How to Use Data to Manage Your Nonprofit

And first of all, thank you thank you very much to the hundreds of people that are taking out your very valuable time to attend this session. We’ve got some great panelists here. I’m going to be moderating but I’m also providing some Read More

And first of all, thank you thank you very much to the hundreds of people that are taking out your very valuable time to attend this session. We’ve got some great panelists here. I’m going to be moderating but I’m also providing some information, but also with us is Sandy Reese and Musso, Matsa Pola. Sandi shows Sandy’s background is really she shows passionate nonprofit leaders how to fully fund their big vision, so they can spend their time changing lives instead of worrying about money. She has helped literally dozens of small profits actually, I’m sure it’s a lot larger than that. But dozens of small nonprofits go from nickel and dime buzzing to adding six or seven figures to their bottom line. She’s based in Loudoun, Tennessee, and you can find out more about her fundraising system at WWW dot get fully funded.com. And I’m gonna give her a chance to talk about herself in just a second. The other panelists with us is Musa metropolo. Musa is the development coordinator for dare to care Food Bank in Louisville, Kentucky. He was he joined the data a dare to Care staff a year ago when they made the switch to DonorPerfect. And in his role, he serves as the manager of the donor database by completing all gift entry reporting for the organization. So Sadie, just take a minute, please tell us about yourself. Well,

I’m so excited to be here with you. I’m, I’m just kind of laughing to myself that Musa works at the food bank, because I spent a lot of years at my local food bank. And that’s where I really figured out that I was a data nerd, I really enjoy looking at software and reports and things we’re going to talk more about that later. I’ve run a company called get fully funded. That’s been in business since 2005. And we specialize in helping small and midsize organizations really ramp up their fundraising and learn how to raise more money. I love teaching people I love sharing what I know, I think that I spent a lot of time figuring things out the hard way. And I like showing people shortcuts and easier ways to do things so that they don’t have to work as hard as I did to learn how to really generate the big bucks my organization needs.

Oh, that’s awesome, really appreciate that. So tell us about yourself.

Well, like Sandy, I’m also really glad to be here. And it’s a wonderful opportunity. And yes, during the one year that I have been in the food bank industry, I have realized that I myself, am a data nerd as well. So for those that aren’t familiar, what we do here at data care as a food bank is we tried to procure funds and secure food that we can then distribute to the community data carriers, specifically partners with over 300 local organizations, churches, food, pantries, community centers, and things like that to distribute over 19 million pounds of food per year. And in our community, we are the largest social services nonprofit, specifically targeting food and hunger relief. So I’m really proud to be a member of dare to care and to have an internal part in making sure that the data is used accurately and correctly to make sure that our organization is as efficient as possible.

Oh, that’s great. Really appreciate that. And finally, my name is John Biederman, and I’m the Vice President of fundraising products at DonorPerfect. I’ve been doing this for a long time, 22 years. And I’m a data nerd as well, you know, go fundraising databases, and have actually helped develop and launch DonorPerfect about 17 years ago, in 2001. So 17 years ago, we’re certainly working on it, we launched in 2001. So I’m really excited about this webinar as well. And really appreciate both Sandy and Musa first, really prepping and spending their valuable time to present this fantastic information. So we’re gonna go ahead and start off with a poll to the audience. So on your panel, you should be seeing a poll spike up that says how data driven is your organization. So if all the attendees can go ahead and select one of those options, and and just so you know, the palace, we cannot influence this vote. We’ll go ahead and give everybody about 20 seconds to make a choice here.

So just couple more 10 more seconds. Ah, here we go. So you’re seeing the results live just like we are. And so clearly, I think everybody’s in the boat of we track a few key metrics, or we don’t do as much as we should. Sandy helped me understand how does this compare to the nonprofit’s you work with?

You know, as I was looking at those answers, that would have been the one that I would guess that most people would say, and I think that there’s a lot of folks who they know they should be measuring some things. But frankly, they don’t have time to figure out everything they need. To measure so I’m not surprised by these results at all.

Right? You know, it’s interesting, the 4% one, we look at data about once a year, I actually one of the I sit on the board of several nonprofits, so I won’t name the one that it is. But one of them is, falls into this bucket. You know, once a year, there’s an annual board meeting, and we are just inundated with all this data, I kind of get it, I would hope so at least. But you know, you can look around the boardroom and it’s as the glazed look on people’s eyes as we filter through it. So hopefully, what we’re going to be able to show today is what are some maybe some easier things to understand that can get into the front and center, minds of board members and key stakeholders. So let’s go ahead and talk about the agenda. So we’re gonna be talking about today using data like a business some KPIs, good old KPIs, key performance indicators, or in this case metrics for nonprofits. Asking the right questions, what does the data tell me, and also talking a little about the right tools for the job? Not necessarily around DonorPerfect, but really just fundraising software in general. And also accounting software, the linby Some times for questions from the audience. So data sources, so where’s data coming from? You know, if you’re like a lot of nonprofits, you unfortunately probably still have a condition that I call Movado MBO t, it stands for Multiple versions of the truth. The reason for that is, is that you likely, even if you’re very sophisticated, you have an accounting system, a donor CRM system, you have your email marketing system, maybe website analytics is a different silo, your direct mail provider is out there could that ticketing software payment processing, you know, mu? So how do you how many data sources do you have? Do you have?

