Raising More Money by Asking (and Answering) Better Questions

Okay. We're going to get started. And hello, everybody, and welcome to today's webinar. We're so excited to have you on board. My name is Judy Braus and I'm the executive director of the North American Association for Environmental Education. And we're really happy to see you here today for the webinar, which is all about raising more money and asking better questions. And you're going to find out a lot more about all of this. And this is a 90 minute webinar, and we hope you'll stay as long as y

ou can. We know that everyone needs more funding. There's no lack of creative ideas in this webinar is really going to help all of us with our fundraising efforts. We know that everybody wants to do fundraising, wants more money, and some of us are petrified about asking questions or asking for more money. So Andy and Harvey are going to help us and we are so lucky to have these two wonderful fundraising experts with us today. They have years and years of experience and we're just so lucky they

could both be with us today. And they are going to introduce each other in just a minute. And I want to thank all of you who sent questions in in advance. We will answer as many as we can during the webinar and please feel free to enter more questions into the chat. For those of you who are new to these webinar series, it's all about bringing new ideas and speakers and insights into our field and beyond. And today is just going to be a perfect example of that because all of us, whether we're in

EE or fields related or beyond, need to raise money. A big thank you to our Affiliate co-hosts in our state provinces and regions across North America. Welcome, welcome and thanks for all you do. Thanks to EPA and. ee360+ for helping to support our webinar series. We really appreciate that support. And again, everybody is muted, but you can talk to us through the chat and we do have closed captions. You will get a copy of the recording and the chat and just know that if you click on the CC, you'

ll get those captions and they come in 31 languages. So I know we have somebody online who is like would be interested in a French translation. There are 31 other languages that you can pick from, and I want to give a big thank you to Carrie, who is one of the masterminds of our webinar series, and helps so much not only behind the scenes but in front of the scenes and is just a wonderful communicator. So, Carrie, thank you so much for all you do. Thank you. Thank you. And as an added surprise,

we will be giving away four books from Andy and from Harvey to four lucky attendees, and they will be selected randomly midway through the webinar. So you got to stay for a while to get the books to be entered into the contest. And so now I am going to turn it over to Andy and Harvey. Thank you so much for being here. We look forward to all your tips and tricks and insight. So thank you. Thank you. And Carrie is going to share her screen. Beautiful. So first of all, let me thank Judy and Carrie

and all the folks at the North American Association for Environmental Education. I have worked with Judy for probably 15 or 20 years and is one of my favorite people in the business. So thank you for doing this. Carrie, you have been so helpful and so supportive and so organized. We cannot do this without you. And thank you, Harvey, for partnering with me again to do this, because we always have a lot of fun together doing this work. Next slide, please. So after you introduce me, I'll introduce

you, too. Okay, Well, I guess I better say nice things about you. Since you're going first. I'm going first. That's it. I'm thrilled to be doing this with Andy because he's one of the great trainers. I saw him long before I met him. I thought he really knows this stuff. He is a consummate professional. He's entertaining. He's written a half a dozen great books. There's probably a few hundred fundraising books out there, and these are among the best. I highly recommend. They’re incredibly readabl

e. He also has a pretty famous newsletter, which is called Train Your Board, which I highly recommend again. Covers everything about nonprofits, and it's really spectacular. I read every issue. Thank you, Harvey, my friend Harvey McKinnon is one of the world's great fundraising thinkers, practitioners and I think also trainers. Harvey's based in Canada but has literally worked all over the world and is a regular at many of the international conferences supporting fundraising around the world. Ha

rvey is the author of, I believe, five books at this point. Six? Oh, you've tied me. This was your goal. You've made it. Congratulations—which are also informative, readable. And I will say we will probably touch on this a little bit today. Harvey is one of the people who made monthly giving a requirement for all of us going back at least two decades now and is really one of the gurus of sustainer programs and we have a good time together, so we're glad to share that with you. Next slide, please

. So here's what we're doing today. We want to help you think about how your donors are thinking, the questions they might be asking or maybe mentally asking, but not verbally asking and trying to help you think about better answers to those questions. The goal here is to strengthen your relationship with owners. That's how we raise more money is through stronger and more intentional and more reciprocal relationships. This is really a webinar about donor engagement, and we're going to go at this

from two different sides. We're going to talk about what your donors are thinking and how to anticipate what their questions might be and try and address them. That's that's going to be Harvey's chunk of this. And then we're going to flip it and say, okay, imagine that you talked to a donor and the donor says, yes, I'd like to give you money. This will happen to you from time to time. What questions should you be asking in that moment to learn more about the donor to deepen the relationship, to

find out how to serve them better, and how to ultimately raise more money over time with that donor? So that's where we're heading. Next slide, please. So we want to know why you're here. And the simple answer is you probably want to learn how to raise more money, and that's cool. But if you have more levels to the answer, we would love to get some of that in chat. So go ahead. And there's quite a few people, so hopefully we'll fill up the chat box. Why are you here? Savannah is looking for unr

estricted funds. Yes, we are all about that and we won't be talking about that. That's the first time I've ever heard that as a request. Nicole says, “same.” Yeah. Everybody wants the unrestricted money. I do. Harvey, you want some unrestricted money? Yeah, I know Judy does. So you guys can follow along and chat as the things are popping up here. I don't have to read them all, but project funding, Donor trust, How to keep our programmings fresh. So donors are continuing to be interested, that th

at's an interesting it's probably a whole nother webinar but that's an interesting question. Anything else you want today, go ahead and put it in chat and we will keep paying attention to that. Now, this is a chance for me to say that we're going to try and answer your questions throughout. We do have Q&A at the end and anything we don't answer en route, we will try and answer at the end and we'll even stand over time for those If we don't get all the questions answered in 90 minutes. We are com

mitted to hanging out until we answer all the questions. So we will take care of that. We will make sure that you get the slide deck. I believe we are recording this so you'll get the recording as well. And we have at least one additional handout to send to you that will go out with the slide deck in the recording. So those logistical things will be handled by Judy and Carrie and their colleagues. So thank you for that. Next slide. Judy, are you out there? There it is. Okay. So, um, Harvey I wil

l, I'm going to give this one to you because I know you think about this more deeply than I do. What's going on in the world of donors right now? Well, some good news and some bad news. The basic thing that has happened in most Western countries where we have good data, which is the United States, Canada, Australia, England or Britain, is that there are fewer people making donations to nonprofits, although the people who are giving are giving slightly more. So the Giving Institute in the States

said there's a significant drop. First time in my lifetime of working in the sector over 40 years back and last year. Now currently there's suggestions that's going to change because the stock market is up significantly. A lot of people say they're going to give more. We'll see if that happens. But generally speaking, rates are declining. I think there's a lot of reasons. One is stewardship is really bad in the sector. Yeah. Two is there's so many diversions that people have from social media to

