Mercedes: Good afternoon everyone!
Welcome to today’s CharityVillage webinar! We will just wait a moment
for everyone to join the session. Okay, we will get started, welcome
to today’s CharityVillage webinar! My name is Mercedes and I am the Marketing &
Communications Specialist with CharityVillage. As we are gathering here on a virtual platform, it is important to acknowledge that
each of us is joining this webinar from the ancestral or unceded lands of the
Inuit, Metis, and First Natio
n People. As a settler on this land, I’d like to
acknowledge that I’m speaking to you from the traditional, ancestral, and
unceded territory of the Anishinabek, which includes the Ojibwa of
Fort William First Nation. For those who may be joining a CharityVillage
webinar for the first time, CharityVillage is Canada’s largest online job
board for the nonprofit sector. In addition to our online job board, organizations
can also post volunteer positions, so if you are looking for work or to re
cruit talent in the
sector, CharityVillage is a great place to start. We also have a ton of excellent resources
for nonprofit professionals, including online courses, articles, fundraising tools, and free
webinars like the one we are presenting today. Before we start today’s webinar, I would like to
quickly run through some housekeeping items. You may have noticed when you joined the webinar
that you were automatically put on mute. Since we have hundreds of participants
in today’s session,
it is important for us to minimize the amount of background noise so
that everyone can clearly hear the presentation. But, you can still ask questions and
make comments using the Question box at the bottom of the Zoom control panel –
look for that at the bottom of your screen. We will be taking questions
at the end of the webinar, so please submit your questions as you think
of them, and we will do our best to get to as many as possible. You can also email your
questions to webinars@chari
tyvillage.com. If you happen to encounter any technical issues
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in the question box or by sending us an email. We will do our best to get any technical
difficulties resolved as quickly as possible – but in a worst-case scenario,
please remember that we are recording today’s webinar and we will send you the
full recording by email tomorrow. So, if you get called away or disconnected, you will
still
be able to view the full presentation. And with that, I’d like to welcome our presenter
for today, Daryl Hatton the CEO of FundRazr. Daryl: Thanks, Mercedes. I really
appreciate it. Hi everyone, welcome to today. We have a pretty
information packed presentation for you. Want to talk about fundraising in the economic
headwinds we've been all been experiencing. And what we can do about it. I'm Daryl Hatton,
I'm Founder and CEO of ConnectionPoint. ConnectionPoint is a collaborative
commerce p
latform. Of which we have a whole component that works with charities. We have tens of thousands of charities that we've
worked with, and we're a certified B corporation. So we're building our business in a way to
benefit, the world and humanity, and, in total. Now, We are also wanna do a land acknowledgement
- ConnectionPoint was founded on the unceded, ancestral territory of the Tsleil-Waututh,
Squamish, and Musqueam First Nations and from coast to coast to coast across Canada
we acknowle
dge the ancestral and unceded territory of the Inuit, Metis and First
Nations Peoples that call this land home. We're grateful for the opportunity to work here
and to give our respects to the first inhabitants. So when you're we talk about
ConnectionPoint, you know, we're considered thought leaders
in social and digital fundraising. That's me up on a stage at Bloomberg talking about the future of crowdfunding that
we broadcast around the world. And I did a TED Talk on philanthropy as
enter
tainment and how we can help increase the amount of donations that come from a
regular population. But you might know us better by some of our brands. So we take
our platform to market under the FundRazr, CrowdFundr, CocoPay, and PetFundr brands and
we have about 70 other partners and one of the most important of those is CharityVillage.
So the CharityVillage crowdfunding platform is based on ConnectionPoint technology
and we collaborate in helping deliver this technology to the marketplace
for
small/mid-sized nonprofits in Canada. And anyone who's looking to raise money
for all sorts of different kinds of causes. So, you know, my agenda is usually
wake up. Make more coffee. Make more coffee. That's actually the
agenda for the morning as well. But if we want to look at what
we'll do for the presentation. We want to take a look back at
2023 you know kind of what the economic conditions were and how those
impacted giving trends in that timeframe. And then look forward into 202
4 and
how those trends are going to affect what our fundraising environment will look like. We'll talk about those market trends and some
of the other ones that are related to it. And then we wanna cover some successful strategies
and tactics you can use for helping raise money in this year and under these conditions. At
the end, we'll talk and have some questions. So we take a look back at 2023, you know, I think
of looking in the rear view mirror at the storm. We were coming out of the ti
meframe
when the pandemic was fading away. So while we had had it from before
the side effects, the residual, that kind of hacking cough that hangs out after
you've had the flu for a while, was still with us. And that and had many impacts on
things like our supply chains, and our ability and access to goods. And I don't know if you recall,
it was a reminder to me. That we went through this thing called the
Great Resignation where people were leaving their jobs because they were fed up,
th
ey didn't want to go back to the office. They were looking to change the
work that they were doing to have more meaning. I tend to think
of that as a reprioritization. They didn't give up on work. They wanted
to change the work they did. And many of them wanted to or looked at coming
and working in the nonprofit sector. You know, it would be great if we'd
had some of the money available to hire some of this talent that was looking to work. But that resignation was an important
mental thing
that was going on for people as it was uncertainty about
where people were going to work, whether or not your coworkers
were going to still work with you. So part of those supply chain issues and and that
and the stimulus that was presented or used in the pandemic to help keep the economy afloat resulted
in rising inflation. And with inflation coming up, central banks around the world, you know, Bank
of Canada, Federal US Reserve, you know, in UK. All started to raise interest rates
to tr
y and calm and get inflation back under control. And that had
a pretty negative side effect for a lot of people in the country
because our mortgage rates went up. The cost of living went significantly higher,
and even the cost of some of the financing that was used for production
of food and things like that. So overall we had a fairly significant
increase in our cost of living and a decrease in our disposable income,
what we could use typically to give. So these things were difficult for
giving. And then to top it all off from your point
of view, a lot of the programs that were initiated during the pandemic for additional
fiscal sponsorship of charitable sector and even of small business are being, you know,
unwound and wiped and pulled back, you know, some of the CERB things and the the CEBA
