle Of Philanthropy
  Detailing funding for pandemic relief grants.
• National Center For Family Philanthropy
  Recovery and emergency financial resources for projects and nonprofits with a focus on community or with a social justice angle

Global funding (including USA)

• Worldwide Initiatives For Grantmaker Support
  Useful contact information for nonprofits and individuals to assist with grants on an international level.
• Global Entrepreneurship Network
  A major aid hub for business and go-getting nonprofit leaders, detailing help available depending on location.
• Women’s Business Enterprise National Council (WBENC)
  Useful information for grants and assistance for female-led businesses and nonprofits.
• Grantstation
  Hundreds of emergency aid resources for nonprofits and businesses.
• United Way
  International support for communities and organizations that are affected by the pandemic.

Although there is some light at the end of the tunnel, there is still a way to go. So maximizing our support networks now – in both human and financial terms – is crucial.

It is my belief, that the post-pandemic landscape may well be as difficult as the current one, regardless of how relieved we all feel upon seeing those sunlit uplands, coming into view.

The post Post-Pandemic: Rebuilding Your Volunteer and Financial Base appeared first on Bloomerang.

“Being the good” doesn’t mean that you’re a perpetual volunteer stuck in the same position forever. As a professional in the nonprofit sector, you can absolutely still work to be the best you can be, developing your personal and professional skills and advancing your career along the way. In fact, many individuals just like yourself are actively looking for new opportunities to enhance their skills and become better versions of themselves.

Here at the Nonprofit Leadership Alliance, we’ve dedicated ourselves to professional development in the nonprofit sector. We have helped over 11,000 people become Certified Nonprofit Professionals and more than 15,000 other leaders in the sector to advance specific skills with virtual training resources. With this experience, we’ve compiled a few key suggestions for nonprofit professionals looking to advance their careers in the sector:

• Actively look for new learning opportunities.
• Discuss on-the-job opportunities with managers.
• Explore potential new responsibilities in the office.

Ready to dive deeper into these three skills for furthering your nonprofit career? Let’s get started.

1. Actively Look for New Learning Opportunities

If you’re waiting for a learning opportunity to jump out and hit you in the face, you’ll likely be waiting for a long time. Too many professionals express interest in learning new skills, but never take action to really find and embrace new training opportunities.

This is a mistake!

Investing in your own training not only helps your personal career, but it can also help advance the mission you’re so passionate about as well. When you invest in your own training, you may see benefits like: 

• Higher job satisfaction. When you enjoy your job, you’ll be less likely to leave and find a new position somewhere else. This simple act saves your organization a lot of funds that would’ve otherwise been spent on replacing you. You hold a lot of value for the organization and they want to keep you around for the long haul.
• Stronger donor relationships. When you learn more about effective communication with your supporters, you’ll be the source of more effective and efficient relationship-building at the organization. This can help you steward supporters for larger contributions and a higher lifetime value for your mission.
• Better fundraising ROI. When you focus your attention on better fundraising, you’ll be able to lead the way in your organization raising more and using your funds more efficiently. This increases ROI, helping you accomplish your goals and get that much closer to achieving your mission.

The benefits of learning more information specific to the nonprofit sector speak for themselves. But the question so many people ask is how to actually learn new skills so that those benefits become possible.

It used to be that you needed to enroll at a local school or spend hours in the library to learn new skills. Now, however, in the age of the internet, we have new learning opportunities emerging everywhere we look! Instead of having to search for sparse sources of information, we’re now left with the opposite issue—sifting through ample resources to find the most trustworthy and impactful information.

To start your search, you need to understand the different options available to you. Some of the best options at your fingertips include: 

• Online courses. Online courses are professionally structured and guided opportunities that simultaneously provide flexibility and convenience for students. The Nonprofit Leadership Alliance guide on the subject explains that you have an option to choose between open-source and paid courses. While open-source can be tempting due to the inexpensive price, they often only offer a limited amount of information before requiring payment or they simply lack high-quality content. According to the guide, subscription-based course services often provide the most value for professionals.
• Books. You don’t need to spend hours searching the library for the best books to learn about specific topics anymore. Now, you can read reviews online, search library catalogs, and sometimes even have the book shipped directly to your home. Consider the skills you want to develop before searching for a new book because there are a seemingly infinite number of books available covering any number of topics. Narrowing your search from the beginning will help you pick the book that will most help you achieve your goals.
• Journals and blogs. If you’re looking for an opportunity to keep up with the newest trends, you might consider subscribing to various journals or blogs for reading material in the nonprofit sector. Be sure to check on the source to be sure it’s trusted or peer-reviewed before you subscribe to these materials.

The learning materials you choose have a lot to do with the learning style that most appeals to you. For instance, some people learn better when they have a guided and structured course. However, others prefer a more independent learning style such as those offered by a book or journal.

Consider how much structure you need in your own education before investing in various professional development resources.

2. Discuss On-the-Job Opportunities with Managers

While it may seem like a paradox, when many people consider their professional development opportunities, they fail to consult the one place where the skills will be most applicable: work.

If you have a manager at the nonprofit where you work, open a discussion about your opportunities for improvement and ask for any resources or recommendations the organization can offer. Often, if you’re finding that you have a weakness in a particular skill set, someone else has also encountered the same challenge, meaning someone else has probably already asked for help too.

Your organization might have a learning resource system of its own that you can use to grow. The first step is simply to ask. Coaching, while often associated with a negative connotation, can actually be incredibly useful for nonprofit professionals who know what it is that they want to learn.

The other advantage to asking for help within your organization is that you can see how the skills apply to your daily position right off the bat. 

While there are a whole host of skills out there that you might ask for coaching on from your own organization, some common options include: 

• Public speaking. From cutting out filler words to maintaining eye contact, your manager can give specific tips after various presentations for a period of time.
• Communication. Ask for help when it comes to communicating with supporters or collaborating with coworkers, then get feedback about specifics to improve.
• Decision-making. Discuss the mindset behind various decisions made by the leaders at your organization so that you can emulate their process in your own choices.

When you embark on a training relationship with someone else at your organization, it’s important to find a metric for tracking your progress moving forward. This will help you show that you’ve improved when it comes time for reviews, promotions, and raises. This Astron Solutions guide explains that a tool to track growth and progress is necessary for effective performance management systems. If you don’t have one of these tools built into a software solution at your organization, you can simply compile your own metric for tracking and share it with your manager.

You might be saying, “This all sounds great, but I’m in charge at my organization, so I’m the most experienced and can’t grow like others.” That’s a dangerous mindset to fall in. We all have room to grow and there is always something more to learn. If you are the manager or executive member of your team, find someone else on the team who seems to have mastered the skill you’re working to develop. Then, humble yourself to ask them for tips, feedback, and accountability as you work to develop yourself.

3. Explore Potential New Responsibilities in the Office

Tips and advice are a great place to start when it comes to learning specific skills and getting advice to improve within your current position. However, if you want to develop a certain skill, but can’t see how it applies to your current position, you might ask to explore different responsibilities as well.

There’s nothing like hands-on learning to enhance your current skill sets!

Nonprofits have many short-term initiatives that provide new opportunities that you can get your feet wet with. For instance, you might ask to help plan a virtual event, researching with guides like this one to learn more about the concepts behind effective planning strategies. Then, practice those concepts by working directly with your event planner to set up the technology, choose speakers, and strategize to raise funds.

Short-term opportunities like these make for great ways to try something without making a full commitment to add to your daily responsibilities. After all, you’d hate to be stuck doing something you don’t like if you just wanted to test it out to get some experience under your belt. Then, if you find you enjoy the opportunity, you can ask to continue your development by maintaining those responsibilities in the future.

Furthering your nonprofit career with professional development requires you to learn new information and skills, then find a way to incorporate those skills at your organization. Your professional development doesn’t only help your personal ambitions, but also helps your organization become more efficient and effective in the long run.

Don’t underestimate the power and importance of continuing education in the nonprofit sector! Use the tips in this guide to continue developing your skills as a nonprofit professional.

The post Furthering Your Nonprofit Career: 3 Tips for Development appeared first on Bloomerang.

Full Transcript:

– [Steven] All right, Linda. I’ve got 3:00 Eastern. Is it okay if I go ahead and kick us off here? 

– [Linda] Sure. 

– [Steven] All right, awesome. Well, good afternoon, everybody. Thanks for joining us for today’s Bloomerang webinar, “COVID One Year Later, What Have We Learned About Fundraising?” I’m Steven. I’m over here at Boomerang, and I’ll be moderating today’s discussion. Good to see you all. Hope you’re all staying happy and healthy and productive. 

If you’re watching this as a recording, I hope you’re having a good day, no matter when and where you are. But we’re going to have some fun. So thanks for being here. Just a couple of quick housekeeping items before we get going. I just want to let you all know that we are recording this presentation, and we’ll be sending out the slides and the recording a little bit later on today. 

So if you have to leave early or maybe you get interrupted or just want to review the content, maybe share it with a friend or a colleague, don’t worry, we’ll get all that good stuff in your hands today. You won’t miss a thing, I promise. And if you haven’t already, please use that chat box right there on your webinar screen. 

Introduce yourself. Ask questions, leave comments along the way. We’re going to save time at the end for Q&A. We’ll try to get to as many questions as we can before 4:00 Eastern. But don’t be shy. We’d love to hear from you. Introduce yourself, tell us where you’re from. 

Tell us what the weather is like. I always like to get the weather report. You can also do that on Twitter. But the main thing is we’d love to hear from you, so don’t be shy. If this is your first Bloomerang webinar, welcome. We do these webinars every Thursday throughout the year. We love doing them. 

This is now our almost … I think it’s our ninth year of webinars. We’re getting close to 1,000 sessions, one of my favorite things we do at Bloomerang. But if you’ve never heard of Bloomerang beyond that, we’re also a provider of donor management software. That’s what Boomerang is. It’s a donor database. So if you’re interested in that or just curious, check out our website. 

There’s all kinds of good resources on there. We’re pretty easy to find. So we’d love for you to do that if you’re interested. But don’t do that right now because, wow, we’ve got a living legend here. One of my favorite people ever joining us from beautiful Las Vegas, Nevada, Linda Lysakowski. Linda, how’s it going? 

You doing okay? 

– [Linda] Good, great. 

– [Steven] It’s good to see you. I always love having Linda on the webinar series because you’re the reigning queen of the Bloomerang webinars, by the way. This is your ninth session. I was adding them up. 

– [Linda] Is it really? Wow. 

– [Steven] Yeah. It wouldn’t feel like a season of webinars without my buddy Linda here. If you don’t know Linda, I feel silly trying to summarize Linda’s credentials, but she’s a legend. She’s an ACFRE, which is kind of a big deal. There’s only like 100 people who have that designation. Has been doing this for over 30 years. Has written or contributed over 30 books. 

I got a bunch of them on my bookshelf here, but I don’t have all 30. I don’t know if I have room on my shelf for them, Linda. Super involved in the Las Vegas AFP and nonprofit community there. And, jeez, I feel like I’m introducing a rock star a little bit, Linda. So I don’t want to take too much of the time away from your presentation. 

So I’m going to stop sharing, and I’ll let you bring up those slides, hopefully get those working again. 

– [Linda] Now, are you able to see my slide? Because it’s showing on my screen but … 

– [Steven] I think you may have to reshare since I was sharing previously. Yeah, you may have to hit that Share button again. 

– [Linda] Now I have to figure out how to get through my … get rid of the slide because it’s dominating … Okay. Let’s see. 

– [Steven] Oh, was it full screen and covering everything? 

– [Linda] It was. That always messes things up. Okay, now let’s see. Now I seem to have lost the things to share my screen. 

– [Steven] It might be a … it’s kind of a green button on my screen. 

– [Linda] Yeah, usually it is, but I don’t see any of my Zoom controls for some reason. 

– [Steven] Hmm. 

– [Linda] Hmm. Well, I don’t know. This is weird. This has never happened before. 

– [Steven] I know. Those Zoom gremlins get you every time. 

– [Linda] I can share the document. But I don’t know what happened to the Zoom. I may have to close out this document altogether. I don’t know. Hmm. Okay. 

Share screen, there it is. 

– [Steven] There we go. 

– [Linda] Okay. Now, hopefully, you can see. 

– [Steven] There we go. Hey, if that’s the worst thing that happens, that wasn’t too bad. 

– [Linda] I think Zoom gremlins have been after me this week. 

– [Steven] They knew we were doing our presentation about 2020. 

– [Linda] Some very strange things. 

– [Steven] There you go. 

– [Linda] I was telling Jay, before we started, somehow Zoom decided that I had to sign in from scratch and I lost all my virtual backgrounds. 

– [Steven] The worst. 

– [Linda] So now I have to upload them all again. Anyway, welcome, everyone. It’s good to be here again. I didn’t realize I had taught nine webinars for Bloomerang. So I guess that’s one a season at least. We’ve been doing it for nine years. But this is a topic that I’m eager to talk about because, first of all, it’s hard to believe that it’s been a year since we’ve all been going through this pandemic. 

And I think that many of you have probably had lots of changes in your organization. Hopefully, you’re all surviving. I heard some interesting statistics on a webinar I was on a couple weeks ago, that they fully expected one-third of non-profits to go out of business altogether, which really is quite scary. 

So, hopefully, you’ve been one of the ones who have been able to survive and maybe even thrive in this pandemic, because some organizations are doing quite well. So I thought we’d get started by talking a little bit about what we have learned. We’re definitely living in a different world than we were a year ago. 

Whoever thought that we’d all be wearing masks? And I’m convinced that, in a couple of months, everybody is going to need ear surgery, because every time I wear a mask, my ears get folded over at the top. And I said, “You know, we’re all going to need ear surgery when this thing is over and we don’t have to wear masks anymore.” And then we’re going to have to go back to buying makeup again. 

My goodness, I haven’t worn lipstick for a long time, except when I’m on a Zoom meeting. So there are some things I think that’s different. But it’s good to see that people are getting out and about more. People are traveling a little bit more. In fact, I had my daughters visiting a couple weeks ago, and then four of my granddaughters came out and visited this past weekend. 

So I think people are starting to travel more. If you’re not traveling yet and you feel comfortable doing it, I can tell you that the airfares are very, very cheap. We have some really cheap rates into Las Vegas from all over the country really. But I think people are still scared. Not everybody has been vaccinated. 

I’m fortunate enough to have had my second vaccine. That’s one of the benefits of being old and gray-haired. You get your vaccine early. But I think there are still people who are leery about what’s going on. And certainly, in some locations, the economy is still in a great deal of danger. I honestly feel sorry for the governors of every state and especially states like mine, where our state depends on tourism, that’s our biggest source of income. 

And so the governors are trying to protect everybody and keep them safe. And yet, at the same time, they’re getting a lot of flack from businesses saying, “You know, we need to open. We can’t stay closed.” And some people I think are still worried about the economy, and some people are still not back at work. 

Many people, of course, are working at home and finding that they really love working at home. For me, it didn’t make a whole lot of difference because I’ve worked at home for 20 some years, I guess, since I livef in Nevada. And so I’m accustomed to working at home. But I think some of the things that nonprofits need to think about is there is a lot that hasn’t changed. 

One is your mission still matters. You’re still doing good work in the community, and you need to get the word out about the work that you’re doing in the community. Some of you probably are being stretched even further, like food banks and food pantries and organizations that are dealing with health care. Certainly nonprofit healthcare institutions, nursing homes, hospitals, those missions really matter probably more now than they ever did before. 

And I think people still care. What I have found is that people are just as generous, if not more so, in this environment because they understand that many organizations are really very vital to the community, more now than they ever were before. 

One of my clients was a free health clinic, and they did a fantastically successful online fundraising event because people really understood how important their work is now. It was always important, but now it’s even more. And I think, because of the publicity that we’re getting, people are more aware of these things and they are still being generous, except for those, of course, who have been hurt by maybe being out of work and having their businesses shut down. 

But they’re still supporting organizations that they really care about. I know I lost clients in this pandemic, and certainly my financial picture has changed. But I still give to the organizations who I really care about. And I think most people are like that. So even though we’re living in a different world, I really believe we’re beginning to appreciate the nonprofit sector and appreciate each other more than we ever did before. 

So even though there’s a lot of things that have probably changed in your organizations, there are some things that still are the same. And I think you really need to emphasize how much work you’re doing in the community and that your organizations do matter, that your missions are important, that you’re doing good work in the community. 

And you need to communicate. Maybe you’re communicating in different ways now, but it’s really important that you do still communicate with your donors. So how has COVID affected your nonprofit? Well, if you’re like others, and we’d love to hear your input in the chat room too, and maybe Steve can kind of monitor that and share some of it with us, but most organizations, their staff has been affected. 

One of my clients, for example, had to cut more than two-thirds of their staff. They had a staff of about 20, and they’re down to 4 I think now. So some organizations did have to reduce their staff. Others probably had to increase their staff because they’re more in demand just because they’re front-line workers and they’re providing direct services to people that are in need right now. 

But your staff may also be affected by the fact that there are now many of them being forced to work at home and also possibly homeschooling their children. I know my daughter has worked full-time at home and has three children that she’s homeschooling while she’s working full-time. 

And she’s a CPA, so this is a busy season for her already. But many staff members are feeling that pressure of being working at home, maybe having a husband and a wife working at home and having children homeschooling. I know my son had to actually renovate his basement to make more office space at home, because he’s got two children being homeschooled, and has he and his wife both working at home right now. 

So your staff has definitely been affected. Your board has probably been affected. Maybe they’re accustomed to meeting in person, and now they’ve been forced to meet online and things like that. So sometimes boards maybe tend to feel less engaged because they’re not there at your organization’s office as much as they were in the past. 

So they’ve probably been affected in some ways too. And your clients have been affected. Depending on what kind of organization you work with, you may have more demand. For example, as I mentioned, an organization like a food pantry, I know our local food pantry used to only be open a couple days a week and now they’re open every day because they have so many more people coming for food. 

So your clients have been affected in one way or another. Maybe if your clients pay for some services, maybe they can’t afford to pay for them now if they’re not working. Or maybe their needs are greater. Maybe they’re caregivers for someone else in their family who maybe has had COVID. And your volunteers are affected, because a lot of times organizations are very dependent on volunteers to help run their programs, to help with administrative tasks, to help with fundraising. 

And now their volunteers maybe don’t have the time because they’re also working at home and maybe homeschooling people. So they’ve been affected. And, of course, your donors may have been affected. If the economy hit them especially, they’re going to be affected by this. So I want to talk about some ways that you can start keeping these people engaged with your organization during this crisis, and as we come out of it, how you can keep them engaged. 

And, hopefully, you’ve been doing some of these things all along. But I think your board is one area that people really have found the way their boards function have changed greatly over the last year. Fortunately, for many, board members are now more comfortable with technology for board meetings and their committee work. 

And I think this is one of the good things that probably has come out of COVID. For example, I had one client who their board always met in person, of course, and several of their board members were out of town and traveled a lot. So they used to do conference calls. Well, I don’t know how many of you have sat around a table with that outer-space gadget that looks like what they always look like, the phone line, and somebody calls in. 

And you’re never quite sure if they’re there, and you participate in a conversation and they can’t hear it all because it’s in the middle of the table. And I find conference calls are almost useless. So now boards are starting to get accustomed to technology, like using Zoom to have meetings, where everybody’s on, they can still see each other face to face, and they can converse back and forth with board meetings and committee work. 

So I think this is something that many organizations will benefit from if you continue that technology in the future. Even when board members can get together, instead of just having that conference call telephone in the middle of your board table, why not have a Zoom meeting where board members who can’t attend can still participate fully in the meeting? 

And I think they get so much more out of it when they can see people face to face. Steve and I were chatting before time, and I think, like most of us, we’re on Zoom. I’m usually on about three or four times a day, depending on what’s going on. Sometimes it’s more than that. 

Sometimes it may only be once or twice a day. But we’re all so accustomed to being on Zoom meetings. And there are other tools that some people are using, like Google Hangouts and things like that, GoToMeeting. But having your boards getting more comfortable with technology, to me, is one of the good things that has come out of COVID. And I would encourage you to keep your board members engaged in this way because they can accomplish so much more. 

So some of you may have, during this time, set up either a board page on your website, so they can access documents. Or maybe you’re using a program like Boardable or some other program that board members can access a page, either on your website or through some other medium, where they can access all the documents. 

You don’t have to be sending things out in the mail anymore. I think that’s another positive thing that has come out of the new technology. And I find that most boards are much more comfortable now with technology than they used to be. I don’t think I know of any board members that can’t even get onto a Zoom meeting anymore. 

It just seems like it’s part of our life now. So I think these are some advantages that we can continue to carry forth and try to help keep your board members engaged as much as possible. So if you don’t already have something like a program like Boardable or a website page that’s only accessible to board members, this is something I think you could do in the future to keep your board members more engaged, because a board that doesn’t meet and doesn’t really engage with the organization pretty quickly loses interest. 

And they aren’t really involved. They don’t understand your programs. They may not understand the need for fundraising and things like that. So try to keep your board as engaged as possible now and moving forward. And I have some ideas for boards that I think have been really helpful. For some organizations, this has been a great time to really start restructuring their board, getting them involved in the strategic planning process. 

If you don’t have a strategic plan … I just recently surveyed some people and I was surprised, during a webinar, how few of them actually had a strategic plan. And those that did said it was so outdated it really needed to be updated now. So this is a perfect time to begin strategic planning. 

And a lot of this can be done virtually too. You don’t have to meet in person. If you’re still uncomfortable about meeting in person, you can do a lot of strategic planning through virtual tools. I’ve even done some strategic planning retreats with boards over Zoom, and it works just as well as meeting in person. 

So this also might be a time to think about getting your board engaged in fundraising. You can teach them about your organization. There’s so many things that you can do on Zoom. Maybe have some special board training sessions about your program, about fundraising, about all the things that are important to your organization. 

So this is a great time to think about doing things like this. If you don’t have a good board in place, maybe this is a time to restructure your board and think about: “Okay, do we have a large enough board? Do we need to add new board members?” I have one client, for example, who has a board of four. So they’re using this time to really increase their board size because four people is really not enough to accomplish a lot. 

Another one of my clients, they had a board of directors in place, but they weren’t doing any fundraising. And so what they did was they used this time to start appointing some board committees to get a development committee in place. And within a couple months, their development committee has just progressed so amazingly. 

I’m just truthfully shocked at what they’ve been able to accomplish in the couple months since they’ve organized a development committee. And, again, it’s all done by Zoom. But they’ve done a fantastic job of using this time to reorganize their boards and make sure that they are getting everything they really need for their organization, getting the right people on board. 

And it’s a great time to do things like that. So I would suggest if you need to restructure your board, if you need to begin a strategic planning process, if you need to engage your board in fundraising or just give them some more awareness about your programs, this must be a fantastic time to start a regular maybe a virtual training session for your board members. 

And all this can be done virtually, so you don’t have to worry about endangering any of your board members by expecting them to come in person to meetings if they’re not comfortable doing that. So this is something that I really suggest you work on very much over the next couple months. 

Another thing that I think is a thing to think about is how you can engage fundraising volunteers. And you might think, “Oh, gosh, you know, we can’t go out and do fundraising in person. We can’t involve our volunteers.” But there are so many things that volunteers can do for you. And one of them is get them involved in some social media fundraising appeals. 

I know, for example, lots of organizations are doing these things. I mentioned the free health clinic that was a client of mine, and they did an event that was just amazing. Now, I know they made some personal contacts with people, either by phone or by Zoom or maybe actually in person, to make major commitments before this event. 

But they had a virtual tour of the organization. They had several people, their clinical director and several other people. Some of the people that they serve gave testimonials all through a Zoom meeting. And they had a host who kind of organized this and introduced each person. 

And then they asked for contributions, and they announced some very major … one person donated I think $25,000. In an hour’s time, they raised about $400,000 just through this virtual appeal. So it was really effective. I’m sure it took a lot of work to coordinate it behind the scenes. 

But it was a very effective way to involve some volunteers in doing things like this for you. One of the things that volunteers can also help you with is research. You know, sometimes this is a part of fundraising that a lot of people don’t like. 

I admit I’m one of them. I hate doing research. But if you have a volunteer and you have access to the Foundation Directory, maybe a volunteer could do some of that research for you to help you find possible foundations that would support your organization. Or a volunteer could sit and research business websites and look for the kind of businesses that might be interested in supporting your organization. 

And most major businesses, if they’re a medium or a large company, they have a social involvement page on their website that shows the kind of things that they do support, because most businesses want to brag about the fact that they are socially responsible. And so they’ll talk about the kind of people, the kind of organizations they support and what their causes that they really get involved in, and how their employees get involved, and how they, as a business, can support your organization. 

So that’s something that you can assign a volunteer to do. If you are one of the organizations that had to cut back on staff, maybe you don’t have enough staff to do this research on your own. So you can have some volunteers get involved in that. And even researching individuals. 

That’s a little bit trickier because a lot of it is not public information that you’re not going to be able to access as easily as you can foundations and businesses. But you could still do an individual screening session virtually. You can get a group of your board members or your development committee members or some leaders in your community together and talk about individuals who might be willing to support your organization. 

How you can reach those? Who knows them? How much are they capable of giving? What are their particular interests? All this could be done virtually by volunteers. And then, of course, there are those virtual events that many people are having. I personally am not a big fan of special events. 

And I think that’s one of the lessons that we learned, in this last year, is that organizations that were so dependent on special events have had to really rethink their whole fundraising. But there are many other virtual appeals that volunteers can help you with. This would be a great time to do a volunteer phonathon if you have a list of members or a list of existing donors. 

We never suggest that you just pick up names out of the phone book and start making phone calls. But go to your Bloomerang list, hopefully, you’re all Bloomerang users and you have that data at your fingertips, and call your existing donors, and, you know, ask them if they would be willing to support that. 

This is something that you can do with volunteers at home. You can have a virtual training session on Zoom and then let everybody kind of keep your Zoom meeting open but let everybody sign off and make their phone calls and come back if they have questions or comments. And at the end of the night, bring them back to make a final report. So a virtual phonathon I think is a great idea right now to raise money. 

You can also ask volunteers to help you with email appeals or direct mail appeals. They can still get involved in things like that, whether or not you’re meeting in person or whether you’re doing it virtually. So engaging fundraising volunteers, to me, is one of my favorite topics, because so many organizations use volunteers for a lot of things, but when it comes to fundraising, they think, “Oh, we can’t get volunteers to do that.” 

And believe me, I’ve seen a lot of volunteer campaigns that have been extremely effective, both phonathons, business appeals, direct mail appeals, social media appeals. All these things can be done by your volunteers, and it’s a great way for them to stay engaged. 

And right now there are a lot of people who are working at home. And maybe they actually have more time because they don’t have to commute. They don’t have to get up in the morning and get dressed up to go to work. They can work in their pajamas if they want. Or as those of us who use Zoom a lot probably work in your pajama bottoms and a nice top. 