We have just about everyone that’s available on the screen right now, obviously, we have the donor CRM system, which is separate from our accounting system. And we also have to get a lot of our analytics that influenced our decision making from our direct mail provider.

Alright, so let’s talk about common challenges. You know, just in your case, okay. So if you could tell me, you know, what are some of the challenges that you face?

Well, specifically for our organization is trying to understand the sources of revenue, and how that should influence our decision making in terms of putting funds into making those sources larger and more profitable. So for example, if our if our direct mail vendors giving us numbers that illustrate how well our direct mail is doing, but then trying to gauge that, versus the the return on investment, versus what we’re doing with maybe our special events, or our other streams of revenue that we’ve never putting money into whether it’s online marketing, or social media or things like that television. So yeah, it’s really just trying to understand all the pieces at once when it’s coming from, like you said, multiple versions of what we expect to be the truth.

Right. And in Sandy, what’s your experience?

You know, I think the hard thing is that you identify a need. So like, a lot of people think, well, we need to be able to track our campaigns and our donor tracking our donor information. And so they get a donor tracking software. And then they go, oh, you know, it would be nice if we could sell tickets to our event online. And, and I think instead of looking to see if the existing tool will do that, they go out and get another tool. And then before they know it, they have all these different tools that are not integrated, and they’re not talking to each other. And I’m sure that’s something that new so deals with every day is how do I how do I integrate the information that I have? How do I get the the merchant account to talk to the donor tracking software to talk to everything else we’re doing? And I think really, that I think that’s the hard part. And I think one of the things that compounds that is that everybody’s so busy, they don’t have time to stop and go, let’s think about this for a minute. They’re just like, I need a solution. And I need it now. And they’re they’re moving so fast, just trying to make everything work that they don’t think about, oh, this would be a whole lot easier down the road. If I could integrate all these tools and get something, get a system in place where it’s all working together and given me the data that I need to make decisions.

Okay, and so let’s go ahead and actually ask the audiences yet again, it’s an example in here we go another another survey, to make sure that our audience is kept busy here and engaged. So go ahead on your screen, you can choose one of the answers here. So what data challenges have you actually experienced? And we’ll give everybody about 15 seconds or so. I like number four data is someone else’s responsibility.

And here, let’s go with the results. So again, this is a live poll, we have well in excess of 475 folks on this webinar right now. So this is, this is something else. And so the highest one right now is data is fragmented across multiple systems, just kind of like we that example of MB IoT multiple versions of the truth, then followed by data’s incomplete or inconsistent. So Sandy, did these results surprise you at

all? No, I think that’s just what I was talking about was fragmented across multiple systems, where you have wound up with all these different tools, and none of it really is integrated. And I’m not surprised to hear that data is incomplete or inconsistent. And, you know, I think what happens there is, you’d have a lot of people working in fundraising that don’t understand the importance of keeping data clean. Now, we’re all self proclaimed data nerds, so we get it, that you’re only going to get out, whatever you put in it. So the output is only as good as the input. And I think you get people who are real busy, and then get a volunteer to do data entry, which there’s nothing wrong with that as long as the right person. And there’s a system in place for how data goes in. And so I think when you have a lot of different people putting their hands into your data, that’s when it becomes incomplete or inconsistent. It’s a huge problem.

So do you have anything to add? Yeah,

totally. To piggyback off of that, like she said, all nonprofits do rely on volunteers, at least in some capacity. And usually that does fall in or, you know, bleed into data entry. And so I’m kind of surprised that with data is incomplete or inconsistent, having such a high percentage, that data is someone else’s responsibility isn’t also near that level. Because usually, the inconsistency is a result of it being another person or multiple people’s responsibility, which kind of leads which can lead to more messy entry and inconsistencies.