loans and things like that that were there. So again, that's that's causing some
stress on our economy. And then, you know, we have war in Ukraine which was continuing and
then broke
out in between Israel and Gaza in the end of the year. And this is important
because from a mental perspective this is distracting. It is unsettling for a lot
of people. And when we feel unsettled, we tend to go into a protection mode. We want to
try and kind of hunker down, not spend as much. We hoard a little bit more. And so this
was also negative in terms of giving. So to take a look at the impact
of this, want to look at it from, you know, how did this impact giving? What was different
about giving in the
year? And one of the best ways that I know to do this is to look at the fundraising
effectiveness project - that's run with GivingTuesday. So the GivingTuesday group
brings together, you know, in the back end, brings together all the major vendors in
the world, in the, in the fundraising space. And, you know, ConnectionPoint participates
in this in helping put together our data so that we can get a clear picture of what
happened in the giving market during the year. No
w one of the reasons for doing this is
we're trying to get to the data sooner than would normally come in analysis of
the industry. You know sometimes with the analysis it can trail what actually
happened 2 to 3 years - anything the government does on that is just difficult
for them to get the data in real time. But we have it all flowing through
our platforms. So we voluntarily share anonymized data about what's going
on to help. The - I was hoping the numbers would be out by the time we
did
this presentation. I was really hoping they'd slide under the wire here, but we
only have as of September of last year. So even though we get them quicker, we don't
get them really quickly. But as of September last year, the year to date trends were that
overall number of donors was down almost 8%. So, you know, this is a change compared to the
prior year and then kind of adjusted for the length of time during the year. The total,
total dollars raised were down about 1%. Which is, you
know, not that significant, but if
you think how strong inflation was at around 4%, that means we're down overall in terms
of about 5% in giving purchase parity, you know, purchasing power parity as they call it. And our retention of donors dropped
slightly, it was below 1%. So if we dig into that a little bit more,
let's take a look at the donors. If we take a look over the last couple of
years, you can see in 2020 the bump that happened from the pandemic. The number of
donors that decide
d to contribute because of the the trouble that was happening with the
pandemic around the world. And then you can see in 2021 that it went back almost exactly
reversed the 4.2% that increased dropped again afterwards. But the very concerning trend
was the year following with 2022 and then 2023. This, if you plotted this graph
over a longer period of time, you'd actually see that there's an overall decline
in the number of donors happening. And that it intensified in 2023. There's lots of r
easons
we can speculate for this, particularly that, you know, people just had lost some of their
disposable income to the cost of food going up, the cost of our accommodation going up, cost
of gas going up. A variety of things like that. And so this is a pretty significant
trend to watch for. And then if we go forward and I promise the, this
gets a little more positive as we go. The if we take a look at the trend monthly
of what was happening during the year and kind of map it year to yea
r - you can see
the blue line that's happening in there. The blue line was showing that the number
of donors were declining again during the year on a month over month over month -
on a year over year basis. So, you know, our hope is that with the slight improvement in
the economy that happened at the end of the year, that we could see the end of the inflation
bubble, on that that people would start donating again and we'll have that data pretty
shortly to know whether or not that had happ
ened. If we take a look at the gifts
coming in by the, you know, the number of donors by the size of their gift. So people making micro gift, under
$100, small gift under $500. These are typically the gifts that are given online. It's really important to see the
number of small gifts had dropped fairly significantly. The number of donors
that we're giving small gifts had dropped. The major donors, the, you know,
and supersized donors and even some of the mid size doors were probably
not as
affected by the economy - in terms of their wealth and their ability to
give, they stayed fairly strong in giving. And that kind of masked some of the big decline
that was happening down below. If we take a look at the the number of donors here 84% of the
donors are in the small or micro gift category. And while I see, well, they
want to give small amounts, I don't need to worry about
them individually all that much. The concern is, is that this is the best target
population for growing i
nto long-term mid-size and major gifts donors. This is the place where
you can start to have a relationship with these folks that may end up coming in to you, if they
start to develop a lifelong relationship with you, then they may encourage friends and
family. If they have a major bequest, as someone passes on, these are the kind of
things, places where you can attract them. So it's really important that
that number of donors is dropping. If we take a look at the number of donors by
the l
ifecycle, meaning how did they come to us? Were they a net new donor in the year to
this cause? So that's a big drop - 17% shows up in that area, where we've lost
new donors coming in quite significantly. Newly retained donors are a donor who gave for the first time last year. And
then gave again this year. And that dropped again. So if we think about
the the kind of the graph that we saw after the pandemic bubble, that kind of makes a
little bit more sense is that they may have given once
or twice during the pandemic
period, but now they're not giving again. The repeat retained donors, those donors that
have given to us in previous years and continue to give to us has even dropped a little bit.
That's kind of a normal thing to have happened. Unfortunately, I think it's something
we really can do better on doing for our causes is helping keep these donors
retained with us for a long period of time. And then recaptured donors or donors that
have stopped giving for a little wh
ile and have come back and given again - and that was
also down. The kind of the key thing in here is that this is the group that's really,
really important for the financial health of a nonprofit or charity - because this
is the ones that you can wake up in the morning and hopefully count on to be there
and then your fundraising activities can expand on this group and hopefully add to
this group. So it's pretty important thing. Mercedes: Daryl, sorry to interrupt, we
just had a great ques
tion come in. So, Sarah asked how much money do the micro and small donors represent as in what percentage of
total donations come in from that market? Daryl: Great question. I actually had a slide
and I hid it on that topic, I'm sorry, I didn't answer that for you. It's anywhere between 2 and
5% in each of those categories at the bottom. So from an overall point of view, the major donors are giving the the lion share of the
of the money coming into a nonprofit. The smaller donors dollar-wis
e are not in
terms of the number of donors they are. Mercedes: Perfect, thank you.