Netflix to whatever and people are also giving through nontraditional channels such as GoFundMe campaigns and then also supporting individuals. So in my network of people, when I have friends, who actually could use some financial assistance as non charitable. I will give them some money when appropriate, and that's not going for a charity, but it's also a form of giving. So I think a lot of people seem to be doing that. And then lastly, because of the economy, a lot of people are right financi

ally because inflation was fairly significant. Households are spending more money. It used to be they kind of cover their expenses with 50%. Now it's gone up to over 60% because of rent, cars, housing, mortgages and extra costs for food. So it's putting a bit of a squeeze on people giving and therefore not giving to as many charities. So lots of reasons. The last one, economic inequality is we see a lucky few going into the top 10% and the middle being shrunk and a lot of people any up and with

less money these days. Okay. So what I take from this is there's stuff we can control and there's stuff we can't control, right? We have no control over the economy. None of us are in a position to address inflation in a meaningful way for the whole society. But what we can control is how we engage with our donors, how well we treat them, how often we ask them and engage them, how many people are involved on our end in doing donor stewardship. So what we're really focusing on today is the stuff

you can control. I remain an optimist like Harvey. I am 40 years into this industry and I've seen way more up than down and I think there's plenty of money out there if we organize ourselves to go out and raise it. Next slide, please. So I'm curious about how do you actually meet with donors And this could be in person. This could be on Zoom. This could be I'll even give you a phone calls for this. But how often are you interacting on a one on one basis with your donors? And go ahead, Carrie, an

d put the what the poll question up here. How often in person, virtually for any reason, relationship building, getting advice, asking for gifts, thanking, etc., like how often are you actually meeting with people? So go ahead. We'll give you a few minutes to fill this in. And if you don't know, you don't know. I think the intention behind this question is the closer you get to your donors, the more money you raise. And it could be—sorry No, please. I just going to say that even if the individua

l on this seminar is not doing this because that's not their job function, you have a major gift officer, an executive director or a development officer that has this responsibility. I think you could check off the box, whether it's quarterly or monthly. But so, Carrie, whenever you're ready, please show us the results of the poll. Interesting. Okay. Well, short answer to the question is not often enough. Harvey, what are you seeing? It's kind of distressing that almost never and don't know are

so high. That's getting up to 43%. Yes. Couple of times a year. You know, in my experience, when people say a couple of times a year, usually once or could be a phone call or. Well, actually happened last year, not this year, but I kind of felt like it was this year. So it's like, you know, when your doctor says, how many how often do you drink? Most people kind of minimize the number of drinks they're taking. So I feel like, you know, kind of exaggerate this a little better. Not my experience.

All right, Carrie, we can close the poll and we can go to the next slide, please, Judy. So a little very quick fundraising, one on one here. What you're looking at is a model called the Cycle of fundraising. And there are many versions of this in fundraising world. This is one I particularly like because it's easy to teach and easy to understand. And generally we'd start on the lower left where it says identify prospects. We want to get them excited about our work. We want to educate them and cu

ltivate them When the time is right, we want to ask them to give. And the ask could be in-person, it could be on Zoom, it could be over the phone, it could be through email, it could be in social media. It can be through traditional mail. There's a lot of different ways to solicit a gift. Once those people give, you want to thank them and appreciate them and love them and recognize them. Our goal with any with any donor following our way around here is to involve them more deeply in the work. If

you are really good, you take the people you've involved more deeply and you say, Hey, do you know other people that might want to be involved with this? And you use your donors to identify new prospects, which is how we complete the cycle. Now what you're looking at is the modern theory of fundraising. Anything you need to know theoretically about how fundraising works is represented in this slide. You learned it in 90 seconds. It's not difficult. And the reason I bring this up is that this is

a model for inclusivity and fundraising. And there are many people and some people on this call who will say, like, I'm not going to ask for money. I can't do that. That's too weird, that's uncomfortable. And my response is, you know what? Maybe you're not the asker. Maybe you're doing some of the other steps in this process. And I think we have a fundraising culture in our organizations is that we benchmark it or measure it is that everybody in the organization has some piece of this cycle. Ma

ybe the person who is writing thank you notes is not the person who was hosting the cultivation parties, who is not the person who is asking for a gift. You can spread that work across the organization. And so Give me the next slide. I think it's the next one. Just one thing to add about this last slide is that the asking doesn't have to be in person. Yes. Or over the phone. The absence would literally be writing a compelling letter or a compelling email or even a post. So there are some individ

uals will never be able to ask for money in person, but that doesn't mean they can't be great fundraisers if they're good writers and, you know, even handwritten notes. Or, you know, maybe they're just active on social media and they have a big network and they're willing to promote to their network that is fundraising 100%. So let's look at the time piece. Next slide, please. This is borrowed from our colleague Tina Cincotti, who's in Boston, lovely fundraising consultant. And Tina took the mod

el and carved it up by time allocation. And in this case, the identify prospects started on the upper right and went around what I would have you this is the slice where it says ask, which is at the bottom and is the smallest slice is like maybe 10% of the work and fundraising and the other 90% is the stuff we do before we ask to cultivate and ready the person and the stuff we do after we ask to appreciate them and engage them. And a lot of what we're going to talk about today is not the asking

part. It's the relationship building and management in multiple engagements Part of this and a lot of folks who are new to fundraising, they're really stressed out about the ask. They're going comfortable, they're freaked out, whatever. And my response is always, that's not where the work is. The work is all the other stuff, and yet somebody has to ask somebody to give. That is absolutely true. But if we're talking about donor retention, it's not just the ask, it's the relationship. And when the

money gets in front of the relationship, you have a problem. So the goal is always to prioritize the relationship. Next slide. And I think we're going to hand this off to Harvey. So you've got the next run of show my friend. Go for it. Thank you. So a core thing is figuring out where you going. This could also apply to prospects because there are people who will give you money in the future or are currently prospects or will become prospects. And one of the internal problems we often face in ou

r organizations is that we assume we know what donors want, and we have some probably good guesses because I may be like us, but generally speaking, a lot of organizations have people who are younger as fundraisers than their donors or donors. They're often people in their sixties and seventies and eighties. And so you don't necessarily know exactly what motivates them because there are differences that happen in different generations, even though there's lots of things in common. But the core t

hing is, you know, I'd say based on my decades of experience, is that donors want impact. They want to make sure they can see where the gift is making a difference. Sometimes they want to change things. Sometimes they want to preserve things like if you want to protect this river so it doesn't change would be a good example. So there's all sorts of different motivations. They're all emotional reasons that people, you know, every everything that drives us is an emotional reason. And the book that

this kind of that first half of the seminar is based on is called “The 11 Questions Every Donor Asked.” So I spent a lot of time figuring out what kind of questions donors might have, and I synthesized it down to 11. I didn't really care how many there were, but that seemed to be the number, and nobody's really come up with another one since this first came out, I guess. my God, 19 years ago. Kind of shocking. But what I tried to do is figure out what do donors care about? And if you can answer

these questions in advance, then you're already halfway there and you can answer a lot of these questions, as you will see by putting that information up on your website, having preliminary conversations are filling things out in a grant application, etc.. Next slide. So our minds are constantly full of questions. This, everybody on this call is Should I show up for this webinar or who are these guys or what am I going to learn here? Or why aren’t they charging me any money for this? Why is thi

s free? I should be paying. What's the problem with that? But really, when a kid goes to school first, they're thinking, Will the teacher like me, will I make any friends? Can I do the work? Same thing when you're a teenager. Can I get tickets to that show? Is that hottie in the front row ever going to turn around and look at me? Can I afford these new sneakers? Whatever it is, this is how our minds work. And so anticipating questions in advance, as I said, reduces barriers to giving. Every one

you answer reduces a barrier. And it doesn't mean that donors all have exactly the same questions. Some questions for a couple of people may not be relevant at all, but fundamentally, this is, you know, the basic 11 questions. Next slide. The first question is why me? So everybody's favorite subject seems to be me as far as you are young and we change over time, but our donor wants to know how you perceive them. What do you think of them? Do you approve of them? You care about them at all? And r

eally, I kind of both, Andy and I really believe if you're only interested in the money, that's a problem. If you're not interested in them as an individual, helping them solve some problem. But they want solved them, that's not it's not quite sleazy. But what it is, is it's something that they will pick up on in any personal interaction. They can tell that you just care about their money. And that's not the basis of a long term relationship. And really great fundraising is focused on the long t

erm. When Michael Bloomberg first gave gift to his alma mater, it was $5 some 50 odd years ago. And so far he's given $3.44 billion and lots more to come because he's got 80, 90 billion and he's giving it all away. So, look at the long term perspective on a charity. When you recruit a monthly donors, we might talk about a little. They come in at $20 a month, but they could be worth $4,000 over time and then they're among your best prospects for legacy. What much of a fundraising I hate to say so