I completely agree. In fact, even 20 years ago, when I was in our support and implementation department, I would be the one that actually did the Data Conversions. And it was almost like doing anthropology, as you looked at the data, you can clearly see where there were changes in the staffing of the database administrators, because, you know, from you know, for 18 months, it’d be perfect, all the data would be coded correctly. And then all of a sudden, it’s all over the place for maybe four months, five months. Sometimes there’s gaps, and then and then boom, it gets back to the clean again, it’s almost like reading the fossil record, different layers, you’re going to absolutely tell when there’s been changes in the hierarchy of the nonprofit. So let’s go ahead and actually look at some, what are the important metrics. And this is where the intersection of nonprofits and business I believe really intersect. Because for a lot of ways, in a lot of ways, you can replace the word donors here with the word customers, or clients. And because donor retention and lifetime value is so important in nonprofits, it’s not a surprise, it’s important to businesses as well. So for example, DonorPerfect is what’s called a software as a service. We like Netflix, and your cable companies and even old school newspapers, for example, we measure down to the the 1000s, place our donor retention, which is basically saying or to be our customer retention to the same thing as donor retention, which is what are the percentage of the customers of the donors that are repeating this year, that were also our customers the previous year? Alright, in business, you want to be above 80%? All right. Interestingly enough in nonprofits right now, and we’ll be talking about in just a second, but not yet. The retention rate, on average, according to the recent 2017 Fundraising Effectiveness Project is only 45%. That means you’re losing six to the five and a half donors for every 10 every year, and you’re only keeping four and a half donors out of every 10 for every year. And if that was a business model, those businesses would be out of business, but let’s just go through this obviously, growth and donors, you know, that’s percentage of growth, just the number of donors average donation per donor, something to track and measure. Interestingly enough, for DonorPerfect for example, the average donation is right around $375 $400, something like that. The online donation is less but it’s still about $130 along there New and lapsed donors, this measures, your overall donors might have increased only 1%. But that’s because you had new donor growth of 7%. But the last 6% of your donors or some other equivalent, the lifetime value of donors or upgrade and downgrade donors are folks that, you know, the upgrade they’re giving, or do they downgrade or giving, but they still give. And then lifetime value donors and donor retention attrition, very important. Again, as a business, we measure our lifetime value of our customers, again, to the set. And the reason we’re able to do is actually it’s actually quite simple. The formula, and if you are reading email right now and you’re on the call, you might want to write this down. It’s a very simple formula, that you basically take the number one divided by whatever your attrition is of your donors. So if you’re losing 20%, all right, you take one divided by 20%, that’s five, that’ll give you a lifetime, in years of how long your donor is going to be with the organization. And then you just multiply the five by your average donations per donor in a year, that’ll give you the lifetime value. And the reason why lifetime value is so important to measure is that you can then base your investments on what it takes to acquire donors, direct mail company has been doing this forever. Sandy, you want to talk about any about that about lifetime value?

Well, I agree with you, it’s a very important thing to to keep a handle on. I think that for a lot of small organizations, that’s something that they know is important, they don’t know how to measure it. And if they if their data only goes back two or three years, but the organization has been around for 30 years, then they know that there’s way more information. And so what they’re able to show with their with their software may not be as appropriate. I’ve got a lot of organizations I’m working with that are really young, like five years old or younger. And what we’re seeing there is the same as what we see in the Fundraising Effectiveness Project. And that is that they’re they’re bringing in a lot of new donors, they’re hanging on to a donors there, I’ve actually got a couple of groups that I’ve got one that has retention rate of about 60%. And it’s really funny, they come to me, and it goes out, okay. You know, and I laugh and go, Yeah, you’re doing great. Whatever you’re doing, keep doing it, because 60% is amazing. And and what we’re trying to do now and start to look at for those organizations and some others, what is the value of a donor over their lifetime? And what we’re finding is that the more that they can take care of those donors, the more that they’re really inspiring those donors and keeping them engaged, the longer they’re giving, which means their lifetime value is going up, which is very cool.

Right? And we had a quick question on what that formula was. And we’re also we’ll text this out to folks, but it’s pretty simple. You again, donor retention is the percentage of donors that you keep from the previous year. In Sandy’s case, it was 60%. Okay, that means that their donor, attrition is 40%. You basically take one divided by point four, I’m doing the math right here, one divided by point four is two and a half year. So in that organizations case, their average donor lasts for about two and a half years, if their average donation per year was, let’s say, $500, then $500 times two and a half is I believe, yeah, one. Yeah, for $1,250 lifetime value. In that specific case, obviously, it’ll change for your organization. I’m not going to read through all these. But because really to get these benchmarks, it’s pretty simple. And it’s free. You can look at the next slide. So DonorPerfect is one of the founding partners, and organizers of what’s called the Fundraising Effectiveness Project. I was actually invited by Bill of us in 2006. I met in the Charlotte hotel. And I had my first question to him, because he actually paid my way, by the way, was what am I doing here? And then we struck out on a vision that we would work with the other fundraising software companies out there to co mingle our anonymize data. So the user the fact that hey, a donor, somewhere someplace, gave $500 to an organization somewhere someplace on January 15 2006. And then that same donor gave $200.04 months later, and then they never gave again. So this anonymized data source similar to what car companies do, and even like, you know, retail chains like McDonald’s, for example. They do same store sales. They’re able then to do all kinds of benchmarking. So here’s just one small example. So the growth and giving for example, because since we’re tracking all these donations, we’re at 3% 2015 or 2016. For this sample size, it’s literally over 10,000 organizations. The overall rate retention rate, as I mentioned 45%, and then the growth and donors a tiny point 6%, there’s actually a lot more data for benchmarking is out there. To download the report, all you got to do is visit, be it a bit.li/d p dash f EP, it does need to be an uppercase that DP dash FTP, there’s nothing to register for it completely free. In fact, they’ll go straight to a PDF. So you’ll be able to download it lots of great information. And I really like to thank the other partners that made this possible was Association of Fundraising Professionals, and also the Urban Institute, who I’ve known the folks that were there for many, many years. So let’s go ahead, actually, now I believe that we’re going to have sandy talk and really let the data speak to you or talk to you.

