Major Gifts Every Day: Leveraging Technology for Actionable Strategies

Darryl Moser: Greetings, everyone. I see a few more people that are actually joining us here in the attendee list. We’ll get started here in just a moment. I wanted to welcome you all to another transformational session. My name is Darryl Moser. I’m the business development Read More

Darryl Moser: Greetings, everyone. I see a few more people that are actually joining us here in the attendee list. We’ll get started here in just a moment. I wanted to welcome you all to another transformational session. My name is Darryl Moser. I’m the business development manager here at DonorPerfect. I have 30 years of experience working with nonprofits in software and in my role at DonorPerfect, I get to look for software tools that allow our clients to extend the functionality of their system through integrated solutions. I also serve on the board of my local food pantry/social service agency and look through the eyes of a nonprofit organization when we try to source these third-party products. Today we’re going to be talking about transformative fundraising and certainly, through many sessions in this conference, you’ve hopefully gotten a chance to hear about donor acquisition and taking the donor through their journey. Some might say that major gifts are the endgame to that, but they don’t really have to be the end. In today’s session, we’ll show you the techniques that you can practice on a day-to-day basis and engage those major donors. Today, our panel will walk you through best practices for major gift fundraising, as well as show you the best techniques to manage your data in DonorPerfect. We will hear from Donna Mitchell, who is a trained professional for more than 25 years and finds joy in helping nonprofits make a difference each and every day. Donna joined DonorPerfect six years ago bringing with her a fresh outlook. She believes that while fundraising is serious stuff, the learning process should be fun and empowering. Trust me, with the practice of this session, I know this is going to be fun today. In Donna’s webinars and training sessions, don’t be surprised if you are dancing, singing, or answering trivia questions. If only we had a camera on the crowd. In her spare time, you will find her cooking, bird watching, and snuggling up with her sweet puppy, Angel. Also with Donna, we will have Ryan Woroniecki. In his decade of experience with DonorSearch has helped more than 1,000 nonprofits use data to segment their database for successful fundraising. He started by building an ecosystem of for-profit partners to help his clients fundraise better. Since then he has helped organizations design prospect management services and plans for specific prospects. Focusing on major gifts, Ryan was able to help the all-volunteer Giving USA Foundation raise the most their annual fund has ever seen. With that, I want to go ahead and turn the keys over to Ryan, who is going to take us through some of the best practices that DonorSearch has been able to provide their clients major gift fundraising. Ryan Woroniecki: Thanks so much, Darryl. Really appreciate the opportunity to be here with Donna today. Really, I appreciate the opportunity to be here with Donna today. Who’s kidding who? She is the main attraction. Thank you, everybody, for joining. We’re very excited to have you here. Donna, I have a quick question. I know for the most part we’ll do questions at the end, but someone asked if a recording of this will be available at the end. Darryl: Yes. In fact, this whole event site will be live for 30 days and after the session is over, you’ll be able to go back into the session and do a replay on it as well. We will be uploading the slide deck to this session as well. Ryan: Okay, fantastic. Anything stupid I do, there’s going to be video evidence of it for 30 days, so I’m going to try not to do stupid things. Darryl: Digital [unintelligible 00:03:47], yes. Ryan: That’s right. That said, we’re going to get this kicked off. There’s a little bit of an exercise. I want you to pull your pens out or if you have access to your CRM in this web browser or a separate web browser, I’m going to ask you to dive in. We’re going to talk about the importance of major gifts. There’s a lot of ways to talk about it, but it’s so much better if you figure out what do major gifts mean to your organization. What I would like you to do is I’d like you to write down or open up a WordPad, whatever it is, the amount of money you raised at your organization last year. Not you personally but the organization as a whole. How much money was that? Then what I want you to do next to that is I’d like you to write the 10 largest gifts that you received. The thought here is I basically want you to write how much money did the 10 largest donors give you? Now I don’t want you to go in and I want you to figure that out in case a donor gave you multiple gifts and it adds up to an amount. I just want you to go and I want you to pull out the 10 largest gifts and once you’re done, I want you to add those 10 gifts up. Once you’ve done that, you’re going to divide the gifts by the amount of money that you raise. The thought is what we’re getting at, what percentage of total dollars raised last year were the 10 largest gifts? I’ve done this exercise a few times. I did it at AFP Florida in June, that was before Delta showed up. When I asked different members of the audience after they had gone through this, one of the people said it was a little over 20%. One said it was in the mid-30s and then another one said it was somewhere over 40%, which was surprisingly large. Darryl, I believe there’s a poll we were going to launch. Darryl: There is and I just published it, so it should be available to all of you that are in the audience, I believe, with your right navigational tool. There should be a poll listed under there, if you want to start selecting whether you’re under 10%, 10% to 20%, 20% to 30%, or over 30%, that’s the percent of total giving from your top 10 donors. Ryan: Now, Donna, you were going to sing while everyone was doing this, right? Donna Mitchell: Yes, I’m going to do some Jeopardy music, but let’s see, what do you want to sing? People are still doing it, so we’ll do the Jeopardy music. Just give you a little snippet. Darryl: It’s perfect. Everybody’s weighing in. We’re starting to see it take shape. It’s good stuff. Ryan: That’s awesome. Donna, just out of curiosity in your DonorPerfect sandbox, which again, that’s not real donors, but you add information all the time and you demo it. When you do that in your DonorPerfect sandbox, what does that cover? Donna: That’s a great question. First of all, I want to thank everyone for being here. This has been such a wonderful