me of our clients, is focus on this quarter or this year as opposed to investing in the future. And I know that's not always as easy as I think it is. Next question. So Harvey, can I throw you a little curve ball while you're waiting for the next slide here? Obviously, Yes. Thank you. I appreciate it. I know a lot of the folks on the on the webinar are also getting grant money or raising money from businesses or institutions in addition to individuals. And I think my spiel and I love your respon

se to this is those are people too. Like if you're going to a bank for a donation, there's a program officer at the bank who makes the choice about whether to give you money. If you're applying to a foundation, you're also dealing with a program officer, etc.. And I think what we tend to forget about is that even we're dealing with institutions, we're also dealing with people who have feelings and opinions and priorities of their own. And I if you could talk about that for a second, that be grea

t. And then we can go to the next slide while we're doing this. I totally agree with that. And here's an example. Here's a story. I was going to a foundation many decades ago when I was working for Oxfam, the International Development Agency, and I found that the Canadian government CEDA program had a new grant program for international education in Canada. I found this out about 11:00. because my plane’s at 1:30, I could dash over to their office, try and meet someone. I called and they said, S

ure, come over. On the way over in the taxi, I came with seven ideas for different education programs we could do. Sat down with the officer, mentioned the first one, “Mm-hm.” Mentioned the second one, “Mm-hm.” I mentioned the third one, and she kind of leaned in and you could just tell that she was interested in. And so I abandoned the other four and just kind of roll that out. And this is in 1980, we got like $70,000 and it came in for about seven years. So a significant amount of money based

on my figuring out what she felt about different things. And so I think one of the great skills we can learn and develop is paying attention to body language, listening to people, repeating back what they say, they feel like they're heard. That works great when you're talking to major gift people as well as foundation offices. So that is one kind of example. Thank you. So, in terms of part two of the “why me?” question, so some of the answers would be, well, you care about cancer because I know

you've had cancer in your family. You've met this person who came to the women's shelter whose life has been transformed now that she's in a safe place. You'll inspire other donors to help protect this endangered rainforest. You'll solve our community problems. You've got answers for all of these things. But these would be some of the reasons why you are, in fact, talking to them. Next slide. So why are you asking me? Core question is you and people want to know, is there some self-interest here

? Is this person asking me because they benefit? First, let me say Donald Trump, for instance, if I can do that, I'm a Canadian, so it's like I thought I could get away with that. They want to know if you've given. So if you're asking somebody for money, the theory is and I believe this to be true, is that if you haven't given yourself, your ask is not an authentic ask. When you can say I've given to my capacity, that's inspiring for people. It conveys that you believe in this organization as we

ll. And that does make a difference to people. And people often pick this up. People want to know who else has given as their peers given. We had a a hospital client where the donor was would normally given $25,000 a year, was asked accidentally for $10,000, and he gave the 10,000. And then when he had a report came out and he's in the $10,000 category and all his peers are in the $25,000 counter, he called up to complain like, I can't believe you didn't ask me for more money because all my frie

nds are here and this is really embarrassing to me. So knowing who else is given is a critically important issue too. And if you get permission to reference other people have given, that's also inspiring people. Because if you can say, well, all your colleagues in the hospital or doctors in the surgical department have given out, would you like to join them? That's kind of motivating. Next slide. Do I respect you—So core thing in fundraising is trust and trust is earned and not given. So the amy

gdala, which is our lizard brain, is constantly looking for, you know, flight, fright and freeze are the three things that happen. And a slick salesperson may remind him that movie they saw where that person was kind of creepy. So you want to be authentic, you want to be compassionate about their particular situation and you want to be really passionate about your cause. And that builds trust. As Stephen Covey says in the great Seven Habits of Highly Effective People—Trust is earned. The bottom

level is when you're working with somebody, you give them something. If they accomplish that, they do a good job. They move up the trust ladder to get to the point where I have a call, you know, like virtually all of my colleagues now, because I worked with them for so many years, I will give them something to do and I will know they will do a great job, because I've seen year over year that they are competent, committed and, you know, do the work that they have to do to get something done. So a

gain, you can expect somebody who's never met you before to instantly trust you, no matter how trust or there you are. And that's why really good fundraising takes time. Excellent. So, Harvey, there's a question here, which I think this is the moment to answer, which is how do we frame the conversation in a relationship way when I don't actually know the donor so it doesn't feel like a pitch. And, you know, my answer and I think this is the classic mistake, is people show up with a pitch instead

of questions. And the classic ratio you want in a donor conversation is the donor should be talking like two thirds of the time. And so the way you address this, I'm going to give this to Nicole, since you raised the question, Nicole, is show up with questions. Who are you? What do you care about? I noticed you've given to our organization before. Why is this work meaningful to you? How would you like to be involved in this work? What do you see as your role? And I mean, do you have any other t

houghts on this, Harvey? How do we turn ourselves from salespeople into listeners? Yes, I do. The line, which might help people remember this is this is why you have two ears and one mouth. So, yes, two thirds of is listening. The second thing, which I hope people will stick on, one of the first things I learned 40 odd years ago is that when you ask for money, you get advice. And when you ask for advice, you get money. So by asking questions, you're asking for advice. And even people who have be

en asked hundreds of times still like to get asked for advice because, you know, often people who have money, not always, but often they're accomplished people. They've been professionals, they've earned a little money and they know things other than how to make money. They often can. My brother in law, who was a corporate executive, was gave a lot of money away. Still does. But he said, you know, that was very illuminating a couple of decades ago. You know, like I like giving money away. I wish

people would ask me for my ideas because I'm a pretty smart, well-connected person and I could help them in other ways. And so I think that is, you know, it maybe the opportunity to recruit board members among the people who have great capacity, because that is a way that they may like to help. And if they become involved emotionally, which you often do when you're on a board, that will lead to much more gifts and larger gifts for sure. So quickly. I think one of the things that can build trust

is when you talk to people about why you personally are doing this job and you might not call yourself a fundraiser, it could be this is the reason why I'm working for this important mental organization. And you just happened to be in there asking for money, but that's often inspiring. You know, my mom had cancer and that's why I'm working for this organization. I grew up near this river and it's so meaningful to my family. We've been here for generations. We have to protect it from this mine.

There's always the case. My personal line is I met some people from Southern Africa, learned about apartheid and I thought, this is the worst thing I'd ever heard. I started an anti-apartheid group on campus knowing nothing about apartheid or South Africa or anything, really. But I was just highly motivated and then learned lots of skills, met people from Oxfam, end up working there. So I got into this just because I had a passion. And it could very well be that your passion is very similar to t

he passion that you're talking to us, and your story definitely will motivate people. When I've had people come to me and the really passionate something, even if they don't know what they're doing around fundraising, I am often volunteering to help them a lot. The core question is how much do you want? This is really art and science, and this, there's no right answer for this other than over time. You tend to learn to be better at it. We had a friend, a very accomplished fundraiser for a nation

al environmental organization who, along with her chair, went into an office, business office, and they were going to ask for a quarter of a million, but they got hopped up on cappuccinos and said, Let's ask for half a million. So they go in and they kind of were nervous and sweaty. And Lynn said, Well, we then we asked for half a million. And the CEO said, Well, no problem. If you needed more money, I could have given it to you about happy to write the check for half. And he was willing to give

them $1,000,000, but they did not know this because it is hard to assess these things somehow Tending to aim high is probably a safer thing because sometimes you can be pleasantly surprised. And Andy, I think, will have something to add to this. Well, you can always negotiate down. It's very hard to negotiate up, right? If you say to somebody, will you give $1,000,000? And they say, whoa, that's out of my league. You say, well, what's an appropriate number? You know, it's half a million the nig