You bet, one of the things that I get a lot of when I sat in the development director’s chair was looking at my software, looking at reports, and, and I know that’s really nerdy, but there were things that would just jump out at me. And so when I was talking with Jeff, here at DonorPerfect mentioned, and I use this phrase, let the data talk to you, because that’s what I did all the time, I would just look at these reports and see what I would see. And so we started talking about the reports that everybody should be looking at, and monitoring regularly, and we came up with about seven. Now thankfully, if you’re using a tool like donor, perfect, they’re gonna, these are gonna be really easy to pull, you’re not going to have to do a lot of hard crunching yourself that let’s take a look at some of these reports that you should be looking at regularly. The first one is new donors. So if we take them the information that we just were talking about around retention, if overall retention is 45%, and you know that you know that you’re going to be losing donors every year, you better be bringing in enough new donors just to break even at the end of the year. And if you want to grow, you got to be pulling in even more than that. So one of the things that I teach is that you need to set a goal every year for donor retention and donor acquisition, you need to be thinking about how many new donors you need to bring in if you want to grow your organization. So I spent five years at my local food bank. So Musa and I may have a lot of similar stories. And one of the things that I saw coming was a capital campaign, because we were really starting to burst at the seams. And and so I thought about and I looked at our data, and I said, I don’t have the right donor makeup right now, to do a successful capital campaign. I knew I needed to, I needed more donors, and I needed to upgrade a bunch of donors. And so I started really trying to play with the numbers to figure out how many new donors did I need? And then I thought about the strategies that I was going to use to bring those in every month. And then every month, I would pull this report just to look at how many new donors did I just bring in? Am I on track? Am I falling off? And then I would look at where those new donors were coming from. Because I had a way in that tool that I that I could think through or tag. Did those people come? Because I went out and did speaking gigs did they come because we did a direct mail acquisition mailing did they come because it was an event. And that was really helpful in determining whether we should repeat those activities or not. If you never look at your your numbers of new donors that you’re bringing in, and if you don’t know where they’re coming from, it’s really difficult to figure out what to go back and do more of. Hopefully that makes sense. So I think you ought to always be looking at that new donor report. lapsed donors is another one, you know, in my world, and it’s easier to renew a lapsed donor than it is to go out and get a brand new one. And as a rule of business as well. And we can you can look at the hard numbers of that. But if you start looking at how many you’re losing, and if you can catch them before they lapse, you can actually renew a fair number of them. So one of the systems that I set up for myself, was to really look at when are people lapsing? Is it at the 12 month mark? Is it at 15? Is it at 18. And you have to look at your data and let it tell you when people are typically lapsing. And so one of the strategies that I came up with, I figured out that it was about 15 months at my organization. And so what I did is I pull a list every month of people who were at month 13. So they hadn’t given in 13 months. And we put together a very short note. And we would hand write I had volunteers that would help me with this, we would hand write these notes to our lapse donors and basically say something like, Hey, thanks so much for your past support. We really appreciate it. We noticed it’s been a while since you’ve partnered with us and we would like to invite you to renew your support of our in that case fight against hunger and also handwritten notes with a lot of stamp on it hand addressed on the outside and we actually renewed gosh, probably about 5% of the was donors that way, which was pretty handy. And what that meant was, that was fewer donors that we had to go out and get as far as brand new donors. And that was very helpful. Again, if you’re not paying attention to that, those donors are going to leak out just like water through a hole in the bottom of the bucket. And one day, you’re gonna go like what happened to all our donors, what what’s happened to our donor base, so you got to pay attention to that, you got to really watch those lapsed donors. donor retention, we’ve talked and talked and talked about, you do want to keep an eye on our people renewing every year, are you giving them enough opportunities to renew every year, one of the biggest mistakes that I see organizations making is, and I’ve got a client right now, it’s actually an animal shelter in Missouri that they typically only ask during the holidays, and that’s just what they’ve done. And I hate that as a consultant, when I’m talking to somebody and they go, well, that’s just the way we’ve always done it. No. So one of the things that we’re doing now is really giving those donors multiple opportunities during the year to give. And by being able to pull that kind of report to look at retention. And to see who’s renewing, who’s not renewing. If you don’t have a huge donor base, you can literally go through that lapse donor report and look at the names and see Do you know those people or look at where they came from, again, you may find that people who came to your organization through a specific channel are more likely to lapse than others. And if you know that, then you can do something about that. But he definitely you need to be looking at your retention number. I love love love that the software’s have improved so much since I sat in the development director’s chair and that DonorPerfect to actually calculate it for you, you can put it right on your dashboard. So when you log in, there it is tells you what’s going on. Thank you guys for doing that. That’s amazing work with the Girl Scouts in Knoxville. And that was one of the things that I loved about working with them is that we could just log in to their DonorPerfect and see how many donors do they have? What’s the total giving look like in the last 30 days or so. And then we could look at what their donor retention number was. And that was so helpful. As we were working to get more people engaged get more people giving, it just really made a big difference for them just in feeling like they have their finger on the pulse of what was going on. Alright, another report you may want to look at, or I do recommend you look at is revenue by solicitation. So if you were to take all of the money that’s coming into your organization, and think about it by category, or by revenue stream, and then if you were to put it into a pie chart, it would be very fascinating. I call this a fundraising pie. Now, I love doing this with organizations, you want to have a close look at that. There’s some real danger if you don’t. So for example, of a client who got about 75% of their revenue from a grant through the state of Tennessee. Now if you’re sitting there going, Oh, that’s a little scary. You’re exactly right. That’s very scary. Because if that one grant goes away, you’re dead in the water. Well guess what happened to the screwed. State budget was cut. They lost that grant and they came to me going, we need to raise $750,000. Today, right now let’s go and, and oh, man, that’s a hard uphill battle. When you’re reviewing very closely your revenue by solicitation by category, when you’re looking at things, you can prevent that sort of thing from happening, you can also see what’s working. So if you’re doing direct mail, if you’re doing three mailings a year, you can look by solicitation, and let the data talk to you. Let it tell you that your spring mailing is is always going to perform at a certain rate. Let it tell you that your October mailing is always gonna outperform anything you do in the summer, let that data tell you what’s working and what’s not working. Because again, then you can do more of what’s working. It makes your life easier. You can raise more money, and you’ll have the experience that I did where I had a board member look at me and go, How do you know this? How do you know what’s going to work? I’m like, Well, I just look at the data. I let the data tell me what I need to do next. And again, what I love about a good tool like DonorPerfect is if you’re putting the data in by solicitation, then you can you can have it pop up on your dashboard and telling you what’s working and what’s not. And when you get to the place. We have a very sophisticated fundraising program going and you have you’ve got three or four maybe five different things going on at the same time. You got the lapsed donor mailings going out you’ve got an appeal out maybe you got an online campaign that you’re running, you’ve got to make your gift effort you know a lot of different things going on. Then you can look and see how are we doing? What’s performing? Is there anything that just feels like it’s not working or it’s really sucking and then you can go have a look at that and do something about it before you get to the end of that period, and it’s too late. So I think that’s definitely a report that you want to have. Keep an eye on it. For me, I just like looking at those numbers, and especially your direct mail and looking at what I was actually raising versus what I had budgeted to see, am I on track? Am I head Am I behind what’s going on there. And to me, that’s just a lot of fun to look at those results coming in.

