 Welcome back. We are so glad you're here. It's another episode of the non-profit show, and it's another episode of non-profit drill down part two. And glad to have with us today, for day two, Muhy Kwaja. He joins us as trainer of fundraising academy. He's bringing to us a conversation again yesterday. We had a wonderful, you know, tip off to this and we're carrying on with the topic of powerful end of year fundraising. So Muhy brings a lot of insight. We are going to do a quick review of yesterday, but we encourage you to find yesterday's episode. It's on our platforms and I'll show you where to find it. But Julia Patrick, always glad to be here with you. Be silly in our green room chatter. Julie is the CEO at the American non-profit Academy and I'm Jarrett Ransom, your non-profit nerd and CEO of the Raven group. We are so very honored to have the ongoing support from our amazing besties as well. Our friends and partners in this journey. So thank you to Bloomerang, American non-profit academy, fundraising academy at national university, non-profit thought leader, your part-time controller, staffing boutique, non-profit nerd, as well as non-profit tech talk. Again, just so very grateful to have their investment. Most of these companies have been with us from the very beginning, helped us to produce nearly 900 episodes. And as I mentioned, yesterday's drill down part one, you can find it on these platforms. So download the app, scan that QR code right now. And you can also find us on the streaming broadcast as well as podcast platforms. So I like to say truly wherever you stream your entertainment, call up the non-profit show and we will be there by your side free of charge. Thanks to our amazing partners in this journey. So, Muhee, welcome back. This is day two, part two of the drill down. Again, for those of you joining us, we have Muhee Quajai, who is with us today, MPA and CFRM, trainer at fundraising academy and also he's a co-founder at American Muslim Community Foundation. Welcome back to day two. Happy to be here. Thanks for having me. You know, I always learn a lot from you and I always say that, that I learn a lot from you. But I want to have you kind of touch base with us on the cause selling cycle because we're talking about year-end fundraising and I don't think that this means, oh, abandon everything on the cause selling cycle, right? Just because it's the year end. So can you help us understand how this fits? Yeah, definitely. Yesterday, we went into all of the eight steps individually. So I'll just briefly share that this is a tool that allows you to better connect with your donors, learn about them, see what their interests are, what their connections to your mission are and really deepen the relationship because it's very relationship-centric, not transactional. So you can implement these steps to your year-end giving campaign and we'll dive into a summary of yesterday and kind of focus on what else we can do as well. Okay, cool. So we're not abandoning SHIP at all on the basic values and the principles that fundraising academy structures everything around. I think that's like the biggest message, yeah. Yeah, I think it's more of your buoy in the water. If you are going to abandon SHIP, it's what you're going to hold on to. I keep it. Well, that's important. And yesterday for our viewers and listeners that maybe didn't have it yet, I'm going to say yet, watch and listen yesterday, do a quick review if you would because we talked about planning for the year ahead, how we should review our donor database, as well as these two reports. Talk to us a little bit about this before we really get into the height of part two. Yeah, the Lybunt and Cybunt reports from your CRM are so critical and these are to help you identify who gave a few years ago, who gave last year, but haven't given this year yet. So many CRMs have this in as a baked in report or you can customize it. So definitely learn a little bit more about Lybunt and Cybunt and add it to your vernacular. I love it. And I think what I learned from you yesterday, and it was an observation, but it's like, don't just like, oh my God, it's the year end. We need to work harder and put in more hours and make more phone calls. I think for my perspective, you were like, no, wait, take a step back, be more intellectual about this, and really look at the data first before you start getting all hysterical. Or you're like, no, get hysterical, it's the end of the year. I mean, you know, I've been a workaholic before. So I, you know, definitely put in my time in hours, but I would definitely say it's better to work smarter than harder. And by looking at these reports, building in the cost selling cycle into your year end strategy, you will be working smarter and focusing on the right things. Because there's always so much work to do. My mantra is like, there's work to do tomorrow and leave it for tomorrow at the end of the day when it hits five. So focus on the things a few weeks ahead that we have that will make a difference when it comes to your end fundraising. And that's going to be on relationship building. It's going to be these reports figuring out who you are going to reach out to, who the best person at your organization is to reach out to that person and deepening the relationship. Yeah. You know, so important. So as we also mentioned yesterday, just as we began part one, this topic, end of year fundraising, literally could last an hour's worth of episodes. So we're barely scratching the surface, but let's end a stewardship movie because I understand stewardship is a critical piece to our end of year fundraising plan. In particular, you want to talk to us about the donor's giving anniversary. I'm excited to hear what this is. I have a strategy on this as well. So I'm eager to hear from you what this looks like for the stewardship and in particular using that donor's giving anniversary. Yeah. So with any moves management, you want it to be personal to the donor. So when you're building out your stewardship strategy, you may just want to drop a line to the donor saying, last year, this month, you supported. Here's what you were able to accomplish. Would love to see if you have any questions around our mission and if you could consider supporting again, would love to answer any questions. And