ht number and what's the right number? But it's very hard to go in the opposite direction if somebody says, you know, will you give $50,000? And I'm like, Yeah, no problem. That's easy for me. You can't then say, well, how about 100,000? You know? So when in doubt start high, I guess is the answer. Now, Jimmy Alford is one of the great American fundraisers, sadly passed away, once told me a story where they notified a donor they would hope would give $1,000,000 and they talked to the donor and s

aid, well, I can’t actually do that. I can only give $125,000. And Jimmy said, Well, could we work on this to see if there's some possible way you could make a larger gift? Because I know you love this organization. So they eventually worked it out. And again, this is negotiations where the person gave a piece of property worth almost $2 million plus the cash gift. So they end up giving more because they're trying to solve the problem together. So, again, asking that question. That's a good answ

er. Alright, next question. So why your organization? You have lots of competition. What makes your group stand out? The core thing is—next slide— Your stories. There could be 500 environmental organizations working in a in a particular state or province or country. And but your stories will be unique to you. So you know, storytelling You can do things with telling stories they can't do with presenting facts. And that's a move people emotionally and people give for emotional reasons. When you te

ll a story and you listen to the person and what they get out of the story, that essentially give you the ability to ask better questions in response to actually have a dialog going. And again, you try and pick the stories that will motivate the individual you're actually having a meeting with or talking to over the phone. Next slide. Is there an urgent reason to give? So I think this is one of the three most important questions. If you're working around the environment, we are constantly dealin

g with urgency because of the climate crisis, etc. So that gives us a little advantage. But another way to get urgency is we have targets and deadlines or matching. Yep. So we need 100 new donors by next March 31st. That gives a sense of urgency that motivates people to get again targets. One of our clients will have 500 monthly donors recruited over a certain degree of time and you can see them getting closer. So it allows you to actually communicate with people more often to report back on how

close you're getting to the target. If you're doing a, say, an email series asking. Next question Is it easy to give? I also think this is possibly number two. So if you don't make it easy for yeah, for people to give, they won't back. Yeah. In 40 odd years ago I wrote a check to Amnesty International but did not have a postage paid envelope or stamp on it. I sat in my kitchen. I can still visualize it on the counter and after three weeks I didn't get to the post office. I thought, Well, I'll s

end them some money some other time because I was overdrawn on my bank account. Well, it took me about 35 years before I sent them some more money because they didn't make it convenient for me. I never got on the monthly giving program, etc. Now we could give a fair bit of money, but they lost me as a donor because they didn't make it easy. For websites. every extra thing you have to collect, you lose 5–10% of the people, it has to be nice and seamless. Your donors almost certainly have aging ey

esight Make your typefaces large and use a serif typeface because it's just easier to read. And lastly, promoting monthly giving. You'd ask somebody for a single gift or ask them for a monthly gift If they become a monthly donor and give automatically through their credit card or electronic funds transfer, many of them will be okay, I'm in some of these programs for 30, 40 years. They had asked me once and I've given like OxFam like $17,000 over that time. So monthly giving, which we could talk

about later. You want really key thing to make it easy for people to continue giving. Next slide. You want to say something about this? I see you got a— Well it's first of all it's a lovely photo but also people want to be heard. People want to be seen, People want to be recognized. People want to be appreciated. They want to be loved. I mean, that's a universal human thing. And what I'm thinking of is this is how we get the relationship in front of the money is through. This is is through that

treatment. So, you know, I know you have thoughts about how to treat donors more intentionally and more appreciatively. So go for it. Well, starting with a story, a friend who worked at the San Diego Zoo received a call one day and somebody who had called the another zoo in California want to make a donation, was given the runaround like they were kind of rude to him. So he called up the San Diego Zoo, it resulted in a gift and ultimately some really large gifts. Then ultimately about $100 milli

on in real estate gift because he felt he was better treated at the second place. he called and the number of stories I know around this are just kind of countless, but it's like, you know yourself, if people are rude to you or ignore you, you know, you're not building a relationship with them. So we cannot overemphasize how important it is to steward your donors and prospects and be nice as humanly possible to them. Attitude is key. Next slot. So some donors care about numbers and some donors d

on't. But I think there's two ways to measure. You can say, we help protect 22 acres of rainforest or we took care of this child that grew up in poverty, got them to a summer camp. Now they're doing incredibly well. So there's both stories and numbers. John Wood, who started Room to Read, very good international organization, I saw him speak a couple of years ago, there were maybe 150 people in the room. He came out with $500,000 with a brilliant combination of storytelling. How he started this

organization, because he was hiking through Tibet, came across, Nepal, came across this small community, and said, Do you have a library? They showed him this little box that had a lock on it. But the 22 books they had, including Danielle Steel, a 1912 chemistry book kind of thing, but they value books. He decided to come back with books, took him a year to do it, came back with 3000 books, and then he started this global organization that is doing rural scholarships, building schools and starti

ng libraries. And they're raising tens of millions of dollars a year. But he told great stories. He also said $250 will give the girl a scholarship and girl says, we know are discriminated against in many countries in the world. This is what it cost to buy a library. This is what it cost to build a school. So when you give people tangible things to spend their money on, that's measuring results. And then you can report back to them. Next slide. So unrestricted gifts seems to be appropriate for t

his one. Here is the sad thing. People like to give money for things that are tangible. They like to give money where they can see the impact. Most organizations on this call, most organizations we've ever worked with hate earmarked money, they want unrestricted money. So I could totally understand why you do, because you have to go through a lot of hoops. I've had to do this over the years and it's no fun. It's complicated. And sometimes you diverting away from your mission. However, my kind of

feeling is at a certain point you try a given designated and there's some visionary people will give you money for the undesignated stuff. But how you can build trust in a long term relationship is give people the ability to make designated gifts and build a trusting relationship with them so they get to the point of loving what you do and trusting you so that they will then give you undesignated gifts. And I've seen this happen. So keep, you know, that doesn't solve your problem. Andy may have

some comments on how to get on undesignated gifts. I'm going to do a “both/and.” I think everything you said, Harvey, is correct and we have to meet donors where they are. And if where they are is I want to give you money for X, and X is within your mission, you know, take the money. But I would also say as as fundraisers, we have to get better at asking for unsolicited, excuse me, unrestricted gifts. We have to be able to say when you give us X, it supports the whole range of programs. It allo

ws us to provide environmental education in the schools. It allows us to provide environmental education in the community. It allows us to support the school districts who need backbone help in doing this work. And yeah, you could designate your gift to this program or that program, and we'd love to have it. But what we really need is the ability to apply this money. And you can be a hero to us, if you will, give us that money. So I think it works both ways. And I think, yeah, you got to follow

the donors lead to some degree and we have to be better askers for the undesignated money. And I agree with all that. And when you ask more questions. Yes. You're building every time you're asking questions and listening to them, you're building trust. And you can again, kind of you don't repeat word for word. But when you reflect back what they've said about all the for. Okay, we got one more slide. Okay. And before we get to that one, we're going to say that monthly giving is the best way to g

et on designated. Yeah, we have. Yes. A lot of clients where they're getting almost half their money from monthly gifts and it's all undesignated. So lastly, I think this is the most important thing that if people don't feel their gift is going to make a difference, there's absolutely no reason they should give you money. So every organization on this call, if you're doing environmental education, that is absolutely critical to, you know, getting young people and older people active, protecting

their own environment and protecting our general environment, and potentially voting for people who will protect the environment. So you're doing incredibly important work. Andy and I both have decades of experience working with environmental organizations and are totally committed to this as you are. So we know that this work that you're doing does make a difference and again last couple of tips: Make it tangible. So if you can say when we're doing this, that we're going to you know, if you're

going to campaign, we're going to reach 10,000 people in our community to let them know what's happening with, say, a mine or some clear cutting. You make an emotional you figure out what do they most care about. When we're writing stuff for an environmental organization, one local client is the Georgia Straight Alliance that protects the Salish Sea. And so when we have write about a lot of different things, but people really care about orca whales. So we're often talking about orca whales as op

posed to working in a small community, doing education work. So every time you can talk about the animals or the fish, they're helping. Again, this is universal for. Or the children, right? Or the children. It, those things help. So let me clarify something. This is not the last slide of the presentations, The last slide of Harvey’s portion of the presentation. And we're actually going to go into a break out in a minute and have you guys chat with each other. And when we come back from the break

out, we'll take a few questions and then I have a chunk of work to share with you around what happens when the donor says yes and what sort of questions can you ask in that moment just to deepen and strengthen the relationship? Judy, you have something to say. Sorry, sorry, sorry. Andy, we can't get into breakouts. It's a webinar series. Oh, how sad. Don't worry. Don't worry. You can do whatever you want to do in the chat. Okay, But don't worry about that. Okay. Well, thank you for clarifying.