Daryl: I can get to that answer at the end too if we want. I've got it off to the side
- so we'll try and get you the answer to that. Okay. So let's kind of slide one more
thing here. So kind of a summary of 2023, is that retail giving, giving of, you know,
kind of first time donors or donors that are coming to us typically digitally giving is
down significantly - sometimes as much as 17%. That over the y
ear exceptional
gift giving was masking this trend. It stayed pretty strong, which was obviously fantastic because
that's what's funding a lot of things. But it's also, it's hiding the trend that
we're losing donors, that donors are not participating in the same way as they have in
previous generations and in previous years. And that the overall trending, you know,
and trend for that is negative. So what we know out of all of this is that
acquiring and keeping donors is hard. And that smal
l donors coming in, the net new
influx of small donors, they're holding back. The economy has created challenges for them. So, yeah, this is particularly a
tough environment for new causes. If you don't have major gift donors on the way,
if you don't have super gift donors at all. Then the lifeblood of your small
organization just getting started out in your fundraising can be very, very tough. I focus a lot on the small donors and the
small digital donors here because the starting the rela
tionship with them they are the highest
opportunity for growth in terms of who you have. You know, you can get a smaller donor to
double their gift and it's not such a big deal. Compared to a larger dollar, doubling their gift just by showing an
increase in the value of what we deliver. So we take a look at moving
this slide forward, there we go, looking ahead into what do we have on your
horizon? From a psychological point of view, we have some Canadian potentially of
Canadian federal and
US elections. This matters because the politicians
who want to get elected will paint the picture of everything is going bad. And
they're the only ones that can fix it. But this has a negative effect on the on the
psyche of the population. And as a result, they tend to do that hunkering down that
that protection mode that they want to do. With the war in Gaza and in Ukraine, kind of
continuing seem to be an ongoing thing here. This again is a depressing thing. It brings
our energy level d
own. And unfortunately, because of the tightening of
the of the interest rates, like the increase in the interest rates and
the the tools that the governments were using to clamp down on inflation we probably had
the economy slip into recession. I saw this morning that officially UK and Australia
have been deemed to have been in recession. And I expect we're going to see Canada
being called in a recession here very, very shortly as the, the numbers come out. And you know, this is, this is h
ard because
people have been expecting this for a while. And it shows that the economy is contracting and there's not as much money flowing for
new jobs and and for things like that. That's all the bad news about what's going on.
The good news though is that inflation is easing. It is working to draw inflation down, which is
going to start having effect on our shopping carts when we go grocery shopping and on our
interest rates that we're paying on our mortgages. And people will start havin
g a little bit
more money available to them. You know these interest rates declines have an outsized
effect on the purchasing power in the community. And fortunately underlying all of it with the
view that the interest rates are coming down. The stock market is responding quite favourably
and so people's portfolios are strengthening, which will help give them
the stability. Yeah. So the hope is that consumer confidence
may start to return this year. And if it does, we need to get ahead of
it to
try and remind them that they are feeling better and that they can help take care of those that
haven't come through this period in such good shape as some. So let's talk a little bit
about, you know, what do we do about this? How do we compete in this market? And it's
important to acknowledge that this is a very highly competitive and noisy marketplace. It's noisy from the, in terms of giving about the
various the variety of causes that we can give to. There are so many causes around
us that are in
need this year. And particularly in the last little while, as we're coming through the
pandemic. I think, CanadaHelps and Imagine Canada had done some stats that were saying that
you know 50% of causes were expecting that the needs were increasing and the revenue would not
be enough to handle any of the increase at all. So we're suffering in our ability to deliver
services to the population. But you're also in a market for a competitive market
place for the attention of you
r donor. So in when that happens, we're competing against
celebrity, we're competing against entertainment. We're competing against politicians as I
mentioned. We're talking competing against businesses who are talking about their products
or services. And this is an area where in order to be able to attract new donors, we have to
get messages out that will stand out compared to this crowd. So we have to think about that when in
terms of how are we going to deal with our donors. And there w
as a study by the Lilly
Family School of Philanthropy, where they went out and
they did a bunch of testing. To say what motivates donors to give
and existing donors to continue giving, and for donors to switch the causes they
give to. And I'll leave it up there. I'm hoping you've already read a few of the bolded
words in red, but the key thing here is that donors want to see the impact that they
create, they want to know how their money is being used. And that they're willing to
switch an
d in fact will proactively switch to causes that help communicate to them how
their money is being used. And that they will plan to continue to contribute to those.
They want to develop a relationship there. And it makes sense from the point of view of you
know, if we start to think about some of the other reasons people give - it feels good when I know
I made a gift and when I can very explicitly see what my gift accomplished not what the overall
impact of the cause is but what my money di
d. I'm more willing to spend
again because I'm actually purchasing a feeling when I'm giving a gift. So a key recommendation for all this is
that in all your communications with donors, I'm going to focus here on digital donors. So, you know, there are different ways that you'll
handle major gift or supersized gift donors. You know, you're building a longer-term
relationship with them. You're already probably telling them the impact of their
gift. But when we're talking to to micro donors o
r digital donors or small gift
donors, we need to focus on the donors’ impact and particularly for younger
donors - how that helps the community. So they want to know not only what their
impact was, what they did themselves, but kind of how that fits into
the puzzle overall. Because we can joke and say sometimes it's all
about them, but it's all about them. They want to know what they've done. We talk
about communications here. We encourage you to communicate more often to your group of
d
igital donors than you might think you should. And that it should be kind of an
80/20 or even a 90/10 rule. Where most of the communications that you have
with them about saying where you're going and the work that you're doing and how their
financial help is helping you do that work. You want to celebrate the successes of what
that work is doing. You want to minimize the number of asks in there because they don't
want to hear from you to ask all the time. They want to hear from you to say
the good
work you're doing. Next After which is a great consultancy if you've ever followed
any of their work they do the generosity Freak Show and a few things like that
they hold this fantastic conference. They did some testing and they do a lot
of work testing with major causes around what will motivate donors and things like that. And they tested this concept of, of
continuous communication. They added one cultivational email, a show
and tell type email every week. And they saw an 80%
increase in engagement, an 8% increase in donations
and a 21% increase in revenue. So the size of the gift went
up fairly dramatically. The number of people participating
were giving up - was going up. From a group that had already given. So as a way
of increasing your revenue from within your group, this cultivation sequencing, where you
you put out on a regular basis weekly or monthly - the type of work that's going on
here donors seem to really, really welcome, and the more you can pers
onalize that
message and make it about that donor, you know, it's certainly include their
name when you're sending them something. It helps them feel involved. If you're telling the stories, the
more you can use real examples. Perhaps anonymized example about the work
that you're doing, one of the clients that you've supported, something like that.