So another one is monthly donors, if you guys are not doing monthly giving you need to be, that is an amazing way to raise money. I was just actually talking to a client this morning. It’s she has a three year old organization that rescues draft horses in New Hampshire. And she started monthly giving a bout a year ago, she now has 120 regular monthly gifts coming into her organization. And its funding about half of her operations expenses every month, which is just amazing. And one of the things that I want her to do is to pull a monthly donor report every month just so she can see what’s going on. When you get into numbers like that, you know, 120 people who are giving you want to really keep an eye on are they paying, there’s one thing for them to say I’m going to commit to being a monthly donor. I mean, if they do it online with a credit card, that’s a whole lot easier to manage. But you do want to keep an eye on that to make sure that if people have committed that money that they are paying, and that all that’s coming through, you might also start to notice depending on the report and the tool that you’re using things like somebody who just wrapped up their 10th year of monthly giving, well, that’s worth celebrating, that’s worth a phone call or an extra handwritten note to say you have given monthly for 10 years, you’ve made so many things happen in our community, thank you. And if you’re not looking to reports, you don’t know you don’t notice stuff like that. So definitely keep an eye on your monthly donor report. If nothing else, just to make sure that people are paying when they’re supposed to be paying. top donors, this is another one of my favorites, I love these reports can be automatically generated. So you can look and see who are your top donors at any given time, who are the people that you need to be given a little extra love to. And that’s the kind of report that you can then share with other staff, especially if you already have or trying to build a culture of philanthropy in your organization, you may want to share those names with some of your board members and say, Hey, if you guys know any of these people, then these are some of our top donors. And if you see them in the community, tell them thank you for supporting us, you don’t necessarily have to share the amount of money that those people I really wouldn’t wouldn’t share the amount of money that they have given with your board members or with staff, but they need to know the names, they need to know the names of those people, and that those folks are very important to you. Another thing that can happen with a top donor report is you might have it in your head that your top donor is Mary Ellen Smith. And then you start looking at the actual data and you find out oh, she’s not in the top? Well, I thought she gave a big donation. And then you can go down that trail to figure out, did something get miscoded? Did it get put in wrong? Or has she has not given recently enough to be shown up in that in that report. And those are, those are things you’re not going to know if you’re not looking at the reports and looking at the data, you may also find out somebody that you didn’t realize it was in your top 10 list that is showing up there. And again, you just wanna make sure you’re giving those people lots of love and attention.

Yeah, and you know, what, from the SVP, one of the things that I know, is that everyone’s heard of the whole, you know, 8020 rule 20% of anything comes from, or excuse me, 80% of the results come from 20% of the effort, things along those lines in the fundraising world accordingly. Maybe not this year, but I know from at least last year, it’s actually 80 to 8088 12, meaning that 88% of the revenue comes from just 12% of the donors. So certainly looking on the top donors that really does. You’re right, you’re right in that area.

