 Welcome everyone. Welcome to our webinar, 7 Strategic Fundraising Tips for Your Non-Profit. Thank you so much for joining us. I'm Susan Hope Bard, the online training producer here at TechSoup. We do want this training and this presentation to be relevant to the important work you do. To that end, we're going to be raffling off one of our presenters' new handbooks, Non-Profit Fundraising 101. So don't leave the webinar until we've selected the winning participants. The winner must be present virtually when we announce. Also keep in mind, we will have a survey at the end of this presentation. Your opinion is important to us. Please take a moment to complete it. A few things about our platform ready talk. Lower left hand corner is a chat box. This is where you can ask questions about problems viewing the slides or hearing the audio. We have someone on the back end that can help you. The chat box is also for your questions. Throughout the presentation, feel free to chat in your question. We'll be flagging those questions. Our presenter will be going through those, queuing your questions for answer. If you lose your Internet connection, you can reconnect using the link in your registration or the reminder email that was sent out about an hour ago. Also you can access the presentation slide deck that we sent with that email. If you're hearing an echo through your computer speakers or having any issues with the audio, you can also dial in using the toll-free line. We will be recording this presentation and it will be available to you on our TechSoup website along with all past webinars, www.techsoup.org, slash community, slash events, dash webinars, or you can go to our YouTube channel, www.youtube.com, slash TechSoup video. In about a week, you're going to receive an email with a link to this presentation, the recorded presentation, any Q&A, and collateral informational materials so that you'll be able to access those after the presentation. If you're following along with Twitter, you can tweet us at TechSoup by using hashtag TS Webinars. Joining us today is Darian Rodriguez Heyman. He is the author of the newly released handbook, Nonprofit Sunraising 101. Darian served as the Executive Director of Craigslist Foundation where he helped launch their nonprofit bootcamp and educated and inspired over 10,000 nonprofit leaders and co-founded the only conference series in the U.S. devoted to social media for good, social media for nonprofits. Also joining us is Ali Dizbekan. She's going to be on the back end. She's going to be answering all your technical questions. Some of Darian's objectives today are to share some practical and tactical solutions that can help you with your nonprofit fundraising. He is going to discuss concrete tips and tools for individual giving, Foundation grants, corporate sponsorship, and online campaigns. At the end of today, you should be able to identify at least one idea that you can easily put to work with the expectation of increasing fundraising results. And we're also here to answer your questions. Before I turn it over to Darian, just a couple of things about TechSoup. We're located here in beautiful San Francisco. Actually, Darian is also here in San Francisco and we want to know where you're from. So take a minute to put in the city and state or the country where you're from. Go into the chat box right now as I tell you a little bit more about TechSoup. We're a 501C3 nonprofit like many of you. We work to empower organizations around the world to help them get the latest tools, skills, and resources to help them achieve their mission. You can see from our map here that we serve almost every country in the world. We have 62 partner NGOs. The need is global and we have a dedicated website for countries outside of the U.S. at www.techsoup.global. This is where folks outside the U.S. would access technology donations. Wow, we've got folks from all over the country. North Carolina, Cincinnati, Michigan, Georgia. Wow, Canada, welcome everyone. A few things about our impact. We've helped organizations get more than $5.2 billion in technology products and grants. These technology products and grants come from more than 100 corporate and foundation partners. Now before I turn it over to our expert presenter, and I know you're going to love him, we want to do a quick poll. We're interested in learning a little bit about what your goals are. So what types of fundraising tips are you most interested in learning? Take a moment and check the things that you're most interested in learning. So that will help Darian customize his presentation. I see folks ringing in right now. Great. Well, lots of folks are looking for information on individual donors. Looks like that's up. Corporates, followings, close seconds. Okay, I'm going to give everyone five seconds. Four, three, two, one. Okay, so you can see here that, wow, 76, almost 77% of you want some fundraising tips about individual donors. And that's followed closely by corporate. So I know Darian's got a lot of information to share with you today. You're going to find this webinar very valuable. So I'd like to welcome Darian to take it away. Thank you. Great. Thanks so much for that wonderful introduction. And really excited to be with all of you today. So thanks so much for taking the time. I'm going to move pretty quickly because we have a lot of content to cover. However, I am very comfortable integrating questions throughout the program. So don't feel the need to save them until the end if there's something that I'm sharing