Many organizations are doing that. I think their employees are getting accustomed to working that way. But some of them maybe are saving some time because they don’t have that commute into the office. And what I have found since I’ve been working at home for the last 20 years is I get a lot more done when I work at home than I did when I had an office because I have no interruptions, except for, occasionally, the Amazon driver ringing my doorbell. 

But that’s about it. So there’s a lot of things that volunteers can do to get involved. And I would start thinking about ways you can involve them if you haven’t over this past year. Think about it now. Now, your donors I think are really important, obviously, because they’re the ones who are keeping your organizations alive, in many cases. 

So I think it’s important that you let your donors know that you care about them. Maybe just call your donors and say, you know, “How is it going? How are you doing? Are you okay? Are you isolated? Are you feeling lonely?” Sometimes you just want somebody to talk to, especially if your donors are older people who are living alone and maybe they’re not getting out and seeing people. 

I have a neighbor, he just turned 90. She’s more like my age. She’s still in her 70s. But because of his fragile medical condition, they don’t get out at all. And sometimes they just need to know that somebody cares about them. So maybe calling your donors, not asking them for money, but just letting them know that you still care about them and wonder how they’re doing and if there’s anything you can maybe do to help them. 

But also you can let them know what you’re doing. You can fill them in on this is how we’ve been surviving over the last year, and we’ve changed some things. Maybe we’ve added some new programs. Maybe we’ve had to eliminate some programs. But let them know what you’re doing and let them know that you still need their support, because sometimes, you know, people that they don’t hear from you, so they’re not quite sure whether you’re still in existence even maybe. 

And I think the more you can stay in touch with your donors and more importantly than even letting them know you need their support is letting them know if they did contribute to you in the past year, how you used their money. “Gee, you know, we’ve had to lay off some staff members. But we’re continuing our programs, and your money is enabling us to do that.” 

Or, “Your money let us maintain our staff level, so we can provide these services because we’ve had an increased demand.” And if you let people know how you use their money, they’re much more likely to give to you again and they’re much more likely to recommend you to other people. I know that some individuals and even some businesses … 

in fact, I believe, a couple years ago, Bloomerang did this. They gave a certain amount of money to a bunch of different charities to see how they would be thanked. And people do this. They test your organization to find out, you know, “How long does it take them to send me a thank you letter, and do they tell me in the thank you letter how they used my money? And do they tell me that they really appreciated it, that it really did make a difference?” 

So the more things like that you can do to support your donors, the more they’re going to feel like they’re really tied to your organization, even if maybe they don’t see you in person as much as they did before. So I think sending some kind of a thank you letter … I know one of the organizations that I support is a perfect example of this. 

And I’ve been supporting this organization for probably 30 years or more. Well, they invite their donors to sponsor a child in a foreign country, in an underdeveloped country. And I got involved in this about 30 years ago when a missionary came to my church and talked about the work they were doing in developing countries. 

But the thing that really sold it for me was when we walked out of church, in our vestibule, there were pictures of the actual kids that they were helping. And we were told, if we were interested, to take a picture off the wall and say, “This is who I want to support.” 

And so I did that, and I’ve supported several girls over the years. I decided I wanted a girl in Africa. That was my two criteria. So I picked out a girl in Africa. And when she aged out of the program, I got another girl, also from a different country in Africa. But every couple months, I would get thank you letters from these girls. They were written in their native language, but always someone translated them into English for me. 

And they told me what a difference my contribution … that wasn’t a major gift, by any means, but it made a difference to them because they were able to buy books to go to school. They were able to buy shoes so they could walk to school. And small things like that. And knowing that you make a difference in someone’s life is really what’s important. 

So if you can tell your donors how you used their money and what a difference it made, maybe even getting some testimonials from some of the people that you’ve helped. They can remain anonymous if they choose to, but you can use a story and say, “Your gift enabled so and so to do this, that, or the other thing.” So the more you can do to maintain relationships with your donors, in the past year, I think it was real important, but it’s going to be just as important, if not more important, going forward. 

So in your donor communications, I think it’s important to, first of all, let donors know that you’re grateful for their support especially during this trying time. Maybe some of your donors have lost their income or a portion of their income. Maybe there were two people in the family working and now only one is working. 

So let them know that you really appreciate the fact that, even though things have been tough for them, they’re still supporting your organization. And, again, letting them know how their money was used. And some other things that you can do to communicate with donors is maybe broadcast some of your current programs. You can do them virtually on YouTube or Facebook Live or Zoom, but try to give them a hands-on experience. 

Now, that’s not always possible in every organization because some of you deal with confidentiality issues and you may not be able to actually show your clients. But I’ve had some, like the free medical clinic that I mentioned, they ask people, when they come in for services, “Would you be willing to be videotaped and talk about us and give a testimonial for what a difference we made in your life?” 

And some of the things that you hear from actual clients who receive services are so powerful. I remember seeing one video testimonial for this clinic that came from an RN. She was a nurse, and I mean nurses aren’t the wealthiest people in the world, but they make decent money. 

But she suddenly found herself without a job, which meant she was without health insurance. And if she didn’t have this clinic, she wouldn’t have been able to get health care. So it kind of showed the story that, you know, “Hey, this can happen to anybody.” You know, if you’re out of a job, you suddenly don’t have health insurance and you might need a health clinic someday yourself. 

So that was kind of something that gives you a virtual hands-on experience with what your organization is all about. And then having a strong case for support that talks about community needs, not your needs as an organization. Every non-profit needs money. 

I don’t know of a single one that doesn’t need money. If you’re one of those, I’d love to hear your story. But everybody needs money. But what are the community needs that you’re addressing? This is what people tend to support. They either give money because you’re saving lives or you’re changing lives. And maybe some of you are doing both. 

But that’s what is going to get people really excited. So, again, if you don’t have a strong case for support, this might be the time that you might want to build your case for support so that you have it going forward. And you can really spend that time now to develop good donor communications. And then you can either start or continue to run some social media appeals if you haven’t done this already. 

One of the things that I would suggest is maybe going to your board members and your staff members and your volunteers and maybe even your clients and say, “Maybe you would like to do a birthday appeal.” I know I do this every year. My birthday is in November. And every year, I pick out a different charity because, at my age, I don’t need stuff. 

I don’t want my friends sending me stuff. I just don’t want any more clutter in my house. So I always do a birthday appeal where I ask my Facebook friends if they would contribute to a charity. And I’ve raised, over the years, thousands of dollars this way. And it’s something that really doesn’t cost your organization any money at all to do. 

It’s just communicating with your donors, with your board members, with your staff members, with your volunteers. And, of course, hopefully you all have a good website donation system set up. And make sure that Donate Now button is on every page of your website, not just on the homepage, because when people start to look for something on your website, they’re going to see that Donate Now button pop up everything they look at. 

So that’s something that you can be doing if you aren’t already. And using social media to create awareness. Social media fundraising I don’t think is all that effective because it’s kind of hard to measure how much you’re really getting from some of these social media appeals. 

But use them to create awareness. Do regular postings about your organization and what you’re up to, what you’re doing, how you’re surviving the pandemic, how things have changed, maybe new programs that you’ve added. Whatever you need to do, but continue to do that. If you’ve started it during the pandemic, keep it up. 

Maybe your message is going to change, but keep up that good work because it is going to be important. And then continue your research. As I said, the Foundation Directory is a great tool. If you don’t have access to it yourself, it is quite expensive, and if you’re a small organization, maybe you don’t have access to it. 

But you might be able to go to your local library, or even local university, and ask if you can access their Foundation Directory. So continue to do that. Do some research on businesses. You can go to their website and search their websites to find out. And you’d be surprised how many businesses talk about their social responsibility to give to their community. 

But you can also do brainstorming sessions, either in person or virtually, where you maybe get your board members together one month and say, “What businesses do you do business with? Who are some people that you might be able to talk to? Your accountant, your attorney, your doctor, your car dealer, or your insurance company?” 

And when you do that brainstorming, you come up sometimes with a huge list of companies that maybe you never thought of before. And this can be done online. If you’re not meeting in person, you can easily do a brainstorming session online. I actually have a brainstorming form that, if anyone is interested in, you can email me and I’ll be happy to send it to you. 

Because just asking board members to give you 15 names, they never give you 15 names. You’re lucky if one board member gives you five names or three names. But giving them some ideas to start with, this form gives them a whole list of people that they might have contact with who could be interested in supporting your organization. 

And then do some things like researching individuals, both electronically, through programs like Windfall or DonorSearch. But also doing that brainstorming for individuals can be very helpful too. And, again, all this can be done virtually as well as in person. So continue to keep doing that research because it’s an important part of your fundraising toolbox. 

Now, with special events, I mentioned one thing that I think that a lot of organizations learned during this last year is that they were addicted to special events. And, please, get rid of it if you’re one of those that are addicted to special events. And it’s important to evaluate your special events so that you’re not doing events year after year just because you’ve always done them. 

Are you really making money on this event? What are the hard costs involved in putting on this event? What are the soft costs of putting on the event? How much staff time? How much volunteer time? Do you have donor fatigue from donors who are sick of coming to special events? And I can guarantee you, I live very close to Las Vegas, which is an event town, and people are so tired of going to special events. 

And I think one of the good things that came out of COVID is maybe some organizations realize that they were way too dependent on special events. So if you’re one of them, try to get rid of that event addiction and start looking at other things. And if you have some virtual events that are working, like some of the ones that I’ve mentioned, keep doing those, do them now and continue. 

But after COVID, if you do go back to doing in-person special events, don’t try to do 12 events a year or 10 events a year. I once had a client who had a one-person development office and they were doing 14 special events a year. And I used to tease their development director, because he was a former Marine, and I said, “Nobody else would have the stamina to be doing 14 special events a year.” 

But it restricted them from going out and doing major gift fundraising and other things because all he did was manage these events all the time. So choose maybe one mission related event for post-COVID-19, when you’re ready to start meeting again in person. Pick one event but make sure it’s something that’s related to your mission. 

You know, I always sort of pick on golf tournaments. And I love golf. I used to play quite a bit with my husband when we were both in good health. But golf tournaments, you’re getting exposed to 72 people a day. So what are 72 people going to do for you? Choose an event that somehow connects to your mission. 

Now, if you’re the First Tee or some golf scholarship organization, then maybe you are making an event that’s related to your mission. But if not, try to pick something that really helps build relationships with major donors and helps them understand the mission of your organization. So with events, I think that’s one really great lesson that a lot of people learned, during COVID, is don’t have 10 events a year. 

It’s just not worth it, and you’re going to burn yourself out trying to do it. And this year most of them got canceled. One of the worst fundraising appeals I got during COVID was from an organization that said, “We had to cancel our event, and now we’re going to have to close our doors if we can’t raise $40,000 in the next 2 days.” 

And I thought, “Well, maybe you shouldn’t have been so dependent on special events in the first place.” So I, of course, didn’t support that organization. I doubt many other people did. Virtual appeals, think about direct mail, it still works. I know a lot of people … I personally get so much direct mail, and I don’t respond to it very well, but some people do. 

My friend that I mentioned, that just turned 90, gives literally hundreds of thousands of dollars a year through direct mail. So it does still work. Email is another form you can use. Start building your email list if you haven’t already done that. Try to get emails for everybody on your list so you can contact them through email, because it’s a lot less expensive than direct mail, and in many cases people will respond easier. 

I know if I get an email and there’s a link to click on and make a donation, it’s much easier for me than sitting down, writing out a check, writing out an envelope, finding a stamp, finding a return label to put on. I would rather just click on something and make a donation that way. A phonathon, I mentioned, this is a perfect time to do it. 

But I always tell people, “Be like Santa and check your list twice at least.” Look at your mailing list, and you should be able to pull it very easily from Bloomerang, and find out: Are these people still in the same address? Are they still married? 

Are they both still living? What does your list look like? So if you have the right list, that will make all the difference in the world in doing a phonathon. And then have your case for support and build talking points. And you can train your volunteers virtually, as I said, and then they go off on their own, make the phone calls, and come back and report to you. 

So these are some things that you can continue doing. And you might find that, even once you are meeting people in person, that these things still are working better and it’s much easier for you to do some virtual appeals. So how are we going to operate post-COVID? Well, I think one thing is that our human resources are going to change. 

We might have fewer staff members. We might have more staff members. Our volunteers are maybe doing different things than they did in the past. Maybe your client services have changed. Maybe your fundraising has changed. Maybe you have become less reliant on special events. Your communications with your donors, hopefully, have gotten better, and you’ve done more to communicate with your donors during this time because you know how important it is. 

And your board has probably changed too during this time. Maybe it’s grown, maybe it’s shrunk. Maybe it’s become more active. So think about how you can operate post-COVID-19. One thing is I think everybody is convinced that we’re going to have a much greater reliance on technology than we ever had before. 

And technology can be our friend. I know sometimes I have a feeling it’s not my friend, but, in most cases, I don’t know how I would function without it. And I think you probably can say the same thing. There’s also I think much more of a need to diversify your fundraising streams because of the fluctuating economy. 

Maybe you’ve always depended … for example, living close to Las Vegas, a lot of nonprofits here depended so much on the casino industry to support them. Well, the casino industry, first of all, they were closed totally for about three months. And then, when they were reopened, they had to spend a lot of money putting up plexiglass screens and temperature machines to take your temperature when you walk in. 

And the capacity is limited. So you’ve got to become more diverse in your funding stream so that you’re not dependent on one grant or one company or one major donor to supply all your money. There’s going to be more opportunities for volunteers, so take advantage of that. 

And I think there’s going to be more of an emphasis on strong communications and definitely more sensitivity to your client needs to really be able to deal with them. And if you can’t deal with them, make sure you have someone that you can refer them to. And more flexibility for staff. My son doesn’t work at a nonprofit. 

He actually works for the government, but he had always worked two days a week in the office and three days a week at home. And then he got a new boss who said, “Oh, I don’t believe in this working-at-home business. You’re all going to work in the office.” Well, a couple months after the new boss came, COVID followed. And guess what? 

They’re all working at home five days a week now. So I think he’s realizing that he was wrong, you know, that you can get work done at home. So definitely I think the more flexibility your staff members have, the better off they’re going to be. So I know that many of you are spending more time at home now than you ever did before. 

And one of the things that I think is going to be important is how you use your flexibility time at home. So this is a perfect time to train your staff, board, and volunteers. Take advantage of all the online learning that’s out there. There’s so much out there. 

Some of it free, some of it very expensive. And maybe even, you know, encourage your staff to volunteer maybe not for your organization, but I know many people in my community that are sewers. I’m not a sewer, but I have a friend who made hundreds of masks. Calling shut-ins. 

If they’re retired nurses, maybe giving vaccines. Your employees are going to feel better if they’re doing something to help the situation. So that’s something that you can do is encourage your staff members to volunteer so that they don’t get just so randy being at home all day long that they go crazy. And try to make sure that your staff are taking care of their health. 

Encourage them to get out of the house safely and eat properly, get some exercise. I know many of my friends say one of the greatest things about COVID is they now have time to get outside and exercise. And, for a while, the gyms were closed, so everybody went outdoors and did their exercising. But these are some things that I think are always going to benefit us, but we’re becoming more aware of them during COVID. 

So one of the things I want to just briefly mention before we open it up to questions is when it comes to online learning, some of you may know that I do a lot of online courses. I have 14 courses actually, and they’re all approved for CFRE credits, if that’s important to you. 

But right now, during COVID-19, I’ve reduced the price. Some of them were anywhere from $199 to $799, but right now they’re all $99 each. So I would encourage you to visit my website and look at those if your staff does need some training in some specific areas. 

And also you can sign up on my website for my newsletter, which means you’ll be invited to my free monthly online sessions. I do about a 30-minute webinar every month that’s free of charge. It’s called “Learn with Linda.” So with that, I want to open it up for questions. But I think one thing that I think is important to remember is that even if the economy is uncertain, I do believe it’s important for us to face the future with certainty and with some trust. 

And I hope that your organization is going to be one of the ones who comes out of this thing stronger. Some of you may be a little bit weaker, and hopefully none of you are going to be non-existent. But if you just want to talk sometime, if you have questions about, you know, what you might be able to do differently, feel free to email me. 

And I always answer all my emails, if you have some questions. I know we don’t have a whole lot of time for Q&A. But if you have questions that don’t get answered today, feel free to contact me by email, and I will be sure to answer all your questions. So, Steve, I talked really fast. 

But I think we still have some time for Q&A, right? 

– [Steven] Oh, yeah, we could probably do two or three. But thanks, Linda, that was really awesome to hear. I was just nodding along. Actually my neck kind of hurts because you were just saying things that not only did we see in our customer data, right, but also that I’ve just been hearing anecdotally. I love what you said about the volunteer thing, I just feel bad. 

You know, these volunteers who have been coming on-site, you know, may just be sitting around waiting for you to ask them to do something. I loved the phonathon idea, you know, letter writing. There’s all kinds of things they can do. Fundraising peer-to-peer. Yeah, that may be worth the price of admission alone for this webinar. So thank you, Linda. 

I can’t wait for session number 10. It’ll be great. 

– [Linda] Okay, we’ll have to work on that. 

– [Steven] Here’s a couple questions. My buddy Holly here was wondering if you think this is a good time to look at your strategic plan, right? It’s kind of an uncertain time but also maybe an opportunity. What do you think there? I’m kind of a toss-up. 

– [Linda] Yeah, I think it’s an excellent time to look at your strategic plan because, certainly, plans or guidelines are kind of like budgets and they don’t always go according to plan. If you have an existing plan, a lot of it maybe went out the window in the last year. But it’s a good time to think about, if it did go out the window, why. 

You know, maybe we were too dependent on certain programs and we’ve had to change our programs and we weren’t prepared to make that shift as readily. Or in the fundraising arena, maybe we were too dependent on special events and in-person things and we have to now think differently. So I think this is an excellent time to look at your strategic plan. 

– [Steven] I love it. Let’s do it. That sounds like a super fun exercise. I’m kind of a dork. Maybe that doesn’t sound fun to other people. 

– [Linda] I know. 

– [Steven] I love it. There’s a couple other good ones here. The phonathon idea with perhaps volunteers or anyone else, you mentioned, you know, they talk about your case for support. Can you unpack that a little bit, because I think some folks maybe are hearing that “case for support” word and thinking, “Oh, that’s a case statement. Is that different than case for support?” 

How deep should they go? How would you prepare those people to talk about the organization? 

– [Linda] That’s a great question. And I actually happen to have a whole course on building your case for support that talks about what kind of … there is a subtle nuance in the difference in terminology. The case for support is kind of your overall organizational case of every reason why anybody should give to you. 

But then, from that, you often develop separate case statements. If you’re having a capital campaign, you’ll have a case statement focusing on why you need a new building or renovate your building. If you’re trying to raise money through bequests, your case statement might focus more on the future of your organization and building up a reserve, which right now I think a lot of people are struggling with because the reason they’re not in business any longer is they didn’t have any reserve funds. 

So building an endowment might be something that’s important to you, and you might want to develop a separate case statement for that. If your case is for your annual giving, it’s usually more focused on your programs. And that’s probably what you’re going to be using your phonathon for. So focus on what programs you offer and what difference they’re making in the community and how people can be a part of that supporting. 

But if you’re interested in learning more about the case for support, my course is called “Tell Your Story Right, Build a Compelling Case for Support.” So I think that’s a real important tool in every nonprofit’s toolbox. 

– [Steven] I thought you had a resource for that. That’s maybe why that question was … 

– [Linda] Yeah, I have resources for everything. 

– [Steven] Pretty much everything. Yeah, if you want to take a trip to the Southwest, Linda has got you covered there too, not just fundraising advice. Maybe a good way to end it is, you know, we’ve been talking a lot about the organization, but this has been a hard year on us personally and I’m a big believer in self-care. Any stress-relieving tips? Is it as simple as setting boundaries, going for a walk? What do you think, Linda? 

How have you been doing that? 

– [Linda] For many of my friends, it’s going out and walking. I had a stroke and I have a little problem hiking and walking. But one of the things that has helped me tremendously is I was doing yoga before COVID, but I actually benefited by finding an even better yoga instructor who does it online, and it’s called Gentle Yoga. 

It’s mostly breathing and meditation. And it’s all sitting and laying down basically. We don’t do a lot of strenuous yoga. But that has helped me focus my energies a lot. 

– [Steven] That’s cool. 

– [Linda] And it’s amazing. When I’m done with yoga, I feel more energetic. Even though I’ve been relaxing and meditating, I feel more energized to go. And, of course, for me, writing, because I’ve written so many books. If you have any inkling that you’d like to be a writer, you might want to think about this as a time to start. I’m finishing up a book right now that I’m hoping to get out in the next couple weeks. 

And then there’s always several books in my file that I’m working on. But if you like to write, this might be a good time. Even if you just don’t want to write a book, but just start journaling about your experiences. And another thing that, believe it or not, relaxes me is I play words with friends on my phone all the time. 

Every night before I go to bed and every morning when I wake up, I catch up on words with friends. But my kids are scattered throughout the country, and when COVID started, we began Zooming and we play games like Pictionary online with my family, and there for a while, we were on every day. 

Now that people are getting out a little bit more, we’ve sort of tapered down to a couple times a week. But just, you know, a phone call to a friend that you haven’t seen for a while. I also am doing a lot of volunteer work for my church, and that helps me kind of channel my thoughts into a different direction sometimes so I’m not always thinking about work. 

Most of the time I’m thinking about work, but those are the things that I find helpful. 

– [Steven] Yoga? You heard it here first. 

– [Linda] I also use a lot of essential oils too, which helps. 

– [Steven] Oh, my wife does that too. Yeah, she swears by it. 

– [Linda] I, unfortunately, lost my sense of smell when I had my stroke, but I still use the diffuser and use the oils because I think, even though it’s not getting into my olfactory system the way it normally should, it’s probably still helpful. So I do that. 

– [Steven] Well, folks, I do yoga also. We actually do it through Bloomerang. We have a virtual instructor every Wednesday morning. If I can do yoga and Linda can do yoga, there’s no excuse. And I’ll vouch for it also. I was skeptical, but I’ve learned to love it too. So, dang, this was fun. 

We’re a little over time, but, Linda, this was awesome to have you. Thank you for always being willing to come on my weird webinar series. I really appreciate it. 

– [Linda] Well, I appreciate you and I appreciate all Bloomerang is doing for the community. And I hope all of you do. I mean, I don’t know of anybody else that does weekly webinars for the community, so I think that’s a great thing that Bloomerang is doing for the community too. 

– [Steven] We love it. Well, thank you. It’s good for me. I mean, I feel like I’ve gotten my CFRE like 100 times over by now. So I feel bad that I’ve been able to listen to all these, but this is great. And thanks to all of you for hanging out. I know it’s probably a busy time of year. 

It’s always a busy time of year, right? But I always say that, but I appreciate seeing a full room. But we’re going to get the slides, recording, all the good stuff to you. So just be on the lookout for an email from me a little bit later on today. And, hopefully, we’ll see you next week. We’ve got a great webinar coming up same time, same place. I’m going to just flash that on my screen here real quick, Linda. 

My buddy Sean Hale is going to be joining us. Same time, same place, next Thursday 3:00 p.m. We’ll talk about how to create a strong back office. So he’s kind of a guru on accounting, HR, all that non-fun stuff, you know, that we’ve got to do that’s kind of necessary. Maybe it’s fun for some of you. 

That’s cool too. But be there. If you’re an ED, small shop EDs, this is the one for you. He’s going to give you a good kind of rubric on how to wrangle all those things, so you can get back to fundraising and, you know, helping your beneficiaries. So be there if you’re free. If not, we’re going to record it. There’s lots of other sessions on our webinar schedule. 

So just check it out because we’re here every Thursday. And I’ll be talking to somebody, so you can tune in to hear a great conversation. So thanks for listening to this one. Hopefully, we’ll see you next week. But have a good rest of your Thursday. Have a good weekend. Stay safe, stay healthy. 

Please, we need you out there. And, hopefully, we’ll talk to you again soon. Bye, now. 

– [Linda] Bye.

The post COVID One Year Later: What Have We Learned About Fundraising? appeared first on Bloomerang.

Researchers have uncovered a key component of organizational agility, and it’s not what you might expect. A study by Elaine Pulakos and Rob Kaiser published in Consulting Psychology Journal: Practice and Research (2019) reveals stability as an essential part of agility. This finding seems counterintuitive—isn’t agility all about change? Yes, but organizations need a solid foundation of stability upon which change can occur — especially during challenging times. 

Agility and Stability

The topic of agility, an organization’s ability to adapt and respond to environmental changes and evolving needs, is extremely timely. During this article’s writing, the world faces a global pandemic, and no sector is immune to its effects on staff, clients, finances, and daily operations. COVID-19 has turned our organizations upside down and shaken them out. 

For many, the situation feels anything but stable. However, agile leaders are always looking for the opportunity hidden in adversity. In that spirit, we should consider that the fallout from COVID presents a chance for organizational leaders to look closely at the pieces on the floor and figure out how to put everything back together to equip us for challenging times and opportunities during “normal” times. One way to do that is by focusing on establishing stability now in our organizations to be more agile in the future. 

Four ways to create stability for agility in challenging times

Pulakos’ and Kaiser’s research shows that stability creates a solid foundation upon which change can occur. In this sense, stability refers to a psychological state where employees trust their leadership and the organization and feel safe in their jobs. The research indicates that there are specific measures leaders can take to instill stability in their organizations. Four of them are: developing and communicating concrete plans, ensuring that adequate resources are available, reassuring staff about the security of their jobs, and letting employees experiment. 

1. Develop and share clear plans for the path forward.

When leadership isn’t communicating plans in disruptive times, employees tend to assume the worst. To combat this, Pulakos & Kaiser suggest consistent, frequent communication of status, goals, and progress. Doing so will instill faith that managers are competently leading everyone toward a light at the end of the uncertainty tunnel.

2. Get everyone what they need to do their jobs.

When employees are already stressed out and overwhelmed, a lack of adequate resources adds fuel to the fire. The researchers recommend decreasing staff demands and increasing resources (time, energy, stuff, and money) wherever possible. This one might not seem likely for nonprofits that regularly struggle with resources. However, replacing burned-out nonprofit staff will be costlier in the end than finding creative ways to cut costs and direct more resources to employees. 

3. Reassure your staff that their jobs are safe (but be honest).

Leaders can’t expect employees to focus on hitting their performance measures if they’re unsure they’ll have a paycheck soon. Pulakos and Kaiser say to affirm job security during uncertain times when you can but to be realistic. Managers must dance between telling the truth and encouraging optimism about the future. If leaders overpromise and underdeliver, trust—an essential aspect of stability—will diminish. Hard truths are more stabilizing than false promises, and over-communication is better than saying nothing at all. 