conference so far. I’ve heard some great things, I saw some wonderful clients in here and just looking forward to the rest of the conference, but thank you. I did it in the database that we’re sandboxing in for now and it actually came up to 13%. With our training database, it came up to about 31%, but in this particular database, it was about 13%. Our major donors comprise 13% of our total raised in 2020. Is there a question and maybe others are thinking that what should that number be? What’s a nice number for that to be? Ryan: Oh, I don’t think they’re– I don’t know. The real answer is I don’t know. I haven’t done the research to dig in. You’ve probably talked to a number of experts at the Giving Institute of which DonorPerfect and DonorSearch are both members and they could tell you what a healthy breakdown is. Unfortunately, I’m not sure. What I do know is if it was something like 70%, that would be very scary because you don’t have a very diverse revenue stream. What I’m looking at on the screen is I see a 20% and a 21%, which is probably pretty good, right? That would mean you have a fairly diverse revenue stream. Darryl, somebody else said that they don’t see the poll. Are there poll results, and if so, what are they? Darryl: There are. I know a number of people who have registered. Just for clarity, I still have the poll open. You should be able to access the poll from the right-hand side of your screen. It’s one of the icons next to chat Q&A, and then there’s a poll button, and you should see an active poll in there that’s got four categories that you can go ahead and register your vote. Ryan, you may also be able to see the poll if you access it that way. If not, I can go ahead and read off what these numbers are looking like because it’s really starting to take shape. Ryan: Oh, there we go. I have to scroll down. Now I see it. Okay. Technology is really helpful when you know how to use it. User error is the biggest reason why things don’t get done. We’ve got a healthy disbursement of these. Under 10%, that’s 10.5 people or 10.5% of the respondents. 10% to 20% of all dollars raised is 38.7. That’s the biggest group. Between 20 and 30 is 22%, so roughly a quarter. 30% plus is growing. It’s now up to 31.3%. If you think about what do major gifts mean for my organization, if you eliminate those 10 largest gifts, presumably they’re major gifts, that could eliminate somewhere between 10%, 20%, 30%, maybe even more, from total dollars raised. That’s a scary way to think about it, but the beautiful way to think about it and what we’re going to focus on for the rest of the session is, “Hey, what happens if we get more of these? Maybe we can raise a lot more money as an organization.” The thought is, if you’ve got donors coming through at the beginning of the donor journey, and they’re making a gift, how can you figure out who you could engage, and how much you engage them so that they too could become a major donor, and continue to diversify your revenue streams and grow total dollars donated? Donna, I believe we are good on this exercise. Can we please go to the next slide? Donna: Sure. Ryan: The importance of major gifts, we spoke about that a lot. One thing that I will talk about is from a fundraising efficiency perspective. If you focus your time on the most qualified major gift opportunities, and we’ll talk about what does qualified mean, that is the quickest way for you to grow revenue sustainably, because just like the theme of this whole conference, relationships and community, by engaging your donors, you should be creating a community for all of them at your organization. Frankly, they should be furthering their community by engaging with you, and you can’t engage if you don’t have a relationship, right? You’re building these ongoing relationships that will foster a community, and ultimately, that is the quickest way to grow sustainable revenue. Now on the next slide, sorry, I misled you a little bit there, Donna, we’re going to talk about a study. This is a study that DonorSearch did, and the thought here is we’re going to try and qualify what does a good major gift opportunity look like? I don’t think I said this, but DonorSearch, we’re a prospect research company, wealth screening company, we’re now a machine learning company. We help folks identify major gift opportunities and a bunch of other opportunities too. The most important part of this is we’re an integrated solution with DonorPerfect. It’s the only ad that you’ll hear from me, those few words. That said, we analyze files for nonprofits all the time to try to help them find good opportunities. A while back, we did some regression analysis and we tried to say, “Hey, look, when we look at all these files, these organizations tell us how much money these people have given to them. What data is it that DonorSearch appends to a record or identifies, that says, ‘Hey, this person’s a good opportunity’?” Historically, well, screening has been all about trying to find real estate, so if someone has a lot of real estate, is that a good predictor? What about if they sit on the board of a grant-giving foundation? What if they’re an SEC insider? What if they’ve made a gift to a different nonprofit? With this backtest, we were able to figure all that out. We looked at data from over 400 of our client organizations, we anonymized it. We didn’t know who had what name, or where they were necessarily. All we knew was that, collectively, they made up two million individuals, and those two million individuals or households, oftentimes it’s couples, collectively, they gave over $5 billion to those 400 orgs. Now we’re going to talk about, hey, how do we do that analysis? How does one do this kind of regression? Darryl, you look like you’re going to say something. Darryl: I was, and maybe it’s just to provide clarity. A few people had actually asked the question when they were doing that calculation, and particularly as it relates to the research that you have represented here, what gets included in a major gift? Should grants be included in that calculation? You had mentioned some people might actually be the head of foundations who give grants. What’s your recommendation towards considering that as a major gift? Ryan: Yes, that’s a really good question. I think that would be dependent upon the type of foundation and the type of relationship that you have with that foundation. We’re going to say that Donna has done incredibly well in life, and Donna, you now make Jeff Bezos look poor, you are the nation’s first-ever trillionaire. Because you’re such a wonderful human being, you want to use some of your money for good, and you’re going to donate it, so you decide to create a private foundation. You believe that’s the most efficient way