Yeah, I would have guessed 9010 Because it you know, it’s that way, I can think of probably three different organizations that I’m working with right now that have one big donor, who, yes, probably given a huge amount of their budget, which, on the one hand, that’s a little scary, and we’re working to grow their donor base, so they’re not completely reliant on the one big donor. But it’s a it’s a great example of how this can absolutely be true that you can have just a handful of donors that are providing the bulk of the revenue that your organization is operating on. So the seventh report that I think is really fascinating. Gosh, I’m such a nerd about this stuff. And I admit it and I laugh at myself about it, the volunteer hours. You know, I think that time is probably more precious than money for an awful lot of people and if they are volunteering with your organization, that’s Huge, you’ll find that volunteers may be more likely to give because they’re seeing firsthand what your organization is doing. They get really involved and engaged in the organization. And especially for organizations like Habitat for Humanity that could not live, if they didn’t have volunteers, it’s really important to keep an eye on that. If time is just as precious a commodity as money, then you definitely want to be acknowledging people when they hit certain milestones. So I used to sit on the board and my local Habitat for Humanity. And we kept an eye on that, when people hit a milestone of 100 hours, we did something special for them. And when people gave their first 10 hours, then we had no cards that board members would, would would hand write a little note to them, thanking them for donating their first 10 hours to the organization. If you’re not watching those reports, that stuff’s really hard to keep up with. And you can go through and create a whole acknowledgment plan for people based on the number of hours that they’ve donated to your organization. And then you can kind of cross reference that people who are giving the most in terms of time, where did they fall in your in your donor reports? Are they also in your top 10 donors? Are they in a mid level segment someplace or some? Are they in a lower segment, this is absolutely a report that I like to pull and look at. And just let that data talk to me. If I find that people who volunteer over 20 hours are also in the top half of my donors, then what I may want to do is have an initiative to encourage people to volunteer more, or take the folks who are in that 10 hour or less volunteer range and see what I need to do to move them up. Because if that means they’re also going to become a great donor, then I want to do what I can do to make that happen. I got to look at the data, we got to look at the reports in order to figure out what’s really happening and and then develop a strategy so we can get more of that.

That’s fantastic. Thank you so much for going through those seven reports. And we are getting tons of questions. And so if you do have a questions, go ahead and submit it, I we’re not going to be able to answer every single one of them. But rest assured we know who you are for the questions and after the webinar is over, we will have somebody contacting reply to it. So using the right tools for the job, so I think it’s already been mentioned. And Musa was actually a client of DonorPerfect. But really, it’s really important when you’re doing the job is using the right tools, believe it or not, DonorPerfect. Number one competition is actually a company called Microsoft, and probably Google Sheets. So Excel, Microsoft Excel is hard number one competition. Sec, it’s probably QuickBooks, because people think that they can go along. And they can they can use those tools, because either they’re very inexpensive or they’re free to manage their donors. I wouldn’t even begin to know how to calculate retention in Excel, let alone QuickBooks. But the bottom line is that by using the right tool, and fundraising software like DonorPerfect, you’re really going to do two things, you’re gonna save a ton of time. You know, one of the things that Sandy talked about is that she does not want for her clients to go through the same pain that she did, right, Sandy. Right. Right. And, and I can’t imagine even with my own organizations, because we use donor product, obviously, there’s no way it would have time to track these things. So with fundraising software, you really is easy to track and manage relationships, you keep the gift records to ensure they’re thanked received and acknowledged on time. One of the things that we do at our annual conference, we have several 100 people attend, and Philadelphia grows every year. And we give out awards for the organization that thinks the timeliness because we know the data shows that people who think their donors quicker, have higher retention rates. Okay, there’s a direct correlation. Someone said there’s a causality. I’m not going to go down that rabbit hole, but there’s certainly a direct correlation. And with that, our top person literally according to the data, thanks their donors within five minutes. All right. Now that’s kind of hard to do. You’re like John, how is that possible? Well, the reason is, is because almost literally 98% of the time, they thanked the donor the same day. We don’t track the time, the donor was thanked obviously but we track the day and 90% of time, you can track it the same day. Then if you do the math, it ends up being they do it literally in five minutes, but literally to have that kind of just excellent same day thanking that when the gift comes in to thank you goes out. That’s saying something with fundraising software, you’ll be able to boost retention with tools increase, maintain donor engagement. You know, accounting software, obviously is very important. You know, in the ideal world that To talk to each other, typically, the best practice is that the fundraising software becomes the database of record, you then take, you have a process that is defined. transactions are recorded in software like DonorPerfect, and DonorPerfect, you can track the and manage the income chart of accounts that correspond with what we call general ledger codes and DonorPerfect so that it’s a one click option to then export that information out to your accounting software or with DonorPerfect and QuickBooks, you can do it in one click because we have an integration. Obviously, accounting software really does simplify financial tasks that every organization, nonprofit or company, for that matter, have to deal with, you know, whether it’s accounts payable, purchase orders, counts, receivable, inventory, etc. And at the end of the day, it really is keeping an eye on the bottom line here at DonorPerfect, you know, we do look at the net profit margin. But even for my own nonprofits, you know, we have budget versus actual, we look at, you know, what is our net profit, or the revenue that we get, basically, minus the expenses. That’s the net profit, but we take that number divided by the total revenue. A lot of nonprofits try to aim for zero. In fact, actually, Sandy, can you help me understand with your clients? What do you do in that area? What do you recommend that they do?

Well, I think people do try to have a zero based budget, but I find it’s a little easier to raise money if I can show a small deficit. Because then I think in the donors, I if there’s a reason for them to give, if everything looks like, oh, it’s all buttoned up, there’s money coming in. And a donor might think, Well, why exactly do I want to give or a foundation may have that too. So personally, I like to show us a little bit of a deficit, I think that’s a little bit more of a reason for me to ask for money.