that is not clear or you would just like some clarification of something or you have a specific question or challenge that you're facing in your work with your organization. Feel free to use the chat box, send that in, and I will gladly do my best to integrate responses to those inquiries throughout the entire program. And so let's get into it. What I've done here is actually just yesterday I released my second book which is called Nonprofit Fundraising 101. It's pretty exciting. It came out as the number one new nonprofit release on Amazon. And what I wanted to do, which I also did when my first book, Nonprofit Management 101 came out, was really take a couple super salient tips, really concrete and practical insights from the book and share those with you in kind of a back-to-back environment covering individual giving and online and a variety of other disciplines. So that's what we're going to be doing today. You heard about my background, but really my work in the nonprofit space, and in particular my life's work of helping people help, working with people like each and every one of you and connecting you to the resources, best practices, and contacts that you need to succeed and maximize impact. That really started for me when I was running Craigslist Foundation and I created their Nonprofit Boot Camp which turned into my first book. And so I am very much at your disposal not only for the next hour, but moving forward in general. So please feel free to write my Twitter handle down at the upper right corner here. I'll also share my personal email and mobile phone number at the end. And if I can ever be a resource or be of service at any way, don't hesitate to reach out. I do a bunch of pro bono work and just love working with nonprofits and social entrepreneur leaders like yourselves. So let's dive into it. I'm a recovering executive director. I know how busy nonprofit and NGO leaders are. We've all got a lot of things pulled in at a time. And what I want to do here over the next 45 minutes is not just leave you inspired, but inspired to action. Meaning what can you do differently? What's the – to Susan's point, the one thing you can do differently today or tomorrow that's going to make you better able to raise money for your cause. And one of the things – the reason I wanted to start with this first one around getting your board engaged is the fact that what most people don't realize is the group called CompassPoint did a study called Daring to Lead a few years back. They discovered the number one reason why executive directors lead their job is frustrations around fundraising. And number two, quickly followed that which was frustrations with their board. And if you put those two issues together and you come up with getting your board to fundraise, that can be an incredibly vexing challenge for many, many nonprofits. I've worked with hundreds, if not thousands of groups that have suffered in this arena. So I wanted to share a couple quick points on how to get your board to fundraise and to contribute financially because their fundraising really starts with their own personal contribution. And especially as you're going out to foundations for example, oftentimes they are going to ask, what is your board participation in fundraising? Meaning what percent of your board contributes? And the right answer is 100%. The wrong answer is anything less than that. So how do you get to that 100%? And the easiest way to do that is through a simple tool, a document called a board member agreement. There's also another template and I'm happy to share copies of templates for both of these documents for free to anyone who wants to email me after this webinar or shoot me a tweet. But there's also a really helpful document called a board matrix. Now let's take a quick look at these. They're going to be hard to see on your screen because they'll be pretty small and zoomed out. But again, I can email these to you as a follow-up. But the purpose of a board matrix is really when you're starting to look at expanding your board and recruiting new members. If you meet with a well-connected person and they understand your work and you give them an update and you say, hey, do you know anybody that you think would make a good board member? Maybe they'll think of someone and maybe they'll share a name. As opposed to if they learn about your work and then you say, hey, we're looking to expand our board. In particular, we're hoping to find a Latina who is based in San Francisco and has a legal background and solid corporate connections. Do you know anybody that might fit that bill? If you give people a clear understanding of what you're looking for, the likelihood of them being able to support that effort goes up exponentially. And the purpose of the board matrix is to help you and your board really clarify exactly what the profile is of your ideal board candidates. And it's a simple tool just like all the ones that I use. On the top, the columns are just people's names starting with your existing board and then adding in a couple key prospects. And down the rows, you're going to put different characteristics into buckets. So it could be their skills and expertise. It could be what kind of connections they have, their personal financial capacity, technical expertise in legal or accounting issues, do they have board experience, etc. And the point is diversity and geography are those things that support you. So it's an exercise where you sit down with your board and collectively you decide 5, 10 years from now we have