So let's go to the next slide. So this is a chat question as opposed to breakout, which is sort of good because it goes a little quicker. Harvey just rolled out 11 questions that donors might be thinking, some of which they will verbalize, some of which they may not verbalize. Which of these is getting your attention as a fundraiser, which of those 11 questions, and you can combine them if you want. Do you need to be paying more attention to and, just jump in chat wise. And while people are doin

g that, Harvey, I will pick your brain on this for a minute. You know, you're working with all these clients and you have for decades. Which of these questions are your clients missing or avoiding or ignoring or just not attending to well enough? And you're welcome to say all the above, but is there one that's jumping out? Well, it varies. So I should say there's if you divided all, fundraising into major gifts for individual giving or mass fundraising, it would be different for one or the other

. Let's focus on individual. Let's talk about individual gifts. Okay. So I would say it totally depends on the organization. So we work with our universities, hospitals, environmental groups, international development agencies, and then some smaller organizations as well. So what I find happen with a lot of organizations and you get the big ones, they're way too bureaucratic. Yeah, yeah. They have competing silos. Now, I can't talk to that donor because it's kind of nightmarish. And what they're

doing is they're not looking at the donor as an individual or looking at it from their own perspective. I have to hit target. And so that's a bad thing. As opposed to looking at collectively, how can we raise more money for all the great work that we're doing? And then conversely, some of the super small organizations, the people who are the fundraisers, spend all their time in administration or meetings or answering the phone. And I did a tour of Australia decades ago where I asked people who

are supposed to be doing major gifts and legacy giving and all the other staff to analyze where they spent their time. Very, like this is like 35 years ago, And I learned a lot from this. And most of the people are doing major gifts to their full time job or legacy giving full time job. They're spending like 5 to 10% of their time doing their actual work, but they're sucked into collective meetings or administrative meetings or working with volunteers or having to go to an event that wasn't rela

tive related to actual developing a monthly donor or a major donor relationship. So I think if you can even cut 10% of the other stuff so you have more channels to go and talk to donors, that's great. So that I would say an individual basis is the biggest problem with most organizations I know. So we have a consulting colleague named Amy Eisenstein, and Amy did this thing for years called the Major Gifts Challenge, which was, you know, aimed at small development organizations. You know, like if

you have a fundraising department that's two people or one person, which is a lot of the folks that I interact with. And her deal was, can you get out of the office? I think she was saying 5 hours a week to meet with donors and just set a goal of I'm going to or I'm going to talk to three donors a week to say thank you, to solicit them, to cultivate them or whatever. And that was her major gift challenge, was to get your butt out the door and actually sit down and see some people. And we will ac

knowledge that organizing these meetings is challenging. Not every donor wants to meet. You know, we end up doing stuff on Zoom instead, we might end up on the phone instead, but the intention is still the same, which is get out from behind the computer. It started gauging with people and it's a barrier, and I think it's a barrier we create for ourselves. And that's one we can tear down ourselves, you know? So I am I am appreciating a lot of the questions and stuff that's coming in. What we're g

oing to do is we'll capture a few questions now and then we'll move on to the next the second half of the presentation. So, Harvey, one of the questions as this came through was how in you've had some experience with corporate giving, how do you identify who to talk to within a corporate setting? Who is actually a decision maker and can make a gift? And I my sense of this I'll throw I'll get started here is that depending on the size of the business, there might be two or three decision- makers

bring out two or three different buckets of money, right? So some corporations have a foundation and there's a foundation person who's giving out the money. They might have a community relations department with a different pot of money. They might have a marketing department that gives out a whole different pot of money, which might be like event sponsorship, that sort of thing. So that's what I've experienced. What have you seen? Exactly the same, there’s usually more money these days in the ma

rketing budget. Yes. And then you have the gift giving thing. So if you have a population that could appeal to them because they're going to have a large reach and that's you know, that totally makes sense. Keep in mind that the biggest corporations, depending on where you live, everybody is going after them. So sometimes figuring out, okay, these are other corporation in our community, but now they don't have as much money, but maybe it's easier to get in to see them. Maybe we can build a relat

ionship with them that will last over time as opposed to the biggest corporations. And again, as Andy said at the beginning of the session, they're all individual people, so they all have connections in your community. And if if you can figure out who knows somebody at that credit union or bank or, you know, corporations selling widgets, again, that's what I have often done is when I'm organizing a community stop is got a bunch of connected people under the room, more or less go through the term

. Used to be Rolodex, but I guess that's probably the list of people on your phone now. Yeah, it's. Okay. Yeah. And you kind of have some easy ways to do. Okay. Who are all the doctors we know? Who are all the lawyers we know, who are all the engineers? You know, who are all the people who own business, you know. Who do you know that gives away money to other nonprofits besides us? Right. And so I just joined an arts board. I've been on a lot of our boards over the years. And when I was doing so

me pro bono work for them a decade ago, I said that every donor list you can, for other arts organizations and other community organizations or through them, if you find somebody’s name more than once, they are a philanthropically inclined person. And I had a meeting with them the other day, my first board fundraising meeting, and they actually took my advice and they found a bunch of donors who had given to other not dissimilar arts organizations and cultivated them and raised a lot of money. A

ll right. So let me just look at that. Yeah, I want to be mega specific about this for people. And again, I realize we have people from around the world who are joining us today. I can't speak to whether these published lists exist in other places. They definitely exist in North America. But, you know, if you go to the theater, they hand your program, the program, they list all the donors. Right. If you are an environmental education organization and many of you are today, you need to pay attent

ion to the other groups that operate in your state or your province or your neighborhood, because many of them will have annual reports. Some of them have websites, some of them do newsletters. In those documents. They often list their donors. Sometimes they list them by the amount of money they give. These are the categories, right? So what I used to do, and it's still relevant, I would get copies of those like newsletters or annual reports, and I would photocopy the relevant pages and staple t

hem into booklets and give them to my board of directors or give them to my development team and say, Here's a list of 2000 people who give away money in our community to adjacent organizations. And what you need to do is to get a cup of coffee or a beer or a glass of wine and sit down and review these 2000 names and check off anybody you know, because this is the definition of a prospect. It's somebody who gives money, who cares about a cause that's like yours and that you have a personal conne

ction to. It's always those three things. They have capacity, they have interest, and they have a relationship. And so I have raised a fair amount of money over the years by getting people to screen published donor lists from other organizations, End of sermon. So let's go on to the slides, please. Next slide. So I'm going to run with this for a few minutes. And Harvey, pay attention to the chat if you would and feel free to jump in with questions or comments here because you came to this webina