for you to make these gifts and also for you to get the tax benefits associated with making these gifts. You treat the foundation, basically like your personal philanthropic checkbook, because of the way you’ve set it up. If someone receives grants from Donna’s Foundation, and they really have this personal relationship with Donna, and that’s what’s driving these grants, then I would treat that like a major gift. Otherwise, if that is not the case, and it’s not a deep personal relationship with one person or a couple, or maybe an entire family, and that relationship is driving to giving, grants should not be considered major gifts. They are a important and separate part of your fundraising operations. What is a major gift? That is a very squishy thing. At some organizations, a major gift’s $1,000. At Harvard, it’s got to be at least six figures before it’s a major gift. We’re not defining major gifts with $1 value because we can’t say what the culture of philanthropy at your organization considers to be a major gift, we can’t. Only you can define that. Only your organization and the donors and the board can define that. Whatever is a major gift, if people meet these criteria, they’re more likely to do that as a whole. Darryl, did that answer the question? Darryl: I think it did. I think it’s really key what you said about the personal relationship. If you’re cultivating that grant through a person that you are [unintelligible 00:16:26], then the relationship is a major gift. To me, that really resonated. I know in my nonprofit, there are lots of grants that I would say we apply for that are completely faceless, and then there are grants of people that actually live in our community that are at the heads of the boards, and foundations, and so forth. There, those relationships are super important, so we tell our executive director to make sure that that relationship is in really good shape. Ryan: Do you track those the way you would track major gifts in your fundraising system, in your DonorPerfect platform? Darryl: I would say in our nonprofit because we’re relatively small, we only have about 5,000 constituents that are inside of the system, there isn’t a whole lot of tracking like that, but the grant process that they’ve gone through definitely had more tracking, and they are using DonorPerfect to register all of those grants inside of the total gift picture. Ryan: Got it. Because your organization doesn’t really have a sophisticated major gifts program, because you’re so small, which is really common, you don’t have much of the standard tracking process that another organization would, I can tell you in my limited experience, when I volunteer for the Giving USA Foundation, historically we have some committees we meet every so often once a month, ideally, and we have names in a spreadsheet. It’s not even a database. We’re trying to change that. That said, it is really dependent on the organization. You might not have the ability to really aggressively pursue major gifts. In all honesty, there was a study done a few years back that was conducted by MarketSmart, and one of the things that we learned in that study was if you’re an organization that raises $3 million, or less than a year, you’re most productive. You’re most successful with major gifts when you’re targeting 50 people or less because you just don’t have the bandwidth. Again, it goes back to these relationships, major gifts are not transactional. You need to have not necessarily a long-term relationship with somebody, but a deep understanding of what does the mission of your organization mean to that person. That’s essentially the key to understanding how can you help them further their philanthropic interests through your organization. When you know that you can get a major gift. It’s tough for one person to do that with a lot of people, and so that’s why going back, small numbers are good, and what you described as a smaller organization totally makes sense. Now we’re going to have fun with math. That’s actually the next slide. We’re going to ultimately play a game. The game is called “Who do we call who invite?” The thought is you’ve got a small list of donors from the previous week, or from yesterday, however you want to consider it, and you’re only going to have time to call one. What we’re going to do now is we’re going to go through those markers of philanthropy that will help guide who it is that we’re going to call when we get that little exercise. The first thing to focus on is giving to your organization. For the purposes of major gifts, you want to engage people that have already given to you. It can be a little different at a higher ed institution where you’ve got alumni. Although, typically, that’s still not the case. You try to engage the donors. It is a lot easier to get somebody to upgrade to a $5,000 gift than it is to bring somebody into the organization at the $5,000 level. If you think about donor retention, even small gifts, it’s not necessarily easy to get somebody to give a second time, but it’s a lot easier to get somebody to give a second time than it is to get somebody to give a first time. Focus on the giving at your organization. An easy way to track this, and I think there’s a way to do this inside of DonorPerfect, it’s the RFM, which stands for recency, frequency, and money. Donna, I see you nodding, is that a fairly simple report inside DonorPerfect? Donna: It’s actually a way that we can run some reports to get the recency, frequency, and monetary value of each donor. There are different reports that we could do to get that and then we are able to create the fields to grade them on the RFM. Then combining that total that will tell you the value of those donors. We do have a webinar on this and so it’s called Tracking Donor Trends. This is really a wonderful webinar that speaks directly to this. Ryan: Oh, that’s fantastic. If you’re really interested in this stuff, there’s a book called Fundraising Analytics, it was written by a guy named Josh Birkholz. Josh is currently the CEO of a company called BWF, it’s a fundraising consulting firm. He’s got an entire chapter dedicated to the RFM. He’s a math whiz. Just so you know, RFM, it stands for recency, frequency, and money. The thought is you want to figure out who’s given to you most recently, who’s given to you most frequently, so the biggest number of gifts, and then who’s given you the most money. Basically, the people that score highly in those three categories, they’re going to be some of your best opportunities for major gifts, because those are three good markers of a healthy philanthropic relationship. That is the first marker. We talked about that a lot because it’s so important, it’s the most important one. The next one is giving to other