the perfect board. It has all of the expertise and the contacts and the resources we need to maximize impact. What is the profile of that board? What does it look like? And then you put those characteristics down on the matrix. And then in a board meeting you just send 5 minutes. You let everybody put an X under their name for the boxes that are appropriate. And that really quickly and easily helps you identify out of those characteristics, what do you miss it or what do you light on? And that way the group comes to consensus around what are the top 3 or 4 characteristics that we really need? Well, we need to add some diversity. We need a young leader on the board. We need someone with deep pockets that can light a large personal check and we need someone well connected to foundations, whatever the case may be. But that is really helpful. Now once you know what you're looking for that's where the board member agreement comes into play. And typically when you recruit someone to your board you'll give them the board orientation packet which includes the bylaws and a bunch of other legal mumbo jumbo and it's 200 pages. And even if people do read it there's so much content that they can't remember any of it. You'll say if you say 10 things you'll say nothing. So the point is what a board member agreement is is it's a very simple document one to two pages at most written in very plain English or Swahili or Laura for the students joining us from Nairobi, written in very plain language with very clear expectations. And it basically says as a board member of TechSoup I commit to the following. I will attend 75% of all board meetings for example. So it's not I'll make a good faith effort to attend board meetings. It's really concrete. It's something that can be objectively assessed at the end of each year when you do your annual board reviews which is very much a best practice. And this should be the checklist for that review. Did you do all these things? Did you attend 75% of all board meetings? There's no question there. It's a yes or a no. Did you make a personal capacity gift or a give or get goal? Did you give or get $10,000 this year? Did you facilitate reductions to at least potential donors and funders this year? Did you serve on a committee? Etc. Etc. Did you commit at least five hours of your time pro bono a month? These are some of the standard things in a document like this. And again, I'm happy to send out a template to anyone that might find it helpful. But the point is you want to keep it really short, very simple, very concrete language that is not subjective, that is very easy to understand. And then at the end of each year and certainly from a fundraising standpoint, you want to have a commitment in there to make an annual contribution and also to make some introductions to other potential donors. And so the idea is at the end of each year that Board Chair can go down this list and say, okay, did you do this? Did you do this? Did you do this? And the answer to any of those is no. It makes it much easier to have a conversation objectively about okay, was this the one off thing because you had a kid or had a health problem or had your lifestyle changed and maybe Board Service is no longer appropriate for you into an advisory role and still keeping you as a donor. So it makes it much more painless to have these kinds of potentially awkward conversations and you're really clearly establishing right from the get-go when you're recruiting members and also you're getting your existing members to sign this document in the context of, hey, we're going to have new people sign it, so we need to as well. And it's really clearly establishing what's expected of each board member from a fundraising standpoint. I do recommend personal capacity gifts as opposed to a minimum give or get target, especially if you have a diverse board. And just so you know, a capacity gift is defined as the largest gift a donor or board member can comfortably make and one of their top three philanthropic investments of the year. If they're giving more money to three other nonprofits then they should probably join their board. Let's get into grant writing. And Ray, I saw your question come through about the template. I don't have your emails through the platform. So I will share my email at the end of this presentation and you've also got my Twitter handle on the upper right here. So if you reach out to me either of those two ways, I'll be happy to send you those templates. So as I ask thousands of nonprofits and NGOs all over the world why they don't do more work raising money from foundations, typically I hear about 90% of the time they all share the same complaint and the same reason for not investing more resources and time into grant writing. And it's always a matter of, oh, we tried that before and we spent 20 hours, 50 hours sending out a bunch of grants and we didn't get any of them and it was a huge waste of time. We decided to focus our efforts on individual donors, on social media, on whatever the case may be. And there's a reason why people share that complaint all the time and it's because they are failing to take into account my cardinal rule of foundation fundraising. And that is never submit a cold grant or set another way. Don't show up to a party that you have not been invited to attend. Don't be a wedding crasher. So the idea is rather than spending a lot of time and energy to identify the most targeted foundations where they are doing exactly, they are finding exactly the work that you do in the