r because you're investing 90 minutes learning how to do this, you're going to get some “yes”s. And in the ideal world, you would send us 10% of everything you raised for the rest of your life. But that's unlikely to happen. So we're just going to go with the generosity model here and say when you get the yes, first of all, get excited, be appreciative. If you if you're one of those people who breaks into tears when you get good news, it is cool. You may do that. I give you permission to cry in

joy, but then you have to get organized. So let's go to the next slide. Now, the story of this is that Harvey and I wrote an article years ago about this together, and I think we came up with a dozen questions. I believe there are 13 in the slide deck. I want to say that you're not going to be able to ask 13 questions of every donor that you sit down with. But what you can have is a checklist or a tracking form. And we actually have that. And I will send that to Carrie, and Carrie can share it w

ith everybody along with the slide deck and the recording. So please take notes, but we're actually going to send you something that sort of takes the notes for you. First question is, how would you like to pay? And, you know, if you have a pledge form, it simplifies things because you pull the pledge form out of your briefcase or your backpack or whatever you've got, and you say, okay, how do I spell your name correctly? Is there somebody you would like to honor or memorialize with this gift? A

ll those questions, we'll get into that. But one of the questions is how would you like to pay? If people want to pay with a credit card, it doesn't hurt to have a square on your phone or bring your laptop and have some way for them to input their credit card information. Some people want to do it that way. And ideally, if you can collect that and do it in real time, it is helpful. Next one, please. How do you want us to use this gift? So this gets back to the question of is this going to be a d

esignated gift for something specific or is it going to be unrestricted? And it may be obvious as a result of the conversation that you've had with the donor that you know the answer to this question based on that conversation. But again, if you have a pledge form or some sort of tracking form, the option might be “unrestricted”—check. Or “restricted to”—check. Or special project or whatever you want to call that. Now, somebody asked a question, I think maybe before we came in that they were try

ing to renovate their site. They have a facility. They're also trying to build an endowment to support an environmental educator salary. And those are lovely, legitimate things to raise money for. This is where you have that conversation with a donor and maybe as part of your pledge form, it says that the gift is going to be used for for capital improvements or perhaps it's used for the endowment. We can talk endowment later. I would say most endowment gifts are going to come from legacy gifts.

When people pass away, and that's like a broader conversation. But the point is you want to know what the donor's intentions are before you leave the room. Next slide. How should we recognize you? Do you like your name published on the list? Would you prefer to be anonymous? May I share your name with other people so that they know you have given, you know, And one of the questions we get to is, do you know anyone else who might want to give? But I'm going to hold that. People learning about oth

er people giving is inspiring. And, you know, I will tell a quick story. Harvey, I think has heard this and you'll roll your eyes when you hear the story. But when we were in our forties, my spouse and I created our first will. We have a daughter, we have nieces and nephews, but there are also these other nonprofits that we were connected to. And when we wrote our will, we included six different nonprofits in the will and we were in our forties at the time. And I wrote to all four of these organ

izations and I said, We put you in a will. It's not a lot of money, but it's something. But if you'd like to use us as poster children, if you'd like to write a story in your newsletter that says “Middle-aged couple writes will. Remembers us.” and you want to use us to prompt other people to do the same thing, we are willing to out ourselves as legacy donors, and you can put our picture and you know, we'll give you a testimonial, whatever. And they're all like, That's amazing. Thank you so much.

And of the six organizations we offered this to, five of them never followed up. And the sixth organization took two years to follow. Now, in their defense, these were grassroots organizations. They were understaffed, they were under-resourced, They were overwhelmed. This was a gift they could not accept in the sense that they were just not in a position to use the testimonial or they thought they couldn't. But it was a missed opportunity because I felt like our giving could have inspired other

people's giving and multiplied. So be aware that that's an option when you talk to donors. I will tell you parenthetically that five years later, when we updated the will, maybe ten years later, we do it periodically. Most of those groups have fallen out of the will because we just weren't that close to them anymore. So if somebody says, You're in my will, you want to re cultivate and re cultivate and stay in touch with those folks. Next slide, please. Do you want this gift to honor somebody? I

s there someone who's passed away you'd like to recognize the thing about this is if somebody is honoring somebody, the person being honored needs to know. You have to have a way to notify Jane that Sally has notified, is honoring Jane with the gift. And so in this case, you're writing two thank you's instead of one, you're writing a thank you to the donor. And you're also notifying the person who is being honored. If someone is being memorialized, you want to notify the next of kin, whoever the

heirs are. So they're aware of this, too. Next slide. This could come earlier in the conversation. And I want to say this sequence I'm giving you here is not the automatic sequence. You might end up shuffling the sequence of these questions, which is totally fine. Hi. You just made a really generous decision. I'm so grateful you said yes. Say a little more about this and you know where I'm going is if you can get testimonials from donors about why they give, that is gold. That is really good co

ntent for you to use in your letters or on your social media, on your website in conversations with other donors. So exploring this with people is really powerful. And also it's another question you can ask them. It's another way to listen deeply to who they are and what they bring. Next slide. Here it is. Will you give us a testimonial? Because you know, what we say is the most powerful fundraising is peer to peer. It's one donor encouraging another donor to give. This is a form of peer to peer

fundraising. Now, Harvey, have you ever ghostwritten these for donors? A lot. Smaller. Well, basically goes back to that question around is it easy? Yeah. So every time I'm trying to get anybody to do anything, I try and make it as easy as possible. So if I'm writing a book and I ask friends for blurbs I've written, a bunch of them takes a bunch of time, but I here's some sample things you can add it right? Makes it so much easier for me. It makes it so much easier for them. So it's a game. If

you draft something and edit it. I write letters all the time, you write telling other people's stories. So it's essentially the same thing. Right. And they always, of course, have to have final say and change any inaccuracy. Hopefully not change the style because you write these in a particular style. Next slide, please. This is one of my favorites. Will you come to a board meeting or drop in on Zoom and talk to our board about why you give to your organization? And I bring this up because boar

d members have this idea like some of the many. We have this idea like donors are from another planet or they're a different species. And I don't know any donors. And they're all in a different social class. And, you know, they live in a different part of town or whatever. And I love me a donor panel in front of a board where you have three or four donors just speaking about why they love your organization in their own words, because it really demystifies this idea that donors are a different sp

ecies and it's you know, it's an honor. Like if you say, would you come and talk to my board and talk about where you give what a lovely gift to the donor to say, We want to hear from you and I'm going to put you in front of some of the most powerful people in our organization so you can share your story of giving. Next slide. How do we keep you updated? Do you like a phone call? Do you want to be on our list? We still publish a paper newsletter. Would you like to get that? Should I have coffee

with you once a year? Should I call you up if something is happening and you'd like an invitation? I mean, how do you like to be engaged with? And so this implies that you have a database and this implies that you're going to update the database and you can customize your communications based on what the donors tell you. Next slide. When I come to see you, can we bring in family members? Would you talk to your kids about why this is important to you or your grandkids or your siblings? This is su

per helpful. You want to turn it into a family thing, just not an individual thing. But this is really important. If you're doing planned gifts, legacy gifts, because you want the children to know that the parents are into putting you in their wills so that you don't have a contested problem when the parents die. So we are trying to cast the net wider, but we're also trying to protect the gifts that we already have. Next slide. Is there anybody else you know that might want to give to this organ

ization? Parentheses, If yes, will you introduce us? And again, I'm back to the peer to peer idea. If you can have donors encouraging other donors to give, that is probably the most powerful kind of giving. And it also speaks to what Harvey said earlier, which is, you know, the question is, why are you why are you asking me? And if you're a donor yourself, that's one reason to ask. Like I'm already committed to this organization. I love what we're doing, what we're doing using the word we, not t