4. Let employees experiment—and even fail.

Finally, leaders would benefit from a bit more flexibility amid uncertainty. During challenging times, the inclination might be to become more rigid and constricted—to go into survival mode. On the contrary, trying times are a chance to let employees exercise a little creative freedom and try some things. The innovation that results might help the organization level up out of a rough patch. On the other hand, the experiment might fail too, and managers need to be okay with that. Employees feel safe to take intentional risks when they know they won’t be punished if it doesn’t work out. 

COVID will end, but nonprofits will always face pressures. We are, after all, attempting to solve many of society’s most significant problems. So, rather than resisting challenging times, we can aim to be more agile in preparation for them. Research published in a 2018 McKinsey Quarterly Report shows that when agile organizations experience pressure, performance not only sustains but improves. Even during challenging times, striving for stability is undoubtedly a worthy endeavor for nonprofit leaders and their organizations’ future. 

Article Referenced:

Pulakos, E. D., Kantrowitz, T., & Schneider, B. (2019). What leads to organizational agility: It’s not what you think. Consulting Psychology Journal: Practice and Research, 71(4), 305-320. doi:10.1037/cpb0000150

The post 4 Ways to Use Stability to Achieve Organizational Agility in Challenging Times appeared first on Bloomerang.

But, to pull off a successful online or virtual event you will need to do more than string together a series of webinars or host a Zoom free for all.

Aside from respecting the safety protocols put in place in response to the COVID-19 pandemic, online events provide event planners and attendees with several incredible benefits including reduced costs, ease of access, greater leads, and improved networking opportunities.

To maximize revenues and ensure value for your attendees, here’s our list of tips and tricks for a successful online event!

15 Tips and Tricks for Hosting a Successful Online Event

1. Know your target audience

The easiest way to find success in hosting an event in any format is to know who is likely to attend.

Think about it, you don’t want to market a conference about advancements in dental technology to a bunch of real estate professionals.

By taking time in advance to narrow down who the event is for, you will be able to create content to suit.

Ask yourself:

• Who is the event for?
• What challenges or obstacles do they face in their industry or daily life?
• Is this a professional industry event or one targeted to a lifestyle or entertainment market?
• What are the personal goals of your ideal attendee?

2. Define event goals

Hand in hand with identifying your target audience is defining your event goals. As an event organizer, what is it that you hope to achieve?

Knowing what you want your event “to do” will help you direct a path toward that end.

Begin by defining your event type. If you want to host a virtual networking event, for example, you will need to set up and market your event in a way that is different from a virtual trade show or exhibition. One requires robust chat and connect tools, while the other requires virtual exhibit booths, a show floor, AND robust chat tools. A virtual conference will likely require live streaming capabilities or at least some type of video production.

From there, think about what defines success for you. Do you want to generate ticket revenue, do you want to grow brand awareness? Are you hoping to raise funds and awareness for a specific cause or charity?

Knowing where you want to go will help you get there.

3. Create an event brand

To make sure that your event marketing efforts speak to your target audience, create an event brand.

This means creating a logo, a slogan, possibly a hashtag, and a clear brand message. The message and the branding should be reinforced through your marketing channels.

Build an event website that includes detailed information about the event, who you are, and why people should attend. This site will be where people can learn more about each session, review speakers and exhibitors, purchase tickets, and complete registration.

Beyond the website, promote your virtual event on social media platforms like Twitter, Facebook, Instagram, and LinkedIn. Social media posts are an effective way to grow your event brand and generate early audience engagement. Write and share relative blog posts, push video teasers, and create an environment where virtual attendees will come to trust and value what your brand is doing and saying.

You must be consistent with your branding. You want people to have a seamless experience and much of that comes with recognition. Use the same colors, fonts, and logos in all of your materials so people can easily tell that the post or message is coming from you.

4. Choose an appealing topic

Sure, you can choose to host a virtual or hybrid event on the aesthetics of drying paint, but don’t expect a flourish of ticket purchases.

Depending on the nature of the event and the industry you are targeting, you may have to get creative in your approach to the event theme or topic. Certainly, by nature, some event topics will be a little drier than others. But, that doesn’t mean you can’t spin it into something more interesting.

Many times, people attend large scale events and conferences to learn something. Think about your target audience and consider what information and material could be valuable to them.

Don’t be too general or vague. Build your content around specific pieces that relate to the overall theme. If your topic is the aesthetics of drying paint, have sessions around paint application, brush types, drying speeds, etc.

While you don’t want to be too general, you also don’t want to be too specific. When choosing a theme, specificity can limit your options. If you are hosting a single virtual meeting or webinar, specificity is great, but if you are planning a multi-day digital affair, you will need more room.

If your target audience includes novices and experts, be sure there is enough content to keep both ends of the audience spectrum actively engaged and interested.

5. Put together a team

Physical events often have event staff and volunteer teams in place to help things run as smoothly as possible. You will want something similar for your digital event.

For starters, you will need a tech support team on hand. These individuals can help presenters navigate event technology and mitigate any trouble faced by event attendees. Be sure to include contact information for tech support in your registration package and any pre-event communication.

Put a person (or two) in charge of making sure each presenter is ready and able to go at the scheduled time. A virtual event needs to be on time. At a physical event, some interactions can take place if there is a slight delay. With a virtual event, people are more apt to just log off and never return. Keep things going as planned!

You will want to have people moderating chat rooms, as well. This will keep abusive behavior to a minimum but also enable the virtual audience to ask questions of the keynote speaker or presenter.

Finally, depending on the nature and scope of the event, you may want to implement a virtual emcee to facilitate engagement and interactions in real-time. A video production crew, including a videographer, may also be a wise choice.

6. Land a great speaker

One way to succeed with your online event is to land a coveted speaker. Do some research and find a popular voice that relates to your topic. This person should have enough authority and expertise to make them a draw for the audience.

Be sure to explore social media pages to see if their following aligns with your target audience. This overlap is likely to lead to greater interest in your event and increased ticket sales.

7. Choose date and time wisely

Online events give people plenty of freedom when it comes to attendance. They can attend from any location in the world that has an internet connection. But, this doesn’t mean that you don’t have to put careful thought into the date and time of your event.

For a target audience that includes working professionals, scheduling your event to run early in the week and during normal working hours is unlikely to work. Planning the event for a weekend is helpful, but people want and deserve their downtime as well. In this instance, scheduling your event for a Thursday or Friday can be appealing. It can be used as a professional development tool and provides attendees with what feels like an extended weekend.

Additionally, try to avoid scheduling your virtual event around major holidays. People tend to be preoccupied with their personal plans at these times and attendance is likely to suffer.

8. Choose a virtual event platform

A virtual event can benefit from the use of a virtual event platform. If you’re hosting a small virtual meet up, using a platform like Zoom or Google Hangouts may be all you need. But for larger, more detailed events, you need an online event platform that supports your unique needs.

Look for software that allows you to:

• Sell tickets and support online registration
• Enable live text and video chat
• Live stream video
• Designate breakout sessions and networking opportunities
• Market via social media and email campaigns through integrations
• Set up a virtual lobby and/or “cocktail lounge”
• Create customizable virtual exhibit booths

The right virtual event platform will create an interactive virtual experience that fosters participant engagement.

9. Create specific networking opportunities

One of the biggest concerns people have before registering for a virtual event is that they won’t have access to the same networking opportunities they would have at a physical event.

Fortunately, networking can be worked into your event agenda. Facilitate networking by:

• Using live chat
• Creating networking events within the event
• Leveraging social media engagement
• Using live video streams
• Using event gamification
• Creating virtual spaces for people to gather

10. Test all tech

Before you launch your event, you need to check to make sure that all your technology works properly.

Check video cameras and lighting and test wifi functionality for all speakers and presenters. Make sure that your event platform works as it should. Get a team together and collect opinions on audio and video quality and speaker backdrops.

Testing these elements well in advance means that you can get it right before attendees start tuning in.

11. Send event email invitations

Email campaigns are one of the most effective marketing tools available today.

If you have a list of past attendees, be sure to invite them to your upcoming event. These individuals are likely to be more familiar with your brand and are more likely to register.

Send email reminders to anyone that has already registered. Include details on how to get the most out of the event platform, tips for networking in the virtual space, and contact information for tech support.

12. Prepare all presenters

Once you have lined up your speakers and presenters, make sure they have everything they need to succeed.

Check-in on their access to the appropriate technologies but also help them understand how their contributions fit into the event as a whole. By understanding the greater context, the presenter will be able to tailor their message to be more appropriate to the event and the target audience.

Presenters should be made aware of their exact start time and their expected run time. For a successful event, things must run as close to on time as possible. If there are delays, make sure presenters know so they aren’t sitting and waiting to start.

13. Provide More Content

When the event is over, send attendees more content to keep the conversations going and attendee satisfaction rates high.

Some presenters may be willing to share their slideshows or provide downloadable content to support the points made.

Repurpose event videos or create a blog post that addresses some of what emerged from discussions at your event.

The more you can provide attendees, the more value that will see, and the more likely they are to attend and recommend in the future.

14. Send out a post-event survey

The only way to improve your events is to get honest feedback on them. Send a post-event survey to all attendees, presenters, and sponsors.

The responses will tell you where your event succeeded, where it came up short, and help you decide where to go in the future. You can even use this survey to crowdsource ideas for future events.

15. Tabulate the results

A virtual event provides event organizers with a treasure trove of data.

How many people registered for your event? How many actually attended? How many people stayed for the entire thing? Were there sessions that were less popular than others? Where did attendees go when on the showroom floor?

This information, combined with the survey results, will help you better understand your event and plan even better ones in the future!

Hosting a successful online or virtual event requires careful planning and consideration. You need to work to ensure that you are providing content that the audience wants and that the presentation of that content is interesting and appealing enough to keep the audience engaged. Remember, there are lots of other ways people can spend their time when tuning in from home, the competition for attention is real.

Employ the 15 tips and tricks listed above and you are sure to see results across all of your performance indicators! Need some additional inspiration? Dive into the Big Book of Hybrid and Virtual Event Ideas—it’s bound to spark your creativity!

The post 15 Tips And Tricks For Hosting A Successful Online Event appeared first on Bloomerang.

It is hard to fault any one of us for being overwhelmed, for not wanting to know, for turning to fear and misinformation as a way to tune out the truth.

And yet – I want to share three sources that speak to meeting the moment:

1. One is Margaret Wheatley. Margaret Wheatley has written about and worked on leadership for over 50 years. Now 77, Wheatley’s most recent book asks this exact question, Who Do We Chose to Be? Facing Reality, Claiming Leadership, Restoring Sanity. Her thesis is that, at this challenging moment, we must be warriors of compassion who support others to recognize the present situation and bring out generosity, insight, and compassion in all.
2. Second is Resmaa Menakem. Menakem’s book My Grandmother’s Hands explores the trauma of racism on Black bodies, white bodies, and police bodies. Menakem argues that all bodies hold the multi-generational trauma of racism (whether as perpetrators or victims) at a somatic level and can only let go of that trauma through doing body-based practices, such as meditation, reflection, singing, or rocking, to acknowledge and process this violence and settle ourselves. Menakem teaches that meeting the moment – and moving to a more compassionate one – is only possible through an awareness of what we’re feeling – and allowing space for those feelings to move through us.
3. And lastly, Ruth Bader Ginsberg who we so sadly laid to rest recently. So many dimensions of how she is a heroine and paved the way for justice and gender equality. What resonates with me the most is that she held on to her vision of justice without fear.

Whether or not we feel ready to meet these challenging times, we have an important moment coming in a little over a month. For me, I do not take it lightly as it comes looming with the risk of our democracy in its throes. These are the things that I keep in front of me as I rise to meet the moment. I ask that you join me and, please, no matter which way you bend politically, VOTE! [Note that nonprofit organizations are unable to endorse individual candidates, but can encourage stakeholders to participate in democracy by voting.]

We are also meeting the moment by launching a six-week live online course on Equitable Board Building, which starts October 21. Clients, colleagues and students have expressed a hunger for tools and frameworks to move towards racial equity in their boards and organizations. This course utilizes the frameworks we share with clients and students in a cohort-based experience to move on a path towards anti-racism. More information here.

I believe this is the path in front of us. To review:

• Be warriors of compassion
• Recognize the trauma and violence of racism, take active steps to let it move through us so we can move to anti-racism
• Without fear, speak up for and hold on to our visions of justice

Sending strength to each of you through the roller coaster of this time. And if you want to share, we’re eager to hear: how you are meeting the moment?

The post How Do Nonprofits Meet this Moment? appeared first on Bloomerang.

Full Transcript:

Steven: All right. Daryl, I got a 11:00 Eastern, my time. Is it okay if I go ahead and get this party started?

Daryl: Good for me.

Steven: All right. Cool. Well, welcome, everybody. Good morning, I guess, no matter where you are, except our guest, Daryl. He’s way out in Spain. We’ll talk about that in a second, but I hope you’re having a good day. I know it’s an early start for some of you, but I so appreciate all of you logging on. And if you’re watching the recording, I hope you’re having a good day. We’re going to be talking about the art of pivoting, how some nonprofits have actually really thrived during COVID-19, which is a nice change of pace from some of the doom and gloom we’ve seen out in the news. So I’m Steven. I’m over here at Bloomerang. And I’ll be moderating today’s discussion as always.

And just a couple of housekeeping items real quick. We are recording this session. We’ll be sending out the slides and the recording later on today. So if you have to leave early, if you miss a tidbit or just want to watch it again, maybe send it to a friend or a colleague, don’t worry. We’ll get all that good stuff to you later this afternoon, you won’t miss a thing. But most importantly, please feel free to chat in any questions or comments along the way. There’s a chat box. There’s a Q&A box. We’ll keep an eye on both those things. We’d love to hear from you. We’re going to try to save some time at the end for Q&A. So don’t be shy. Introduce yourself now. If you haven’t already, we’d love to hear from you. You can also do that on Twitter. I’ll keep an eye on the tweets there. But yeah, don’t be shy. We’d love to know who you are and what your questions are.

And if this is your first Bloomerang webinar, just want to say an extra special welcome to you folks. We do these webinars now a couple of times a week. We love it. Bring on a great guest, totally educational, informative, oftentimes inspirational. But if you’ve never heard of Bloomerang, just for context, we are a provider of donor management software. So if you are interested in that, maybe you’re looking to switch software this year, check us out, you know, visit our website. There’s all kinds of videos on there. You can learn more about us. We’re pretty easy to find. But don’t do that right now because you all are in for a real, real special treat. It is not too often that I get to have a literal living legend on the webinar series, but we are blessed to have my good buddy, Daryl Upsall, joining us from beautiful Spain. He’s in central Spain. Usually in Madrid, but he’s hunkering down at one of his cottages. Daryl, how are you doing? Are you doing okay?

Daryl: I’m good. The sun has come out. The sun is shining. It’s a blue sky. And yeah, I’m looking forward to having a conversation with you all.

Steven: This is awesome. We owe you such a debt of gratitude for doing this. You actually reached out to us and offered to give this presentation. Very, very generous of you. And then obviously there’s a big time zone difference. So thanks for doing this so late in the day where you are, although it sounds like . . . It’s not quite nighttime, so that’s good. Geez, Daryl, I don’t even know where to start.

Daryl: It’s 5:00 somewhere. It’s 5:00 here.

Steven: That’s not bad. Okay.

Daryl: But I think I’ll have to wait till 6:00 for my glass of wine.

Steven: Okay. Good. So we’re not delaying the wine or dinner, but this is awesome. Daryl has been a buddy of mine. I actually got a chance to share the stage with him at a one of the AFP ICON presentations a couple of years ago. Just a wealth of knowledge. I mean, has clients all over the world and definitely has an international view of what’s been going on. Has been helping his clients deal with, you know, all of this since February, March, even before it hit the U.S. of course. And I’m just so excited to hear about all the things you’ve seen and learned. So I’m going to pipe down. I’ll let you share your screen, Daryl, because you got a lot of good stuff for us. Let’s see if we can get your slides up. Hopefully, it’ll work. It was working before.

Daryl: That’s the joy of technology.

Steven: Right.

Daryl: There we go. Is that working for you?

Steven: Looks like it’s thinking about going. Yeah. That looks beautiful. Okay. The floor is yours, my friend. Take it away.

Daryl: Thank you. Thank you for that. Hi, everybody. Welcome. Greetings from Spain. I’m going to cover something, a word that I guess popped up during the course of the COVID crisis, which is pivoting. And I don’t mean becoming a ballerina, which certainly wouldn’t suit me, but let’s just talk about that. So welcome. Pleased to have you here. And a little bit about me. Yeah. Thirty odd years, six years in the fundraising world, headed up Greenpeace, done some stuff for Mandela for his election and run a number of agencies out of Spain, digital, consulting, recruitment, face-to-face, and so forth. I don’t have to tell. Everybody can see. All of which have been very impacted by COVID itself as you all imagine.

These are some of the clients. Maybe some of you are there, have been there, probably even going there. But so we work for a lot of the national, international organizations, UN agencies, but also smaller national organizations around the world. And just to give some context, my team at Daryl Upsall & Associates, the consulting side, we’ve been doing studies for the last 20 years of national markets, organizational evaluations. And during this period of COVID, we’ve been speaking to a lot of our clients across multiple markets, suppliers, funders, and so forth, as well as looking at some of the information coming out in the digital form through blogs and so forth.

So just to sort of context, I guess most of you are coming in from what would be a mature market Canada or the USA. You know, these are the trends that were going on pre-COVID in the mature markets, the darker blue in the emerging markets of which there are many. And we work in at the same time. Face-to-face, by that I mean the street fundraising, definitely stable. Digital was already growing, but as we’ll see, has boomed as a result of COVID and those organizations that are there and jumped in stronger, have done well. Direct mail, which in most of the world has been going down in recent years and the U.S. Canada, Holland, Germany is some of the few markets, it remains, funny enough have had a bit of a kickback in COVID. These people actually took time to read the communications they were getting from their donors, especially if they were relevant. Television, for those that can afford it, it’s a gain, had a big boost under COVID, even though it was quite stable previously.

Corporate fundraising, we’ll look at that a little bit, and I’d certainly welcome any input from the audience here. Hasn’t really changed. I’ve been in fundraising 36 years. I don’t think the dial has shifted for more than 5% of global fundraising income, private income that is, has come from corporations hasn’t changed much. And they haven’t really responded that much collectively in this period. Foundations, yeah, they’ve been growing in all markets, both in private foundations, larger ones, and donor-advised funds. And I think they’re going to, as will come on later, they’ve got some interesting moves they’ve made during this period.

Major donors, that’s been a tough one high level, high level philanthropy. Got harder for us as fundraisers to actually go out and reach them. Legacy income, bequests, planned giving, as you may wish to call it in some parts of the world, that has been growing just because they’re slow as opposed to the . . . you know, the monumental wealth transfer has been going on across generations. Interest in legacies has definitely gone up in enormously during this period. Middle donors, yeah, not much done, but either way, not so much affected by this period.

Some of my predictions based on what we’ve been seeing, reading, etc., is globally, we think in 2020, even though some organizations will do well, globally, income will drop between 20% to 30% this year. And next year could be even tougher as people have less resources to ride it out. I also think that 30%, 40% of the smaller, perhaps local organizations will go under if we continue. And certainly as of today, for example, Madrid got locked down again and much of the UK and other cities and parts of Europe are being, you know, infected by the second rise in COVID. And that makes a lot of the fundraising operations hard.

Even some of the bigger, and by bigger I’m talking about 100 million-plus organizations are struggling and we’re seeing very, very high levels of layoffs and so forth. And what we’ve been lucky is organizations most at risk, being those with overdependence on single channel fundraising, retail trading, that may not be so big in terms of charity shops or thrift shops, as you may wish to call them. I’d imagine the Salvation Army has both had reasons for growing and reasons for contracting during this period, but in the UK, major brands like Oxfam, cancer charities, etc., a good 20% of their income can come from high street trading. And when the high streets closed, there is no trading. Likewise with gala events, community fundraising. Having said that, and we’ll show an example from Australia, organizations that have pivoted or found a way of dealing with that too.

I assume most of you will have seen the AFP, Canada AFP, USA research on the coronavirus response survey. If not, I really encourage you to do so. It’s there on the website and pretty easy to find. But if you look at the expectations, only 11% expect to grow more than 2009, but in Canada, 70% less. And only 30% are going to do more fundraising activity, 39% normal, a lot less. So decline in activity, similar in the U.S. but I think less feel less optimistic, shall we say, only half expected to drop. Only half sounds terrible after years of slow growth in income from fundraising.

What’s been changing is a massive increase in donor retention or stewardship, which for somebody who’s banged on about supporter relationship, development, donor-centered fundraising, monthly giving for many, many years, this is great to hear because I think that is the [inaudible 00:10:55] for fundraising for many organizations. Social media, virtual, online email, all gone up hugely and effectively. And, again, when we come to pivoting, I think these are key factors. Yeah. Canada, even more on donor retention and stewardship. And this is an example of, I think, the kind of low level, but general market pivoting that if people can do it, organizations can shift into it, is going to make the difference of growth, survival, and if not, failure.

The ultra-high net worth, yeah. Some have stepped up to the plate, 8 billion from corporations is no small sum. This is definitely 8 billion of COVID-related donations. Not related to their other typical financial support for the sector. Having said, that it’s hard to measure where money has been either diverted from supporting, for example, cultural activities that they would have supported and shifted into COVID. Ultra-high net worth, 1.5 billion. But if you look at, and I’m sure many of you have, the wealth growth of the ultra-high net worth individuals in the world during COVID, it has been phenomenal. And just look at the owner of Amazon for that one. What was it? He’s doubled his wealth value in the period of COVID. Honest.

Foundations, particularly in the U.S. have taken a really positive move. And I think it’s one of the areas around our business where we should be thankful. And they have definitely, I would say, in my words, pivoted the speed at which 800 foundations suddenly speeded up their grant giving processes. The fact that many of them are giving more this year, the Skoll, Mary Reynolds, etc., double or quadrupling. Giving, but then again, is it reaching across [inaudible 00:12:57] And know for sure. We’re seeing a fallback in, in all kinds of funding, including foundations for the arts culture, which why it might be seen as nonessential if you think about the mental health and the social wellbeing of our society as a whole. I think we need to think beyond purely medical and social welfare. I think we thrive when we have external beauty around us, shall we say.

UK situation, pretty much largely the same as the U.S. and Canada. Twenty percent income has declined, but what was surprising is 40% there said income had increased in a big survey done by the equivalent of the AFP, the Institute of Fundraising, along with Blackbaud in the UK. Probably more confidence, I’d say, in the UK, when the survey was done, that recovery will happen and that new ways will be found to combat the challenges. I think probably one of the bigger differences is in much of Europe, UK, in particular, nonprofits have had financial support, whether it’s paying wages during furloughing for many months or some specific funds and not insignificant actually funding into the sector itself to keep them going. But, again, in that bottom line, there’s 29%, almost 30% that think they will not do well during the lockdown. That point open up for any questions, Steven, whether you are collecting questions through the chat box and want to throw any at me or we want a whole questions and answers to the end. How do we pace.

Steven: We are collecting but there haven’t been any yet. So I’d say keep going. We can get to them at the end.

Daryl: Keep going. Okay. Please, I encourage you to put some questions into the chat box and we’ll take them as they come in at the Q&A points. And I see Jessica’s raised. Great. So let’s go on to the art of pivoting. And what is it? Well, as I said to Steve earlier, be prepared. It’s a Boy Scout motto from Baden-Powell. My middle name’s Baden, so I’ve got some legitimacy in using this slogan and it’s not just for scouts. I’m not sure how many of you in the session today, with regularity, I’d argue, I’d say, you know, on an annual basis, at least do a PESTEL analysis of your organization, which is looking at the political, economic, social, technological environment, and legal environment your organization is operating in. So, for example, for colleagues in the U.S. you’re clearly, yeah, a month away, more or less from an election that has an impact of the political outcome, but it also has an impact in terms of money is going into political campaigns, election funds, and so forth that may not be at this time of year typically go into you.

Environmental issue, you know, many organizations are impacted as I . . . definitely was working in this area at Greenpeace. You know, if you’re in some areas, activity, the environmental changes that are going on will impact upon your work. It’s good to do this, but then we got COVID and that was not in any of the PESTEL analysis we have done for our clients over the last few years on markets or their organization.

So what did COVID-19 bring up as organizational issues to review? And see some of the key ones. What we have seen is it really raises issues about governance of organizations, small and large, and the speed of decision-making. I think the worst side of governance we’ve observed is organizations where the board have instructed the management team to say, “No fundraising activity, no additional investment at this time, because, you know, that all died there. People aren’t ready for it. Nobody wants to give at this time.” Da, da, da. “COVID is a problem.”

It’s also impacted on how we work. Clearly working from home is a different way of working than normal, so therefore it raises issues about how well is your organization in the cloud. We had to, with our own telephone call center in Spain, we had to suddenly move 200 employees from Friday to a Monday from working in a call center to working at home. It worked perfectly. We didn’t lose any call time. Why? Because we’d gone to the cloud. I think during times like this leadership and motivation, why did the call center in our case double the amount of money raised, double the amount of calls made in the first six months to the same six months last year? Because the leadership of that company was incredibly motivational. Made videos every day, all callers were allowed to make videos which were shared.

I don’t know. Keeping organizations happy and strong during crisis is important. What was very important we’ve seen for organizations is to look at how you make investment decisions. A lot of organizations set their budgets one year ahead or for the previous financial year. Those organizations that could literally tear up their budget and say, “Okay. We’re going to start again. This is a different situation.” Human resource issues. You can imagine travel, you know, people like me, 150 days on the road meeting clients. I haven’t left the country since COVID. So what did the organizations that are growing do? Yesterday I was in contact with my colleague at UNHCR, the global head of fundraising there, Christian Schaake, and he told me that UNHCR, the refugee agency, had a 20% increase in their income this year. We’re talking about 1/2 billion, $600 million organization.

Now, MSF, Doctors Without Borders, the Red Cross, Red Crescent, you would expect to grow because they are delivering vital services, supporting people with the virus. Having said that, we have a client, Smile Train, both in the UK and in the U.S. they have seen a huge lift in their income during the COVID crisis. They deal with, for those that don’t know, Smile Train, they deal with cleft palate operations. Not connected if you’re like.

So what are these organizations done? They’ve ramped up their social media and digital work. They’ve invested in direct response TV. As we’ve seen from those statistics, they have been throwing a lot of resources at donor loyalty and taking on-off donors to monthly donors. They’ve been taking their monthly donors, their sustainers for people in America, USA, and upgrading their monthly gift. And interesting, as I mentioned earlier, investing heavily in legacy marketing. That investment came because they saw a spike in the data requests for legacy, planned giving, bequest, fundraising, and therefore said, “Okay. Let’s throw more money at it. If there’s more interest, more for us.”