It can help the donor feel closer to the problem, closer to the solution. And by
talking about how it works with the rest of the community for y
ounger donors - you can
leverage their FOMO - fear of missing out. They don't want to be the last person in their group that jumps on to help
support a particular cause. So you can talk about that.
And then the last thing we encourage you to do is make it easy to share. And you might go share - I
thought social media was dead. So social media is certainly in decline.
Eventually all empires crumble. You know, here is the Roman Empire and the ruins in Rome. It sometimes takes a little small,
it's smaller than you might think
and it can take longer to happen. So it's kind of more of a revolution, an evolution than a revolution. Our
behaviour with social media has changed. Trolls and and kind of negativity online has destroyed some of our willingness
to share our personal experiences. We're not willing to go out there as
much. And as a result, our sharing is moved from private or from public social
where I will share generally on Twitter, generally on Facebook. And talk to the th
e whole
world through that to dark or private social, where I'll share it maybe using
Facebook Messenger or WhatsApp. Or just text messaging or
others to my close group of friends and family - the sharing that's
happening there is actually increasing. But the sharing that's happening that's publicly viewed is not. And so to give you an
example, there's some stats on this. Gartner did a study and they said that 28% of people are now more willing
to share their lives online, which is down fr
om 40% even a couple of years
ago. So we've kind of our behaviour has changed. And in a similar study, they said, 61%
are way more selective about what we post. We're not just willing to post anything
anymore. You know, even some of the things that we used to do that were fun, we're not
willing to do that anymore. And this is, they gave some stats on this move to
private social that only about 30% of the things that people are sharing are
on public social. 35% of it is going into group cha
ts like the messaging and 43%
is still shared with texting or email. So this is people sharing or
emailing stuff to each other. So I think. Well, there's
a couple of thoughts there, but I'm gonna try and move on
here because we gotta get going. So why do we talk about using social media?
Because, the Lilly study showed that social media has a high propensity to
motivate the giving of a gift. The younger you are, the more likely it is. On a
scale of one to 5, Gen Z, averages at about 3.8.
So they're more likely to give, be motivated to
give based on something they see on social media. Millennials a little less, Gen X a little less.
Boomers don't aren't that motivated by it. They don't want to talk about it. So this is
really for for younger donors. And PayPal Giving Fund Canada did a report, in full disclosure
I'm a director of the Giving Fund in Canada, that younger donors under 40 years old
are driven are driven by the impact and heavily influenced by friends and family
i
n determining who they give to. So this kind of communication is really
important to get them involved. And to give you some idea of the kind
of conversion that happens from this, Classy published some nice numbers that
show the different social media platforms, how much traffic comes from
them, and how well it converts. So you can see there that and this matches
our platforms very closely - where about 90% of the traffic coming from Facebook
is coming in. The interesting thing is look at
the conversion rate -
13% conversion rate. If this was an email blast, you'd find that this
is probably making you pretty happy. If you look at Instagram, you get
less traffic from Instagram that comes in but it converts. The people are
much more intentional when they arrive. 22.7% conversion rate - pretty darn good. Youtube, you don't get very much traffic at all but when
they come they're really ready to give - you know, 17% of them are giving. And at LinkedIn,
you don't get very much tr
affic at all. LinkedIn is not very viral in terms
of its sharing capability. But the conversion rate of people coming from
LinkedIn tends to be very, very high. So this will be important, remember this
number for later on. It's kind of important, I think, to think of the rest of
them as like it doesn't matter. You know, TikTok has got a lot of interest in it. But it doesn't tend to have a lot
of traffic, a lot of conversion. And Twitter or X has become
so toxic that nobody wants to go ther
e. Nobody visits from
it and nobody converts from it. Okay, so you might say, okay, fine,
that's great, but I don't have a crowd. I don't have anybody that we work with on social
media. And this is a pretty common problem. So one of the techniques you can look at, well, the techniques you can look at to get a crowd is
to build the crowd, buy a crowd or borrow a crowd. We think having this crowd is very, very
important as we're moving forward in our society now because it's gonna become
tou
gher and tougher to get donors. And what we need is a community of
advocates that will help us find new donors for us because we can't afford to
market them in some of the ways we used to. And if we really want to grow and we want to deal
with the attrition rates. And you know some of the retention rates we have, we have to find new
ways to bring in new donors on a regular basis. So, if you want to build a crowd, these are things that you're probably already doing.
You've got your newslette
r going out. You have your website and so that someone
searching for you for you they can learn about you. And ideally the work that you have on
your website is focused on the individual projects you're working on because that makes it much
easier for a donor to understand their impact. We talk more about micro projects later. And
then you have your social media where you may have no one at this point or you may be starting
out in social media to grow to grow your crowd. Building a crowd is
great. The only problem
with it is it takes a long time. Pretty slow. So other ways to amplify that or grow it.
And one of the ways is to buy a crowd. Now this isn't an option for most causes but I
mentioned it because it is for some. And that's where you might do advertising on Google or
Facebook or Instagram. Not Twitter anymore, but LinkedIn. And remember the
LinkedIn conversion number? LinkedIn donors tend to be much to
be mid-sized gifts or major gift donors when they come in from a
LinkedIn platform. So this can be a very cost-effective way for
getting a donor targeted in that size because you can do some very explicit targeting on
LinkedIn for the for the types of people that want to see your ad, that may respond
to it both from a geography point of view, from kind of a role point of view, what their
interests are. And so it can convert fairly well. This graph was showing just what, you
know, simple query of Adwords looking for Alberta Wildlife Rescue. And the number
of people
that were searching for it was 280 in a month. Interestingly enough, it only costs you a $1.82
in a click to get somebody through on that. If they leave you a hundred dollar gift and
you have a pretty high conversion ratio, you're making a little bit of money on it.