hey. I love what we're doing. And so the reason I'm involved is because I care. And I hope that you will care, too. And I've already made a commitment. Now, classic language I am trying to teach to board members is something along the lines of and I hope this is true, “Because I'm on the board, This organization is one of my top three charitable commitments,” which is flexible, right, Because people have different amounts of money. And then the ask is, would you consider it making it one of your

top three charitable commitments, also? So look at the organizations you give to. Is this something that feels like it's on the near the top? Is that something you could do? Next slide. Who else do you give to? What other causes you care about? What are you interested in now? One theory, which I disagree with is that if somebody gives to health charities, that's what they give to, or if they give to the arts, they give to the arts, or if they give to environmental education, that's the thing th

ey give to. And what I have seen consistently is donors are way more diverse than that. And, you know. “Promiscuous” is I think is a correct term “Promiscuous” is a fine word, right? Now sometimes that promiscuity is local, like I give to all the local organizations, right? I give to the local church, I give to the local theater, I give to the local land trust, Right. I give to the local education group. But a lot of times it's much more random than that. And that's interesting. And if you find

that somebody like is political donor and they've given them multiple candidates, that’s interesting information. Next slide. Would you help? You're obviously smart, you're committed to this, you're articulate. I've enjoyed the last 45 minutes talking to you. You clearly know your stuff. You've actually given me a few tips about how to fundraise, which I wasn't looking for. But I'm grateful for. Would you help? And the thing is, you want to be specific. Like “will you help with fundraising” is n

ot a great question. A better question, “And here's a specific way that you can be helpful. Is that something you are willing to do?” And I'm thinking of in this context is I'm going to see some donors. Will you come along and talk about why you give? Are you willing to share your donor story with other potential donors? And that's empowering to people. People like to tell their story. And if their story actually has the impact of generating gifts from other people. Wow, that's good. And I belie

ve there is one more question. Slide, please. Oh yeah. What's your calendar like? When do you make your giving decisions? And the question is, when should I come and see you again? Are you somebody who tends to give at the end of the year? So I should be around in November. If we have a special need, are you somebody I could talk to more than once a year or are you a once a year donor? And again, you'd want to get this into the database so that you have a way to track. Are the times of year when

I should be talking to donor X, and maybe donor X is cool with being asked more than once. Now if someone commits to monthly giving, you're circling back to this again. It doesn't mean that you can't also talk to them occasionally about special gifts beyond their monthly commitment, and usually that to do with a campaign like we're trying to raise money to renovate the building or we're launching a new program and we have to bring in another $50,000 to do it, or we have this amazing challenge g

ift and we have to meet the terms of the challenge. And I hear this on public radio, public television all the time in the U.S., which is they do the pledge drive and they have a challenge gift. And a lot of the monthly donors are chiming in and giving extra money to help them meet the challenge that's on the table. So a monthly gift is not a ceiling, it's a floor. And sometimes you can get money beyond that. But you have to be sensitive to when you're asking and what you're asking. So I believe

that's the questions. Let's go to the next slide. Yeah, So we're back to chat here. And once again, this is, you know, this is the breakout that didn't happen because we're doing chat instead, which is good because we actually have a record of what you write and you can educate each other. We just gave you 13 questions. Which ones stick with you? and maybe they're questions you're already using in your interactions with donors. Or maybe it's like, Wow, I never thought of that one. I should be.

I should be using that question more often. So this is market research for us. Like what? Just what stuck. We spent 50 minutes talking about questions you could ask donors. Which ones will you remember, Harvey? Which one will you remember? Said one old man to another old man. I don't remember what happened 13 seconds ago. I kind of have memorized them all, to be honest. Yeah, right. You know what's present for you in this moment? Which one is top of mind? The questions of the 11 questions or the

questions that you ask afterward? The questions at the end. The 13 questions to ask. I think like you, one of the best is will you come to our board meeting? Yeah, because that is asking them for something that is totally different than money. It's for them to participate in the community. Yes. Speaking with these people aspiring for the board members, it's a gift to them really. Because you're saying you're an important person and we want to hear from you. So I think that's, you know, fabulous

question. And, you know, that's that's getting a lot of love and chat. That's the one that most people are typing into chat, is will you come and talk to my board? Yeah, Yeah. And again, it could be Zoom, right? It doesn't have to be in person. I was once asked to come and talk to a board for the Vancouver International Writers Festival. Yeah. Talk about fundraising because I'm a fundraiser. It’s what you do. Yes. And two months later I'm on the board for 11 years, so I've been giving them a lo

t of money every year, so and still volunteer for them. So yeah, you never know what will happen when you actually ask the person to come and talk to your board. Yeah, so this is where I share that Harvey is aspiring to read 100 books this year, and we'll probably get there because Harvey reads a lot of books. Yeah, and he'll tell you about all of them. So if you want to recommend it, but you're interesting. So yeah, if you want a recommendation. Fire Weather by John Valiant. Fire Weather you’ve

recommend it twice and what was the one by Jim Sharlet. Jeff Sharlet, Undertow It's about the slow civil war in America. Both two of the top five nonfiction books for the New York Times. And I believe Jeff Sharlet is a Vermonter. So he is my neighbor here in Vermont. Sa hi to him. I don’t think I know him. He’s almost as good a writer as you. Well, that's kind. So as mentioned, we do have a tracking form and it's related. It's one of the exercises we put together. And I will make sure that Carr

ie gets that. We will make sure that you get it. But obviously, if you took notes, that's awesome, too. So let's do a little Q&A here. Let's go to the next slide, please, and we'll pull some. And I know Carrie and Judy have been tracking some for us. I'm going to read you this one, Harvey, how do you feel like philanthropy is shifting? I think some philanthropy is trying to put trust in the organization and not drive what progress people do by letting their personal interests take precedent. In

other words, are funders backing off and more? Are they more likely to let us do what we want to do? What do you think? I don't totally understand the question, to be honest when I read it well, but I. Think paraphrasing it. Yeah, one of the things that's happening, the Chronicle of Philanthropy, pretty good. Probably the best publication on fundraising, if you want to know what's going on, is there's a debate constantly among foundations and individuals who are saying, I just going to give you

the money and I trust you to organizations and other people saying, Well, you have to build and earn the trust. And we don't really trust organizations because they're full of people who have self-interest or are not necessarily competent. And we want to have more control. So it's kind of holes and there's you know, it's probably the reality in the middle somewhere where things will work the best. There was an article, an editorial, somebody saying, we did test this or we just gave groups a bunc

h of money and let them do what they want to do. And it was all successful. Now, again, I don't know the methodology, how they evaluated, but this is one person's opinion. So it's I think it's it's probably a little more of that going on than used to go on. But I think it's not necessarily a way. Yeah, cool. Let's see what else we have here. this is the classic question about when is the right time of year to reach out to a donor? And you know what? I think what I wrote in chat was a lot of orga

nizations focus on the fourth quarter because that's when a lot of donors give is year end. And the sort of counterintuitive argument, if that's when everyone else is asking, maybe you should be asking at other times of year when there's less competition for people's attention. So how do you think about that? Well, it depends what kind of fundraising you're doing. So there's a difference between major gift again and mass fundraising. Yeah. So or we work with a lot of clients running their digita

l and mail programs, Right. And we know that in the final quarter of the year, we're getting way more money than they were. For any of the other quarters, especially this summer. However, there are some donors who are major gift donors that the best time of the year is when they have sold their business, whenever that is, or they get a big tax refund, or if you're an organization that sending kids to an environmental summer camp, the best time to ask people to give to that is not October. When y

ou're looking at the camp or the next June or July. Right. It's going into April. And we want to you need to raise $22,000. So it varies from organization to organization. One thing I do know is most organizations do not ask often enough, at least in Canada, in the States, sometimes they ask too much. Donald Trump is asking his donors 10 to 12 times a day to give money, which is insanity? Which is why the small dollar I know it's just horrible, but so you have to find out for your organization w