This is an interesting one, and I think we’re seeing it at the level or national offices of international organizations. They’re looking at the failing organizations in their markets, struggling organizations, and looking to merge, or even in some form, acquire. Where there might be 10 organizations providing a service, say to children in a region or a country. They say maybe we merged with the two smaller ones who look to be struggling.

I think the other issue to look at is, and I’m sure all of you have had these discussions at some point in your career, how big a reserve should your organization have? Is it three months operating reserve? Is it is it more? If you’ve got large reserves, do you keep them for security or do you start pulling into them? And we’ve seen both. We’ve seen organizations saying, “Actually, we keep our reserves because we know this is for the long-term.” But I have to say, the ones that have significantly grown have been saying, “Okay. Now is the time to go to reserves and invest in growth areas of fundraising, primarily digital [inaudible 00:21:51].”

This is a client of ours in Australia, Fred Hollows Foundation. It’s the best known iHealth organization. It does operations on cataracts in much of Asia, for example, parts of Africa. And it normally has a fun run, sort of mini marathon raising money for its cause. It’s a very well-known organization named after its deceased founder, Fred’s Big Run. But, of course, if anybody’s been following the news, Sydney and Melbourne, two big cities there were locked down. So they took their actual run to become a virtual run. Result was instead of raising 1/4 of a million Australian dollars, which would be their typical income from that event, by going online, they ramped up their income to 1.6 million. So it makes us rethink about virtual events versus real events. I’m sure the real one will come back in time. Virtual concerts. I’m sure some of you donated, watched as we did. It was a global virtual conference. So we could watch it here in Spain. And it raised money.

Again, you know, drawing back to where we’ve been picking up our information, it’s from these sources, studying, researching. Okay. So we’ve mentioned already, decision-making, moving reserves, and the other thing is switching budgets, and switching human resources. So one of the most exciting things, where we were supposed to be having the first ever international face-to-face fundraising conference in Vienna in November next month. Clearly it couldn’t happen. So we’ve had to go virtual. We’ve done one virtual, we have another one coming up.

What was interesting working with all of the global heads of the major international brand, NGOs, UN agencies is how they had their thousands of face-to-face staff. I mean, tens of thousands. Face-to-face is the biggest single fundraising tool in the world these days in terms of donor acquisition. And actually, instead of just having them at home doing nothing, they have them using their own social media, working on telephone, fundraising, calling donors. They had personally recruited in the street or in a shopping mall and asking them how they were and talking about their cause and thanking them for their support, which is pretty amazing in my mind, pivoting a face-to-face fundraiser into a telephone fundraiser. We did the same in Spain, our face-to-face teams couldn’t go out. They went into the call centers and shall we just say they were perhaps a little over enthusiastic compared to telephone fundraisers, but they brought in the results for the clients.

The other characteristic of those doing well was how and when to change your message. It was very easy to keep the COVID message running. In fact, you know, as a company, we had it on our website, we had it now signatures for our emails. We set up a COVID resource center for free resources, for charities wishing to read, look out, see during the crisis. But then there is a point to drop it. And what was very interesting for many of the international clients was how quickly they were moving the message and back to their core mission and making sure that actually the COVID-19 message did not dominate because at the end of the day, I’m sure everybody on this call, on this presentation eventually gets a little bit fed up with it. And yes, you do need to hear about other issues around the world.

So the UK fundraisers changed completely how they communicate with their sustainer, regular donors. They focused again on stewardship, more telephone thanking, more offering payment holidays or reduce gifts. And, again, even monthly donors, more use of digital, using social media to reinforce the message of what they were doing. You know, a good call, definitely a good call. I don’t know how many on the call, I’ll be happy to have a discussion about that later. Actually, during the crisis, tried to call all of the donors at different levels. Yeah. Even if it’s just to say, how are you? Thank you. We really appreciate your continuous support. And, again, as I mentioned earlier, direct mail came back, in even the UK where it was pretty moribund apart from maybe the very older part of the donor support piece.

But looking into the future, a lot of people were not skilled up enough to go digital, their board, in many cases, did not fully understand that some things about digital go, you know, it’s viral, it’s out of your control. Your supporters can be putting out messages to seek support. And obviously we saw, in many cases, I know in the U.S. it’s not so big, but in Canada face-to-face is huge and stopping that was a big, big impediment. So, again, pivoting an organization’s face-to-face investment and people into telephone or other channels like DRTV or digital was critical. Oops. Skip through that. It’s not surprising that these were the good channels, but now I think we have some questions. So let’s hear some of those Steven, over to you.

Steven: Yeah. We got some good ones. Thanks, Daryl. This was cool, to get some flavor for what’s been going on elsewhere in the world because it seems like you folks over the pond are always a couple months ahead of us over here. So things to look forward to, I think.

Daryl: Including with the virus.

Steven: Exactly. Yeah.

Daryl: Italy came first. You know?

Steven: Well, you know, so much of what you said we saw reflected in and we saw our customers, you know, we saw a lot of people calling donors, you know, obviously the stewardship came up a lot. Got a question here specifically about what to do instead of the face-to-face, so I’m wondering if you can maybe pull on that thread a little bit. They’re a small nonprofit, can’t do face-to-face meetings. Is it phone calls? Is it video chats? Is it social media? Are those, you think the things that can, you know, certainly replace those in-person meetings?

Daryl: I think the question relates to face-to-face more in terms of major donors or people [Inaudible 00:28:48]

Steven: Yeah. Sounds like it.

Daryl: Not mass fundraising. One of the most exciting things I’ve seen people doing during this period is actually setting up WhatsApp groups with donors, but not just one to one, seeing if donors would like to join in on a shared WhatsApp chat group or a shared WhatsApp call with video. And in a sense it’s almost like a mini donor-advised fund, but because of the so much isolation that has been related to COVID, you know, to give an example, in Spain, we were not allowed to leave our homes for three months, period. You could get medicine, you could get food, otherwise you were fined $1,000. It’s as simple as that. My wife never left the house for three months at all.

So actually putting people into groups, asking people if they’d like join a WhatsApp group where you can be sort of sharing, asking questions or joining a Zoom conference group call certainly has helped because what we found is that donors tend to reinforce each other. They’re enthusiastic collectively. I think part of the challenge also of trying to set up too many one-to-one Zoom calls is people got zoomed out. I use Zoom as a generic term. It’s almost like it’s become the conference call. It could be any type of system. And therefore, actually what you’re asking, was something they go, “God, no, not another one.” So I think you have to be very careful and I think having more dial in activities.

So [inaudible 00:30:35] like for years, and it’s been reemphasized, is people at MSF. Canada, interesting, many years ago, started with me, inviting me to go and go into a live chat with somebody in South Sudan in a medical facility. And they will be there with their cell phone and there’ll probably be 50 of us joining the chat and he or she will be explaining what they’re doing in a really terrible situation and literally moves the camera around and show you what’s going on around them and then you could ask questions. That kind of thing, I think interactive, but not Zoom, Zoom. Sorry. I’ve fallen asleep.

Steven: Right. And hearing from a service recipient or, you know, your work out in the field, that seems to be the key, right?

Daryl: I think that’s much more interesting is, again, we’ll come to it a bit later, showing impact. Showing what you’re really doing, not kind of smooth talking.

Steven: I love it. And the small groups of donors, is that like maybe 10, 12 donors you got?

Daryl: Yeah. Yeah. Probably not much more than that just to give people time because you set a limit and probably even half an hour is sufficient because, you know, I’m sure we’ve all even found it, “Oh, my God, it’s my best friend. But do I really want to go on another call at 8:00 at night?”

Steven: I know. I feel it. I feel it.

Daryl: So also, the beauty of a group is it takes a little bit of the responsibility off the single individual for being too on.

Steven: Good point.

Daryl: Yup. Next question.

Steven: Here’s one that spawned from your PESTEL slide. So, you know, here in the States, we got the election coming up in about 33 days, I think. You know, it seems like there’s a lot of things that can distract you from fundraising or maybe, you know, talk yourself out of asking. Is that an exception or is that something that maybe you could perhaps capitalize on? I feel like, you know, people are going to be fired up on both sides of the aisle. No matter who wins, you know, you’ve obviously dealt with a lot of elections in a lot of different countries. What should people be thinking about there?

Daryl: I think that it’s an excellent question because it depends entirely on your mission, but things happen in the political world that then roll on into economic and everything else. But, for example, the appointment of a certain Supreme Court judge in the USA is certainly going to impact upon people like Planned Parenthood. So, you know, you’ll be looking at your news thinking, “Even if that is possibly coming down the line, that’s a reason for ramping up your fundraising on particular issues that, you know, an incoming Supreme Court judge may not be sympathetic to.”

So I think you’ve got to be, two things, looking at your own internal political world and how that may be impacted, but for other organization, it’s what’s happening in the external political world. So, you know, if you’re Amnesty International right now, the politics of being banned in India, which they just been banned and made illegal after, you know, many attacks from the government there means no doubt that that political impact in India is going to be the cause for additional support for appeals for support in the rest of the world, like who’s got the right to close down Amnesty in the world’s biggest democracy? Because that’s what India is, billion people vote. So, you know, I’ve worked in political fundraising all my life, but the politics largely has been around cause politics. So I think always keep a track on what might impact upon your cause. And if it’s not impacted, then yeah, stick to your core mission because that can be a distraction, otherwise.

Steven: That makes sense. I’ve had a couple of people, Daryl, talk about celebrity endorsements, getting celebrities involved in maybe your campaigns. Is that something that you’ve seen be successful? And you know, I think celebrity is a term that has a pretty broad definition. I’ve seen local orgs. here in Indianapolis utilize local celebrities, people that maybe be known outside of the town, but is that seems like something that they could leverage?

Daryl: I think the classic thing in celebrities and as you well know, you know, I managed all of Elton John’s philanthropy and sets of his foundation for him and worked with many, many of the . . . managed all the Freddie Mercury Queen stuff when he died. And celebrity can be a two-edged sword. So, one, you got to be very careful about who you choose, so make sure they’re not the coke snorting, adulterizing. Perhaps religious evangelists that are your endorser. I mean, in terms of, you’ve really got to be very careful. Having said that and even in the heart at the peak period of COVID, one of our clients called Animals Asia based out of Hong Kong, but an animal welfare organization has just launched a global campaign using celebrities, Ricky Gervais, being one of them, the kind of a love-hate figure, I’d argue. But lots of Chinese, Taiwanese, Korean celebrities, and boy, the impact has skyrocketed upon them because they’re getting reposted and it’s very simple.

They wanted to change their message from, “We hate people who harm animals, anger hates to love conquers all,” basically. Celebrities have put out that message from all over the world and I say, Animals Asia, you know, we’re in discussions with them right now. They’re seeing an absolutely boom, including in markets where they were not having such an impact like China, which is hard to breach that [inaudible 00:36:24] wall. But I also, I think for the smaller organizations, definitely, you know, local radio, celebrities, and so forth all good. If you can be really sure you’re not going to get caught in some celebrity boob trap.

Steven: Right. You don’t want a PR disaster because of it.

Daryl: No. No.

Steven: You mentioned major gift fundraising, at least in the higher end, is up quite a bit. You know, obviously there’s a lot of wealth disparity, but is there a way that, you know, the average small to medium sized nonprofit and can tap into that somehow or does just come down to, you know, building relationships with the people you have. What do you think there?

Daryl: As everybody on this call knows, there’s no quick fix there. I think one of the most important things, if you are stewarding your existing wealthy major donors is to definitely make sure you’ve done due diligence, that, for example, their wealth might be increasing. Maybe they’re in the home food delivery business and they are booming and this is just the right time to ask them for a bigger gift. On the other hand, they might be at the other end. My son’s a top chef and the restaurant business, shall we say, in much of the world has fallen through the floor, has been going out to dine.

So I think you should always, you know, like everything with major donors, you should always make sure you know enough about what’s going on in people’s lives before approaching, whether that’s, if they’ve been affected directly by COVID, for example, through a family member and therefore may be thinking of other things, or like I say, their businesses booming or busting. Just take those facts into account before approaching them.

Steven: It’s a good point about maybe corporate fundraising because there are a lot of businesses doing well, right? I mean, you, you mentioned either, you know, I think of maybe like cleaning service companies, you know, it seems like that’s an opportunity as well, especially if you already have those relationships, right?

Daryl: Yeah. That doesn’t necessarily go to . . . Yeah. A lot of those cleaning companies, funny we had our sofas cleaned the other day and we spoke to the guy and how’s business, it’s booming. Everybody wants their house, their hospital, their hotel, whatever cleaned. And they’re booming. They’re a small business, but small local businesses are doing well. I’m sure would like to put back into the community. I think those of your donors that you know are having a hard time. It’s also good to reach out with them, but reach out thanking them for their past support and wishing them well in these challenging times. Nobody will regret you saying thank you, that’s for sure.

Steven: I love it. We were talking, Daryl, earlier and you mentioned at one of your slides about kind of the board getting out of the way or maybe leadership, in general, whether it’s your boss or a board member. What advice would you have for organizations where maybe they’re getting that message from above that’s saying, “Hey, we shouldn’t fundraise. There there’s too much going on in the world. We’re not the right cause type,” which I think is a bunch of malarkey, personally, but what should those people do who feeling kind of stuck? Like they want to fundraise, but they’re getting roadblocks from above.

Daryl: I would go and find as many local case studies or case studies relevant to your cause and say, “Hey, look what they’re doing. They’re raising a lot of money in this difficult time and they’re in the same business as us.” So if you’re a, you know, I mean, one of the areas that’s boomed during this period is animal welfare or dog shelters, or, you know, things like that. But try to find the success stories in your community and then have that story told to your board. Look for the evidence that’s there, it’s out there published, it’s in reports and blogs about donors not feeling offended by being contacted, and thanked, and asked for support because your mission is still vital.

I mean, I think, again, culture is really hard. Imagine you’re a local theater or a local orchestra and you can’t perform. So you’ve got no revenue through the door. Again, I think if you’re in that area, you shouldn’t feel guilty about going and say, you know, “Culture’s a key part of our community. We need to continue and thrive. We will continue to be doing our virtual program or putting on socially safe activities, but we need more support than ever.” There’s nothing wrong in going out and asking. But I think most boards are convinced by example.

Steven: Yes. And if anyone needs any of those case studies or donor research, I got them all. So just email me, I’ll send them to your board for you.

Daryl: Fabulous. Fabulous.

Steven: Including some of the things in the slides that Daryl had. Can we talk capital campaigns for a minute? Seems like maybe some people are in the middle of them. They were thinking of starting one. Should they stop? Should they keep going forward? What do you think there? I know there’s a lot of different situations, but . . .

Daryl: Wow. That’s a really difficult one because I think even every capital campaign has its own uniqueness to it and . . . I think what you’ve always got to be doing is testing your case for support, testing your case for support because things may change in time. Things may be, you know, the urgency for a capital campaign can rise or fall depending on the issue.

I found myself in the middle of the last pandemic. I was working for the leading HIV AIDS charity in Europe and the UK called the Terrence Higgins Trust. And we were launching capital campaigns, about [two/to 00:42:14] and then Freddie Mercury’s, the queen that she wanted to build the Freddie Mercury Memorial Hospital wing with the concert that we did at Wembley, which was an awareness raising, but the rerelease of “Bohemian Rhapsody,” which we benefited from. And I found myself as a 30-year-old banging the table in front of the members of Queen say, “We don’t need it because this pandemic of HIV AIDS is going to be over because we have drugs now.” And I persuaded them to change, to give it to help people living with AIDS and prevention of future spread of AIDS. So read the texts that I wrote in the back of “Bohemian Rhapsody.” So I just think again, it’s the circumstance, it’s whether it still holds true, you know, do you still need that extra facility, your console or when something else is happening? It’s a tough one. I don’t think there’s an easier answer to that.

Steven: It’s a tough one. We would need hours to cover it fully. That’s okay. You mentioned political giving, you know, spiking over the next month or so. And in previous months here, at least in the States. How should people navigate the fact that maybe, I think you said this, that some of that money that might be going towards charitable causes is now going towards candidates? Is it all that money? Is there still enough to go around? It seems like, you know, if you can still make a compelling case, that you could still, you know, capture some of that money, but what do you think?

Daryl: I mean, let’s be frank. I think we knew four years ago there was going to be another election. You know, if that’s not part of your strategic analysis every four years, there’s going to be elections for the president. There’s going to be midterms, whatever your system is. Bear in mind, in North America, especially USA, it’s a very different model to Europe where I think the maximum you can spend on a candidate in the UK is £2,000 max. So political fundraising just doesn’t count in most of Europe, so in Australia and so. It’s not driven by money. And, in fact, in some countries, the state pays all the costs of election. But I mean, these things are predictable. So if you haven’t factored it in, why not? It goes back to the PESTEL, I think. I’ve got a few more slides. Should we move on and take some questions at the end?

Steven: Yeah. Why don’t we move on? I think we exhausted the questions for now, but yeah. Let’s keep going.

Daryl: Wow. We can still pull them back in if they have. Why is my screen froze?

Steve: There it goes.

Daryl: Where was I? Yeah. So more PESTEL, more risk assessment, more preparation. More reasons why my . . . So key findings for the future. Let’s just go to the final run here. First of all, don’t hide from the problem. This duck and dive, not a fan of it. Get out. Don’t . . . I mean, I think we have to persuade upwards if we’re in a junior position, if we’re the CEO, we may even have to persuade downwards and say to our development fundraising staff, “Come on, guys. This isn’t the reason for not doing, so go for it.”

Act fast and be decisive. And I think our message going upwards to boards is prepare the case strong early. Don’t say, “Wait for them. Oh, we’ve got a board meeting coming in three months. We’ll review it then.” No. That either needs to be an emergency board meeting or most likely anyway, a virtual emergency board meeting.

Stick to your mission. I’ve mentioned that before. Four Paws, pretty much all the wild, all the animal welfare organizations we work with have boomed and they’ve hardly mentioned COVID because that’s not what they’re there to do.

Thinking to the future, are you prepared for next time? What’s the next crisis that could hit your organization? Okay. We’re going to have to live through the pandemic. We’re going to have to wait until there’s a medical solution resolution somehow, but what’s really important I think in this crisis is to document what we got wrong and what we got right and how to prepare for the future. Most of us who’ve worked in big international organizations which are high in the media, we have to do this planning typically, you know, at Greenpeace about media scandals, attacks, crisis. What if one of our ships does something, you know? So there are emergency communications protocols and stuff in place. How quick can we turn around a fundraising appeal if a crisis is affecting us either positively or negatively?

Ken Burnett who’s a guru of fundraising and in the world had to deal with Greenpeace UK back in the ’90s that they could turn around a direct mail appeal, newspaper adverts and any other form of media we had then within 24 hours, 48 hours over a weekend, that literally the staff would go in and do the copy, the design, and in the packs, the envelopes were already pre-ready to be stuffed. You’ve got to be fast. There’s no good waiting three months, then say, “Oh. We should’ve done something about that.”

Introduce flexible fundraising. Actually, interestingly, a lot of the international organizations have started over the last five, 10 years to get rid of the silos. So somebody is no longer in donor acquisition, direct mail is one area, they’re actually in the whole donor experience. People can move between panels. They’re not stuck in one role. People know that in certain times, their role, as a, for example, face-to-face fundraiser on the street is now going to pivot and change into a telephone fundraiser. You’ve got to be able to do that and have the stretches and the human resource programs in place to do that. You can’t switch everybody to home working if people haven’t got a space to work at home. How do you deal with that? Keep testing because . . . yeah, this is new. We’ve had pandemics, but not pandemics that affected us in this way for fundraising before.

Again, going back to monthly giving, monthly giving is the savior. Those people paying every month through their bank accounts, through their credit cards, $20, $15, whatever, they will stay with you. There is no strong evidence of those types of donors leaving organizations. And, in fact, enough evidence to say they’re increasing their gifts if properly asked and stewarded.

The digital transformation like many people have said, we’ve compressed six years into six months during this period of COVID. I think now you need to be planning how fast can you transform into a digital organization? Committee donors. Tell your mission, communicate impact. People may think you’ve stopped activity. You haven’t. You know, I was listening to a representative for the British zoos, you know, and marine places today on the radio, of course they’ve still been running their breeding programs. They’ve still been feeding their animals. They’ve still been doing the research and support to make sure, you know, animals don’t go into extinction, but they have to communicate that because people aren’t going to those venues under lockdown until they open today in the UK to get their true work across. So, you know, really keep telling people what you do.

Keep saying thank you. Even things like a little handwritten note, maybe because you’ve got people furloughed. Why aren’t people at home writing handwritten notes and just sending to donors through the office, obviously. Give donors choice, let donors during a crisis make it clear to them they can control their payments. If they are having a problem financially that, “Hey, take a holiday. If this is too much, take a downsizing of your monthly gift.”

Speak to your donors and call them just to find out how they are coping and what they would like from you. I always think of telephone fundraising, it’s why I never ever used the word, telemarketing. Even though I’m a pioneer of telephone fundraising, telemarketing is not what we do. Telephone fundraising is much more about listening, communicating, hearing what the donors have to say.

I would say if you’re not diversified in your fundraising in terms of channels and mix, you need to be. Keep testing and keep reading those benchmarks. I’m sure at Bloomerang you’ve got loads of data people could look at they would benefit from and could put into their cases for support internally for increased investment in certain areas and channels. And on that note, I say, “Muchos gracias.” And to quote a president who dealt with perhaps the biggest crisis the U.S. has faced and indeed the world faced, Franklin D Roosevelt. I love this quote, “The only thing we have to fear is fear itself.’ So thank you. And questions.

Steven: I love it. We owe you our thanks, Daryl. You’ve, you know, graciously offered to do this for us out of the blue. I so appreciated getting that email from you a few months back. This was awesome. What a treat. And thanks for doing this near dinner time for you. I don’t want to keep you much longer.

Daryl: No. This isn’t Spanish dinner. This is the end of Spanish lunchtime. Spanish dinner time’s 9:00.

Steven: Okay. Yeah. I got to get on that schedule. That sounds a lot better. Well, I know you’ve got a lot going on. You’re talking to the UN tomorrow? I mean, geez.

Daryl: Yeah. Yeah. Yeah.

Steven: Totally normal thing. You know? No big deal. But we’re getting some chats in here thanking you for the session. Any thoughts you want to leave us to part with? I know we answered a lot of the questions already, but . . .

Daryl: I’m happy to take more questions. I mean, we still got five minutes or is that?

Steven: Yeah. We got some time. I’ll let people, you know, chime in if they want. Somebody was asking about WhatsApp. I think that’s more popular in Europe than in the States, but, you know, I think you said it, something like Zoom is probably kind of . . .

Daryl: Yeah. It’s just how you send text messages, but without text messages and you can share images and videos and you form groups. So in Spain, I think more people use WhatsApp than email, than they use text or any other form of chat, actually.

Steven: That’s interesting.

Daryl: Yeah. Yeah. Yeah. And it’s a global app. I don’t know where it originated from. Except when you go to China and they look at your phone and they go, “What’s that? Oh, that’s so old-fashioned.”

Steven: Well, speaking of the phone, I remember when we were talking at AFP ICON, you mentioned that it seems like mobile fundraising in general is a lot bigger in Europe than it is here in the States, except in the cases of maybe, you know, maybe disaster response. So some people have asked, you know, what about texting donors? Is that something you’re seeing, you know, be effective right now?

Daryl: You know what? Texting died some years ago, I think, in Europe. Well, I’m sure it’s sometimes used, but WhatsApp and things are much more popular. To be frank, I mean, even an old boy like me who’s about to be 60 next week, we’ve pretty much abandoned landlines. Nobody in Europe really uses a landline for anything. And all of your, you know, you communicate with your 86-year-old mother-in-law through WhatsApp, not through any other means. When we do face-to-face, we don’t care if people have no landline, no address, no nothing. The only thing we want is an email and a cell phone number. And that’s pretty much true all over the world now. And in Asia, nobody uses email. I mean, even my son’s generation, he’s 26 email is, oh God, why do you use that? So, yeah, you got to be on the cell phone. It’s all there.

Steven: Interesting. A couple of questions here, one from Merrill. They are primarily a fee-based organization. So, you know, maybe they’re performing arts, I’m not sure. But they want to move into individual fundraising. And you mentioned some of those cultural organizations. How should they pivot? Is it, you know, people that used to buy tickets to performances, simply asking them to donate? Is that kind of a good starting point? What do you see to work there?

Daryl: I think if possible, you can do activities. Let’s talk about the cultural sector. If you are an organization that can still put on a classical concert and people can live stream but maybe it’s the artists solo in their houses. Strangely, I got locked down and one of our neighbors is one of the world’s top cellists. He was meant to be playing the Sydney Opera House the next week in LA and then week after. And, you know, a lot of those people, what they ended up doing was performing online through YouTube and so forth.

I think one of the things I did notice, and I actually wrote to the head of the National Theater director of development is the National Theater in the UK, which has fabulous theater. And they did loads of amazing performances. They put out live streaming and you’re allowed to donate to. You clicked on Donate and it was like the worst back-office I’ve ever seen in my life. So much so the only way to donate was to buy a ticket as a donation. I said, “No. I don’t want three seats.” But that’s what the donation drove you to do.

So I think one of the first things to do is to make sure you are able to take online donations and able to take payments, whether it’s through PayPal or whatever for virtual events. The other thing I’d really suggest, and I haven’t checked today, but use Facebook fundraiser. If you’ve got no resources, use Facebook fundraiser. My birthday is next week and I put up a Facebook fundraiser two weeks ago for an organization that rescues people who are migrants on these rubber dinghies in the Mediterranean. Thousands who’ve drowned.

Steven: Yeah. I’d donate to that.

Daryl: Yeah. I set a target at €1200. No. €800. Is it hitting 1500. This has been a real hit 3-1/2 like $4,000. Cost to the organization a tiny charity with no fundraising staff, nothing.

Steven: I love it. I’m going to look up your profile and make sure . . . Somehow I miss that. I feel bad, Daryl. You put it up last week.

Daryl: Yeah. You should. You should. Anybody looking at it. Daryl Upsall. I’m on Facebook. Hit that donation button. But the good thing is it’s free for tiny organizations as long as you can get registered with Facebook and you are legal and legitimate, you know.

Steven: Yup. Yeah. I can’t log on to Facebook without seeing at least one of those. I wish I had seen yours, but I’ll donate when we get done here for your birthday.

Daryl: For my 60th birthday. That’s awesome.

Steven: Sixty-day. That’s awesome.

Daryl: Sixty from the 12th of October.