that just opens up the conversation again. Proper stewardship, you want to thank them several times after their gift before you asked them for another gift. So looking at a report that shows you what month your donors gave and building out touch points three months, six months, nine months, a year later, just to show them what you've done and then finally following up to ask them again after that movie. Is this a phone call? Is this an email? Is it a handwritten letter? Are we asking them to coffee? Is it all of that? What what is the best strategy that you see? All of the above. Yeah. So whatever method works most for your donor, I mean, I do personalized text messages. I've done the robo text messages. I've done the email newsletter. I've done personalized emails, phone calls as well. And even if you get no response, the next time you see them in person, a lot of my supporters always say, you know, I haven't responded, but I really appreciate you sending the information. I see it. And that's all that matters. It's that top of mind awareness. And how can you create that opportunity for your donors to be thinking about you? So another question when it comes to this end of year anniversary touch point, is this a touch point you also use, you know, throughout the other nine months of the year? Or do you personalize it or, you know, really deploy the strategy for the final quarter? Yeah. I think you can have those touch points throughout the year, revolve them around opportunities for engagement with the mission. So say there's an event coming up or there's an opportunity for them to meet somebody from your staff. You do a little raindrop here, a little raindrop there, but it might intensify into a thunderstorm closer to the year end giving. And that may accumulate, that may get their attention, but around those moments where you really need their engagement, you can turn those raindroplets into a thunderstorm. I love, love, love that visual because sometimes we get frustrated. We think, oh, we're doing all these things and then nothing happens. And I think it's equally the pressure coming from the board or from other members of the C-suite saying, what are you guys doing in development? You're just going out to lunch. You're just going to events. You're just throwing parties and nothing's happening. Nothing's moving. It takes a lot of grit to stay online and stay on task to realize that these, to use your phrase, these raindrops turn into thunderstorms. It's brilliant. And I appreciate really having that strategy of the three-month, three-month touchpoint, the six-month touchpoint, you know, really using that throughout the year because I really feel that stewardship, Muhi, falls flat and falls short in many of our organizations. As Julia mentioned, I emcee'd an event last night and stewardship after events. Can you talk to us about that and the best way to continue to steward an individual? Maybe they're a new individual, you know, that's been brought into the mission, or maybe they have been a long-standing supporter. What does that stewardship look like beyond the anniversary? But let's talk about beyond the ballroom, if you would. I love that. Yeah. So, you know, just thinking of putting on large events myself, take a day to rest after, then within 48 hours to a week, send a thank you for attending and have that go specifically to the attendees, not everybody who is in your work. So, again, a very segmented list that is meant for the attendees. Talk about how much the event raised, if it was a fundraising event, how they can get involved, how they can share it with their network. And then from there, set those touch points up for, you know, three to six months after the event to follow up with the broader list and just say, you know, it's been six months since our Gala. We wanted to let you know about the impact that you helped create. And we still need your support. And then say, would you like to volunteer? Would you like to do some other thing that brings them in the door? And then, of course, a year later, you have your event again, you're inviting them to the event. Maybe you asked them attendees from the event the previous year, again, specific segmented list, do you want to join the host committee for the event? And you do that six months out. And different opportunities to get people more involved. I love that. You know, I've always seen the host committee be very strategic in like who they tap on the shoulder, but really casting that net far and wide. You never know who's in that audience that says, I would love to do that, right? And maybe we would have overlooked them. 100%. Yeah. And, you know, one of the biggest challenges is like, if somebody gets a table, you may not collect the information of their guests, but looking into how you can better capture that into your CRM, make sure that they get those updates that, how they supported and all of their information, whether they raised a paddle for the silent auction and things like that. So, trying to capture as much information from the attendees is super critical as well. You know, I appreciate your kind of taking the concept of stewardship to that event management, because I think sometimes we think, oh, stewardship is like donors and the people, you know, over here and event management is something else. And we don't always combine these and yeah, and keep them active and have like a real like process. I mean, when you said take a day off and then do all, you know, do these stewardship pieces, to me, those things should be done before the event ever starts. You know, they can be pre-done, you know, maybe 100% or to 90% and then fill in some specific data points about what went on. And then that should be, you know, queued up, ready to go out. And there's no reason to start and think, oh, wow, the event was good, we're exhausted. Okay, now what do we do? You should have this figured out. So, that's a little bit of tough love, but you know, I'm just saying, I'm just saying. Okay, let's go on to this next aspect that you talk about. And again, we're talking about the year end piece of this and the things that we try and do and we understand how important this is for not only our donors, but for our organizations, outreach plans. What does that look like to you? And what should