Now you have an opportunity to work with that donor to continue forward for future
gifts. But it can be a way of acquiring. So doesn't generate a lot of money off
the bat, but starts to build your crowd. But the most
cost-effective way
to do this is to borrow a crowd. And in borrowing a crowd, you have to
remember that all the people around us have crowds. So your board and community
members, lot of the reason your board is there is so they can reach out into
their network and and share your story. Getting them to share your posts and share your communications about the impact you're
doing can help bring their members over. Same thing with your corporate sponsors. What
we hear a lot is a corporate spon
sor will say, I would love to help you, ask me for
anything except writing a bigger cheque. And the best thing you can ask them to do is say
talk about us. Talk about us to your employees, talk about us to your supply chain partners,
and please talk about us to your customers. And really good technique on GivingTuesday is to go to your corporate partners and
say to them, this GivingTuesday, will you will you give everyone the nod and
say when you go to give on GivingTuesday, here's the caus
es that we have taken a look at
that we work with, we recommend you give there. That can bring your your message
in to tens of thousands of people or even hundreds of thousands if
you've got the right sponsors. So that's one of the ways
to build a crowd in a very, very large way that doesn't cost you anything. If you can get local media coverage, you're borrowing the crowd. Get them
to write a story about the work you're doing and now that will get out to some
people and you've got awarene
ss going on. And if you have influencers or celebrities
that are willing to talk about you, fantastic. I mean, they can
get out and they can put them. If you were lucky enough to
have Taylor Swift say, hey, give to your cause. Things would change,
but it doesn't have to be that scale. It can be a local celebrity, a
local business person celebrity who endorses you and that brings that crowd over. But what is the best crowd for you to borrow?
Your donors. The donors you already have. They al
ready care about you. They have a social,
especially younger donors or digital donors, you know, soccer moms and down kind of
thing have hundreds of friends on social, and they want to do more for you - they
just can't afford to give you more money. So what they can do is that they can share for
you. They can talk to their friends and say, this is a cause that I'm working with. I love what they're doing. And
if you can give them stories of the impact they're generating, they want to share.
Because they know that they want
to make a change in the world. And they want to see that change and
they want their friends to know. So ask them to share. You know, with even 10%
visibility in someone who's got 500 friends, you're getting a post out - 10% visibility means
when they share only 10% of the friends see it, you get to 50 of their friends. If they
share multiple times over the year, not all the same 50 will get that post. So you could end up having for each one of your donors a
couple of 100 new
people aware of your cause. That will bring in new donors because
it's an endorsement from a friend. Okay, so how do you attract them? One of the things about this
this generation is that they have a very short attention span. We all do now. We've been trained into it
by our phones and by media and everything else. So we recommend
that you tell your story in 7 parts. And I was gonna go and do a deeper dive into this, but realizing the amount of content we
have for this pr
esentation, I don't. So if you're interested in hearing how the 7 part
storytelling works, where we can end up telling the story of your cause, the impact of your
cause, and make an ask in 90 seconds or less. And everybody's going, yeah, right. It works.
It's amazing. In telling the story of your cause. Let me know and we'll do a separate, session
on this. But you tell that story and the reason you want to tell that story is you want to
use it as part of an impact growth flywheel. In a flyw
heel, let's start at the attract level.
We need to get somebody attracted to your cause in some way, whether it's an ad, a referral
from a friend, a post in the local paper, an email blast that went out, a poster
you posted at Starbucks, whatever it is. You want to bring them to a campaign page. That's
very specific on the topic of how they can help. Because this page has got to
create an emotional response. You want them to see the value of giving to you. First of all, we’ve got to trigger
those
emotions. If it's all logical, they do not give. Then we want to monetize that
and monetize is not just about taking payment. It's about helping
them see the value in their mind. About what their gift is gonna do.
So at this point we talk about units of impact. How much money will get
one unit of impact in your cause? And the donors would like to contribute a
unit of impact, they'll find a unit that's affordable to them - you might have a $20 level,
$50 level, $100 level, $200 leve
l. They'll give at those levels because they want to visualize
the result of what they're creating. Now it's really important that once they monetize, you
get to them very quickly to try and get them to share. This is what we call the amplify
step. Ideally your platform will do this for you automatically by sending a communication at
that point or asking them to share at that point. But if they don't, the sooner you can turn an automated response to them to
say, hey, thanks for the gift. We
'd love it if you tell everybody else about the impact you just created for
the cause and get them to share. You can get more donors coming to you right away
because that endorsement from that donor is huge. The next step of this flywheel is that we need to
retain this donor. This is especially important if we've got somebody who's come to us because they
are attracted through a peer-to-peer campaign or a DIY campaign where somebody gave up their birthday
for you. We need to be able to reta
in them. So we use that unit of impact
that they have given, and use that in a communication to help retain them. Tell them as quickly as you can after like
a short period of time, a week, 2 weeks, a month - tell them how the money was
used and the results of that money. You can aggregate it up a bit so it doesn't
have to be really burdensome on you. But by telling them, you're more
likely to retain them. And at that point when you're telling
them, you can also rally them. And rallying at
that point is motivating them to
share that story of impact with others and get that out to the crowd, which then attracts
donors and starts to bring them through. But because we've done a retention on
these, the next time we're doing campaigns, they can start to see potentially
recurring donation opportunity or certainly a repeat opportunity to give to
you again, and that can bring more donors in. The key to all of this sharing activity
is to create scroll stopping and content. We can't j
ust put out a text message saying, hey, so and so gave something. That's
not gonna, that doesn't work anymore. We need shareable imagery. We need that when somebody is flipping through their
phone, they go, what was that? Because this is about show and tell.
It's really about helping to show the impact that something's been done with that money, we want to trigger the viewer curiosity.