Steven: Well, we’re getting close to the noon hour here. There are some questions we didn’t get to, but how can people find out more about you? We see your website here on the screen, but is there a good way to get in touch with you?

Daryl: Easiest is to go to the website, which is www.darylupsall.com. Oops. The other way is I’m on Facebook. I’m on Twitter @DarylUpsall. And I am on LinkedIn.

Steven: Okay. And Facebook.

Daryl: And just Google Daryl Upsall because I can tell you what, nobody else on this planet has such a stupid name.

Steven: Aww. We like it. You’re easy to find, which is what I like about you and very generous.

Daryl: It’s unique.

Steven: So thanks for doing this. This was really a treat to hear what’s going on across the ocean, but also, you know, what, some things we need to be paying attention to here as well. So thanks for doing this, Daryl. This is was fun.

Daryl: My pleasure, and I wish everybody every success. I wish you good health, safety. And thank you again, Steven, for giving me the chance to be on this call.

Steven: I love it. And I found your fundraiser, so I’m going to do that.

Daryl: There you go. How much have I raised?

Steven: Now you all know the last four digits to my card. It’s probably not good.

Daryl: I’ll turn my head away.

Steven: That’s okay. There’s not much money in there. But hey, this is awesome. Like I said, we’re going to send the slides and the recording later on today. And we got some cool webinars coming up next week. My buddy, Valerie Harris, is going to talk about donor retention on the 7th, 1:00 p.m. Eastern. Check it out. We got other topics. We got a leadership topic coming up. We got some cool stuff coming up through, I think almost February, we’re scheduled. So we’d love to see you on another session. But look for an email from me with all the goodies from today. Definitely reach out to Daryl. You’ll want to follow his stuff because he’s obviously a wealth of knowledge. Daryl, go get a glass of wine. You earned it.

Daryl: I love it. Have a great day, everybody.

Steven: And I hope I stay healthy. Yeah. Stay safe and all of you out there. You know, hope you have a good yearend if we don’t talk again soon, but hopefully we’ll see you in another session. So have a good rest of your Thursday. Have a good weekend, stay safe, stay healthy. And we’ll talk to you again soon. Bye now.

Daryl: And thank you for all the chats. We’ve got some lovely feedback there.

Steven: Good group.

Daryl: Ciao.

Steven: See you.

The post How Some Nonprofits have Thrived during COVID-19…the art of “Pivoting” appeared first on Bloomerang.

2020 has been a year for the ages. Not only are we dealing with a global pandemic, but also civil unrest, a shrinking economy, partisan politics, and environmental disasters, leading to uncertainty about 2021. Not only does this create unease in our personal lives, but also professionally, and across all industries. This unease has never been felt more acutely than in the nonprofit sector. The nonprofit sector has always been deemed as the “safety net” but it has become more apparent that the safety net needs its own safety net. Many nonprofits are struggling to maintain revenues while minimizing unplanned expenses due to 2020 events. Not only are nonprofit professionals (who continually have to strive to do more with less) becoming crisis managers, but you might be serving more people in need as well as trying to figure out how to best navigate these uncertain times.

In conjunction with Bloomerang, we will focus on four different topic areas and explore how nonprofits can build a path towards sustainability right now. Is this a quick fix? Not a chance. Is this a way to provide insights into looking inward to find organizational resources that build capacity? Yes.

The first topic we are going to explore is nonprofit strategic planning. This is a big term and can mean many things. Let’s break this down a bit more so we can review different areas of the planning process.

But first, there is an elephant in the room: Someone said they don’t have TIME for strategic planning! Did you know that you can create time? Everything you can possibly do falls into one of four categories concerning importance (high and low) and urgency (high and low). Important tasks are those related to the long-term vision of your organization. Focus on those tasks that are high in importance and low in urgency. Manage those tasks that are high in importance and high in urgency. Limit those tasks that are low in importance and low in urgency. Avoid those tasks that are low in importance and high in urgency. That is how you prioritize what you do and create time to do important things like nonprofit strategic planning. 

Now that you have some time, let’s focus briefly on four areas of nonprofit strategic planning. 

1. Stakeholder Involvement

Be sure to include your key stakeholders in your nonprofit strategic planning process. Key stakeholders should not only include your program staff, leadership team, and board of directors, but also your volunteers, clients, supporters, and relevant community members. This is now the time to collaborate and build bridges to discuss shared challenges, accomplishments, and engage in brainstorming discussions about the organizational changes impacting staff and who you serve. 

2. Needs Assessment

Together with your organization’s mission statement and its vision for the future, the collection, and analysis of data is required to develop a needs assessment. This data collection should be done in conjunction with those key stakeholders. Data includes all information that is relevant to the envisioned future state. You should include information about your organization’s programs, operations, and finances, and other organizations that serve similar clients in your location, relevant census information, and information from focus groups and surveys. With the data collected, it needs to be analyzed. What stands out? What is the step or series of steps that will bring your vision of the future closer to reality? Summarize this information into a needs assessment document (which can serve as the basis for updated strategic priorities and/or strategic plan). 

3. Organizational Reset

Have you noticed that in this new environment some businesses are thriving while others are struggling? A new environment means new business possibilities. Could earned income supplement your nonprofit’s donations and provide a source of unrestricted funds? Can you leverage partnerships to co-locate programs or share in-kind expenses? Four business models have proven to be successful for nonprofits and may be considered for potential next steps: 

• Service Subsidy Model: In this model, the nonprofit conducts a business on the side while simultaneously delivering services to clients who cannot pay the full load. 
• Direct Service Model: In this model, the nonprofit offers two levels of services. Clients who choose to pay for the upper level of service subsidize clients who choose to pay for the lower level. 
• Microfinance Model: In this model, the clients are independent businessmen and women, who need microloans at attractive rates of interest to provide a product or service to the market. 
• Partnership Model: In this model, the nonprofit and clients are in partnership. They go together to the market with a product or service. 

4. Priority Setting

When the process is done correctly, there will be multiple possible paths forward for the organization. How should you prioritize among the various paths? Are there some paths that need and could share common resources? Could you partner with a different organization in your area rather than start a whole new program? A SWOT (Strengths, Weaknesses, Opportunities, and Threat) analysis could give further insight into which path(s) should have priority. 

While these are the building blocks to better understand your organization and prepare for the future state of the world, there are other ways in which you can gather information to enhance your capacity. In future blog posts we will explore your financials, leveraging social media, and building your board of directors. What will be your next step to overcome these challenging times?

This post was co-written by Rachel Werner and Loren Dill of RBW Strategy.

Today Loren has his feet firmly planted in two worlds, STEM and Social Impact. He studied chemistry at Houghton College, where he earned a BS degree, and chemical engineering at the University of Rochester, where he earned MS and PhD degrees. Loren began his career as process engineer at The Upjohn Company in Kalamazoo, Michigan, but soon a love of writing developed within the company’s corporate library. Coupled with a desire to return to research, this love of writing led to his first federal proposal and a postdoctoral position at the NASA Lewis Research Center in Cleveland, Ohio. He later had the opportunity to write research proposals for corporate and academic clients, raising more than $500 thousand in the process. In 2010, Loren learned that refugees were coming to Cleveland and needed someone to help them overcome culture shock and adapt to their new culture. Loren volunteered to mentor them. Later, this interest developed into how to create social impact more broadly. In 2015, he earned a certificate in Social Impact Strategy from The University of Pennsylvania’s School of Social Policy and Practice. In 2017, Loren and two medical doctors co-founded the nonprofit Les Amies De Gaëlle in Kinshasa, Democratic Republic of Congo. Loren is an active member in the Grant Professionals Association, Rotary, and Toastmasters. Past clients include the University of Akron and California State University Bakersfield. Loren recently joined RBW Strategy as an associate.

Loren lives with his wife in Bay Village, Ohio. 

The post Nonprofit Strategic Planning in a New Era appeared first on Bloomerang.

Full Transcript:

Steven: All right. Mazarine, I got 4:00 Eastern, 1:00 your time. Okay if I go ahead and kick it off?

Mazarine: Please do.

Steven: All right. Awesome. Well, welcome, everybody. Good afternoon if you’re listening live, if you’re watching the recording, or if you are outside of that time zone, whatever time of day it is, I hope you’re having a good day. We’re here to talk about yearend fundraising appeals. That’s right. It’s yearend time. I know time has no meaning, but we’re going to be talking about yearend. It’s getting close. It’s late September and we got some specific coronavirus COVID crisis examples of what’s working, what’s been working, and how to do that in yearend. So I’m excited.

I’m Steven. I’m over here at Bloomerang in my home office, and I’ll be moderating today’s discussion as always. And just a couple of housekeeping items, just want to let you all know we are recording this session. We will send the slides and the recording later on. You’ll get those by email. So don’t worry if you miss something, if you get interrupted, if you can’t watch it all, we’ll get all that good stuff to you. Don’t worry. Just look for an email for me. But most importantly, we love for these webinars to be interactive. So use that chat box. We want to hear from you, introduce yourself. If you haven’t already, there’s a Q&A box, so you can ask questions. You can ask questions in either of them, no problem. I’ll keep an eye on those. We’re going to try to save as much time at the end as possible for Q&A. So don’t be shy. Love to hear from you. And you can also do that on Twitter. I’ll keep an eye on the Twitter feed as well.

And if this is your first Bloomerang webinar, welcome. So glad you’re here. We love first-timers. We usually have a few first-timers for every session. If you’re wondering what the heck is Bloomerang, we are a software. We’re donor management software. Not what we’re here to talk about today, but if you’re just wondering, just for context, but we do these webinars quite often. We do these multiple times a week. We love it. One of my favorite things we do here at Bloomerang just to kind of give back. But if you’re invested in software, if you need something, need to make a switch or put in software for the first time, check us out, go to our website. There’s videos. You can get an inside look. You don’t even have to talk to anybody if you don’t want to. But don’t do that right now. Wait an hour because we got Mazarine Treyz here. How’s it going, Maz? Are you doing okay?

Mazarine: Yes. Thank you for having me back, Steven. We’ve like done this for like what? Five, six years now, I feel?

Steven: Oh, it’s got to be more. This is maybe like your seventh or eighth. You’re a stalwart of the Bloomerang webinars series. I remember back in like 2013, you probably got an email from me, like who the heck is this guy begging you to come on. But it’s been fun to learn from you and you’ve been blogging for us for as long. You had a great post on our blog yesterday, I think, it was. Check that out. Check her out. She’s over at Wild Woman Fundraising. She does all kinds of awesome things. She does her own events. She does trainings all the time. Subscribe to her blog. I love getting your newsletter, Mazarine, because it always puts a smile on my face because you tell funny stories and there’s always a funny meme at the bottom.

Mazarine: There’s jokes at the bottom. Sometimes there’s memes. Always a joke.

Steven: Better than my jokes. Yeah. I just have dad jokes, but she has real jokes. So you’re going to want to subscribe to that. She’s got an awesome event coming up in November that we’re sponsoring that you’ll definitely want to check out. And one of many things I like about Mazarine is she shares my passion, probably more passionate than I do about diversity, equity, inclusion. And you’ll see some of that come out if you get to know her, which I think you should. Connect with her, especially after this presentation, you won’t be disappointed. So Maz, I’m going to stop sharing because people want to hear from you, not me. So let’s see if you can get your beautiful slides up here.

Mazarine: Yeah. Maybe what I’ll do, what you did and just put the slides up here so I can still see your face. Is that okay?

Steven: Yeah. For people listening, it’s kind of hard for us to fullscreen the slides and still be able to see all the Zoom elements. So I think it’s pretty big. I don’t think that that . . . Yeah. Oh, yeah. Let’s do it.

Mazarine: Let’s do it this way? Okay.

Steven: Why not?

Mazarine: We’ll do it this way. Okay. We’ll do it this way. All right. So year-end giving letter during coronavirus, what works now? Everybody, thank you so much for being here. We’re actually going to, after this crazy year, drop into our bodies. So I’m going to lead you through this right now. So I wanted you to ask yourself, “Are my shoulders up or down?” For me, the answer is always up. And then drop your awareness down into your spine, into your pelvic bowl. Put one hand on your heart, one hand on your belly, breathe in, breathe out and feel your energy expand beyond your pelvic bowl. Feel your feet on the floor or wherever they are.

All right. Thank you so much for being here. Thank you for dropping in with me. And I hope today that you find exactly what’s working for others and you get a chance to brainstorm with us about how this can work for you. So this is for you if you want clear, effective tools to help your organization and community, you want to know how to wisely use your resources financially and emotionally, and you want to be proactive about donor engagement. So quick question for you, what have you given up for COVID and what have you gained? And Steven and I were talking just before we got started here about giving up seeing my family, and it really sucks. So feel free to put in the chat what you’ve given up or what you’ve gained. I’d love to see. And I don’t know why I can’t see the chat right now, but I can’t, go figure. Maybe, Steven, you can help me see what’s in the chat.

Steven: Yeah. Lots of people saying they’ve had to give up hobbies like traveling, dancing, going out with friends, seeing family like you said, meeting with donors. Yeah. That’s a tough one for sure.

Mazarine: Thanks, everybody, for sharing that. So what worries you the most right now? Please type in the chat. And maybe, Steven, you can share anything about people are writing.

Steven: People are worried about losing a job, finding a job, funding their mission, you know, hitting their goals. Industries recovering. Funding, a lot of people saying funding and fundraising, for sure. Meeting goals. Yup.

Mazarine: Thanks, everybody, for sharing that. I really appreciate that. So one webinar isn’t going to solve all your funding problems and there’s a lot of job instability right now as well. I heard that 1.6 million people were laid off between March and June of this year in the nonprofit sector, which is a lot of people. So Steven knows we’ve done research together on how to improve the sector for fundraisers and for those of us who have to fundraise, if we don’t call ourselves fundraisers. And I’d like to say, if you’re a nonprofit leader in this webinar, in this presentation, you’re considering laying off your fundraiser, I invite you to not do that. This is the best time to keep them. So thank you for sharing what you’re worried about. Hopefully today you’ll see some good emails that you can then use to help activate your donors to give to you right now.

So we don’t know when we’ll truly be able to come out of quarantimes, but we have more tools and connection at our disposal than the world has ever known. And as workers and nonprofits, we’re used innovating, adapting, and bringing communities together. We got this, and I am here to help you. So what I want to invite you to do now is to take notes, turn off other apps for the best viewing experience. We’ve got a ton to cover and we don’t want bandwidth issues to slow us down. So if you’re like looking at your email or looking at your phone, I really encourage you to not do that and just try to focus on this because I’m already going to start dropping knowledge right now.

So here’s the first gem for you. Try moving towards a more informal way of speaking with your donors and your readers. A quick email just to say hi, ask how they are, share what’s up with you and end with a smile. So I was working with a Idaho land trust and the one-line email worked really well for this executive director and her donors saying, “Hey, I have a quick question for you.” Or, “Hey, can I tell you something?” Or, “Just want to check in with you. How are you doing?” And then as long as it’s not super long, it invites them to respond to you like a friend. You’re treating them like a friend, they’re responding like a friend.

So I’m going to show you more little tidbits of what’s working for my clients as we go about through the presentation today. This is what you’re going to learn. Why COVID is a diagnostic tool. Communicating what has worked best for us, brainstorming your next fundraising steps together, emails that work now. Going to show you lots of those. And then getting clear on a plan moving forward into fall, an invitation to join us in a new event coming up as we mentioned earlier. So by the end of class today, you’ll have new story ideas, be motivated and ready to take action. You know, new ideas for how to respond as the news shifts.

So a tiny bit about me. I have incredible COVID fundraising results I want to share with you. I’ve spoken from London to Jamaica. I’ve made ten e-courses on fundraising as well as a bunch of books. I’ve cofounded a nonprofit and I’ve risen from development assistant to development director, and I’ve fundraised millions for national, international, and small organizations as well as universities. So for the last 10 years, I’ve taught nonprofit communications and my students and clients have reaped the benefits. So one LA client with only seven employees got 127K in March, more than doubled that with 275 in April, and in the last several months, have continued this incredible success and are on track to raise 2 million having their best year ever. I’ve worked with them for the last five years. So during COVID, a Chicago student of my March webinar got out of a freeze mode and into action mode and she got $18,000 after getting two matches and communicating in a timely way with her donors.

So what I want for you is to get out of overwhelm and worry and start to feel in control of your communications, to make enough money to survive COVID, and still provide programs when it’s all over, and to feel successful in communicating to donors who are scared and feeling helpless right now. In year-end fundraising, it could be a scary time for a lot of people. More people are getting sick, who knows what’s going to be happening politically, but it’s a very uncertain time. So COVID is causing a surge in fundraising. While we watch the facade of capitalist structures crumble, while people are dying alone, while doctors and nurses are getting PTSD, and while donors are sitting there wondering what they can do, and that’s where you come in.

So according to Arundati Roy, COVID is a diagnostic tool. It shows what’s wrong with our healthcare system, with our wage levels, with our corporations, with our governments, and with our food systems. And it lays bare the inequities for black people, for Native Americans, for incarcerated people, people detained at the border, and not the least, the elderly. And that people who have health issues in general. So this is why it’s just really pinpointing for us where our society needs support. And if your nonprofit can speak to any of these issues, it’ll be very timely to get people to give to you now.

So what does this crisis ultimately mean? It means we’ll no longer be able to fundraise or do earned income the way we did before. Steven and I were talking before the presentation started about how we’re not even going to talk about physical appeal letters, because who knows if you could give somebody COVID-19 by licking the envelope, we don’t know. So there might not be more Goodwill or Salvation Armies. That model might go away. Fewer Habitat for Humanities because of less in-person volunteer opportunities. So you’re going to need to change your models, and includes your yearend fundraising model. You need to change your fundraising. And you might need to merge or shut down your organization.

Hard reality. According to the AP and Fast Company, in August, they said 40% of nonprofits could close next year. You don’t want that to be you. We really have to radically change what we’re doing and show our values to our donors. At the end, I’ll share an opportunity to join us for the next event we’re having and get involved in a larger community. And that’s called the New Power Fundraising Conference.

So let’s go. Here’s case study one. I’m going to show you exactly what they sent, when they sent it, and the results that they got. So these emails helped raise 275K for a small homelessness nonprofit with just 7 staff. Aside from these emails, they also get the board to help fundraise. A donor raised 10K in a crowdfunding campaign for them and they also started calling major donors. This organization is called Food on Foot.

So here’s the email they sent in April 3rd. So it said . . . Didn’t even write their first names. They said, “You’re incredible,” club member. Their club members, the people that are their monthly donors. They have over 600 monthly donors giving them over 600,000 a year in income that is unrestricted. So if you want to see how to do monthly giving right, definitely check out what they do. So, “Thank you for your big hearted club support during the crisis because we’re not having volunteers coming out. How else can we help? Here’s how. Please tell everyone you know.” And then they gave them a little snippet about what to say. It goes, “Copy-paste into email and tell people about . . . ” what their organization is doing because of COVID.

If you haven’t yet done, this is a great thing to do. It shows that you’re still relevant. And then the bottom of the email said, “Because you helped us, this is what we’re doing. And then with your help, this is what we’re doing this last Sunday. So thank you again.” And sincerely, and it’s signature of the CEO and founder.

I think they sent this about a week later. And they said, “I want to thank you again. This month you helped us provide relief to these people who lost their jobs and the next few months are critical to our continued success. We need to raise this much. And I want you to double your monthly donations.” Because these people are already getting $98 a month. They’re asking them to double it. “Your generous additional funds will allow us to provide the following services, full rent assistance, additional food gift cards, crisis management and counseling sessions, and 300 pre-bagged meals every Sunday when none of the other programs are serving the homeless.” And then there’s a big button that says, “Yes, I would like to double my donation for three months.” So it doesn’t even have the person’s first name and it still made them so much money.

So here’s the case study two, the Momentous Institute. And they do education and they’ve had to pivot to online. So these three emails raised $320,000. They were originally going to be a direct mail piece, but their event was canceled, their golf tournament. So they were in a $2 million hole and they moved quickly to secure $100 matching gifts and then moved the appeal to email. Because the event canceled, they moved up the timeline, they ran the appeal from April 15th to May 15th and this is what they got.

So here’s April 15th, what they sent, “Dear first name, we’re in unprecedented times.” And then maybe you don’t want to say that quote and I completely understand. It’s way more of a cliché now than it was. “So COVID has caused us to move forward in serving students, families, and clients in unique ways and these ways are creating a strain on our budget, a budget that was already stressed.” So what do you notice about the picture, the design, and the wording of this letter so far, this email? What can you tell me that you notice? Please feel free to type in the chat. And maybe, Steven, you can tell me what people are saying.

Steven: Yeah. Lots of people saying, the photo, uplifting photo. It said positive photo. It kind of draws their eyes, you know, a happy kid. Looks like definitely the photo is drawn people in. Some people also saying how the donate button is, you know, prominent and up top too. Yeah.

Mazarine: Yeah. Yup. And it’s a simple design. You know, if you look at this on the phone versus on your screen, it probably looks pretty similar. One thing I would change about this is have the donate button be a wildly different color than the rest of the elements in this email, because it will make it stand out more. And I would put it below the kid’s face or right above his face because over here in the right-hand column, it’s like Siberia. It’s like people don’t necessarily look there because it’s usually where like ads are. So that’s the first part of this email. Remember this email sequence raise $320,000? So, “A generous donor has offered to back to any gift received by May 15th up to 100,000. Please help us raise these much-needed dollars to continue our important work.”

And this continues the email. It’s a pretty long email. “This is how we reacted when we had to close our campuses. We did this, we did this, we did this. Within two days our teachers had restructured their education plans, our therapists were immediately reaching out to clients, and we’d had already 275 therapy sessions via phone or teleconference. And our training team has posted blogs and webinars, providing suggestions and how you can maintain your social emotional health brings difficult time.”

So, wow. There’s a lot of good stuff here. There’s still more to go. This email is a long email. If you feel like you could only do short ones, try a short one and then try a super long one. Like, “This is only scratching the surface. This crisis not only disrupted our method of certain clients, it also canceled our tournament. Today you have an opportunity to be a hero. Take advantage of this exciting chance to have your gift doubled. In these extraordinary times, I know we can count on you. By raising this money, we can . . . ” And so you can add in what you could do with that money, “Continue meeting the needs of our community through education and social emotional learning. Please make your gift.” And again, they remind you, “By this day, to make sure it gets matched.”

All right. So look like somebody raised their hand. Did somebody want to share something or maybe put it in the chat or in the questions pane? Or should we have saved questions to the end? What would you like to do, Steven?

Steven: Yeah. If people chat it, I can definitely answer questions if there of a technical nature, but yeah, I would keep going.

Mazarine: Okay. Cool. So email two, April 23rd. So you can see it went from April 15th to April 23rd. So fairly soon after this, here’s what they’ve got. So what do you notice about this email? It says, “Dear friend, in just one week, friends of Momentous quickly stepped in to help us reach 25% of our 100,000 match goal.” There’s a graphic that says, “We are 25% of the way to our goal. We are truly touched by your generous support. We still need your help to get us to 100%. During this most difficult and uncertain time, social emotional health has never been more important. Just look at what your gift is making happen.” What do you notice about this email? Please type in the chat. And maybe, Steven, you can share with me what people are saying.

Steven: Lots of people are noticing the donor centricity, you, your support, your help, kind of putting the spotlight on them, for sure.

Mazarine: Yup. And one of the things that I really like to bring up here is that their cause is more urgent now because of all of the stress, trauma, and disruption, and change that we’re all going through as a nation. And I would say as North Americans for the Canadians in the audience, so another thing I want you to pay attention to is there’s lots of white space. That really helps people focus on what’s important. In here it looks like 25% is important and donate is important. I would maybe not have all of these little pictures because it’s hard to know what to focus out. The little words, I just put like a big one. They’ve got lots of smiling kids, and that is so cute and that’s so easy to give to. So I’m going to show you more of what this email says now.

There were pictures inside this email of people and their kids and how this nonprofit has affected them. “Alex and his sister will finish the school year at home. Alex misses hanging out with his friends, but he enjoys being able to connect over video in his Chromebook with his classmates and teachers. Joanna received a learning kit filled with interactive projects and materials last week and she now has also by chance to continue learning.” So real people, these are not stock photographs. And maybe it’s really hard to read the light blue on white, and that’s why I read it to you just in case you couldn’t read it.

And then they have another one, “Julia wrestled with whether to continue working at a grocery store or leave a job to keep herself and her children safe from the virus. She needed the income to pay rent and buy food. Through a video call our therapist was able to listen to her struggle, partner with her to make a plan to help her feel confident for keeping herself safe at work.” So that’s good. Again, this is how this nonprofit is helping.

And then they said, “Just look at what your gift is making happen.” And this is like the second part of the email from above. “Your support allowed us to supply Momentus families with needed technology and learning kits to make sure all students can participate in online learning. Our therapeutic service clients are expressing increasingly high levels of stress.” And so we need people to keep giving basically, that’s the message here. “Remember, we still need your help to reach our 100,000 goal. But the more we raise, the more support we can provide to students like Alex and Joanna and parents like Julia and hundreds of teachers during this difficult time.”

And then they also focus on the teachers. This is another graphic that was in this email. “Staff launched free webinars offering support and ideas for teachers, facilitate social emotional health during distance learning last week. Within four hours, all 600 slots were filled.” So, wow. And then at the end it says, “All of us say thank you for continuing to bring hope to our students, families, and community.” So if you have an audacious goal and you’re partway towards that goal, you could take this email and basically copy paste it and put in your services.

Here’s the third email from April 30th. So what do you notice about this email? Anyone want to share? And maybe, Steven, you can tell me.

Steven: Goal tracking, people are saying. And then all of the faces in the photo, for sure.

Mazarine: Mm-hmm. There’s some happy kids here. Even if we can’t be together, you can see how they’re enjoying learning with this group. So it says, “Our fifth grade students were thriving with rigorous social, emotional, and academic . . . ” Right? So it looks like fifth grade students thriving, basically. It’s showing you that they’re actually doing the work that they say that they’re doing right there below it. And it is goal tracking.

So here’s what the rest of the email says. This is what they were preparing to do. “Thanks to their amazing teachers, they’re continuing to thrive via online learning, but they’re still going to miss out on graduation ceremony.” Which sucks. So they’ll miss out on family members, reading buddies, friends and teachers, but what won’t be lost is a strong foundation in academic, social and emotional learning will each carry their journey forward. But even if they’re not going to get this little graduate prepared for academic success. So basically you’re helping the donor frame, this is sad, but this is still happening. This is sad. And we miss this, this hugging thing, I’m just going to raise my head saying I miss hugs. But they’re going to graduate with the thing that we want them to have. So, again, the message is we are doing the work you don’t have time to do. If you’re sad about this, we can help make it less sad.