hat is cost effective and all that. But I feel like asking people four times a year as a minimum is good. And some of that could even be in a newsletter where you say, these are the great things we're doing with their money. And by the way, here's project we'd love to fund and you might want to help with it. So again, probably half of all money comes in September through December. Yeah. And for some groups we know from lots of testing that December, almost all the not all, almost all the an enor

mous percentage of digital donations come in as people get before the end of the tax year, even in the last week of the year. They're probably you know if you're not if you're not e-blasting your list on December 30th and December 31st, you are leaving money on the table because there are those procrastinators who are dropping their money at the very, very end of the year. So here's a question that's, you know, broad and is germane these days, and it's a question about technology and AI and how

is that changing fundraising and, you know, is that showing up in your work? Not a lot, but it will. What I found is like some of the like I've seen a bunch of AI writing and most of it's not great. But on the other hand, we've all used A.I. for many years. So if you're using theory, if you're using Grammarly already, these are A.I. and they are useful tools that can improve your writing or speed up editing. Yep. So I'm all in favor. I dictate things because I have carpal tunnel. So these things

help. So I think for any individual you have to figure out what is the ethical way to use this. Like a lot of donors will not like, this was written by a machine should they find out. So that's a thing to consider. Everything I've ever seen you really have to edit it if you have something turned out well. One of the things I find is great at is churning out hundred subject lines for an email, doing lists of things. So I was working with a CEO in Indiana who, at a women's organization, that real

ly needed an executive assistant. So rather than me write, here are ten reasons why you need an executive assistant to free up your time so you can raise more money. I just want to chatGPT, Give me 20 reasons. Seven of them are great. Took out three added another five that are appropriate to them. Saved me a ton of time. So I think there's many ways we can use this that are helpful to our organization. And of course it manufacturers— hallucinates as they say—all sorts of inspirations, I wouldn't

use it for scientific research necessarily. Yeah, but the thing is, we're we're trying to write inspirational copy in some cases, and maybe it's a tool to help you do that better. Yeah. So here's a question from Rachel, which I will paraphrase, but I think it's sort of the Uber question for a lot of people in environmental environmental education, how do you talk about a person's impact of giving for things so large, lofty as educating people about environmental issues that are very difficult t

o quantify, right? So if we are trying to build people's awareness of the natural world or connect them more strongly with nature or, you know, create a therapeutic space for people in nature to heal or just increase nature literacy, hard to quantify. It's not like we served 500 meals last month to the hungry in our community, right? So, I mean, I have thoughts on this I'll let you go first, because a lot of groups are out there that are doing important, necessary work that can't always be quant

ified. So how do you think about that? Well, I think it's a great question and one of the ways to quantify it is by telling stories. Yes. So if you've been around for 20 years, you've got somebody now in their thirties that is working as a biologist and making a huge difference. And why did they want to become a biologist? Because they went through this kid's education program and were inspired by the natural growth. So almost everybody has to have these stories. And even if it's a new organizat

ion and two years ago this kid says, I want to be a scientist and, you know, learn about animals and you can tell their story three years later. That's pretty inspiring, but invokes people's emotions. Yeah, and, you know, that's a, it's a really good thing. And then again, you can, depending on where you are, you might want to say, okay, we know climate change is going to be a big issue in the future. We want our children to be living in a world that's not a dystopian hellscape. They have to lea

rn about the environment, our environment, and when they learn, they will become activists and that will make a difference. So again, depending on the context and the community they’re in, that may be a disaster or maybe a good thing. But again, when you go back to stories and, you know, children are our future and optimism and hope, that's inspiring. So here's great quote. Everybody write this down. Get out your pens or your whatever your keyboard you're typing on. Someone gave this to me. They

said once “Statistics raise eyebrows, but emotions raise money.” and data is powerful. Stories are more powerful and you all are in the story business, right? You are. You are a story-generating if you're doing environmental education work and 99% of you are. That is a story-generating machine. And you're going to get not only the stories, but the lovely photos of all the people you work with, doing whatever environmental work you're doing, often in a beautiful place, not always, but always in

an interesting place. And if you can combine those images with the stories of the people and the transformation that happened to those people as a result of your work, that is good fundraising stuff. So I want you to stop feeling like you're competing with the food bank or you're competing with the health center, or you are competing with people who can measure the work differently. It's okay, you got enough. You have enough to raise money off of. You don't necessarily need to quantify everythin

g. And you can have—you can have a story from one of these kids that went through your program. Yeah, but doesn't have to be from the CEO of your organization and can write it like a 12 year old would write it. It's a lot like handwriting and yellow line paper. Those things work. I got one of those from TNC a million years ago. I assumed it was a kid, but maybe it was, you know, scam kid. But it was, you know, here's my visit to the nature preserve, and it blew my mind and this is, you know, 12

year old handwriting. And I thought, what a great piece of fundraising. Yeah. Judy, I see you live. Are you here to engage? Do you want to ask a question? Do you want to wind us up? What are you thinking? Yeah, both of those. I have one other question that was from way back. And then we're going to have to thank you and move to the end. Carrie has a few slides, but Celeste asked early on and I know a lot of people face this about any for asking friends and colleagues for funding when you don't w

ant to lose your friendship where you have it. That's easy. And basically it goes like this. I'm involved with this work. It's really powerful and meaningful to me. I would love it if you would be a part of this. So I'm going to ask you to contribute. If you have other priorities, if you don't have the money right now, if you choose not to give, it is totally cool. We will still be friends. I still love you. If you're able to give, that's great. If you're unable to give for whatever reason, that

's okay too. And just give them explicit permission to say no as part of the ask. Thank you. That's so simple. Yeah. Thank you, Andy. That was perfect. Harvey and Andy, thank you so much. So many great ideas. And look at all these books. And again, four of you will get books, really excited about that. And Harvey and Andy, I hope you'll come back. We'll do another webinar in the future. But you have been fantastic. Your experience speaks for itself. So many great ideas. And Carrie, thank you. Do

you want to take over now and close us out? But thank you both so very much and look at all the love in the chat. Yes. Yes. Many hearts and flowers. Yes. And again, thank you so much to both of you for all of this. And I know I was getting really excited as the days were coming towards this conversation. And clearly from the chat and from everyone's reaction, it has been nothing but a phenomenal conversation to be part of. So we really appreciate that. And as everyone knows, we will be sending

you the recording of this webinar. We've got the materials that have come through and we'll share all of that on the eePRO post to continue with that. We've got an email coming for you in the next couple of days, so we'll have the recording. So stay tuned for that. We've also got some items for NAAEE including our call for presentations for the conference we have coming up in Pittsburgh this November. We invite so many different points of experience, of research and of education that all of you

I know have to contribute. So we're eager to hear your proposals. They are due by April 26th and you can go to naaee.org to share. We also have our Natural Start conference coming up in July. It is our nature-based Early Learning conference taking place in Portland, Oregon this year. The registration is about to open, so stay tuned. And you can go to the conference site for Natural Start as well to get more details and plan how you'll be potentially attending that as well. And then I have a requ

est from those of you who are on, We are so eager to hear your thoughts on today's survey as well as your thoughts on what kinds of topics we can cover in the future. And so you can scan the QR code, you can go to the bit.ly listed there underneath the QR code, and then it will also be included in the email you receive in the next couple of days. But again, we'd love to hear your thoughts on Harvey and Andy's conversation and certainly on the topics that as environmental educators you're thinkin

g about and looking for more information and learning from. So again, I want to say thank you one more time to Harvey and Andy. This is a phenomenal conversation to listen to, to interact with. And we can't wait to keep sharing these materials, get some fundraising going, lots of tips and lots of good ways to make use of it. Thanks, everyone. Thanks, Harvey and Andy. Yeah, thank you for hosting us.