organizations, and where we found that ends up being really predictive is a gift of $5,000 or more. In the olden days, the BC days, before COVID days, when people would regularly go to the theater and see a performance, in the back of the programs, you might see, “Hey, there’s a list of donors and subscribers.” Non-profits oftentimes published donor honor rolls where they have donors at different ranges or tiers or giving circles. As a company, we collect that data and we’re able to say, “Hey, really, this person made a gift of X thousand dollars to this organization.” When we were doing our backtesting, we found, “Hey, there’s a really small group of people responsible for giving a large percentage of that $5 billion away who have made gifts of $5,000 or more elsewhere.” That is the second most predictive piece of information. Behind that, it’s people who sit on the board of grant-giving foundations. Behind that, it’s people who make sizeable political gifts. We’ll talk about these first three or these next three a little more in detail. After that, it’s real estate. We won’t talk about real estate that much because actually real estate’s not incredibly predictive of someone being philanthropic. Lastly, it’s business affiliations if someone’s an executive at a company where the revenue is 5 million or more typically, or if they’re an SEC insider. When I said real estate is not incredibly predictive, at some levels, it is, it can be predictive. The thought that you want to have in your mind is someone’s got 2 million or more in real estate. I’m currently in a hotel room in San Diego and I get to tell you, $2 million in San Diego is not a lot, and it wouldn’t be that predictive here. That’s pretty variable. Anyway, we’re going to focus on two, three, and four next, but this is when we’re going to do some math. We’re going to see what kind of a math teacher Ryan would have made. Donna, can we please go to the scary next slide, where we talk about the methodology that’s used. [screams] It’s not Halloween yet. Don’t scare me. In the subsequent slides, you’re going to see slides with identical column headings. You’ll see percentage of donors, percentage of giving, and predictive strength. The thing I’m going to talk about is the predictive strength. That’s ultimately what’s driving the discussion. Over here on the left, we did a few examples so that we can say, “Hey, how does this math work?” If we just benchmark the full database, this is just level set and say, “Okay, we’re looking at 2 million donors and so that’s 100% of the donor population in our study. Those 2 million donors have given $5 billion, so that’s 100% of the dollars donated in our study. The predictive strength of that is one because when you divide 100% by 100%, you get 1. Now we’re going to go down and we’re going to talk about a category of people I fall into, which is people who think they can dance, but they absolutely cannot. Oh, that’s you too? Donna: I’m a [unintelligible 00:26:01] dancer, what can I tell you? [laughter] Ryan: Really, all that matters is that you’re having fun. In this case, we’re saying that’s 30% of the donor population. That’s 600,000 individuals out of those 2 million. That 30% of the people, they’re responsible for 80% of the giving or $4 billion. How do we get to the predictive strength when it’s not one-on-one? Really, we’re going to divide 8 by 3 and you get 2.6, 80% by 30%, you get 2.6. The thought there is that that is the predicted strength. Yes, anyways, so that’s 2.6. Now we’re going to go down because this is about relationships. We’re going to talk about the people who use match.com and as we all know, if you’re using match.com, the goal is to stop using match.com. This is going to remain a small percentage of the people. Out of the 200 million people, it’s 5% and they are responsible for 50% of the giving. When we divide that 50 by 5, we get 10. The predictive strength is 10. In this imagination land that we’re going through, donors use match.com, it turns out that’s a really good predictor. They’re 10 times more likely to make a sizeable gift than someone who isn’t using match.com. Then lastly, again, because we’re talking about community, we want to focus on the people who want to use meetup, but they can’t understand how to make it work. They’re having user error like it was a moment ago with the poll. That, in this hypothetical, would make up 75% of the group. They’re responsible for 5% of the dollars donated. When you do that math, the number is smaller than one, so it’s bad, bad marker. Basically, if somebody can’t use meetup, you don’t want to approach them for a major gift. Statistically, they’re less likely to make that gift. Also, I’m noticing some of the math, the numbers in black are way wrong and they don’t add up to please ignore that. Donna, let’s go to the next slide, and let’s use this methodology in our study. In our study, if we look at this, we’re saying what’s the single largest gift DonorSearch found somebody making elsewhere. We’ve got the benchmark up at the top again, but we’re going to go all the way down to the bottom. We’re saying, when we’re looking for people who we believe made a gift between $5,000 and $10,000 elsewhere, that was 1.1% of the 2 million individuals and that 1.1% of the 2 million individuals was responsible for about 5.5% of the $5 billion donated. Somebody who’s made a single gift of $5,000 to $10,000, they’re five times more likely to make a major gift in general to any organization. Sometimes you might say, “Hey, well, this person made a really large gift to this organization,” but that’s a really different organization. Well, that’s okay. It’s not a guarantee that the person is going to make a large gift to your organization, because they have to really like what you do and they have to be engaged. Statistically, someone who’s made a $5,000 gift is more likely to make a $5,000 gift again and that’s what the math is showing here. If we go all the way up towards the top, less than 1% of our 2 million individuals gave the gift of $100,0000 or more. That less than 1% was responsible for almost a quarter of the $5 billion and so that predictive strength is 34 when you do the math. Someone who’s made a six-figure gift somewhere else, they’re 34 times more likely to make a major gift than someone who has not. That’s why we focus on giving elsewhere. Let’s hop over to the next screen, which is going to be foundation trustees. This is looking at data a little bit differently. In this case, we’re saying on the left-hand side, what are we looking at? We’re looking at the average lifetime giving, how much money has this person given to the organization over their lifetime as a donor? It could be 1 gift, it could be 18 gifts. Then below that, we’re