we be thinking about, Moohi? Yeah, definitely. You know your donors best, you know how they respond, you know how they give. So, you may not want to implement all of these, but you should implement some of these, whichever works, and you may want to test all of them to see which ones have the biggest output. I know at American Muslim Community Foundation, we have people's home addresses and we don't have their email or we don't have their phone number. So, in order to touch our entire database, we do have to do direct mail. We do have to do a multi-pronged approach to make sure we're covering our bases and we hope that we can continue to collect more information once they become donors, but perhaps maybe they signed up for the email newsletter only and only put in their city and zip and then we did more research to find their actual address. So, there are a lot of things in place that you may need to do to beef up your outreach plan, but I know that for direct mail, we often receive a lot of gifts by people sending us a check in the mail or filling out a form and submitting their credit card information to us, and we have to input that into our processor manually. So, we still do a little bit of that. We of course push our website, try to get them there. We put a little QR code on a postcard so we know how many people scanned it and visited and the effectiveness of it, and always testing these things to make sure, okay, next year we'll tweak it this way and test it this way, and then same thing with email. It's how many opens did you get? How many click-throughs did you get? Did we put the big button up top or at the bottom or in the middle and how effective was that? So, looking into all of these little design details, that's part of the outreach plan as well, and then when it comes to digital, are you allowing for other means to give through PayPal and Zell and Venmo and your website and how does that information dump into your CRM seamlessly, or do you need to manually transfer that data in every single month? And do you do that once a month? And then on social media, are you doing a specific short URL code that you can track when you place a link on Facebook? Is that getting more clicks than when you place it on Twitter? And so on so forth. You can track the effectiveness of which social media you have more engagement on. We do LinkedIn, don't sleep on that one. So, so many different things that you can plan and strategize around, but all of there should be something happening on each platform and maybe you only have one social media page and that's what you use, but I would encourage you, even if it's the same content on each platform, utilize services like HootSuite that allow you to schedule and plan and post once and then it posts to all the social media platforms. So there were ways to, again, work smarter and not harder. Movie, do you find that with the American Muslim Community Foundation that you are targeting different demographics or age groups according to what tools you have in place, or are you just trying to move through whatever data connecting points you have? So you mentioned, you know, snail mail address versus email. What does that look like for you? Because I think that's a big discussion that we're always having. Snail mail is only for the older set, you know. Yeah, definitely. And, you know, at least on social media, it does give you demographics and details of your age groups by decade of who they are, where they're located, and you can really dive into the data. In terms of AMCF, you know, for our donor advice funds, majority of them are in their 40s and 50s and 60s out of the 175 that we have. So many of them are still good electronically. But again, we always still send to anybody we haven't addressed for unless they opt out. So it's a multi-pronged approach. So it can be that top of mind awareness, even if it ends up in the recycling bin, or even worse, the trash. I still think it's worth sending the direct mail because they see it, they see your branding, and it puts it subconsciously in their mind to then the next time you reach out with a text or a phone call or an email, yes, they saw that. Now you're reaching out. It's a good opportunity for you to engage. So it helps you get closer to the next step in the process. And I will always be a diehard fan of direct mail until the day I die. I say I am too, Moohee. I absolutely love it. I am on and we talked about emails yesterday and your love for unsubscribing. You know, I get a lot of emails. I get fewer direct emails. And when I receive that touch point in the mail, I pause, right? I open it. I sit down. I read it. I turn the page. I look at the photos. Like, I'm very present with their piece as opposed to email where I'm eating, I'm talking, I'm on a Zoom meeting, but I'm scrolling through my emails. Like, I'm just not as present, if you will, in the electronic format as I am on that direct mail. And like you, you know, it's a touch point, which then when it comes time for me to do my end of year donations, I sit down and I start doing them online. I do. I think about those that I received in the mail and I'm a lover of them as well. I still think that they are fantastic. And there are so many great stats out there about, as you mentioned, this multi-prong approach and really getting your messaging out beyond digital, right? And really touching all of these touch points here. I want to move us into the final talking point, I believe. One more thing I wanted to share before we switch topics. So, some organizations definitely overdo it. So, at AMCF, we do maybe two postcards a year at Macs and one letter a year. Like, that is enough touch points, Ramadan end of year, and maybe like for our annual symposium that's happening in the fall to kick off our year-end fundraiser, right? So, typically three times a year, low touch point, but good opportunity to get in front of those people that we don't have emails and phone numbers for. But, yeah, just wanted to touch, like, don't overdo it because that's the other end where, you know, you don't need to bombard people in the mail, but at least keep it significant enough. Yeah, I love that. And I appreciate you sharing that because, again, that's the strategic aspect. You know, Ramadan, your kickoff to the symposium kickoff