Oh, that is actually quite fascinating. There’s a book called Freakonomics that talks about things like that where you would expect something different. But actually, that’s some great, great advice are based on your experience. Musso helped you understand? What is your organization aim for?

Well, our budget is also is based on a zero, you know, a net of zero, overall. And I’ve also only been with dare to care for a year now. So I’m sort of trying to wrap my head around the way things work entirely on the accounting side. But obviously, our goal is to raise as much money as possible. And if that means adjusting the amount of spending that we need to meet that zero, then we do that. But it’s interesting, Sandy, your point to have on paper that there is a small deficit, to show the need for more fundraising. I’ve never heard of that approach. And I think it’s really interesting.

It works for me, we had a point at when I was at the food bank that I was raising too much money, you guys will all laugh at this. And we we did we had a lot of money, we wound up with a huge reserve. And I got to the point where I couldn’t bring in grants anymore, because foundations were laughing at me saying, Why are you asking us for $5,000? When you’re showing 50 That you’re sitting on 50,000? Like, we’re not giving you money, you got plenty. And so I went to the board and said, Okay, we got to do something here, because this is this is a problem. And I hate that I’m not going to be able to take advantage of these opportunities to get money. And so what they did is they said, Well, what can we do about this? At the time, we had a mortgage on our building, and they elected to use the extra money that we had and pay off our buildings so that we owned it outright, it was an investment in ourselves. And then that took away my problem, and I was able to go back out and continue raising money and doing my thing. And and that worked out really well.

Wow, that’s a that’s a great story. Alright, so I think on the next slide, we actually talk about what the pros do. So that’s, it actually also addresses one of the questions that we had from the audience. And that is, you know, how often should we take a look at these reports. One of the great things about software like DonorPerfect, and in my experience, there’s only two others out of the dozens and dozens of other competitors that do the same thing we do. And that is the ability to automatically schedule these key reports to your constituents, or duction. constituent, your stakeholders, your stakeholders, all right, and so in DonorPerfect, you can do that you can take the revenue analysis report and have that sent to your key stakeholders on the first or the second of every month or whatever your normal business cycle is. So that’s something that’s included in DonorPerfect it’s called scheduled reports. It’s through our Report Center. The other thing is, you know, it’s it is route really around keeping your board informed and creating your own custom reports. With snaps off, so your data so most of you know, how do you keep how to use donor product and keep your board and stakeholders informed?

Well, I think the most important tool that I use every day is the that bottom one that create your own custom reports, because I feel like one of the best aspects, from what I’ve found from DonorPerfect is the way that you’re able to customize and filter almost every single aspect of any amount of data that you have on any of your constituents. So it really gives you the tools, you need to hand tailor reports to your organization specifically. So for example, we, I created a custom report for the lifecycle of grants to track them because we wanted to be able to include not only the general information such as you know, the the donors name, and the amount that they pledged and when that pledge is due. But we also wanted to include the contact notes, which wasn’t available to us on one of the canned reports. But it was totally available to create a custom report. And we also wanted it to be sorted by program rather than solicitation or GL Code. And again, while that wasn’t available to us in a canned report, it was something that I was able to find and use for a custom report. And there are probably between five and seven customer reports that I run on a weekly basis. And two of those are sent to maybe I think it’s seven of our staff members every week. And then there’s another one that I send to our accounting department every single day. And all of those reports that I’m sending to our team, our custom reports, so that they’re really getting information that is specific to our organization, and it has custom fields that are more relatable than let’s say things that are, you know, to cut up and bogged down in jargon of data that might not be easily accessible to all of our staff.

Wow, that’s fantastic. So we’ve got about 10 minutes left or so. So we’re going to take some questions from the audience and against I really, really appreciate everyone’s time taken out on this valuable Thursday, here, it is Thursday, right? I hope so. Whether you’re eating lunch on the West Coast, or you’re like me, I’m about to run off and take my son to baseball practice, about an hour and a half away. So let’s actually take a look at some of these questions. So I think this question is probably about Sandy. And so can you elaborate on some very basic ideas for donor acquisition, for those who are new?

Well, I’ll jump in and say I think it depends on how much money you want to spend. What I like to do is figure out first who your ideal donor prospect is, and then use a just a hardcore marketing approach to figure out based on demographics and psychographics of who you’re looking for, where you can easily go find them in the community in, in large numbers, like, where are they hanging out? What are they? Where are they spending their time where they spend their money, I find that there are some places that tend to work for just about everybody, if you’re not out speaking to your local civic clubs, and giving people the opportunity to get involved in the organization, you’re probably missing the boat, because those tend to be full of people who are community oriented, they care about what’s going on. There are all kinds of other ways to do it. Depending on what kind of events you have going on open houses I’ve seen work really well. I think direct mail acquisition is not dead. Although a you have to be very careful about that you have to know what you’re doing. And you can spend a lot of money and not get a lot of results out of it. I have clients who are doing really well with donor acquisition on Facebook, my draft horse girl that I was talking about earlier, she’s done very, very well, not only recruiting the average donor on Facebook, but also monthly donors. And she literally will post a picture of a horse and talk about why they need to take care of a horse and then invite people to give and people do. So those are some of the ideas are just popping right off the top of my head about ways to bring in new donors. Wow,

it’s cycle graphs. Wow. It’s been a while since I heard that term. Can you give us an example of what a psycho graph like band looks like?