We want to go, hey, what was that? So they'll click through on it. Give
them something to land on. Go back
to that campaign page that talks about how
exactly how that money is being used, what the problem is that it's trying to solve. And you have a higher opportunity
to convert them into a donor at that point. The more authentic and transparent
you are, not polished, not professional, not saying that you make it sloppy,
you don't have to be perfect in those communications and they will be attracted to
you because it feels like you're real humans. Okay. And remember that content has to be targe
ted mobile. About 80% of the content
we consume is on our mobile phone. And so it has to be really mobile friendly. Now
if you're having trouble writing content for your cause, there's no presentation this
year that is not going to talk about AI. If you use something like Chat GPT, you can
use it to really help you write compelling stories about your cause and the work that
you're doing. It's like having a friendly editor in your pocket. That you can say, hey,
touch this up for me, make it
look better. I'll really encourage you to try it. It's
about $20 a month for a professional account. But that can save you hours and
hours and hours of editing time and the quality of the results is really amazing. Encourage you to check that out. I think
CharityVillage has a webinar on this topic that you can get to and we'll maybe put that up later
on if the crews there they could pop it in chat. And, because I really encourage you to look
at it and something you can look forward to is t
hat we're putting into our platform
an AI assistant with your story that will be available shortly where as you're
writing your crowdfunding story it'll help guide you through those 7 parts of your
storytelling to make it easier for you to do. Okay. Do you know you can create a
crowdfunding campaign page in less than an hour? It doesn't have to be a big deal. You talk about it, you just put in a little story content and the story content is very
focused when we talk about the 7 steps. Put i
n some details of how much you're asking for, what the funds will be used
for, review it, and launch it. And now you can then start sharing
with others either through your newsletter through your social sites
or getting existing donors to share it. But you can create a really
stellar campaign in about an hour, so it doesn't have to be a barrier to get going. To getting going. And you know, this
is the last the only sales pitch of it is that CharityVillage has this amazing
crowdfunding plat
form that you can use for free. It's designed to implement that, that,
flywheel lifecycle - of inquiring, engaging, mobilizing, amplifying,
retaining, rallying donors. And it's done for 0% platform fees. You
don't pay anything to use it only based on the funding that you do there's a transactional
fee, or a tipping model so you get it for free, including your peer-to-peer campaigns in
your advanced forms and things like that. So get a very, very powerful platform. You know,
it's got some b
asic digital CRM capabilities, which begs the question, why are you
paying for CRM when you can get it for free. So this is just a quick view of
the different kinds of things you can get. I really want to encourage you
about how comprehensive that platform is. And that you can get it for free. So. If you're looking at this, even if you
don't take advantage of the platform, there are resources on the CharityVillage platform,
in the learning center for how to do you know all sorts of things o
n guides and courses. And
how to videos and webinar content like this. And we also have our FundRazr Hub on
ConnectionPoint’s website that has similar kind of content and goes more
deeply into things like our flywheel, how to engage in social media,
how to promote on social media. And if you need to, you can talk, well,
we welcome you. You don't have to need to. Is leverage our experts, we provide coaching on strategy and
on the tactics for using crowdfunding. Ask the expert webinars like
this. We put
on workshops. And we can help you craft your strategy or just answer some questions about
how any of this stuff might work for your cause. So if you're interested, type SOS in the
in the chat and the team will capture it. Hopefully you've got your email address in
there too and we can talk with you about, we can get in touch with you and help give you kind of personalized help for
the outrageous price of free. Okay. So I, oh, and the last thing
about the leveraging experts is
that we're starting to build a community
of fractional fundraisers, people who are helping other organizations
to do some other fundraising. And for example, working with Kim at Cedar
Fundraising in Vancouver and Victoria, BMW consultants out of out of Calgary and helping them go in - they're running
projects for some of our clients. And we're referring them in and helping
them craft their crowdfunding strategy. So we know that the community needs lots
of hand holding at some times in this
process of going - typically when they're
entering the digital realm. And so we're trying to build a network of consultants
that are interested in helping with this. If you're interested in that, let us know
because I'd also like to learn more about who you are and what you do and what kind of
clients you might be able to help. Alright. I think little little long but not too
bad. So now we're gonna open it up to questions and you can either ask them
here or you can contact us separately,
and we can go from there. I'm just
gonna try and pull up the questions. So, okay. And let's go into Q&A here. What can charities do better to
attract and retain donors? I ask as the donors often felt taken for
granted by charities in some cases, would have been penalized for giving. So, the
full question. I recently donated $500 for a charity online portal and was charged
an additional $40 in transaction fees. This will make me think twice about donating to the charity in the future.
I wan
t to see the impact. Want to feel that my decision was
appreciated. So on that topic, you know, the there's a whole
thing around fees in the industry. And, you know, with the CharityVillage platform,
ConnectionPoint platforms, when you're making the contribution, you may be asked if you're willing
to cover the transaction fees, but it is optional. So that should be as part of the thing, a fully easily opted out thing. So that if you
don't wish to do that fee you don't have to. And I expect
that the underlying feeling is
that you need to be acknowledged more for the work that you've done, and communicated
about the impact of that gift. And that's a kind of an important thing that I think
the industry as a whole unfortunately doesn't do great job of is being able
to keep in touch with those donors. Best practice is to send them a welcome
sequence after they give you the gift. And help weave into that welcome sequence
the story of how their money is being used. The attendee ask
ed, what was the organization
that mailed out the weekly impact report? I unfortunately don't have the name
of it but it was documented on the Next After site they document
all the tests they're doing. So, I don't know. They may have been
anonymized for the benefit of their client. Okay, if and when appropriate can
you slide this question? What's the best practice for cold contacting
donors that will create succes? My belief on that is that you cold contact,
if you're cold contacting for
major gifts, it's a different realm and that I'm not
an expert in so I shouldn't talk to that. If you're talking about it from a digital
donor realm, the best way to cold contact somebody is to get your existing donors to do it
for you by sharing impact of what they've done. So I'm probably being broke a record now. But
if they are sharing out and they have a friend relationship with this person they are more
likely to contribute then because they wanna, we're interested in what our friends
do
and how they how they share - it helps us validate whether a cause is worth supporting. Mercedes: Sorry to interrupt, Daryl.