And then finally, they want to remind the donor of everything they’ve done for the last 30 years, 90% graduation rate on time compared to 85% of comparable peers, 78% enroll in college compared to 46% of comparable peers. There times more likely to obtain a bachelor’s degree and the gift will continue to ensure these results. They share their practices across the nation to support children they will never meet. And so maybe they take away large ceremonies, but they’ll never take away students sense of belonging, their strong social, emotional health, and their interest in lifelong learning. And so, again, they’re encouraging you to make the gift day. They’re only 63% towards their goal. So what do you notice about these three emails? What can you share with me? Steven, if people are putting it in the chat, I want to hear what they’re saying.

Steven: Folks like that there’s a lot of impact being shown, their zooming in on the stats, the impact they’re having, the results in the community, to results-oriented. Yeah. Data-driven and positive also.

Mazarine: Yeah. And we really need that right now. You know, last night when I was crying, I was like I just really miss my family. And I’m sure a lot of us have been there in the last several months, missing friends, missing the way life used to be, and grief hits us at different times. And so if you turn on the news, it’s just more doom and gloom. And so for a lot of us, having an email like this come into our inbox, we might read the whole thing. We might say, “Wow, there’s still something that makes me feel happy. There’s something I can look towards the future and hope for.” And imagine if your nonprofit could give people hope in a time that is very stressful, very sad, very chaotic. Like that is what your emails this yearend could do. When they’re saying, “I wish I could be with my family for the holidays,” when they’re saying, “I wish I could just, you know, go out and have life the way it used to be.” You know, when there’s more scariness than ever your yearend letter could be so huge for them.

So here are some takeaways that I’ve taken. So lots of emails work more than you would think. Bigger ask amounts work, $1,200 actually works as an ask amount. So I want to tell you a friend of mine wrote some emails for a nonprofit in Canada recently and she raised a million dollars in a week and she sent eight emails and they were all pretty long and they asked for $1,250 Canadian and they got it from a lot of people. So another nonprofit called [Kosheka 00:28:47] encouraged people who were getting their stimulus checks of $1,200 who didn’t need it to give it to people who are undocumented and they would just give it directly to those people. And they raised millions that way earlier this year when the stimulus checks were being handed out. So $1,200 an ask amount seems like a lot, but it’s working. And so are there other things that you noticed about the two case studies that I’ve shared with you, these are my takeaways. Anything else that you noticed?

Steven: Some people, before we even mentioned the stimulus had noticed that, Mazarine, into that number jumped out of them. “Digestible amounts of information,” Aaron is saying. They’re longer, which I think some people maybe don’t know that that long is okay or maybe they think it always needs to be short, but, yeah. Matching gifts is always good. Yeah.

Mazarine: Yeah. Matching is an ideal situation. And even if you don’t have a match like the first organization that I shared that’s on track to have their best year ever, if you just ask people to double their monthly gift for a certain amount of months until the pandemic is over, maybe for another six months or whatever it is, that can be very persuasive. I’m a monthly donor for a nonprofit in Atlanta and I started out giving $10 a month. Then I give $20 a month. Now I’m giving $50 a month and I’m taking part in their virtual 5k. So those are some things to think about. When you’re looking at asks for your yearend giving, when you’re thinking about how to frame the ask and acknowledging where your donors may be at, because they’re probably at a similar place that you are like sad, worried, wondering what’s going to happen.

And so one of the key physiological responses to remember is that anxiety can also be excitement. And so sometimes to get your anxiety out of your body, you need to talk to your limbic brain and your limbic brain is there at the base of your skull. The limbic brain says, “I’m being chased by a monster. I’m being chased by a large animal, and I’m afraid.” So sometimes you get yourself out of anxiety, or fight or flight, fallen or freeze, you can take a walk around the block. And by the time you get back, if you’re able to do that, your body will have calmed down because it thinks that you got away from the monster. So if that’s possible for you or even doing like some pushups on the ground or something like that, that can really help you discharge that energy that says everything is terrible and you need to freak out right now.

So to get into that frame of mind before you write your emails, I think is important. It really does matter the frame of mind that you’re in before you write your emails. So I want to remind you of that, that how you’re feeling right now is not something to be ignored or pushed down. Feelings just want to be felt. And saying this as someone who has been in therapy since the pandemic started. So I was just repeating therapist stuff to you now, but it’s important if you’re going to get through the end of this year and write incredible emails like this, acknowledges where you’re at, acknowledge where your donor might be at and emotionally connect with them, just like we did at the beginning of this presentation.

So brainstorming your next fundraising step together. If we were in a Zoom meeting, I would say let’s all just break into small groups and talk, but since we’re in a webinar, we can’t do that. So I would just say write down your ideas right now. Based on what we’ve talked about, what could you try now? Time to brainstorm. And please type in the chat what you’re thinking about. What are you thinking for your organization? And, Steven, please feel free to tell me what people are typing and whatever you say can help so many other people who are on this call with us. So I would love to hear your beautiful brainstorm now that you’ve seen what they’ve done.

Steven: Somebody said they don’t send enough emails, which is, I think true of everyone, at least from what we’ve seen in the Bloomerang data. Yeah. So if anyone was kind of shirking about the quantity, quantity is good. Believe me, I can back it up with data. Social justice issues need support. Yup. Definitely. Repeating what we’ve already shared in August and updating people. Yeah. For sure. Fundraising emails that build off of one another. I love that. I think that seems really key right, Mazarine? They’re kind of part of a cohesive, you know, campaign.

Mazarine: Definitely. Definitely. And that’s something I do with my clients. I say, “Let’s write the three emails together. Let’s get on the phone. And let’s make sure that your thank you email also matches your ask emails and that you ramp up the urgency and you can see that when you have a match, the urgency is built in.

Steven: Absolutely. Segmentation. A lot of people are saying storytelling. Asking people to up their monthly donation. That’s a sneaky good one, right?

Mazarine: Yes.

Steven: You know, you don’t just have to leave them at the same amount they’ve always been giving.

Mazarine: Correct. And you’d think $98 was a lot, but this organization with 7 employees that had to close down most of what it was doing for programs, like got people to double it very easily.

Steven: Love it.

Mazarine: Yeah. And on top of that, like we need to think about A/B testing subject lines. So if you’re thinking about sending out our monthly newsletter at the end of the year, please don’t. You want to A/B test. And if anybody here doesn’t know what A/B testing is, it’s simply taking half your list and saying, “We’re going to send this subject line to them.” And then the other half say, “We’re going to send them this subject line to them.”

So maybe you could say test let’s take a look at some people that, you know, talked on the slide before, maybe you’re a land trust, and maybe you’re going to have a yearend appeal that’s focused around doing trail maintenance. And so you might say, “The trails need you” is one subject line. And then another subject when you could try is, “Did you know . . . ” And then inside, you could say, “The trails need you.”

So that’s just something to think about. You can also A/B test pictures. You can A/B test what’s in the email itself. But the thing you don’t want to do is A/B test everything all at once because if you do that, you don’t know what actually works. And so you want to make sure that you are sending enough emails to, you know, A/B test one thing at a time. So anyone else want to share? Steven, is anyone else saying anything else here?

Steven: Some people are saying they’re going to start doing a monthly program campaign, which is good. Getting the monthly giving off the ground. Showing visuals is another one I’m seeing a lot of people say. A focused ask, you know, really honing in on one specific thing they are asking people to do. There’s some good stuff in your, Mazarine. I’ll send you the whole chat when we’re done.

Mazarine: Oh, yeah. Thank you. Yeah. A focused ask is super powerful. Imagine, you know, I mean, this nonprofit just said, “Hey, on our website, in your emails, we want you to give us $1,200.” And then they were like, “Okay. I have it.” Imagine if you had a million dollars or whatever and you sent that 1200, you wouldn’t even feel it. You know? And so that’s also kind of how donor-advised funds work. People like put their money in them and then they don’t have any impetus to use that again because it’s not easy to do a donor-advised fund on someone’s website. So the easier you can make it to give, the better, but the more focused your ask is also the better. And the deadline really helps. Luckily, with your end fundraising, the deadline is built-in. Unfortunately, because of our new laws of the U.S. people get less of a tax write-off than they did so they have to give more.

So what were the results of your brainstorm? We started talking about that. So maybe you want to try a crowdfunding campaign, working with a consultant, revamping your donate page. You can also A/B test your donate page. Making a new series of emails to show the urgency of giving now or something else. And if your website doesn’t do A/B testing, there’s A/B testing plugins for WordPress, but you can also use other software that will do A/B testing of your donate page. So I’m glad people are already sharing what they want to try us. Steven, is there anything else that’s coming up now, people are sharing if they want to try in the chat?

Steven: You got people wanting to look into to A/B testing, for sure.

Mazarine: Yeah. A lot of us don’t realize how powerful that can be. And the example I usually like to give is when I did my first online conference and we had 1,000 people attend, and one of the messages I sent, I did three A/B tests. So I did A, B, and C testing. So the first subject line was announcing the fundraising career conference. The second one was saving a seat for your first name and the third one was this conference will change everything. Which one do you think A, B, or C performed the best? Feel free to type that the chat.

Steven: It’s pretty mixed, Mazarine. You’ve got you got a hung jury here.

Mazarine: All right. It was B, saving a seat for your first name. Outperformed everyone else. So I just like basically plugged it in to my list and then I had the highest click-through rate and the highest open rate. Had like a 15% click-through rate, which was really huge. Most click-through rates were like 1% to 3%. So that was the one I used. And everything else was the same. The only thing was different was the subject line. So if you’re not A/B testing subject lines, you are missing out on donations, and readers, and people who care. So if you’ve had go through all the trouble of writing these beautiful emails, your subject lines have to be incredible.

And one book that I always like to recommend to people, and hopefully someone can put this in the chat for me because I can’t see the chat right now is “Cashvertising” by Drew Eric Whitman. Cashvertising, it’s like advertising with the word cash instead of ad has a list of the best words to use for subject lines in it on page 100. And it’s like got 40 words you can start using. And I use these consistently in my newsletter and people just open like crazy.

So the words new, here’s, this, things like that, free, all of these things encourage people to open. We didn’t even look at subject lines for these emails. All we looked at was what was inside. But if we had looked at subject lines, I could have then shown you, you know, what they were. But if you look at . . . Hopefully you’re sending it for other people’s email lists. If there’s one you want to look at that shows you some really clickable subject lines, mercola.com is one. Smithsonian is another. They have such good subject lines that really encourage people to open. See how you could use these for your nonprofit. Or you can sign up for my email list and copy what I do. I’m okay with that.

So if we’re going to look at donate pages or first pages, for example, here’s one, helping entertainment labor and professionals. This is their COVID-19 page. I wonder, could you think of a way to improve this page? Is there something they could be doing differently for their fundraising that they’re just not doing right now? I want all these brains here to just talk to me. What do you think they could do better to make their cause more urgent to make people give? What’s wrong with this?

Steven: Lot of people saying it’s kind of a busy page. There’s a lot going on. Lots of things to click. And it took my eyes at least a couple of seconds to find that donate page. But yeah, pretty good consensus here on busy-ness, I would say.

Mazarine: I agree. Busy-ness. Yup. Anything else anyone else want to share?

Steven: Also some color. People talking about out some of the gray, on white, and blues all kind of coming together.

Mazarine: Correct. And so one of the things I want to share with people that we often get wrong as communications professionals, as nonprofit leaders, as consultants even is that this is what’s called reverse type right here. Register and Learn More, Click Here, this is reverse type as well, and that’s harder for people with ADHD and vision issues to read. And if your average donor is going in her 80s, imagine how hard you’re making it for her to find out more about you, get involved, or donate. So what you want to do is make sure that the writing is black writing on a white background is the easiest to read. And you can see here, it’s just harder in general. Also the donate button could be bright pink, or bright red, or bright yellow. Just get it to a place where people can find it. Like Steven said, it’s not really find-able. You know what I mean?

So now that we’ve done this page, I want you to go back and look at your page for your nonprofit and say, “Are we committing any of these crimes against readability? And if so, how can we do better?” And the same is true for your newsletter. Some people’s newsletters look like this. Not going to lie. Looks a little bit bad to me and it’s really hard to know where to pay attention to. So another thing I want to share with you is studies have shown that if you have a rotating cover image, it actually makes your donations go down. So you don’t want to have a rotating cover image on your website. This is the rotating cover image. So that’s something else to remember.

There should be one page and one goal. When they go to your donate page, it should be just that for your home page, you can have a few more goals. But you want to ask yourself, “Who are really talking to?” And you want to ask yourself, “What are we trying to get them to do?” Pick one thing you want them to do and then make sure that that is front and center on your page. And if you look at the Food on Foot website, you’ll see that donating is a number one thing on that page. It used to be volunteering, now it’s donating because no one can volunteer anymore. But people are standing by them in this time of great need and it’s incredible.

So this is another acknowledgement of COVID. What could be better about this page? Anyone want to share with me what they could do differently or better? It says, “Letter from the Monell Chemical Senses Center on the Novel Coronavirus, COVID-19.”

Steven: Small font. I’m seeing a cascade of small font here, Mazarine. Big picture too.

Mazarine: Yeah. Yeah. It’s like okay, we know this is the problem, but is this really, really going to help people give, this picture? Are you sure? You know? They are a science nonprofit, but that doesn’t mean that this particular image is going to be effective for their donors.

Here’s Newark Academy. Anyone want to share with me how they could do better if this was a donate page and they were trying to show we are relevant. We are important. We need your money.

Steven: No pictures. No pictures of happy students from some of your older examples. I don’t even think there’s a donate button on here. Is there?

Mazarine: No. There’s not. And there should be. Support.

Steven: Yeah. Giving, I guess.

Mazarine: Giving, but it should just say donate. Yeah. Yup. Thank you. So here’s a question for you. How much are you raising right now? How are your asks going? Do you feel pretty good? Are you having the best year ever? Do you need some support? Feel free to type in the chat. How are your asks going right now? Online, offline, whatever.

Steven: Some people are saying they’re doing really good. Best year ever. Pretty well. Slowing down a little bit. Having an amazingly good year, mostly normal. Good. It seems pretty positive so far.

Mazarine: Good. I’m really, really glad to hear that and I want that to continue for you. So who are your donations coming in from right now? Is it former volunteers, alumni, monthly givers? Is there someone who’s showing you with their money that they’re still engaged? Who is that?

Steven: I’m seeing alumni, monthly givers, usual sponsors, repeat, long-term donors. Looks like a lot of people are keeping sustained support from previous givers. So I love that.

Mazarine: Good. So if people are giving to you now, it’s not too late to ask them to give again, but you need to pay attention to them. I have a friend who she and her husband last year, gave $500 to five different charities and they only heard from one charity a week later on the phone to say thank you. So if you are not reaching out to those people that are still giving to you despite the tremendous instability in the global financial markets, you know, housing values fluctuating and jobs maybe being less stable than they were, are you really appreciating these people for what they’re doing for you? And could you do better? I feel like the answer to that is always yes. I know I could do better at appreciating people. So that’s something I think about. How can you appreciate the people that are giving to you right now?

People who gave to you two years ago, you can’t do much about. But people who have given to you the last six months, those are your main people and appreciating them by calling them and saying thank you could be so huge. So getting clear on a plan moving into fall, summer, fall, who, when, how much what’s your goal, who is responsible for that goal, how will you raise it, and what are your deadlines? So what are your most effective channels right now? Think about, is it Facebook, YouTube, email, Twitter, Instagram, TikTok, Twitch, word of mouth? Please type in the chat so we can all learn from you, what is the place you’re getting the most movement on donations right now?

Steven: Lots of email, Facebook. Email, online, website. Yeah. It seems very digital-focused for now. Some people are saying that they are doing some physical appeals and having success.

Mazarine: That’s fantastic. I’m so glad to hear that. Everything I’m saying about emails, you could do in a letter. So just remember that if you want to do physical appeals, sending several of them works. So, everybody, thank you for sharing that email is probably the most effective for most of the people on here. There’s a new movie out on Netflix called, “The Social Dilemma.” And surprise, it’s about how all of these platforms are spying on you and how people are vastly moving away from them. Whether it’s Facebook, YouTube, Twitter, Instagram, LinkedIn, all of them are going to become less, and less, and less worth our time. So I say this as somebody who wrote a book about social media and who has taught people how to use it more effectively, email is your best thing to do for social media. If you can do email, you are doing great.

And every one of us can have a free Mailchimp account, even if you’re a brand new nonprofit with nothing. So I want you to know that. So where can you message for the greatest impact? If it’s emails, just know that. But how to message across platforms. So this is something to think about, where are you going to put your message? All these places, end of year appeal letter, texting, Facebook, via newsletter, website homepage, YouTube, Instagram, Twitch, crowdfunding, whatever it is. Then what should you say on these platforms? So if you have a serious letter from your president, website’s a good place for that. Alumni story, put it in the newsletter.

So late last year I was working with a university in Florida and we raised them . . . up from 36,000, we raised them 90,000 and we doubled their number of donors as well. We raised 144% more and we had 144% more donors. Because we did a series of yearend emails and letters that just knocked it out of the park for them. And we did an alumni story. And we also did stories of students that were benefiting from scholarships. So that can still work for you, as you can see, it still works for COVID. So asking you to give, obviously, website, texting, appeal letter, and Twitch. I’m a monthly donor to this nonprofit because the ED texted me because we have a personal relationship. Put the donate link in the text and I signed up on my phone. So I’m not the only one who can do it this way, but that’s something to think about.

So not every story is the right place for, you know, these different things. So these are some things you can experiment. You could take this slide and say, “I just want to experiment with all of this and see which story will give us the most money. You can A/B test all of this. So what do you notice about this page? What can you tell me? What do you think? Feel free to put in the chat and then Steven can tell me what you wrote.

Steven: Striking photo, multiple places to give, you know, that’ll all probably go to the same place, you know, those multiple buttons for sponsorship, which repetition seems good, right? Clear. I mean, there’s only a couple of things to do here. That’s good.

Mazarine: Yup. And the thing I wants you to do is super, super apparent. Give now, donate, sponsor a child, sponsor now, it’s all here. So even though they have these other links here, they’re much less important. And I feel like this child looking at you, studies have shown that if like eyes are looking at somebody directly, you’re much more likely to do the thing that they want you to do.

So this could last for six more months. Yikes. So if you want continued support and resources on how to fundraise into the end of this year and beyond, I have a new online conference coming up on November 11th to 13th. It’s newpowerconf.com. And I can put that in the chat when I’m done sharing my screen. But we’re going to be talking about all the new ways there are to fundraise plus how to fundraise with major gifts now as well as looking at the psychological health that we have, looking at ourselves more deeply, and then looking how to up level our careers.

I know some people here are worried about losing their jobs, a person at our conference is going to be talking about how to do two people’s jobs and become indispensable. So she’ll be speaking directly to that need if you haven’t been laid off but you’re worried about it. And we’re highlighting black and brown women’s voices specifically because we believe that that is the most important thing to do at this time, so that social justice piece Steven was sharing in the beginning.

And I wanted to offer everybody who came today and who stayed till the very end a coupon. So $20 off, good for six more days. So until the 29th. So you use the code, YouRule20, newpowerconf.com, you can get $20 off and it’s a really affordable price. I’m going to have probably 13 CFRE credits at the bare minimum. So it’s pretty good. It’s like $47 for a day and with the coupon it’ll be 27. So such a deal.

And please remember nothing I’ve shared with you today is theory or fluff that might work. This is all the stuff I’ve been using with my clients. This is what people have told me after they attended my webinars and taken my advice. So these are the exact steps I’ve used to make more in fundraising over the last five years. And that’s what I’ve tried myself when I worked full time. And if you want to explore one-on-one work together, feel free to set up a 30-minute call here, bit.ly/COVIDMsg. And COVID has to be capitalized. And the M in message has to be capitalized. So, anyway, I just wanted to share with you, it’s a difficult time, but we can get through it together. I am here and I can help you and I hope you connect with me. So now we are going to take questions.

Steven: Yeah. That was awesome. Let’s leave your contact info up there for a minute, if you don’t mind, Mazarine.

Mazarine: I do not.

Steven: But definitely, you’re going to want our newsletter, folks. And that conference, she sent me the agenda just this morning. That’s going to be a good one. There’s some really awesome speakers there. Some folks I know and can vouch for, not that you need my recommendation, but yeah.

Mazarine: Yeah. Kishana is going to kick us off with a keynote and I’m so excited.

Steven: That’d be cool. I love seeing these examples, Mazarine. The very first one you showed, can we talk about segmentation real quick? Because it was only sent to monthly donors.

Mazarine: Correct.

Steven: I don’t want this to be lost because this seemed to come up again and again into your examples, is that it’s not just sent to everybody right? In your list, in your Bloomerang, or whatever you’re using. Can we talk about that audience thing because I know monthly donors, and we share a passion that they should get very specific things, but can you talk a little bit about segmentation just for folks who maybe weren’t familiar with that that terminology, I guess?

Mazarine: I will share with you a human thing. So, Steven, I love you. I love working with you. I think the world of you and I’m still really afraid to ask you for sponsorship. I’m so afraid I’ve put it off for six months.

Steven: That’s silly.

Mazarine: I know it is, but I’m afraid. And so that’s how we act with our monthly donors, is that like they’ve already told us they like us, they want to give to us every month and we act and we feel afraid because we’re like, “What if I ask for too much? I’m afraid even though they said that they like me I don’t know.” And so what this organization did was say, “We’re just going to go for it.” And the thing that this ED does that’s different than just about every other ED I’ve ever met, it says when is the donor’s birthday, he calls them up and says happy birthday. As soon as they donate within 24 hours, he’s calling and saying thank you. Even if it’s $50, he’s calling them to say thank you. Nobody does that. And that’s why he has less than a 5% attrition rate in his monthly donors, which is literally insane for this industry.

So if he can’t get them on the phone, if their credit card bounces or lapses in, you know, the first day of the month, he will try and try and try until he gets them on the phone and then they sign up again or they say, “I lost my job. I’m so sorry.” He asked for a year commitment to his program, to get people in as monthly donors and then he treats them like co-creators of the mission. And he’s like, “This is what you help us do every single month. This is what you help us do. This is what you help us do.” And on top of that, he has the people in the program write thank you notes and sends out five different versions of those notes to the monthly donors throughout the year. And that’s how they have so many incredible, 600 incredible monthly givers. And they’ve raised it from when I first started working with them in 2015, from 350 to 600. And that is a consistent number for them. It’s probably even more now.

Steven: I love it. Because it seems like if you don’t do that, a monthly donor might get an appeal and be like, “Why am I getting this? I’m already a monthly donor. Like don’t you know that? Don’t you see that?” And then you get the cancellations or whatever, or just, you know, cracks in the armor. That makes total sense.

Mazarine: And so you can say to them, “Hey, we know you’re already giving,” and that’s what they said, “But we need you to double your gift now because people have had to be laid off.”

Steven: Yup. Can you talk a little bit about the yearend calendar? You know, we’re recording this in late September and boy, this year has a lot of, kind of, you know, stops along the way. I don’t know if that’s the best phrase where you got the election, obviously Thanksgiving week, Giving Tuesday, you’ve got Jewish holidays, you’ve got a lot of stuff. Should people, you know, sit down and, you know, go through the exercise of, you know, looking at all these different days and planning? It seems like maybe the day after the election should be a huge email day, right? Because people are going to be fired up on either way it goes. It seems like that could be an interesting day for an email. Obviously Giving Tuesday. Is it just a matter of sitting down and looking at those things?

Mazarine: Yeah. I would definitely sit down with a bunch of people on your team or your key volunteers and say, “What days am I not seeing here?” Because not everybody’s calendar has all been days on it. I think you’ll see you’re forgetting the dates of holidays. I’m very guilty of that. I can’t think of every single holiday. Sometimes I forget Labor Day, or Arbor Day, or whatever it is. So like just having other people with you to make sure that like you’re scheduling this at the right time is really helpful. My conference, I particularly scheduled it so it wouldn’t be during like the election, you know, but yeah, right after the election, we are going to need a boost of moral boost no matter what, because we have a long road ahead of us.

So, yeah. So you really have to try to think about how does this all fit together? We don’t have a communications calendar in here, but I do have a sample one that was for earlier this year that you could . . . we could maybe put that in the link at the end afterwards. I have a Google doc that you could copy and use for yourself with like story ideas and everything.

Steven: Cool. Yeah. Reach out to Mazarine. I mean, just a wealth of knowledge, awesome resources, lot of free stuff that she just gives away her knowledge, including this. So this was awesome, Mazarine. I feel like we could hang out all day. But yeah, this is how you find it, right? What’s the best thing people could use?

Mazarine: Yeah. This is the best email. This is the best phone number. You can, if you want to work with you one on one, check out that Bit.ly link. And then also the New Power Conference, it’s such a deal and Bloomerang is supporting it and I’m so grateful. So I’m going to stop sharing and let you talk about what is next. I think you like to talk about that.

Steven: Yeah. I got webinars. I love it. But, you know, thanks to all of you for hanging out. This was a fun one. And thanks for giving your time, Mazarine. We’ll get everybody the slides, the recording, you know, we’ll link to all that good stuff. She has put it in the chat so you can grab it now. But we got a cool one tomorrow. My buddy, Stephanie. Okay. I know nonprofit budgeting, not the most exciting, but she’ll make it fun. She’s one of my go-tos for finance stuff. And I swear, she makes it fun. So if you haven’t put together next year’s budget or if you’re in a fiscal year or, you know, I know everybody’s calendar is different. Join us tomorrow, 2:00 Eastern. Twenty-one hours from now, I think, if my arithmetic is correct, That’s why I need her for the arithmetic. But it’s going to be a cool one.

Next week we’ve got Daryl Upsall who’s one of the top fundraisers in Spain going to give us a little bit of an international lens to look at COVID and crisis fundraising. We got some cool sessions. I mean, you know, this was a good one to get started with for going into yearend. So just check our webinar page. We’d love to see you. Again, totally free. And definitely connect with Mazarine.

So we’ll call it a day there. Like I said, look for an email from me with all the goodies. We’ll get that out today. I might have to cook dinner first, if you don’t mind. I got a hungry nine-year-old, but I swear I’ll get it out today, later today. And hopefully we see you again on another webinar. So have a good rest of your Wednesday, have a good week, stay safe, stay healthy, please. We need you out there and we’ll talk to you again soon. Bye.

Mazarine: Bye.

The post Year-End Fundraising Appeals During Coronavirus – What Works Now? appeared first on Bloomerang.

Full Transcript:

Steven: All right. Jay, I’ve got two o’clock eastern. Is it okay if I go ahead and get this party started?

Jay: Sure.

Steven: All right. Awesome. Well, good afternoon, everybody. Good morning, I should say, if you’re out on the West Coast, and if you’re watching the recording, hope you’re having a good day, no matter where you are. We are here to talk about “Power Prospecting in a Pandemic and Beyond.” And I’m Steven over here at Bloomerang, and I’ll be moderating today’s discussion as always.