Well, if you’re if you’re really using a marketing approach, and you’re trying to figure out who you’re trying to find, you want to use the demographics, which tends to be facts and psychographics, which is more of how people feel and what they believe. So and what’s what they value. So if you’re thinking about I do a lot of work with animal rescue, if you’re looking for somebody who’s a typical donor for Animal Rescue, you have to ask yourself, what do they value? How do they feel? What’s important to them? Well, I’ll tell you right now that donors to any animal rescue cannot stand suffering. They just can’t. They’re probably giving to kids causes as well. They probably have pets at home, they value their family time and so forth. So when you start to really dig into what’s important to them and what they value, then you can think about where are they hanging out what radio What if they listened to in their car? What What? What are they doing in their free time? What are they doing for fun? And then just based on how how they behave, you can go find other people just like them.

Okay, great. Talk about direct mail. Loose Are you guys? I think you alluded to direct mail. How’s that working out for you?

Direct Mail is one of our strongest streams of revenue. And it’s also due to acquisition as well. And just to backtrack just a bit Sandy, with what you’re saying about psychographics. How they respond is very important. And I also think it’s important to consider when the timing of when you want to make an acquisition appeal, specifically for our organization, with our direct mail campaign, we spend a lot more money on acquisition during the holiday season, because reports or studies have been shown that people want to donate to hunger related causes more around Thanksgiving and Christmas than they do, let’s say, in the summertime.

Yeah, I used to do the same thing I used to boy, I did a lot of heavy acquisition starting in October. And you’re exactly right. And it was, it was Christmas for me for many months, because we were bringing in so many new donors and new donations. It was fun.

Right, right. And overall, direct mail is a very strong stream of revenue for us. And yeah, I mean, it’s, it’s invaluable.

Okay, so this is interesting question, what is the one thing that you that all nonprofits should either avoid, or you wish you would have avoided? Let’s go ahead and start with most of this time.

Well, I’ve, like I said, I’ve only been with in the food banking world for a year now, one thing that all nonprofits should avoid, I think, would be avoiding looking at your data and taking it for granted. You know, when somebody sends you back, any piece of mail or opens in an email, there’s so many tools out there, whether it’s Google Analytics, or certain email vendors that allow you to track which parts of your emails are being clicked upon. I think that ignoring data, at least from my experience at this point would be it’s just setting yourself up for failure.

That’s it and Sandy.

Yeah, me. So I completely agree. It’s like, that’s the equivalent of sticking your head in the sand and just pretending that it all go away. There are so many things that I think nonprofits should avoid that I’m having a really hard time picking one. I think operating without a plan is a huge mistake. I think doing things just because you’ve seen another nonprofit down the street and do it and it looked like it worked really well. I think that’s a big mistake. I think musos right. If you’re not paying attention to your data, I think that’s a mistake. Or if you’re, like you said earlier, John, if you’re using Excel or a Google Sheet, instead of using a tool that’s designed to track data, I think that’s a big mistake. I think there are so many, we could probably talk for an hour about another webinar, mistakes people are making that they really shouldn’t be. Good question, though.

Right. And I think from my own experience, it’s really you have to watch out for the perils of, of getting too involved in believing on social media, you know, it’s got to be a really good fit with the organization. A lot of times I’ll say, Oh, we, you know, we really got to advertise on Facebook, or, you know, let’s try to or the worst one, and I see this in local organizations, they do tend to be on the smaller side is like, let’s win a contest. You know, like getting the most likes for this, you know, if the bank gets the most likely, then we’re going to win $5,000 or 15. And they literally will spend I just a gazillion hours. And yes, one person will win. However, unfortunately, many will lose. And that’s something that I still see and unfortunately, in my local neck of the woods, but you know, at this point, you know, we really are at the end of the hour, I really would like to appreciate, again, our panelists here, we’ve got, you know, Sandy Reese, again, she’s from gets fully funded, some she’s got some great resources and tools, and I really appreciate her time on this webinar. And also Musso matzoh, Paula from dare to care. Both these folks just generously contributed their time to help community we had hundreds and hundreds of attendees on this call. The call was recorded. So we will be sending out a link so that you can pass this on to your colleagues. And we will also be including that formula calculation, we literally had over a dozen questions about hey, can you do that formula calculation on lifetime value? And also how does DonorPerfect track it which it does, it was part of the dashboards. So on behalf actually any closing comments there Sandy Musa, Sandy?

No, I just thank everybody for being here. I hope that you’ve gotten one thing that you can take away and go implement because cuz that’s how you’re gonna get the most out of the time that you spent with us today.

And so I

totally agree. Thank you John and Sandy as well. I feel like I learned a lot being on this call myself. So I’m glad I I’m glad it was a part of this

as I did as well, so I really appreciate it. And again, I hope everyone has a wonderful day and good luck with your own fund raising efforts. Take care, buddy