looking at the average gift size. When they make a gift, what is the average gift size? Let’s focus on average lifetime giving. The thought is, if we look at all donors, all donors have given on average $315 to these organizations. When we just look at the people that sit on the board of a grant-giving foundation, on average, their lifetime value is about $1,000 higher. It’s $1,300. Now, this doesn’t necessarily mean that they are making gifts or awarding grants from the foundation. They can make these gifts as cash gifts or they could give in other ways to the organization from themselves directly. The thing to look at here is not, “Oh, they’re a foundation trustee. Their foundation is going to award us a grant.” It’s just simply saying, “Hey, people who spend time making philanthropic decisions for a foundation, they’re much more philanthropic themselves.” If we look down below that average gift size, all donors, again, the average gift size is $87. If you’re a foundation trustee, the average gift size is $257, so about three times higher. Again, if someone sits on the board of a grant-giving foundation, they are a good prospect typically. They could tell you they’re not interested, but you don’t know that until you ask. On the last slide here, before we go to our game, we’re going to look at political giving. Political giving, oh, we gave it away. There’s a ghostbusters theme. Donna: I know, I totally messed up, sorry. Ryan: It’s okay. I’ve made worse mistakes earlier today. The political giving. What we found is that when somebody made a single gift of $250 or more to any political or a party, they are in the top 6% of the countries. 94% of the country has never made a one-time $250 political gift. If someone’s made $1,000 political gift, a one-time $1,000 political gift, they’re in the top 1/10 of 1%. 99.9% of the country has never made a one-time $1,000 political giving. What we found is if someone’s lifetime political giving is $15,000 or more, they’ve made a 5, 6, 7, 8 larger than 8, maybe figure gift to a non-profit. There is a direct correlation between political giving and philanthropy or generosity at a high level. If you look at these stats here, what we’re doing is we’re saying, “Hey, if people’s giving down at the bottom is $500 or more, then that represents 14% of the 2 million individuals and they’re responsible for almost 3/4 or 75% of the $5 billion and the predicted strength is 25. If people are making political gifts, they’re a good opportunity. One thing to be aware of, there’s an association called Apra. Apra, think about it as AFP, but just for people that do prospect research and prospect development. They decided that it is not okay to use political giving in this way. They basically said, “Hey, at your organization, you need to decide if this is something you’re okay with.” They said that because the FEC, the Fundraising Election Committee, I believe, they said you shouldn’t use political giving for fundraising purposes. That said, another company challenged that ruling and the FEC said, “Hey, actually, we can’t say yes or no, that the use case you’re describing is good or bad.” The use case is literally what we’ve just been talking about. The FEC had an advisory ruling, but then when it was challenged, they didn’t really uphold it themselves. Apra has taken the conservative approach there. I share all of this with you just to say, this is very powerful and very predictive data. If you’d like to use it, you should, just make sure that that is a decision that is discussed at your organization. In our product, by the way, you have the ability to turn political giving data off if you do not want to use it. All right, so now we’re going to play the fun game. Donna: Come on y’all. Come on now. There we go. All right. Well, I can’t see you dancing, but I know you are. Ryan: The thought is you’ve got time to call one person. We talked through these predictive markers to try and highlight, “Hey, what says somebody is a good opportunity.” Now we’re going to try and apply that in what would be a really nice real-life situation. On the next slide, you’re going to see data that’s been pulled from a DonorPerfect report. These are yesterday’s donors. We’re really lucky to have these donors, by the way. I don’t know if you’re familiar with the Marvel movies, but a lot of these folks are in the Marvel movies. We’ve got Zoe Saldana, Mark Ruffalo, Don Cheadle, he’s my personal favorite because I think he’s a phenomenal actor, but we don’t call Don because we want to gush about what a wonderful actor he is. We’ve got time to be good fundraisers and call one person so that we can thank them for their gift and try to jumpstart the fundraising process. Darryl, I believe there is a poll that we can launch so that everyone can participate and say, “Hey–” Darryl: There is a poll, and I will publish this one. We will just give it a little bit of talking points here that Ryan and Donna can go through. I’m seeing a few people register who they think is going to get it, and then I’m going to close the poll and I can share the results with everyone. Ryan: Thank you for launching that, Darryl. Donna, we have a lot of people who are saying Bradley Cooper’s the guy to call. Donna: I don’t think that has anything to do with his wealth, I’m sure. Ryan: Well, you could be right. Depends who’s voting, we don’t know their preferences, but if we look at the giving data on this screen, why would we want to call Bradley? What about these three pieces of data, the last gift amount, lifetime gift total, and number of gifts would say Bradley Cooper’s worth a phone call? Donna: If it were me, you’re asking me specifically? Ryan: Yes, yes, yes. [unintelligible 00:38:35] in the hot seat. Donna: I’m going to say the numbers are very close as far as lifetime giving totals. It’s number of gifts so that frequency, that person is giving us more often, so that would be my choice other than the fact that he’s hot. Darryl: Are we ready to see what our audience says? [unintelligible 00:38:57] good shape here, so I’m going to bring the poll to one end and then publish it to the whole group here. Ryan: Darryl, what does it say? Darryl: Well, it looks like most of our audience actually says Bradley Cooper at 45.6% is the one who’s going to be the one that they would call again, whether it’s for fundraising or otherwise. Then Don is at 38.6%. Jeff comes in at 8.8% and Zoe Saldana at 7%. Ryan: Thank you and now, just to be clear, there’s not really a wrong answer. It’s really easy to justify all of these not based on who they are as people per se but because of their relationship with the organization. Hypothetically, Zoe might be a good person to call because for the first time she gave $5,000, which is a really high dollar