And just a couple of quick housekeeping items. I just want to let you all know that we are recording this session, and we’ll be sending out the slides and the recording later on this afternoon. So, if you miss anything, or want to review the content later on, share it, or maybe if you get interrupted by a kid doing virtual schooling next door, it’s okay. We’ll get all that good stuff to you. That might happen to me that’s why I say it. But don’t worry. We’ll get all the good stuff to you later on today. You won’t miss a thing.

But most importantly, please feel free to chat in any questions or comments along the way. We’re going to save some time at the end for Q&A. So don’t be shy. We’d love to hear from you. Introduce yourself in the chat if you haven’t already. But don’t be shy about asking questions. We’d love to get to them at the end. There’s a chat box and a Q&A box. You can use either of those. We’ll get them. We’ll see them, I promise. You can also tweet us. I’ll occasionally glance over at Twitter. But we’d love to hear from you. So don’t be shy.

Now, if this is your first Bloomerang webinar, I just want to say an extra special welcome to all you folks here for the first time. We do these webinars a couple times a week. We love doing them. But what we’re most known for at Bloomerang, if you’re wondering what the heck is Bloomerang, we are a provider of donor management software. So if you’re interested in that or just curious, want to learn more, check us out. Check out our website. There’s lots of videos there you can watch. You’ll get caught up on all things Bloomerang. But don’t do that right now. At least wait an hour because my buddy, Jay Frost, is here. Jay, how’s it going? Are you doing okay?

Jay: I’m doing great.

Steven: This is awesome. I can’t remember the last time we had you on, which I feel bad about, but I feel like we’ve been buddies for years. We used to run into each other at conferences when we were traveling. Of course, we’re not now. And Jay has graciously had me on his webinar series. So I thought, “Why don’t we return the favor?” Because he’s way smarter than I am. So let’s have him talk about all of his knowledge.

If you guys don’t know Jay, check him out. Boy, he’s been doing this for many, many years, tons of accolades. He is the president over at Frost on Fundraising, which you’re going to want to check out. He also hosts, I alluded to this, the DonorSearch webinar series, the “Mastermind Series,” which is a really, really good webinar series. You should definitely get plugged into that as well, lots of cool discussions and guests he has on there. Also, a senior consultant over at Brian Lacy and Associates, and Visionary Philanthropic Consulting and our friends over at Jerold Panas and Linzy & Partners, knows his stuff, can vouch personally for his work . . . for his clients, and the folks he’s helped out with. And I’m excited to hear all about prospecting because that’s a topic that he really knows something about, especially with his connection to DonorSearch. So, Jay, I’m going to pipe down because they want to hear from you, not me. I’m going to stop sharing my screen.

Jay: Thank you.

Steven: We’ll let you bring up your beautiful slides.

Jay: That was overly generous, Steven. You’re definitely the master here, not just of this domain, but in general. It’s really a pleasure and an honor to be, you know, hanging out with you today. This is a subject that I do have a lot of passion for, and I’ve had it for a long time. So that’s why I have been doing so much work with people at DonorSearch. Can you see my screen?

Steven: Not yet. We’re still seeing just you. We had a little trouble before. We’ll get it going.

Jay: Okay. And let me know if you can see it yet or if I need to share again.

Steven: No, I think you might have to share again.

Jay: Let me do that.

Steven: It might have been because I brought mine up.

Jay: So, everybody, just put up with us as we go through this little process.

Steven: I think people are used to the Zoom, the fun of Zoom.

Jay: I have everything open on the side. I’m closing it all, so we can do that. And there we go, and I’m back to sharing my screen. I’m going to share my . . . Oh, I can actually share the PowerPoint.

Steven: There it goes. It’ll be worth the wait. Beautiful.

Jay: Now, Steven, are you seeing just the slides? Are you seeing all the stuff on the slide?

Steven: I’m just seeing PowerPoint right now, but go ahead. Try to play it, and we’ll see if we can.

Jay: You’re just seeing one slide? Are you seeing . . . ?

Steven: Yeah.

Jay: Okay. Good.

Steven: We’re seeing all the slides right now.

Jay: You’re seeing all the slides. Okay.

Steven: Yeah.

Jay: There we go. All right.

Steven: Perfect.

Jay: Now that we’ve used half our presentation talking about the presentation, I’m going to take some time to talk with you about this subject of power prospecting in a pandemic and beyond. And you probably saw from the preview for this that this is something I’ve talked about a lot over the years, and I’ve updated a bit for our current environment. But I think that many of the things that we’ve been living through as fundraisers, whether you’ve been doing that for the last six months or the last 60 years, and who knows, there might be people who are in both those buckets here today, that many of those things hold true. And you’ll see that in some of what I share with you.

But some things I think are very new, not just in respect to especially the pandemic, but also the real fight, which has been going on for many decades, of course, but especially vigorous fight now among many, many people for greater social justice that those things are, I think, putting us in a position where we can make some really good strategic decisions as professionals in our sector to be, not just welcoming and think about having more diversity on our boards and these things, which we should have done forever, but rather do things that are also going to really truly advance the mission of our organizations by welcoming enough people with resources to make them possible. And I think we can do it even right now in the middle of this pandemic. So I’m going to take some time to talk to you about that.

And Steven is going to be hopefully letting me know if some big question, comment, or criticism comes in. And I really want to welcome all of the above, especially at the end. Don’t hold back in the middle but especially at the end because I don’t want to assume that . . . well, I don’t want to assume anything, but particularly that the information I share is any sort of gospel truth. It’s just one view of this from my perspective, and I hope that you will push back a bit but also . . . and especially share, not only your questions, but your ideas for how we can do better at what we do, not just today, but tomorrow.

I’m going to start right here with something that probably is well known to everyone, which is that . . . in fact, I think this is from . . . not this year but the previous year, from 2018. I should have had the 2019 slide here. But the amount of money that’s generated in terms of philanthropy right now in the United States is just enormous. We know that at this point that we’ve seen the lion’s share of that money come from, of course, people with resources that there’s a constant discussion about where is that money coming from.

Well, first of all, we know it’s coming from individuals. I’ll just state the thing that we have to say at every one of these presentations, that if you added up the categories, even from 18, not 19 in this case, but 18, you’d see in the Giving USA data that giving by foundations is about 18% of the pie. Probably about half that is coming from the people who have founded those foundations. The balance would be coming from more professional entities, and so that’s more institutional thinking. Then you have giving by bequests, which, of course, is from decedents or individuals who have passed away. And then you have giving by individuals at 68% in that year.

Now, we saw a little bit of a shift in the last year. But the main reason I’m bringing this up is because no matter if you looked at this year or last year or the year before, two years before, you find somewhere in the neighborhood of 85%, 86%, 87% or more of the money coming from people, just like you and me. So whatever their background is, however recently they accumulated those resources, whether there was inheritance or all newly made, whether it’s by a virtue of great thinking or by accident, they’re people. And those people are making decisions with respect to where they want to give. That’s an obvious fact. What may be a little less obvious or at least we don’t necessarily talk about with all of our stakeholders within our organizations is that giving is unequal because of the nature of the inequality which makes that giving possible.

Now, I’m not taking a position yet, but you’ll see that I do have a position on what we should do with our time as we dive into what prospecting is all about. But I’m going to start with an obvious image, which is this gift pyramid. And I just pulled this one from the 10 million gift pyramids which are out there on the internet. This is from a school campaign. I was not involved with this campaign. But it just gives you an idea about the typical, you know, kind of Egyptian pyramid approach to fundraising, which so many of us are familiar with. And there’s a reason why we do that kind of diagram, and that’s because it usually works, which is to say, there are usually a few people who are responsible for some very significant gifts. And those ratios change according to the organization, its history, the nature of constituency, etc. But you usually find something like what you see here, where you might have, you know, a $56 million goal anywhere between 10% and 20% of the money coming from perhaps one individual and so forth.

Now, if you were to look at wealth in general, that’s because . . . or rather I should say that pyramidical quality is because the wealth itself is unequal. So what I mean to say about that is if you were to look at, for example, where the wealth is today, and we’re going to talk a lot about that the next few minutes, this is a slide looking at the real-time billionaires list, which is from Forbes, the wealth is so heavily concentrated as we know and most especially now in the last few months that it means that those people not only have more resources to work with but they’re also being asked to consider what they wish to do with those resources. So quite simply it means that, in the end, we’re going to focus on people who have the resources to give because quite obviously, they’re in a position to give them. It doesn’t mean we don’t care about the others. It’s a function simply of resources and time.

Now, there is a choice to be made here, of course, which I’m going to talk about. But I will keep returning to this concept about who has the money and who doesn’t at least now as well as where that money might be in the future. Because quite simply, if we want to fund our activity, we have to focus on where there is opportunity. And I think there’s a very important debate going on about how we want to move forward, which, again, we’ll talk about together, but how much of our energy we want to spend on what might be described as the base of the pyramid are all the people that we know and love who wish to make some kind of contribution to our work, and then that small group of people who really can fund the lion’s share of what happens either today or through testamentary gifts.

In order to talk about that, I want to start with a pie. Okay. Hopefully, this doesn’t make you hungry. And for those of you who don’t know, I thought that this webinar was going to be an hour ago. Now, you may be in a different time zone, and you may have no interest in food right now. But I think it’s important to at least talk about pie because in the context of wealth and how people distribute it, we often talk about the pie and how well, you know, it’s carved up and how equal or unequal wealth distribution is in the country.

And I’m going to start with just a comment, which is that I’m talking about wealth today, not income, and there’s a simple reason for that. For those who are newer to our sector, there’s often a conflation especially in media reporting on these things we’re talking about today between wealth and income, but they’re quite different, of course. Of course, wealth is an asset. It’s something that people hold. It’s a store of something quite literally versus income, which is something that we receive for either doing some labor or based on an asset or what have you. It’s a distribution that comes on a regular basis, and we usually use that to pay for things that we’re utilizing right now. But I’m going to be talking about wealth because wealth is where the gifts come from in capital drives, almost always. Gifts are being made from assets versus from income.

So income-based gifts, which might be responsible for much of what happens at the end of the year, sustaining giving, is very important. But when it comes to any kind of large effort where we would want to do some real prospecting to find who those people are who have those assets and might wish to give them now or in the future, we have to think about the pie in terms of who owns the wealth.

Now, there was a really great story in “The Washington Post.” It’s been now a couple years ago, actually back to 2017. I apologize, December 2017. It talked about this. I love the graphics they put with it. It talked about 100 slices of pie. If you took that big apple pie or whatever pie you like, and sliced it up into 100 pieces and evenly distributed as if every piece of pie represented 1% of the population or something like that, then that would be equal. Everybody gets their piece of pie. Everybody’s happy assuming people actually like pie. But that’s not the way life is. We know that the ultra-wealthy have taken more of a slice of pie historically, that the top 1% owns a very, very significant share versus the bottom 90%. And that inequality has continued to grow. This is all pre-COVID.

Again, I’m stating something that might be obvious to you, but I think it’s really good to see it. Because if we were to take this and try to graph it today, and we don’t have good data for this, but we have a lot of good indicators, you would see this differential has grown even more in the last six months. We know a lot of the reasons for that. There are a lot of people out of work, maybe somewhere between 30 and 40 million people we know in the United States alone. We know that a lot of businesses are challenged right now, and I’ll give you stats on that later. And we also know that some businesses or especially public businesses and their shareholders, particularly the chief executives and the board members and the other insiders, who I’ll define for you in a minute, that those people have done especially well, even better than they’ve done historically. And historically insiders, who I’ll define again in a moment, outperform the rest of us by 11% a year, but that number has grown. Only history will be able to tell us how much it’s grown, but we know that it’s very significant.

Now, if you divide up the pie as it looked about a year and a half to two years ago, it would look something like this. The top 20%, 90 slices of pie, second, 20%, 8 slices, middle, 20%, 2 slices, fourth, 20%, zero, and then finally, bottom 20% are actually underwater, an average net worth of almost $9,000 under, you know. So that’s their debt. Now, the reason why I’m holding here for a moment is that this is where the conversation about wealth usually ends. There’s a kind of political discussion where people talk about the 99% and the 1%, which is interesting and fun kind of to talk about and a great way for us to think about how do we want to be different as a country. But in terms of philanthropy, we tend to stop talking about this issue at quintiles, but there’s a lot of unequal distribution at the very top, which should inform what we do generally as fundraisers and specifically in our prospecting.

So this is the same graphic here from this Wonkblog. I just thought it was really cool. So, hopefully, they don’t mind my sharing it liberally and crediting him. This is Edward Wolff there. And so you can see here the top 1% actually has 40 slices of that pie, so 40% of the wealth of the country, and this was as of two years ago. And then the next 4%, 27% and the next 5%, 12 slices of pie.

Another way to think about this if you don’t like this pie analogy is this. Some of you have children, and some of you don’t. Some of you own a house. Some of you don’t. Around 65% of the country has their name on title to property, but, in fact, they don’t own it outright. There’s smaller percentage of people who do. So many people are paying a mortgage. The people who have kids know that it’s expensive to raise a child, especially multiple children. And it’s something we love to do, but there’s a cost to that in not just the food and other things that we need for taking care of our kids but for education.

So the reason I’m mentioning that is up at the top in that top 10%, you have people who have the equivalent of, well, $2.6 million at the bottom tier in their net worth, but they are paying maybe $200,000 or more a year in education bills, and they might be paying for a jumbo mortgage and an additional property, and they might have a past debt associated with business. There could be a lot of things going on. That mean that $2.6 million is not really as liquid as it might sound versus the people at the very top, in the top 1% and especially top 10th of 1%, where as you can see right here in the slide, the average net worth, even the top 1% two years ago was 26.4 million versus around, again, as they said then 1.6 million in that next 5%. So this is a very, very big difference between the people who are usually lumped together. There’s a lot of good reasons why this happens in our perception.

These people might live in the same zip codes. They might drive the same cars. They might work at the same companies. They might even have similar titles sometimes in business if they’re associated with a business. So there are a lot of things where the cohorts appear the same. It’s sort of like a “Friends” episode, you know, to draw back from pop culture from the ’90s where they kind of all look alike in a way, and they all seem to live in the same building, but they aren’t necessarily earning the same amounts of money.

I have no idea what those characters were supposed to be doing or earning, except one was a paleontologist. But my point is just that you can’t judge these things or these people because they’re in the top 10% of the top 1%. There’s a lot going on up there, and their situations are quite different. So understanding that and having some sympathy or at least empathy for it is going to be important when we then start to say, “We’re going to serve a lot of people. How do we make sure that we’re talking to the people who have the resources to help right now?” And then understand that there’s a difference between this person over here and that person over here, even if by appearance’s sake they would seem to be kind of in the same cohort when, in fact, they may not.

This is where we get to sort of a parting in the road or, you know, where the road . . . I think of the Robert Frost poem, “The Road Less Taken,” right, where we talk about how we could go down one road or another, the road diverged in the wood and, you know. Now, that poem is often misunderstood. We can talk about that later. But the reason I mention it now is we do usually come to a point where we say, “Well, we only have so much time and so many resources,” especially in our fundraising world. So we’re going to have to make a choice here. We’re going to either choose to go double down and do a lot more in the direct marketing sense or talk to a lot of people about smaller things because there are a lot more people there, or we’re going to have to focus on our energy and our time on a few people with significant resources.

Let’s just hold on to that thought because I think that it’s possible to make another choice than just going right or left. But I’m going to explain that with a few more pictures and then looking at some data with you. Let me jump out of this for a second. Oh, there we go. I don’t know why that image appeared there. Sorry, that’s a mistake. Oh, it looks like something happened to my slide deck here, Steven. Take back the helm for a moment, will you?

Steven: Sure.

Jay: Yeah. When I saved it, it did something strange. Oh, no, you know what, it’s the way it’s displaying. It’s really, really odd.

Steven: Yeah. We were seeing chairs instead of those smokestacks for some reason.

Jay: Yeah. All right. Well, just hold on there and entertain our team here while I get the other version, the slide deck up. It’s really odd. Do you see what’s happening? All right. Okay. Okay. Steven, I’m going to stop sharing for a moment. It looks like PowerPoint somehow corrupted my file, so my apologies. Sorry, folks, this is the first time that I’ve had this happen to me. Okay. Steven, do I still have you there?

Steven: Yeah. It looks like it’s showing up now.

Jay: Well, you have a version here. This is an older version of the presentation. So I’ll fill in with where I can, my apologies to everybody. So I’m going to start with this image, which I meant to show you anyway, which is a little . . . an image from a lot of the past of how people made their money. So if you live in a place which was formerly industrial, you know that the smokestacks were off in a way that you knew where the money was, and, of course, that’s really not the case anymore.

You know, whether you’re living in Bridgeport, Connecticut as I once did, or you’re living in another place, that you’ve seen the decay of those communities over time. And oftentimes, they were replaced by something entirely different which wasn’t as visible. So you may or may not recognize this. People with a keen eye often can spot what this is right away, not because they’ve been to the building, but because they recognize one of the flags.

You may be one of those people, but I’m just going to go ahead and say what it is since you can’t really raise your hand. And this is the Apple headquarters. And the great thing about thinking about a company like this is that you don’t necessarily see what’s going on, but we all feel it. We know the market cap of Apple is absolutely enormous. And in the other version of the slide deck, which blew up on me, I would have shown you exactly which companies are the very top of that food pyramid right now.

Apple is, in fact, not the very top. If you wanted to guess which was, you might also think Amazon. Wrong again. It’s actually Saudi Aramco. And if I showed you their headquarters, you probably wouldn’t recognize it at all. And, in fact, if we looked at the headquarters for Amazon, some of you might recognize it because it looks so incredible and futuristic. It’s a whole bunch of these bubble domes. It looks like something out of an old movie called “Logan’s Run” from many years ago. The reason I mention it is that you can’t necessarily guess where the money’s being made. The same thing is true about where people live.

So, for people, again, who are used to looking at either travel logs or traveling a lot, you may recognize this building as The Breakers in Newport, Rhode Island, a place where the wealthy often lived in their . . . what were described as summer cottages. And this building is, of course, enormous and beautiful. If you look at the old records about how people spent their money back in that day, you’d see that one of the biggest items was not just the food budget, but it was also the laundry bill, which you can imagine, washing all those sheets in a house like that for your summer guests. But that is the days of yore.

This is a house in Cupertino, California. It was in the market I think about two years ago for about $3 million. Now, it’s not as small as it looks in this picture. There’s actually a little apartment in the back. I think it’s the total of 3,000 square feet, but it’s sure ain’t fancy. And the main reason for mentioning this is because you, of course, can’t judge a house by the way it looks.

Now, in the version of this presentation, I created today that just blew up on me, I wanted to show you also what just happened. Now, in addition to kind of Saudi Aramco and Amazon experience of going from something which was vigorous and visibly a marker of where money is made to something which is less so but still a big part of our lives to this extravagant display of corporate prowess, the same thing is happening in the real estate front.

Now, it’s been true for a long time that there was a very small group of people, the very, very tippy top of that pyramid of wealth that did live extravagantly. But it would be hard to find a $150 million house in the market until the last few months. And that’s exactly where the biggest house or not biggest house, it’s not the biggest house, where the most expensive house in the market right now is the United States and it’s in Beverly Hills. But if you were to look in Manhattan, it’s $74 million for a six-room penthouse suite with a garden. And that’s not an enormous place. It’s just the nature of the market, which, again, has been split like that road in the woods between the rest of us and a very, very small group of people at the very top who are themselves outpacing like the rabbit originally in the race between the tortoise and the rabbit, the rest of the people at the top of the 10%, which is why I was calling so much attention to those statistics.

This is a picture you may have seen if you are a fan of looking at historical philanthropy because the gent in the middle who looks like Santa is actually Andrew Carnegie or maybe it’s Carnegie, I never know. But in any case, he’s the one in the middle, and all the rest are there. And you can tell they’re all on the fancy gentry. But you wouldn’t necessarily know today who the richest people are.

This picture is from a few years ago in the state where I grew up in Connecticut, and there are three people here. One is the mayor of a town, another one I think is a local pizza shop owner who does some politicking, and the third is Ray Dalio. If that name doesn’t mean anything to you, he’s in the top 100 people in the world and definitely in the United States in terms of wealth. He runs a major hedge fund in Greenwich, and he’s the guy wearing a really awful Hawaiian shirt. People in Hawaii have told me that’s not a Hawaiian shirt. But it just shows that you can’t judge people by what they wear.

Now, again, in this slide, you’ll have to imagine it that I was going to show you, you would be able to see, not necessarily the clothes that people are wearing, but how different things are beginning to look now that there’s, again, this stripping away of a very top tier of people from the rest of us, and it’s become a little bit more visible in some ways but also more removed. So while the real point, as you can tell in these images, is that we can’t judge a book by its cover. At the same time, there are some books that are not available to us in the library at all unless we’re really good at prospecting. So that’s what the pie was about. In this version of the presentation, the pie came later.

So I’m going to just talk for a few minutes about the giving by these folks. It’s really important to recognize that the top 1% are now worth in excess of the 30 trillion when I did this original version, and roughly a third of all the charitable gifts come from the top 1%. In the last study done by Giving USA, that number has risen, and the work that’s done by the fundraising effect in this project makes an even more dramatic point to that. And Steven’s heavily involved in that. So I’m sure he can give us the most recent statistics as we get towards the end of the presentation today.

I don’t have a stack here, but one thing I wanted to call attention to is one part of the fundraising effect in this project data from I think it was a year ago, which said about 88% of the money especially in capital efforts is coming from the top let’s say 1% of the population. What we’re finding in capital campaigns, we have seen this for at least seven years, is that in $100 million plus campaigns as much as, you know, 95% of the money might be coming from as few as 2.5% of the population.

There are lots of different people joining us today, those who could stick around while I try to make PowerPoint work, and those people are probably . . . some of them are thinking, “Well, yes, I knew that” because we’re in a capital drive or have been in one. And so we naturally have been focusing our attention on that top 10th of 1% who are making those very significant gifts, and they’re doing them to lots of different kinds of things. But there are others who are saying, “Well, we don’t have those kind of people in our midst, or how do we find people who are really interested in giving to us? And we haven’t seen that kind of thing here, and we don’t even have a goal that large.” These are all really important considerations and not just for one group or the other in that situation.

Where COVID puts us is in a position where I think that people are reevaluating where they give and also reevaluating who they’re asking and for what and over what period of time and in what ways. That’s all to the good. But if we looked at it through the lens, again, just shortly ago, what we’d find even then is that a lot of money was going to places like higher education and health. And I would argue that the reason for that is simple. It’s because we talked to them about projects. We built the relationships over time, and we asked for very significant gifts for very significant projects.

So there’s a debate right now in philanthropy, and it’s a very vigorous one and an honest one about whether or not in philanthropy the richest people should be deciding where all those philanthropic dollars go, if there should be more equity introduced by changing the nature of decision making in philanthropy. There should be pressure, for example, on foundations, more diversity on those boards, that people who have masses of amount of money, they should pay higher taxes, that if people are going to give, there should be some kind of advice provided to those people where those dollars can go, or it should impact tax deductibility. There’s a lot of a range of discussion about this, especially about decolonizing philanthropy.

But the reason I’m mentioning all this here is because I think we have a role to play, and that role could be simply by virtue of deciding, “What kinds of projects do we wish to offer people? And are we identifying people who can actually invest in those projects and then giving them an opportunity?” And the reality is that in higher education, to name one simple example, is that the universities have outpaced the rest of us in terms of both developing those relationships with alumni over time, but most arguably building an entire sales process founded on prospecting and research that informed who they talked to and when about what.

So it wasn’t just the relationship that mattered, although that’s critical that they build that relationship with trust, and it wasn’t just that those people have more money, which they do because they’re graduates. It was also that they talked to them over time about being invested in things that they said that they wanted to invest in. It was donor centricity, not in terms of letting the donors decide what to do, but donor centricity in terms of listening to the donors first. It’s what Jerry Panas used to describe as listening a gift.

And I think we can use that operating principle when we think about, first of all, the high net worth individuals and particularly ultra-high net worth individuals. Those are people with between $30 and $50 million in investable assets and the rest of the population, all of whom we love and care for, and do want to give but simply cannot give in the same ways at this moment in time. But if we choose not to say, “You know what, it has to be one or the other, but it can be both,” we can start to do some prospecting in a way that allows us to build a portfolio of people who do want to give in lots of different ways who don’t have the same level of resources as the philanthropic market changes. So, again, I’m going to focus first on the money because that’s where the money is right now and especially now.

But I think it’s really important that we get our gears moving towards not just hitting everybody who’s below a high net worth individual level or below $1,000 gift level. You know, you pick your metric and just hit them with mail or email until they just give up and run away in fear, but instead find ways to truly and honestly and sincerely cultivate relationships with them, so that as they emerge as people who can make greater investments that are closer to the heart, that they will do it with us. And that will mean that the other areas of interest will take a greater role in their philanthropy. It won’t be just all higher education and healthcare anymore. We’re seeing this already in terms of giving especially to things that involve racial justice and social justice issues.

As you probably know, there’s an article right in the front of the current “Chronicle of Philanthropy,” I don’t know if you see my face right now or not, about five billion incoming, and this all is about commitments to racial justice. We also know that with COVID specifically that there has been as much as I think it’s $11.9 billion that’s been earmarked for COVID related philanthropy in just the last few months since COVID really emerged for most of us. And that is coming not just from individuals, although that’s true, but also from corporations who have been laggards in terms of giving usually about 5% of the pie as we talked about it. Now it’s much more significant. In fact, about two-thirds of that money is coming from corporations, which is pretty remarkable. 49% of the total awards from community foundations is going to COVID.

And donor-advised funds, which have justifiably taken a little bit of heat for not being as transparent as we might like, they think they are being transparent, they’re definitely being legal, but they are not as visible to us as many other entities are, especially for prospecting, but they have given themselves $453 million for things related to COVID in just the last few months as well. So lots of money is coming from places where it didn’t before to things where it didn’t go before largely because the goals are bigger, they’re building the relationships of trust, and they’re asking at the highest possible level rather than asking for lots of little things from lots of people and never building relationships. That’s a lot of explanation on one simple slide, but I think it’s important to discuss.

Now, again, I’ll have to give some gloss to some of these slides since you don’t have the newest version, and I’ll make sure that I somehow restore that for you and get you all a slide deck afterwards, so you’ll be able to see some of the illustrations. But this is just a way of showing you that at least, again, a couple years ago, this was a 2015 map, but it’s very similar today, that the distribution of the top wealth holders, ultra-high net worth individuals, is across the country, so whether you are in New York or California, where we tend to talk about that stuff, maybe Illinois or Texas or Florida. In fact, it’s really true everywhere. Maybe it’s a little tougher in Alaska in terms of the distribution of these folks, but also the population density is smaller in Alaska or lower in Alaska. So, quite simply, there’s wealth everywhere if you know where to look for it, but it’s only in the hands of a few people right now. So, again, as we take our journey down one path and then hopefully the other as well, we want to make sure we focus on where the money is as well as who has it.