to your end, in your end. Yeah, that's brilliant. Sure, you were starting to talk about this campaign committee. Yeah, I can't wait to hear about this because I'm going to witness to you and everyone watching and listening. I've never recruited an end of year campaign committee. So, talk to us about this, Muhe. Tell us the, you know, the strategies. So, it's all about recruiting donors to be on this year in strategic, you know, implementation. Is that right? Yeah, definitely. And you can include them in different ways. And sometimes we've done it with our board members. Sometimes we've done it with donors. And it's just like really focusing on testimonials, why they support. So, you've probably done it in that sense where you've gathered testimonials from donors or beneficiaries and included them. That's the same concept here. Where you want to get that sound bite, get that text, get that opportunity to show their face and let them tell their story of why they support and why others should consider supporting. So, it's more on the storytelling of that as well and allowing them to be on the committee. And just like a capital campaign has a committee, you engage these people in the same way. Open up doors and bring people to your organization that they think would be interested in supporting. Muhe, are they also adding mailing addresses to your, you know, postcards or your emails? And, you know, are they adding to the database, if you will? Sure. The other thing I wanted to say, so thank you for mentioning that, was yes, they can even personalize letters to people that they know who are already supporters, you know, strike out their name, hand write it in, put a little note, those things. I did that at AMCF for like the first five years and I would get people saying, I always love opening your mail because I get to read a little message from you. And similarly, you can engage this committee in reaching out to the network that they know. And if they do have addresses of family members or friends that they wanted to reach out to personally, yeah, hopefully you can include that information into your CRM if they become donors or add them in as prospects and go from there. Yeah. I love that. Julia, as a board member, because I know you've served on many boards and thank you. How have you been brought in from this aspect, if you will, into that end of year committee? You know, not significantly or strategically enough. And we've talked about that. Just the actual action of coming to the board during a meeting or before a meeting starts and saying, here are some of our lists. I mean, Muhi, your comment about, you know, here are the letters going out. If you know somebody, take it and write a little note. I mean, I haven't seen that enough. And I agree with you. I think that is so powerful. You know, we know that mailboxes are not getting as much mail as they did before the digital revolution. And so use that as an opportunity to have that more personal touch point. But no, I think we need to be using those folks on our boards more than we do. I think we get caught up, Jared, in trying to get through an agenda. Checking the boxes. As opposed to this cultivation. Yeah. I will say it's challenging when a lot of organizations are using mail houses, right? So you have to balance that. And maybe once a year, you'll agree to do it in-house. And it's going to cost a little bit more. It's going to take a little bit more time. But the reward will be there. Yeah. I love that. And I appreciate you mentioning, you know, when it's done externally, it's kind of hard, you know, to get that note on there. But there's still so many other ways to reach that accomplishment. This has been fantastic. I'm rather sad that this is the end of our drill down for part two. But again, for those of you watching and listening, I know end of your drill down review day one, Muhe brought his skill sets and talents. We talked about how you can plan for your year end, how you can review your database to really have the data drive that plan. And then of course, his two favorite reports, mine as well, lie button, side button. So last year, but unfortunately not this and some year, but unfortunately not this. Today, you just heard him talk about stewardship and how that's important for your donors, as well as outreach campaigns, plans, and then the whole communications and the involvement of others, not just the development team. So fantastic conversation, really timely, because we're all in our year end right now. Cannot believe that we're in Q4 Julia. Where I know it's it is a hair on fire moment for me because it just you know, I think we've gone through periods of time in the last five years that where things drug on and now post pandemic, it's like things have just catapulted forward and we have a lot of new tools and new ideas and new missions. And so this type of information becomes even more critical. Muji Koaja, trainer, fundraising academy. I find it more interesting in many ways that this little gem, you're one of the co founders of the American Muslim Community Foundation. And so when we get to work with you and hear your wisdom and learn from you, you've really been on the other side of that desk and you bring to the conversation real practical real world issues that you've been grappling with with your own work. And so I love that because we get the best of both worlds. So check out Muji Koaja. Again, I'm Julia Patrick, CEO of the American nonprofit Academy, been joined today by the nonprofit nerd herself, Jared R. Ransom, CEO of the Raven Group. Again, we have these amazing sponsors that I don't want to make sure that we don't miss them. They include Blumerine, American nonprofit academy, your part time controller, nonprofit thought leader, fundraising academy at national university, staffing boutique, nonprofit nerd and nonprofit tech talk. These are the folks that join us day in and day out. And Jared, 900 episodes sister pretty soon. Next week. Celebrate. Yeah, we will. The fireworks will be going off. We will have a special episode that day. So that'll be kind of fun. So you'll have to join us on that. Hey everybody, we like to end every episode with this sign off. I think it's a mantra of sorts. And it goes like this to stay well. So you can do well. Muji, thank you so much.