amount as a first-time donor. Jeff Goldblum was next. Jeff gave two gifts, $1,050 again. He’s given you twice so that’s basically reinforcing, Hey, I do like this organization. Don Cheadle has given three gifts. That’s a fair amount of commitment and Don’s also given more money than anybody else here. Yes, Donna at your point Bradley Cooper gave four gifts. He’s given more gifts than anyone else here, he’s the most loyal. Actually what we’ve found by the way, if someone’s given 20 consecutive years, you need to call them immediately and ask for a planned gift. That’s a different session. Now we’re going to layer in more data and we’re going to play the same exact game. We’re going to say, “Hey, we know the real estate value of these people.” As an example, Chris Pratt didn’t really seem that special before, but he’s got $9 million in real estate. Maybe we want to call him. Darryl, could you please release the next poll? Darryl: We have started the poll. We have four possible answers here. If our audience wants to go ahead and register who they think they would call based on this real estate data. Ryan: In a normal world, the way it works is I try to navigate between all of you and I just tapped somebody on the shoulder and say, “Hey, who would you call?” In this world, we want you to use the poll and want you to tell us, hey, who’s the right person. Darryl: I think I [unintelligible 00:41:30] a bit more thoughtful this time around. Donna: They’re getting, yes. I could announce this like a horse race, but I don’t want to– [laughter] Darryl: [inaudible 00:41:45] Donna: I don’t want to give it away. Ryan: Coming down the track, it’s [unintelligible 00:41:51] [laughter] Ryan: Someone in the back is shouting. Come on, Paul, come on, Paul, go Paul. [laughter] Donna: You can do this. Darryl: Alright, we’ve got some definite shape to this one. We’re going to go ahead and end the poll here and then share the results. All right and it looks like we’ve got 46 votes and 60.9% work for Chris Pratt, 19.6% for Don, 17.4 for Tessa, 2.2 for Zoe. Donna: Chris Pratt is hot too. Ryan: Yes, it’s again, there’s multiple reasons to call but yes, even out in California, and most places, $9 million is still an impressive house. There’s good reason to reach out to Chris. What we’re doing is we’re using the available information. On the next slide, we’re going to see even more information. This is we’re going to bring it home. This is the last slide. There are no more polls after this slide. I know you’re all very sad but in this case, we’ve laid it on two more pieces of data. One of them is whether or not somebody is a foundation trustee and then the last one is the largest gift bound, lower range. What’s the single largest gift we believe they made somewhere else and Darryl, it looks like you have launched the poll. Darryl: I have launched the poll. We’re already getting our first vote in and it’s interesting, Ryan, as these have gotten more and more progressive, I can feel the thought processes. Donna: Yes, definitely. Although somebody really likes [unintelligible 00:43:35] a lot. Darryl: I’m not sure that the data is [crosstalk] Ryan: While we’re doing this, they’re a few comments in the chat. Someone did say that Chris Pratt always calls me so a way to go, Catherine but there’s some other neat ones. Don Cheadle from Kansas City so he’s local to Kelly Hurst and he’s environmentally friendly and interested and involved and no surprise. He’s super cool. No surprise. Emily Hill had a very insightful comment that was Don is just smart enough to hide his assets. It is not uncommon for wealthy individuals to hide their assets in trusts or other vehicles that make it difficult to find. If Don’s house on paper is owned by a company that doesn’t have his name on it, it’s going to be really tough to figure out that it’s his. Darryl: [unintelligible 00:44:44] I should probably just clarify here, the data that we are actually looking at since it’s very likely that many of these people may appear inside of the Donna search database, is this data purely fictitious for our exercise? Ryan: Some of it is, and some of it is not, but I’m not going to reveal what’s true and what’s not true. Darryl: All right. Ryan: Where are we at with the poll? Where does the– Darryl: I think that’s some shaping. It’s rather interesting. We’ll go ahead and end the poll here. It looks like we’ve got 61 votes in and Tom Morello is our winner at 41%, Zoe at 34.4, and Don at 16.4, Chris now drops down to 6.6 and Bradley is at 1.6. Ryan: The good news is there’s nothing wrong with calling any of those folks. They’re all recent donors and statistically, what we’re looking at here is there are good markers that would make you want to reach out to them and so if we just talk about the top twos, Zoe and Tom. Number one and a really big range against the machine fan. That is why Tom Morello is listed there. He doesn’t really fit the theme otherwise but so Tom, not the most important one, but he does have that $2 million piece of real estate thing going for him. He’s made a gift of $2,300 elsewhere. That’s a nice gift, statistically, not super predictive, but you will pay attention and he sits on the board of a grant-giving foundation. He’s a really good opportunity to reach out to, and then behind him according to the poll you’ve got Zoe, Zoe made a $50,000 gift somewhere else. Both of these folks are first-time donors and the thing that I really want you to think about is when have you made a gift and gotten a phone call the next day or within a week to thank you. You probably haven’t, that’s a really powerful thing. That just goes to show if you call any of these people, it’s good because you’re doing ideal fundraising work. On the next slide, we’re actually going to talk about how to get this data and donor perfect. I’m going to shut up and it’s Donna’s show. Donna: [laughs] Hi. I’m back and yes, we’re going to show you how you’re going to be able to get this data in DonorPerfect now. Understand when I show you this, we’re going to jump right into DonorPerfect and this information has been uploaded to these donor records. Before I jumped in to create the report, I actually want to show you a record. Let’s go into Tom or [inaudible 00:47:29], all of this data actually live on the bio screen in this particular case and [inaudible 00:47:39] You will see all this donor search data. When you do a search, when you go to update a profile, these values will display. Now we can report on any of these fields. I’m going to be using our easy report writer and the ease of report writer is ideal for creating your own customized reports. Particularly if you have user-defined fields that you want to include in a report. We’re going to show you how to replicate the