Kate shared some additional context as well. So they are just referencing that they are a nonprofit that looks for companies
once a year to help sponsor an event. So I'm not sure if that
would be a different process, with regards to cold calling
just with that context. Daryl: Sorry, could you repeat that
again? Cause I think I got tangled. Mercedes: Yes, so Kate
who asked the question
about the cold contacting donors. They are a nonprofit that only looks for companies
once a year to help sponsor an event. So it would just be a one-time ask that's yearly
to corporations for a specific event. So there would there be a different process for cold
contacting those donors in that situation? Daryl: So the donors are coming
through the relationship with the corporation. We've. There's a lot
to unpack in that kind of answer. And so I think that a lot of us
get structured
in how are you approaching that group and how are they, what is that kind of the, my gut feeling
right off the bat is that the relationship between the corporation and the cause needs to be
front and center in anything that's done. And the personalization of that needs to be
important, because you're trying to get the the leverage of the endorsement from the
corporation to go out to that community. And so you need to have them very involved
in that. If that seems overly com
plex, maybe we, we can talk more about it offline. Mercedes: Thank you. Daryl: It's a little bit of a hard one
to answer there. And so if we target companies and businesses, what channel
do you use to enhance your fundraising? This is where I think the social channels
of the business can be really important to you. They're looking for stories of
how they engage with their community. This is gonna be a very important topic for last couple of years is gonna be
even more so going forward. Yeah
, we don't want to have green
washing or pink washing going on. We don't want them to be saying nice
things and doing something else. But if they're engaging with your cause, they're showing their support in
the community, they revel in that. The humans that are in those companies want
to know their company is doing good work. And so when you're sharing out, I try
and get go out through their channels, their socials because they -
businesses are great at marketing. That's what they do all
day. And getting
your message out is something they can do and they can want to do because it
makes them look good. How many times a year can you reach out to ask for
donations without turning them off? Roy asked this question I would I would
look at the question of, a donation can be a side effect of a communication. It doesn't
have to be the reason for the communication. And so I would recommend that show and
tell ruling being, you know, kind of 80/20. If you're looking at communicating
with them for
most of the year, ask them twice. But by telling them the work you're doing and if you make
them aware of campaigns that you're running, but not specifically trying to drive them
with a CTA, a call to action to go do it. I think you have the studies have said,
I showed the Lilly study and others, that say they want to hear from you more
often, they just don't want to be badgered. So if you tell them about it. We see this
happening, like giving a really good example, Harvest P
roject North Vancouver, they were running
a campaign, and I, I was, bugging Philippe to go and post an update. I said post an update - tell
your people what you're using the money for. And he was like, I don't know, I don't
know. Finally, he went and posted it. Called me the next day and said, I
can't believe it, we got a $1000, donation a $500 donation from people we've never
heard of, and I said, yeah, well, so one of your donors shared it to their friends and said, look
at the great wor
k we're doing at Harvest, and the friend wanted to donate. So they, you know,
we encourage you to tell the story of the work. They didn't ask for more money. They just told
what they were doing. And it inspired donations. That's a little bit more what's happening
now. You need to ask. I'm not pretending you don't need to ask occasionally, but
you need to show and tell more often. Henry, great interested in the fractional
fundraisers. Contact me by email if you would. Keiko, can tell us more
about
your storytelling in seven parts? Let me quickly scan through, because we’ve got
5 minutes here and see just to make sure that I, there's not a couple short ones I can do and
then I'll, I'll answer that. So for example, Bridget asks, we're a not-for-profit
do you have to be charity to use the service? No. You do not have to be a charity. You could be also a social
enterprise - so you could be a business that is delivering a social good. You just can't issue tax receipts
under Canadi
an tax law. Carol says thanks and Charity super helpful.
Carol, See Change Initiative, is there an optimal amount to aim
for a crowdfunder in your experience? Many questions but start with that. If it's
your first crowdfunding campaign, go low. The goal here is not to knock the cover off. We
tend to set goals that are too high based on need. I really need half a million dollars
to do our project this year. But what we're trying to do is warm up this
audience, warm up this channel, this gro
up of donors for you and
build some trust in that community. So we recommend sometimes you start with a 5,
10, $15,000 project. Because you want to nail it. You want to get it done. Show that you're doing the work and then communicate to it.
And then you can start to ramp it up. With CharityVillage, we did a group - that
was, they did a phenomenal campaign called the Worry Monster, sorry, brain decided
to leave me there for a minute. The Worry Monster was about helping kids in during
the p
andemic that we're having mental health challenges and they thought they'd
start with I think it was a $6000 goal. They ran their $6000 goal, they followed
our 7 part storytelling thing by the way. And but they missed 2 steps, but that's okay. They got most of it done. And they
nailed their goal in 24 hours. So they bumped the goal, they posted an update
about that, they nailed that goal in the next day. And then they bumped it a couple of times.
I think they ended up at 12,000 or $15,000.
And they had to stop because they,
they couldn't take any more money in the program because they already it
kind of filled it up at that point. So the point is is that by
starting small you can go over, there's no harm in going over it's when we
go under, if we set too big a goal people go, they're not going to make
it and then they don't give. When they go, oh, that's easy. We can nail that. And then they nail it and then
you can give a stretch goal. Well, now we'll use more money to do t
his.
They like talking about that. We feel more successful when we hit a stretch
goal than when we hit the basic goal. So, question from Knoa, Knoa, sorry if I
butchered that, we get government funding for our programs and want to switch donor sponsored
unding, how do we ask for donations to explain that without begging the question why we're
asking it for a government funded program? Well, I would start from the point that this
is supplementary and most groups know that they - the governm
ent program has very finite
limits on how you can spend it and one of the things you need is to cover is more overhead,
for expansion. I would phrase this from the point of view of we want to grow. We want
to do more of the good work we're doing, can you help us grow beyond the
government funding that we already get? I think, you know, like what a noble goal to try
and reduce your dependence on government funding. Most donors are really appreciative of that. Adriana says, Do you agree that
cold calling
is not a great way to do fundraising? There are places where I think it works, but
in my experience it doesn't work too well. If somebody cold calls me for fundraising,
I get so many inbound messages and so many people that want my attention, I
don't want to talk with them at all. Let alone giving them time. I feel sorry
for the poor blokes that show up on my door trying to do door to door canvassing
because I said, look, I'm just not gonna give here. I don't want I don't like
this
model. I don't want to pay attention to it. I want to learn about a cause because of something
that motivates me. And so if there's a way to do cold calling that helps educate me before the
ask quite a bit, I'm much more willing to listen. Okay. Bridget asked how’s the CharityVillage
platform different other than GoFundMe for crowdfunding? Intensely different, anything from
managing your own branding and being able to do the campaigns as if it was your website to
embedding it on your
website to being able to manage all the the donors getting all
the donor information including issuing tax receipts on your behalf if you're a charity
and you're authorized by the CRA you can issue compliant tax receipts. It'll do peer-to-peer
fundraising for you, which GoFundMe won't do. There's a whole bunch to it. And
it'll do it for the same kind of tipping model where you only ask the donor
for a tip to keep the platform free for you. Or you can do a fee recovery model.