Now, I’m not going to talk about Hawaii. I pulled up a Hawaii deck for you. But, in fact, just to show you that there’s a lot of ways of getting this information relatively cheaply or for free. HomeSnacks is one way you could do this right online right away. If you want to just check and see what are the top richest neighborhoods, streets, cities in your state, you could do it right now just be using HomeSnacks, which is the goofiest title I know of a website.

And whenever I show this to people and update it usually that day for audiences, it’s usually surprising because we know our towns really well, but it’s sort of like the pictures I showed you at the very beginning. We don’t necessarily know everybody as well as we think we do, and we don’t necessarily know every street as well as we think we do.

So, just for fun, next time you meet with colleagues in the office, go ahead and take a look at something like HomeSnacks or the other resources I’ll show you. Pull those up and just first of all ask them what they think the pockets of wealth are, and then you’ll find that some of them they know, and some, they’re just wrong. In the case of Hawaii, in case there’s anybody from Hawaii here, these were the five that were listed.

This is a place I want to introduce the different ways we can do prospecting. And I’ll start with prospecting 1.0. Quite simply this is something I started to do a long time ago, and it started with the sushi club. And the idea was simple. We wanted to get a group of people together and talk about . . . back then it was Japan. It was a contentious time for U.S.-Japan relations, and there wasn’t a lot of information about Japanese companies, their principles, and what they might be interested in.

I was working as an international fundraiser, and I was with a U.S.-based institution and trying to figure out where the points of opportunity were. And so, at the same time, I was also a lot . . . I had a lot of interest in Japan. My wife was from Osaka. We started meeting with other people over dinner in a local restaurant, and that group blew up. There were 150 people on our mailing list back when people actually mailed things by mail with stamps. And then whenever we had a meeting, which could only be 40 people in the restaurant, it was always overflow. It was a chance for people to talk off the record, which is a Washington way of saying nobody’s supposed to take notes, but everybody does.

What really happened, though, was it allowed us to have a relationship over breaking bread or in this case breaking sushi, and we could really learn about things that were never available in books or online. That continues to be true today, not only with Japanese information, but almost all sorts of information. So there’s a huge amount on Google on everything, but the really good information usually is down to a few sites, some of which are free and some of which are for pay.

The great part about this, if you have whatever is your version of the sushi club, meaning your network of individuals with whom you share information, not in a surreptitious spy-like way, but just like a common interest, what are we interested in, what do people care about, and then they naturally start telling you things about people, that could be anything from board members to staff, faculty, alumni, current students, volunteers, donors, grateful patients, you know, lots of different people, but also the entities where information is exchanged in the course of business, government, business councils, chambers of commerce, but also the people who are researchers professionally, think tanks, scholars, journalists, other researchers. All those people are just a wealth of information. The problem, however, is that limitation of geography or knowledge or technology if having a group like that.

So, on one level, you can do a lot by just the old-fashioned way of getting together, and I would encourage people to do that. Except now doing it this way, you know, technology permitting where we can have a conversation and then learn what we can from one another. But at the same time we’re doing that and holding dear onto that because it’s so important we have to go beyond. So that’s prospecting 2.0.

And there are six markers for philanthropy. They’re really informing, how we know, who has the money, as well as who has the interest. You can tell I’m doing this pretty quickly now because of the problem we had earlier. And by the way, these six markers, there have been two studies at DonorSearch with whom I do a great deal of work, one a number of years ago. This one based upon, I think it was nearly . . . I’m trying to remember if it was 700 institutions and something like $700 million in giving, really substantial study, and you can get a copy of that either through me or through DonorSearch. But they found that there were five major characteristics, and I’ve added one. I’ve taken that liberty. The first of these for big givers is giving to your own organization, which you can discover quite simply by, of course, looking in your database of record, so whether that’s Excel, I hope not, or whether that’s a really great robust database, which Steven can tell you all about.

An RFM analysis can go one step further than just seeing who gave to you last month or last year. Quite simply it allows you to go and code recency or how . . . of course, recently a person made a gift to you, their frequency of giving over a defined period of time, and the amount of cumulative giving they’ve made to you. Score those indices, total them up, sort that file, and boom, you’ve got a very, very simplistic but fairly efficient and effective tool for narrowing down the group of people who have demonstrated the greatest interest.

Of course, one limitation of this is it depends upon whether or not you’ve been actually asking these people for support with any frequency you’ve done so recently, and you’ve asked them for a sufficient amount of money. So, if you’ve been just, you know, giving them a checkbox for $10, maybe that’s all they checked, and you might have, in fact, seen attrition rates for a variety of reasons. And the people at Bloomberg have done beautiful work on addressing this topic of attrition. Steven talks about it extensively. The people at NextAfter do wonderful work, research work in their library on attrition.

But I would add one thing, which is that if we ask people for too little, they will stop taking us seriously, and it’s simply because if you can’t go . . . nobody can right now go to the movies but pretend you can go to the movies. It’s not going to cost you less than 100 bucks to go out with a significant other and have a babysitter and eat for two people at Chipotle and pay for gas. And so if you can’t do that for $100, then if somebody asks you for $10 from their charity, how can you take it seriously? And if you have a very significant asset base, how do you have the time to write a check or to go online and make a gift for any amount of money if that’s your amount of money? So it’s really important to keep that in mind. But this is a great way to start.

Another thing is giving to other organizations. I won’t go through all the rest of this slide, but just to say this, the more they’ve given in terms of their aggregate giving, especially large individual gifts, the more likely they are to make a charitable donation to more than one cause. In the case of donors of over $100,000 who’ve made a gift of a single gift of over $100,000, they’re 32 times more likely to make a charitable donation to some other organization.

Board of trustee positions. The people who might make up only 2% to 3% of your constituency if you looked at everybody. Let’s say you have 10,000 people who have given and showed an interest and volunteered in your file, and you looked at them, you might have 2% or 3% of your people who have been in a board or a trustee position. Those people might be making as much as . . . giving you as much as a third of the money that’s coming in on an annualized basis. That’s what they’re finding through this study.

Political giving is very significant and also counter-intuitive. The bottom line here is that there’s almost a one-to-one correlation between people making a gift of over $250 to an FEC campaign, Federal Election’s Commission campaign . . . federal campaign and to charity. So you might find that as much as 70% of the money going to your organization is coming from that small percentage of people who are also making political gifts in excess of $250. That sounds crazy until you start looking up these people, which I’ll show you how to do momentarily.

And then you’ve got the value of real estate. Now, real estate is something that seems obvious to us, right? It’s sort of like the fancy houses that I was talking about earlier. If somebody owns really expensive house, it stands to reason that they have money to give, right? Well, yes, no. There are big mortgages out there as I mentioned earlier. But individuals owning more than $2 million worth of real estate are in the top 3.5% of your donor pool, and they’re giving you nearly a third of your donation dollars. Now, that might not just be a single property that looks really nice in a picture on Zillow. This might also be a person who owns two or three properties where the aggregate value is 2 million.

Now, some of you might say, “Well, I’m in New York and everything’s over $2 million.” And I would take issue with that, too. What we often find is that we understand the world as we see it, and even in New York, even in New York City, even in Manhattan, believe it or not, the median incomes and the price of property is not . . . not everybody lives in a $2 million place. They just don’t. So just bear that in mind and try to keep an open mind when you look at your own constituency. But it’s also important to note that when thinking about this as a prospecting tool, that about 65% of your people are going to have the names on property once again. So it has value, but the value is somewhat limited in terms of narrowing your prospect pool.

Corporate leadership is different, and this is where I add a little bit. So DonorSearch has definitely identified the presence of business ownership as being key, and it is. But one thing I would point out is that if you look at the composition of estates by assets, you can see what happens. The richer people are, the more important stock becomes. And I wish I could show you the slide I prepared to just show you some of the data on the most recent . . . what’s happened to the stock market.

But the stock market, if you didn’t know it, has completely blown up, that people sold off like crazy right at the start of the pandemic when most of us either were out of work or starting to work from home. And then it grew dramatically, and now it’s almost at the highest point, again, in human history. So you’ve got a huge percentage of people unemployed, the most since the Great Depression, and you’ve got a small percentage of people whose accumulated wealth is greater than it’s ever been in the history of mankind . . . humankind, excuse me.

This is really important. And if we can figure out who has that money, both the companies that are private that have grown a lot and may go public and the companies that are public where the top executive leadership and their insider owners are all visible, that can be very helpful to us to identify people to prospect and to understand them to research them.

So who are these people? They’re not people who own 5% of their company. I want to just put that aside. They’re people who are in policymaking roles, they’re directors of public company regardless of ownership, they own 10% or more of any class of stock, and they own Rule 144 stock. This is stock that was a distribution when the companies went public.

The main reason I’m mentioning all that is because I want you to know what the value of this very small group people who’s definitely under a million individuals living in debt going back to 1985. These people, to use the most crazy example, like the CEO of Amazon, now the richest person in the world, are rich because of their stock. But because they hold the stock in a way that’s so substantial, they have to file with the government to indicate what they’re doing. So you can see salary, bonus, board service fees, other compensation, retirement plans, their holdings, their options position, and information about their career and other affiliations. You can learn a lot of this by looking . . . and again, my apologies for an old slide.

But if you were to go to CNBC, which you could do now, you could go in there and look up a company. When I prepared this slide earlier today, it wasn’t Blackbaud anymore, it was Salesforce, and you’d see that same arc crash and grow. Never truly crashed at Salesforce, but the growth has been dramatic. We’re using Zoom today, Zoom has cooperated where PowerPoint didn’t, and that growth has been tremendous. Microsoft, as much as we all like to beat them up, Microsoft is still in the top three companies.

It’s very interesting to look at the stock trajectory, but underneath that is the insider ownership. So you can see how the company’s doing. But you can also click a little button here that talks about insider activity. That insider activity will tell you about the individual directors and officers, and you can see their shareholdings and their current value.

And if you want to look a level deeper, and I hope you will, this only takes you five minutes to look up on an individual. You could go to the SEC site, at Securities and Exchange Commission or sec.gov. You could go to EDGAR, which actually does stand for something, Electronic Data Gathering and Retrieval, it’s just a nice little trivia note, and you could look in there for any company like Apple. Just type Apple. You don’t even need to know the ticker symbol. Search for them. Look for the one thing that’s going to give you the best snapshot in time.

Now, if you’re a researcher, you know that you go a lot more depth than this. So I’m doing this mainly for our colleagues who aren’t aware that this is possible. If you are not a researcher and you have a researcher in your shop, collaborate with your researcher on this because they’re going to give you a level of detail, which is much greater than what I’m about to show you that you can do in five minutes. If you don’t have a researcher, hire one.

If you can’t hire one right now, do at least this. At least know this about anyone who’s an insider in your file. Look at the name of Apple. Look up a DEF 14a, which is the proxy statement, which you can find, and then click DEF 14a. Boom, you can see then the document, and you can just search for the person. Control F to search for any key characteristic like Tim Cook’s name. So unless they actually have a Cook working at Apple, you’re going to find Tim Cook, and then you’re going to be able to see his face and learn all about what his interest are including his directorships and memberships as well as his compensation package, not just his salary, but how much he’s got in stock and what it’s worth.

Now, private business today is actually 31 million private businesses in the country, and I have to tell you something that really blew my mind, which is that there are a lot of business starts going on right now. Some of you may have even started your own businesses, or you know people who have in your own families because we’re working from home if we’re working at all. And those who aren’t working are finding new ways to make sure that they can. So there are over 4,000 new business filings per week in the state of Michigan is one example, and that’s a 91% increase over the previous year. So what is this about? It’s people trying to find new ways to make things work.

It’s emblematic of what happened right after the crash of 1929. Many of the companies that were the leaders of industry in the 20th century grew out of the ashes of that time. Similarly, the companies that were very successful in the last number of years grew out of the ashes of the crash of ’97, for those who remember back that far, or maybe 2008. DonorSearch is an example of this. It’s a company that grew really in the immediate aftermath of all that. Now is quite large. So a lot of companies have done that, and a lot of them start, of course, in somebody’s garage or living room or kitchen, I think it was over at DonorSearch.

And it’s important to note that most businesses, most private businesses, first of all, half of them fail, but for those that survive, only a small percentage, about 3.3% end up grossing in that sweet spot of over $10 million. And that’s really where you want to be thinking in terms of the top of the pyramid, that one lane in that divergent wood.

You can get that information from lots of sources. One I didn’t mention here is a great corporate source that’s utilized by DonorSearch and integrated in its database, and I’ll be happy to provide that link to you later. But others that you may be familiar with include Dun & Bradstreet, Hoovers, the company website, of course, Inc., which has a great list of the top-performing and fastest-growing companies in the country. And for COVID related stuff, I would be looking at that.

There’s also a great article from the Helen Brown Group, a terrific resource. Helen’s a great friend to our industry. And Helen wrote a or her team did, wrote an article, I think it was back at the very beginning of the shutdown in April, and I want to make sure I have the right name, called “Who’s Doing Well Now?” which cited a number of different kinds of companies that have been successful right at the start of the pandemic. Those would include companies like the cable providers because everyone needs a good cable connection to have a meeting like this. DoorDash, delivering the food to our homes. Makers of medical supplies seems kind intuitive, but what about the sanitation supplies? Johnson & Johnson. So there’s a list of those companies. That list might mature over time. And, in fact, the Inc. list, the Inc. 5000 is going to be a good demonstration about which companies are taking advantage of the situation, not in a negative way, but in a positive way, trying to address the needs and interests of consumers and potential consumers. And all of that would be documented there.

Real estate is something you can get in Zillow or Trulia or LexisNexis if you can afford it. And that’s a great way to, again, look at that 65% of the people. It’s often the only asset data available. So you do get kind of a window on people in the other lane, too, all the people who are just, you know, living in their houses and trying to make things work. But you definitely get a good picture about the people who are in those $2 million above homes. What you can’t do on Zillow is you can’t see multiple properties. For that, you would need a tool like LexisNexis or perhaps some others that you’re going to get through doing a screening, which I’ll mention momentarily.

There are also a number of other resources, and those would include political giving, which you can get from OpenSecrets, charitable giving, which you could get from DonorSearch or NOZA, which is a product of Blackbaud, of course, foundation and board membership, which you can learn about through Candid, which is the consolidation of the Foundation Center and GuideStar, both great resources. In terms of political giving, OpenSecrets is a great way you can look up things for free right now, and that’s a lot of fun to try.

Just remember one thing. This presentation is titled about prospecting, but in theory, the statute, at least as I understand it, does not want us to be prospecting from political gifts. In other words, they don’t want us to go in here, find people who’ve given to a political campaign, and put them in our database. That is theoretically in violation of the statute. However, it is a research tool that’s public and made available for all of us. And so if you have a donor in your database, if you’re prospecting from your own database, which is really what I’m arguing for much of this presentation, then doing this both as I understand it’s not only legal, but I think it would be incumbent upon us to know something about what their interests are. Because fundamentally, research is not just knowing about capacity to find out who can gift stuff. It’s knowing what people care about. And while their political donations are not a complete reflection, they do tell us something especially this year.

There’s also a tool you can use, and which looks more robust than this now. Too bad you can’t see the current image. But you can get it just by going to dsgiving.com. It’s a DonorSearch tool, which gives you a free window on their database up to the most recent gifts on all the people in there. And so it’s not everything there, but it’s a great way to get a slice of information especially if you’re going to have a meeting with someone, including a meeting like this one. And so all the things I’m talking about are not to replace those kinds of in-person contexts, they’re to enhance them. And one thing I always want to know is what are people giving to? Because I want to know not just what can they do but what do they care about. That will tell you.

Similarly, foundation information gives you a great window on what people have an interest in doing. I mean, they serve on a certain foundation. It should tell you something. If I dived a little more into Tim Cook’s bio in that SEC filing, the DEF 14A, you would have learned about the foundations where he serves on the board. Similarly, you can use a resource like this, the foundation directory within candid.org, and to learn more about that, or if you’re just prospecting natively, meaning you’re trying to just find anybody with an interest in what you do, you can go in and look up by those kinds of characteristics and pull up those people. Excuse me. And that’s just an image from there where I just looked up human services in the state of Wisconsin, and then I pulled up a list with how much they’ve given.

Now, that brings us to the third level, prospecting 3.0. There are lots of ways to do this, and those can include using tools like Acxiom Personicx, which is the backbone of the worth mailing list, CQ Roll Call, which helps you identify which sites you want your banner ads to appear on that are focused on the right kinds of people, the people who have resources and interests, so they put your ad. Let’s say you’re Save the Children. You want that right in front of people. CQ Roll Call would help. And DonorSearch has a marketing list function, which would allow you to go in there and also look up that information and be able to look up a finite group of people, so you can see all the people who have given over $1,000 in this three-digit zip area to this particular kind of cause. It’s a very, very inexpensive quick way to find a small group of people who are already demonstrated to give at a very high level.

And then you can use other resources like AccuData or Aculist, which are list brokers who will sell you lists from specific individuals, or excuse me, specific charities, although those tend to be lower dollar donors, so more on the other lane, if you will. And then finally, you have people who aren’t just brokers, but they’re consultants in space like Brian Lacy is at Brian Lacy and Associates, where he and others like him will help you to figure out who you’re really looking for and then get a list of those people. So you’re not just trying to rent a big list somewhere for a lot of money. You’re not just trying to buy a list and figure it out on your own. They’re working with you to curate a list of people who are the right kind of prospects for you. And you can tailor all that through the tools.

Finally, there are screenings that you can do all this with. They range from asking people on a board, you know, about what they know about various people to provide names of people and then to screen them together, tell you who they think has the greatest financial capacity, the greatest interest, their data overlays ranging from age to income, their asset screenings of the type that I was talking about with DonorSearch or others, I’ll list all the companies in a moment, modeling, which is a very different sort of approach where you can make some determinations about who might have an interest in supporting you based on a past activity or other kinds of interests, and then finally, social, which is very different animal and relatively new.

You can try with any of the companies, any of the screening companies before you buy, which means if you have a database and you want to find out who the people are with real money, you can provide a list of them. This is a little screen that DonorSearch came up with for me a long time ago, so people could just give them a few names and try out the database for a month. And you can do that. In fact, you can just search, “Special offer for friends of Jay Frost,” and then run some names. It’s well worth doing.

I would suggest if you’re interested in screening, figure out first what you want, the kinds of people you’re looking for now and in the future, and then share that with . . . get a list like that together and have that screened by the companies that can provide that kind of information. And so that way you’re comparing the different companies by virtue of not only what they deliver, but how they treated you, which is so important. Not necessarily how does that data work with your database because almost all of that does work, but rather is the whole process pretty seamless and is the information really enhancing both what you know and what you don’t know? Which is the only real reason to screen anything is to find out what you don’t know, not whether or not you were right.

And here are the companies, I think it’s a pretty extensive list, that are doing screening work today. They range from the kind of modeling that’s done over at BWF Insight, to DonorSearch, to iWave, DonorScape, which is part of Grenzebach Glier, Target Analytics, which is part of Blackbaud. I think they may have, in fact, rebranded so it’s not just Blackbaud, WealthEngine, Wealth-X, which does just the upper end, [inaudible 01:08:15] still do this, and then finally, Windfall, all companies that will provide screening.

The last part here is about social ambassadors. Now, when I came up with this deck, originally, I included something called Sherlock. Sherlock in this form no longer exists, and it’s a shame. You can get social handle appending to your files from some of the vendors, and sometimes it’s natively within your own databases. If you’re a Salesforce user, you might find that there’s a way to access the social information on a constituent that you are looking at. If you go into a screening with a company like DonorSearch and perhaps others, some of that data can be appended or at least is visible when you’re accessing the product like prospect view online, and then you’re looking at that. But the reason why I think this is so valuable why I hope that it’s possible to screen a file for this is to find people who have great social capacity and to sort by that basis, so when you go out and you start thinking about that second lane when you’re thinking about the future, you can think about the people who have great social capacity to help you.

And the last thought on that is that I’ve worked with a great deal of organizations over the years where I’ll screen files or do research or encourage them in research projects. So think about prospecting. And inevitably, especially in the really big places where they have a lot of staff, they know their files really well, but they only probably know about half the story. And it’s not because they’re not working hard. They’re working really hard just like you are, just like I am, but they just can’t see it all. It’s not possible. So what a screening might do is allow you to prospect among your own file to see what you’ve missed and then to be able to explore it.

And the reason why I provide this image is that one time in delivering this kind of data, years ago, I remember, but this image has always been burned into my mind, I was at an Ivy League university showing their results, in this case just showing securities data. And the faces of everyone in the room, which was filled with major gift officers, all of whom were a lot smarter than me, were blank, and at first I thought, “Am I looking at the wrong file?” Which is the worst possible thing, but that’s not what was happening. They did not recognize the names. They simply didn’t know their own alumni who had great value, and I’ve seen this time and time again.

If you take nothing else from this part of the discussion I would say this, see if you can test some of these tools, so you can find out what you don’t know, not just what you do. And the reason for that is simple. There are people hiding in our midst who have a great deal of ability and a great deal of passion for our causes, but because we haven’t seen them, we haven’t talked to them, and we haven’t listened to them, they haven’t had the ability to invest. This is a woman who was at the Occupy protest a number of years ago. Again, another image that’s burned into my mind because if you can’t judge a book by its cover, you certainly couldn’t judge her, you know, by the way, she’s looking. You know, she’s a nice-looking person, but I don’t think she’s rich or poor. I don’t make any assumption based on her look. There’s no top hat and big house, but she is sitting on $3 million at birth. And after this, if she’s still holding that money, it’s a lot more than that.

What I couldn’t share with you today, unfortunately, because the slide deck issue is that I think we have another opportunity as we think about, not just how do we prospect from our own constituency, the people with a lot of assets today, but also the people who are either growing their assets or their assets are less visible to us because they don’t hit one of those five markers, particularly people of color. And this has been actually a passion point for me personally for a long time because I have an interest in international philanthropy. And when you think about it, the United States as dominant as we are, as much philanthropy as occurs here, all these things, it’s just a piece of the puzzle. We’re probably only a quarter of the world’s market cap. We’re probably only a quarter of the world’s stock market at this point. We’re only a piece of philanthropy.

And just one example is that zakat alone, Islamic philanthropy, the devotion that people must make as observant Muslims is over $500 billion a year, and I never hear anyone talk about it here. We need to find out everybody we’ve been ignoring, not just because it’s the right thing to do, but because it’s essential for our survival as nonprofits.

So, if it sounds like I’m hectoring now, it’s because I think it’s important that when we go back to our friends and colleagues, we say, “Well, here are some tools, and here’s some ways to understand our people better. Here’s a few more people with money,” and we should do that. Because if we don’t, we’re going to miss this moment in time where the stock market’s huge.

But if we don’t also simultaneously think about the people whose wealth is growing and will eclipse that of those people within 20 to 30 years, we will have missed building the relationships that will change the nature of our organizations, make them more effective, more inclusive, more diverse because that makes us better as well as more successful. And the only way to start that process is to start listening to them now, to start researching them now, and to make sure that we’re collecting information in an appropriate way on those people so that we can build them into the conversation we’re having about what philanthropy should look like in the days ahead. Steven, is there anybody left?

Steven: Oh, yeah, we got 100 people in here. That was a good one, Jay. I’ve been just bookmarking the last 20 minutes all those sites. That Sherlock one, I never heard of that one. That one looks really cool.

Jay: Yeah. And Sherlock, you know, again, is it in, is it out, hard to tell? This has happened a couple times with these companies, you know. We’ll see.

Steven: Well, that’s all right. We know how it is in the tech world. But, yeah, the free tools or at least the list of tools, not all of them are free, that’s okay, but that was worth the price of omission. But, Jay, this is awesome. Thanks for hanging out with us and sharing all your knowledge. And we got your contact information there. I know we’re a little bit over, so I don’t want to keep people too much longer. But can people reach out to you? Is that cool with you, Jay?

Jay: Absolutely. Yeah. And I’ll be happy to, you know, reconstruct that and send it out to you and share it with anybody who wants it. But I’m also available here just to talk anytime, usually in stronger voice, but I’d love to hear from each of you about what’s going on in your world, the questions that you have and how we can make sure that you’re investing the resources you need to get to know these people and welcome them into your world.

Steven: I love it. Yeah. Definitely reach out to Jay. He’s a wealth of knowledge, a great guy, and got that good webinar series, the “Mastermind Series” over at DonorSearch. If you just search for “Mastermind’s” webinar, you’ll find it right, Jay?

Jay: Yeah. We’re having a great session on Tuesday on Islamic philanthropy, in fact.

Steven: Yeah. That’s right. You made me remember when you were talking about that at the end. That’s going to be a good one. I’ve actually seen him speak before. So definitely check that one out because that’s a lot of money that’s just waiting around to be asked for, right?

Jay: Yeah. I mean, there are some things that people need to know about that. Absolutely. Yeah. As a whole, we haven’t been paying sufficient attention to something that’s a huge source of charity.

Steven: Well, that’s why we like you Jay because you’re always shedding light on cool things that folks need to be thinking about. So thanks for being here. This is fun.

Jay: Thank you. I appreciate it.

Steven: And thanks to all of you for hanging out. Like I said at the top, I’ll send out the slides, the recording. Slides will have all the lists of stuff in there. You won’t miss anything. And hopefully, you can join us again on our next session. I’m going to bounce into my slides here, Jay. I just want to talk about some things we got coming up next week. We got two sessions next week. But a real one I’m really . . . I’m excited about all of them, of course. My buddy Ligia Peña is going to come back and talk about legacy fundraising. She’s kind of my go-to for all things, bequests, planned giving, whatever you want to call it. I know there’s lots of different terms for it. But she’s the legacy mastermind in my mind.

But she’s going to be talking about decision science. What’s decision science? I don’t know. You’ll have to join us on Tuesday to find out, 1:00 p.m. Eastern, also totally free. We’d love to see you again. You’ll get an email invite to it. Don’t worry. But check out our webinar page. We’ve got lots of other cool sessions coming up on into 2021. I booked the 2021 session already, I can’t believe it. But there’s lots of cool things coming up.

So, hopefully, we’ll see you again on another Bloomerang webinar. Like I said, look for an email from me with all the goodies, all the slides, the recording. And hopefully, we’ll see you again next week. So have a good rest of your Thursday. Have a good weekend. Stay safe out there. If you’re out West, we’re thinking about you. Please stay healthy. Please stay safe. We’ll talk to you again soon. Bye now.

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