report we just saw and I’m going to go to reports there on that menu ribbon and down to the report center. Now the report center is the hub of all of our reports and you may or may not have the easy report builder, but trust me, even if you don’t have it, you can still do an export to file in order to get that report and what I’ve done– Who do you call, three, I’m going to go over to actions and select edit, and you’ll see all of the different things we can do with an easy report, again, depending on your package. I began creating this report and you will see that I have the full name of the donor. I have my last gift amount, lifetime gift total, the number of gifts and these fields are all DonorPerfect system and calculated fields that will calculate your donor’s giving history as they are giving gifts. The real estate estimate and the foundation trustee, those are the donor search fields that we’ve selected. Over here on this list, I’m going to search for that largest gift given elsewhere, or I’m sorry, largest gift in the lower range. All I need to do is go into the search. Type in largest gift and there is my largest gift found in lower range. I simply click on it and there we have it, just goes right into the report. Your easy reports are simple as a click or click and drag to move the fields in that you want. We do have some other options with an easy report. If I go to the options on the donor name, I can do a count. I can count the number of distinct records and then I can also do totals anywhere else I decide to if I wanted to do that. Let’s just go ahead to this lifetime total under options and do a sum. Easy peasy. Now, I’m going to click on save and open. You can always come back and edit this report as desired, add [inaudible 00:50:25] and all of that. What we’re going to do is we’re going to run [inaudible 00:50:31] based on the records that I want. I just created a filter, donor search, yes. That’s just something that I did. Of course, you can always use one of those fields as a criterion. I want to see anyone where the foundation trustee is equal to yes or maybe. You can do any of those things. Let’s go ahead and run our report, and you will see my data display based on the fields that we’ve selected. All right. Here we are. I’m just going to hide this so we can see this a little bit better and make that a little bit bigger so you can all see it. What you’ll see is that field is actually there, and this is a replication of the report that we just saw. We are able to see this information and any other donor search information that we want on those records. Here you’ll see, we have a grand count of 28 donors, and we have a grand lifetime total from those donors of $152,125. It’s very, very simple, as you can see, to be able to create these reports, pulling in any of the donor search fields, as well as other DonorPerfect fields as desired. All right. Ryan: Thanks, Donna. To that point, you don’t need the donor search data to get the first three pieces of information that we were using. Donna: Correct. [crosstalk] Ryan: Regardless of whether or not you have donor search, it doesn’t matter. You can still do this exercise to figure out, “Hey, I only have time to call one person and I don’t have a whole lot of time for major gifts, unfortunately. Who should it be?” You can use DonorPerfect to do that. Donna: Right. Perfect. It’s DonorPerfect. [laughter] Donna: Just like to get that in there. [laughs] All right. Let’s get back to our presentation. Darryl: Right. I know that we’ve been talking about how to figure out who to call, but one of the challenges that I keep hearing and even inside of my nonprofit as well as from the customers that I bumped into, is that, “Gosh, how do I do it? What’s that cultivation technique? Do I have to live on match.com to actually figure out how to build a relationship, or what is it?” I’m hoping you can help us out here, Ryan. Ryan: Well, full disclaimer. I would not recommend you go to match.com to try and find donors to your organization. That would be a horrible mistake and highly unethical. Not an ethics session, but it is AFP ethics month. There’s one, hopefully, that’s not a nugget of information for anyone. There it is. [crosstalk] Donna: My mom would say, “Don’t do it.” “Why?” “Because I said so,” so don’t do that. [laughter] Ryan: Bingo. How do you continue the relationship? How do you engage people? The thought is, and Donna, it might be possible that these slides are backwards because I think there should be a slide for the first phone call. Donna: Oh, my. Ryan: Is there another slide after this? Here we go. They’re backwards. I apologize– Donna: It’s my [unintelligible 00:53:58] finger. Ryan: You got a quick trigger finger. I do not want to face you in the Old west draw-up. Tips for calling a donor. Number one. The first thing to do, it’s fundamentals, thank the donor. Thank the donor for their gift. Number two, again, it’s really easy. You want them to talk most of the time. If you’re talking most of the time, you’re probably not doing this right. You want to ask them why they gave or what brought them into the organization. Get them talking about, if you can, their emotions because giving is an emotional thing. You want to have an impact. What was the impact? One of the things you could ask them is, “What were you trying to accomplish with that gift? What did you want that money to do to the organization?” When they talk about it, they should highlight one or multiple parts of the organization, some different points of the mission. You should draw out through conversation why that’s important to them, and then tell them a little bit about what you’re doing along those lines. Again, it should be conversational. You shouldn’t jump in and just start spouting the mission. You should talk about the pieces of the mission that are relevant in a conversational way. Then lastly, my recommendation is that you don’t ask for another gift on this phone call. I believe personally, that would be a mistake. Now, if the person says they want to give again because they’ve never had someone call them and thank them so quickly, you don’t want to stand in the way of that gift by any stretch. If someone wants to give, you help them make that gift. Ideally, you should ask for permission to follow up with them. Maybe you want to schedule another meeting to learn more about their interests, or maybe you don’t even want to want to schedule something at that time. It depends on your style. The important thing is, you’re asking for permission to continue the dialogue. Then, if we go backwards in the slide, the thought is, so you’ve ended that phone call. You’ve hung up. Now, what do you do? You email the donor right away about the stuff that they’re interested