We encourage
people to do the fee recovery model because the cost of your
fundraising for doing your sophisticated peer-to-peer event can get down into the
one to 2% range including your payment processing. Way cheaper than CanadaHelps way
cheaper than some other options out there. And it's not because you've cheapened
up on quality. We're just being very aggressive and trying to help deliver the maximum
functionality to the marketplace that we can. My goal is to get it for free or as
close to free as
we can. And we've got some causes that, Harvest did one of
their projects at 0.9% fundraising cost. That's gotta feel good. Okay. Just, how about
a call to a donor who has given a while? It's not a completely cold
call, nurture your donors. Please nurture your donors. When you call, don't ask them for anything. Tell
them what you did with their money. Just start the conversation there.
That would be the way I would look at it. Because I don't want to
hear about why you need more. I was try
ing to help you and it's not enough.
But if you tell me what you're doing with it, I might go, well, gee, I could give you a little
more because I like the result you're getting. So there you go. Okay. If we can go back to, Kiko's question, can you tell us a bit
more about your fundraising seven parts? We're at the end, so if anyone wants
to drop off, but I'll spend another minute or two on that one just if anybody
wants to hang out and then we'll wrap. Mercedes said okay. Mercedes: Yes, th
at's perfectly
fine. Just a reminder to everyone that you will receive a copy of the
webinar recording tomorrow as well. So if you have to leave early, you'll still be
able to view the rest of the QA session as well. Daryl: Okay, so. I'm just gonna go to screen so that
I can, you can see me. When we talk about the the the seven-part storytelling
what we're trying to do is to make kind of the equivalent of if you're in the startup
world an elevator pitch for your investors. The idea of of a
n elevator pitch is you
get in in an elevator with someone you want to talk with whether it's a donor
or whether it's an investor or whomever. And you need, you've got, however, many floors before you reach their floor
to tell them what your cause is all about. If we go into a very, very long statement - it
can be very, very troublesome, because we just get confused. We overwhelm them with information.
So the point about the 7 part storytelling is to break it down into very distinct chunks,
of
which you give one or 2 sentences to each one. And I can off the top of my head, I think I
can do the Worry Monster one that they did. In the cause we say start with a nod,
a nod is get them to say something that they are likely to agree with around your
space, about what the work you're doing. An important point here is for them to go, oh, these people think like me,
I agree with them already. It changes an internal mental barrier. So in
the Worrying Monster case, they'd say during th
e pandemic, each and every one of us was
struggling with their mental health facilities and that's all they said and a lot of people
at that time were going, yep that's for sure. Then they expressed the problem and the problem is the thing that they're trying
to solve, not the need for money. So the problem in their case said and it's
even worse for the children. Children are hearing and worried that their parents
are going to die through this and they are they are seeing all this media cov
erage
and they've really, really lost their balance. So then we talk about this. So that
was really quick, right? They've just, they are also suffering from this problem. Their solution was fortunate they say, fortunately
we have a solution. We have a Worry Monster doll, that in a counseling session, when the
child has a worry, they write down their worry on a piece of paper and they zip it
into the mouth of the Worry Monster doll. And when they come in for counseling, the
counselor pulls
those pieces of paper out, they can work with the child and on counseling them through those worries and
help them feel better about it. The Worry Monster starts to
take on the comfort model and then the Worry Monster goes home with the child. So there's a little bit longer explanation
that they did. They actually did a couple of paragraphs, showed a couple of
pictures of the Worry Monster worked great. Then the thing we talk about is
the gap. The gap they said is we have way more kids who
need worry
monsters than we have money to buy. Can you buy a worry monster for a kid? So the gap was we need more money because of
the number of kids we need to help. And then what they call the impact statement. Can you buy or can if you buy more of
these dolls, we can help more kids. We then have something we call the
promise. And the promise is about communicating back to that
donor that they're valued. That we’ll keep you in up to date on the work
that we're doing with the money you've
given, we’ll show you or tell you stories of
how these dolls have helped these kids. And then we have the invitation.
So join us in helping take care of these children and make a
purchase of a worry monster that we can help get some young child
with their anxiety in the pandemic. So if you run that whole thing
through. And I practiced it, it would probably be about 2
minutes, maybe two and a half. I hope that makes some sense. It can
be broken down for almost any kind of project. We've h
ad a number of folks say,
oh that will never apply to the work we do. Then we say, one of the problems
is if we don't know the granular level of how the impact is making a
difference that's some of the mush, you know, the mushy peas stuff that the
that your donors don't understand either. They don't know why they want
to give. They might buy into your mission? But they don't
know how the money will help. So drilling in and doing the exercise to figure out what those units of impact are
is
really, really, really important. Okay, I think hopefully that answered and if it doesn't ping me and we
can chat some more about it. Mercedes, over to you. Mercedes: Thank you so much. Thanks, Daryl.
Thanks for presenting suc an informative webinar. And do you happen to have any final
comments before we sign off today? How people should reach you that type of thing. Daryl: If they can, I took it down,
but daryl at connection point or you can find me on socials on LinkedIn
and others just
hit me up there. And, you know, leave some comments, on in the webinar here or respond to
the survey that's going to come out. And just ask to talk and we'll
we'll get back in touch. You know, I really encourage everyone that this
partnership with CharityVillage is fantastic. We're trying to help bring very very
affordable crowdfunding and overall fundraising and advanced techniques
to every nonprofit and every charity in Canada. So please, you know, call us
on and say, hey, how can you he
lp me? We'll step in. Mercedes: Thank you so much, Daryl. I
just wanted to remind everyone that you will receive a follow-up email tomorrow
with a link to the webinar recording. This will also include the resources from today's session. So please feel free to share
this link with your colleagues as well. And the email willl also include
a survey link that you can fill it with your feedback on today's webinar
and you should see a survey link pop up right here in Zoom following the
session a
s well like Daryl mentioned. And on behalf of CharityVillage, thank you so
much for joining us today. I hope you'll join us for our next free webinar Breaking Down
Barriers through Knowledge Exchange. You can find more information on this and all of our
upcoming webinars at charityvillage.com/webinars. Thanks again for joining us today, I
hope that you all have a great day!
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