region you do, an area that you do. So great, these guys are perfect. Now let's go under their website, fill out their application form and invest 5 to 10 hours giving them all the information that they are looking for, sending the application and cross our fingers and hope that we get that grant. So you know when you do that, you've got about on average a 5% chance of getting that grant. So just like you can buy a lottery ticket and there's a chance you're going to win, but the likelihood is not high and it's probably not going to be a financial investment, same thing is true with writing cold grants. So the alternative and for me personally, my success rate with foundation fundraising is not 5% but 50%. So the tips I'm going to share in the next 5 minutes are intended to help any NGO, any nonprofit increase its success rate by an order of magnitude. And first off I should say that it is still important to use some resources and do the research to identify your top prospects. And I'm not talking about 200 or 500 prospects, I'm talking about 20 or 30 because the whole point that I'm making here is that instead of applying to a bunch of places, I'd rather have you invest that time and energy into getting an invitation to apply, into getting a call or a meeting so you can share your story with this funder, find out more about their work, secure an invitation to apply, and other pieces of key information. Because just so you know, if you've bumped into a foundation program officer which is kind of foundation speak typically for the person in charge of giving away money in a particular area of focus, the program officer. But the point is if you bumped into one of them at the hallway of a conference and you give them your 10 second, 30 second elevator pitch, and they say that sounds really interesting, you know, sending a proposal, that's great. And your odds have gone up from 5% but only to about 10%, certainly not 50. Because there's other key pieces of information you need to get from 10 to 50. So in that scenario, I would say that's wonderful. Thanks so much. I'd love to send in a proposal. Would you mind if we had a quick call or meeting beforehand so I can get a couple additional pieces of information before I go ahead and apply? And the pieces of information that you want, there's about four or five critical pieces, critical asks that you need to make of this program officer. Now again, all of this occurs under the umbrella of securing an invitation to apply. But going back to that party analogy, okay great. Now you got invited to the party, you need to know what's the address, what time is it, what's the attire. There's other pieces of information that you need to ensure you show up in the best form. In the case of a foundation grant, the pieces of information you want in addition to getting that overarching invitation to apply, the first thing is the what and the why, the programs and the positioning. And what I mean by this is what you want to do before you go into any pitch, any meeting with a potential donor, with a potential flunder, is it's critical that you take the time and energy to craft really compelling and yet incredibly concise elevator pitches for all of your different what I call fundables. And by fundables I mean all of your existing programs, your organization as a whole for when you pitch for general operating support, and then all of the projects that you would love to be able to launch if you secured the necessary funding. And the idea is you want a 30 to 45 second elevator pitch for each of those fundables, each of the arrows in your quiver. And they are not detailed. You're not getting into the how, you're getting into the why. You're not talking about the what, you're talking about the so what, meaning you're communicating the need. You're communicating the impact that this kind of program will have. And at a very top-line level, how you're going to do that. And you have one of these for each of your different fundables and based on the research that you do before you go into that call or that meeting, you're going to identify the three or the four things that you think are going to be of interest to this funder. And you're going to share those starting with general operating support. And hopefully what will happen is as you talk to that foundation about your organization as a whole, about your vocational training program, and about your soup kitchen, is that they will readily respond and let you know if there is a fit, if something resonates, and why. And that may take the form of them asking more questions about it, and then ultimately saying, oh, well, thanks so much for letting me know a little bit about your organization. I do think that there's a potential fit around general operating support because we really share your commitment to helping people help themselves. And in particular, I think that the vocational training program is definitely a potential fit for us because we are a firm believer in giving people a handout instead of a handout, or whatever the case may be. Now what you're writing down in your notes are two things. Number one, they're interested in general operating support, and they're interested in vocational training. Number two, why are they interested in those? And even though it sounds cheesy, even though they might use some cliche terms, they're interested in general operating support because they want to help people help themselves. They're interested in the vocational training people to give people a handout instead of a handout. The