in. Darryl, in your case, I know we’re running up on time, what brought you to work at the social service Oregon food pantry, where you volunteer. I guess work is not the right word but brought you volunteer? Darryl: Yes. Actually, the local business that we had, had heard that they were doing a gift drive for kids that were in need during the Christmas season in our community. That was just something that our company decided that they wanted to get involved in. The more that I ended up learning about the organization, a few years later, I ended up wanting to become a board member for it. Ryan: In this scenario, we had a discussion. We talked about the Christmas drive for kids. I would imagine there’s probably other things that the organization does for children specifically. Darryl: Oh, totally. They offer full case management. They’re helping to feed the homeless or those that are disadvantaged at this point. All of the work that they were doing, surrounded that one experience that I ended up hearing about, and it just completely strengthened the reasons why I wanted to help support that organization. Ryan: Then, in this case, hypothetically, I called you. We spoke. You talked about the Christmas drive, and you talked about the fact that it was really helpful for these children. I’d probably follow up in an email and share more information about the different work that’s going on to help the youth of the community. After that, I would either schedule a time to meet. I’d reach back out. I might send in that email, “Hey, I’m going to call you at this time,” just to let them know the call’s coming to try and schedule a meeting, or maybe you try to schedule a meeting via email afterwards. That’s a separate touch than the follow-up to say, “Hey, here’s relevant information about how we help the youth in the community.” You schedule that meeting, then you meet a second time. Afterwards, you send a more specific follow-up email saying, “Thank you for your time and your interest. I want to highlight the different parts of the organization that were really interesting to you and areas where you might want to make an impact.” Then lastly, you ask for permission to meet again. At that meeting that you end up having, you should have a gift proposal ready. You should have an ask amount plan. Don’t ever go into and ask without understanding a number. Along the way there’s questions you can ask that aren’t included here, which are, what are the three organizations that are most important to you, and why, and what kind of a relationship do you have with them? They’ll probably tell you about some of the large gifts they’ve made so that you can understand what numbers they have been comfortable with historically. That also doesn’t mean that you shouldn’t ask for more if it feels natural. The whole thing is on some level, it should feel natural. In some cases, the ask is very, very easy. The ask shouldn’t be hard if you understand what they like and what they want to accomplish philanthropically. You make the ask. That’s it. We’re supposed to have more time for questions, aren’t we? I couldn’t shut up. I’m long-winded. Darryl: That’s okay. I think [unintelligible 00:59:49] the feedback that I’m getting from a lot of this is that it’s a really good session. I want to be careful and mindful of the closing remarks. I do see that there’s one question out there that I think is super relevant to this and this question is to whether or not is it okay if it comes from a board member rather than a staff member and I’ll even take a stab at answering that? Because I found that in our community our board members are better known than the person that we ended up hiring as the Director of Development and when we had our board member ask for a $10,000 gift, it was a much easier gift to receive than it was if it would’ve come from a relatively new Director of Development so I think both are very valid, but there’s a whole process in Board Development that we could talk about that surrounds major gifts and that’s a session onto itself but Ryan, I think this was some great material on relationships. I’m just going to double-check our Q&A here to see if we’ve missed any and we’ll try to follow up. There is a document that should be attached to this session at this point in time and then there’s a specific donor search question so if you’ve got anything else that you wanted to quickly ask here to top off this session and that– Do we have one more slide left? I wasn’t sure if you needed to– Donna: We do, it was about how to track a major gift in DonorPerfect. Ryan: Oh, yes. Donna: Yes, we were talking about when the gift actually comes in, what you would do to be able to track that and make that contact information so that you could reach out to that donor. I don’t know whether we have time to do it now, unfortunately, because I know folks want to get to the closing remarks or the last presentation, but it’s really creating a contact record and if you go to, I am going to say something. If you go into DonorPerfect, you’ll notice [inaudible 01:01:39] now that new [inaudible 01:01:39] scheduled donor outreach. This is going to be your best friend. This is the way that you’re going to be able to keep abreast of, who you need to be contacting and when you can track all of this information right here in the scheduled donor outreach when you create a contact record in DonorPerfect. Do we have time to go just a little bit, just about two minutes or shall I end it here? Darryl: What I’m thinking Donna is there a session in tomorrow’s, program that might actually touch on some of this contact material? It’s my [unintelligible 01:02:12] Donna: Not at all. Darryl: Okay. Then– Donna: Not with me. Not that I’m aware of, but we can certainly if someone wants to– I think we can schedule meetings with us, if you want to do that, I’m happy to go through that possibility with you. If someone wants to schedule a meeting, if you just go to the person’s profile, you can ask to schedule a meeting and I believe as the speakers, you can schedule a meeting with me. If you’d like that, I’d be happy to help out. Darryl: Great. Yes and trust me, we’ve got your feedback and I can see there being and I’m core presentation to this that we may be offering so keep an eye on your email, even post-conference. This is the first time that we’ve been able to pull all of this content together and my tremendous thanks to Ryan and Donna for doing an excellent job in this content and looking forward to doing some more. Thank you all and we’ll see you all at the closing remarks for today. Donna: See you later. Thanks so much. Thank you, Ryan. Ryan: Thanks, everyone. Thanks, Donna. Bye. Donna: Keep those relationships going. Bye. [pause 01:03:17] [01:03:51] [END OF AUDIO]