point is there's a good chance that the words and the language they use to articulate why those things may be a fit are the way they discuss these things internally, but you will probably not find that language on their website or in any of their materials. And guess what? You want to include that language prominently in your proposal when you follow up and apply for funding. So again, you are looking for the what and the why. And the idea of what I call the pasta test is that you've got these elevator pitches for each of your fundables and you're going to throw them at the wall and see what sticks, just like the guys did back in college. So now you're finding out what resonates. And hopefully you're doing this in the context of that foundation's goals. You've taken the time to do research. And before you even dive into your elevator pitches, you're talking a little bit more with them about their goals, about why do they focus on working with the homeless? How did that first get started? You're essentially asking what I call level two questions, meaning that you're accomplishing a couple of things. One, you're demonstrating you've done your homework. But two, you're trying to find out information that you couldn't find on the website. It's what's known as an appreciative inquiry process. And you can Google that term. It's a really interesting concept. But the basic idea is what makes them tick, what motivates them, and inspires their giving, and their focus on this particular arena? Because once you know that context, you're going to want to contextualize your pitches, your elevator pitches, through that lens. So now we've got an indication to apply for our overarching organization and for the vocational training program. That's wonderful, but we're still only halfway there. We're only at about 20% success rate, not 50%. So there's three final things that I want to share that will take you to that final, that last mile, and get you to a 50% success rate. The first one is, even though it sounds simple, you want to ask for a dollar amount for each of the different fundables that they expressed an interest in. And you want to make an ask here, which means it ends in a question mark followed by a pause, and they are the next person to speak. And that sounds something like, oh, Bob, thanks so much for your interest in providing general operating support to our organization. Our budget next year is $1 million, and we're wondering if the MacArthur Foundation would be in a position to provide a $250,000 grant, or if $125,000 would be more realistic given that we're a first-time grantee. Question mark, pause. You wait until they speak next. And then similarly, and thanks also, and so you get that information, and audits are what they'll probably say, oh, well gosh, even $125,000 would be really high for us. Our grants are typically in the $50,000 range for first-time grantees, maybe the accuracy of going as high as $75,000. Okay, great. You're writing $75,000 down in your notes. If they give you a range, all that matters is the number at the top of the range. That's what you're going to ask for. And then you're going to ask again for that program. Wonderful. Totally upset and happy to get your proposal for that, Bob. Thanks also for your interest in the vocational training program, and on our shared commitment to giving people a hand up instead of a hand out. Happy to get your proposal on that front. The budget for that program next year is $200,000. Would it be reasonable to ask to invite MacArthur to underwrite that entire program next year, or would a $100,000 request be more realistic? Question mark, pause. Now just to be clear, based on your research, if you know that this organization normally only gives out $20,000 grants, you don't want to ask them for $100,000 to $200,000. You want to ask them for a little bit more than they normally do. If they normally give out $20,000, ask them if they could do $25,000 to $50,000. And they will come back to you and they will probably give you a range that might be lower than that. That's okay. You want to overshoot within reason so that you can maximize the ask amount, the invitation to apply. You want that to be as big a number as possible, so you get as much money as possible. So your research should indicate what size ask and what size range to make. In the absence of that, if you're working in the dark, then what I suggest is for general operating support as a formula, ask for a quarter of your total budget next year and then offer a backup option of half of that. And for an individual program or other fundable, ask for the entire budget for next year with a secondary option of half of that budget. So again, hopefully you've done some research and you've identified something that's more appropriate, but as a baseline that may be helpful. Now we've gotten an invitation to apply for specific fundables with a specific reason for each and a budget and ask amount for each. The final thing that we're going to ask is that even though many foundations will have a deadline for rolling applications, you still want to ask for a deadline for your proposal because here's where we get to, and just so you know, even before the new Star Wars came out, I was talking about this, here's where we get to the Jedi Mind Trick. And this is such a simple but incredibly powerful tip that I once spoke alongside a program officer who said she got 300 applications for 30 grants that she was able to administer and of the 30 that she actually approved, 20 of them did this trick. And it's kind of counterintuitive but it really does work. The point is you want to ask that program officer, you know, Bob, thanks so much for your invitation to apply for funding for general operating support in our vocational training program. Happy to get your proposal. And I know that your deadline is March 1st, but I'm wondering if I were to send you a draft of that proposal, would you be able to take a quick look at it before we formally send in the application? Question mark pause. And here's what typically happens, right? And if they say yes, then you need to ask them for a new deadline which will probably be a couple weeks earlier than the official one. And here's what typically happens. They almost always say yes, but they almost never actually review your draft proposal. So you should assume that it's the final draft of the proposal when you submit it and really, you know, dot your eyes and cross your T's. But the point is you're not really looking for their edits, right? If they do that, that is wonderful because it increases their sense of ownership over the proposal. But what you're really looking for here is that sense of ownership. You're looking for that program officer to essentially adopt your proposal. From the perspective of someone who's been on the board of a foundation and been in the meetings when they are deciding which grants to approve and to decline and for how much, I can tell you very clearly that the passion of that program officer or of the board member of whichever is the ambassador, the evangelist of this particular proposal, if you've got someone in that meeting cheering for you and saying, I really want this one, the group is much more likely to approve it, right? Because at the end of the day, they don't want to undermine their staff or a passionate board member. They want to say yes, and then can say no to something else. So that's what you're looking for is to get from the doctor. So just take a step back to look at the difference between 5 and 50%. On one hand, you've identified a perfectly targeted foundation prospect using resources like the Foundation Center or grants.gov. And you put in the 5 to 10 hours, you send in the best grants application you can imagine with tons of research into it, and you've got a 5% chance of success. On the other hand, you use FoundationCenter, grants.gov, or other resources to identify that perfectly targeted prospect. You take the time and the energy to get in the door and get a call or a meeting, get an invitation to apply for a specific set of programs or fundables with a rationale associated for each of those in terms of why they may be a potential fit, and a budget associated with each of those, and they agree to look over a draft of your proposal before you formally submit it. That's the difference between 5% and 50%. All right, well a lot of you expressed an interest in individual donor cultivation, and I wanted to share a problem that was famous quote around fundraising by Hank Rosso, who for those of you that don't know, he was really the godfather of professional fundraising. He's the one that started this as a field. And what he said is that the number one reason why people don't give, anybody know? The number one reason why people don't give is because they are not asked. That's why people don't give. So the question or the point here is that you want to make a direct and specific ask. What that means is you want to give a number and you want to help them understand what kind of impact will that contribution make possible in the context of what they've already said they care about, and you want to end with a question mark and a pause. So again, it sounds something like, Hey Elaine, thanks so much for your interest in our arts program. We're really excited to work to be able to change the lives of 20,000 youth in New York City next year. And with your help we can do that. I'd love to invite you to join me in supporting the crucial work of Art for Children. I'm wondering if it might be possible for you to make a gift of $100,000 today which would allow us to expand the impact of our program and add another 10,000 children whose lives we can change. What do you think? Question mark, pause. So there's a number in there. I'm contextualizing it in a way that is of interest to Elaine. I'm ending in a question mark and I'm pausing and waiting for their response. That's how you ask for money. And again, it starts with this appreciation of inquiry process of finding out what makes Elaine tick. And then you're contextualizing your pitch in the context of that and you're looking to see the tuning book effect, what is getting her excited and ending culminating with a proposal, with an ask that ends in a question mark and has a specific amount of money and a type of impact associated with it. Now let's take that one step further, especially in the context of fundraising events or online fundraising. And this is what I call the Sally Struthers Effect of Fundraising. The idea is for those of you that remember back in the 70s, there were all these commercials saying for the price of a cup of coffee, a child in Africa can go to school for a year. So you can help people understand essentially return on investment. What is it going to cost me and what kind of impact can I generate in exchange? And so the idea here is that you should think of your organization as a channel, as a conduit for impact that connects people and organizations with resources to the change that they want to see in the world. Or said another way, Case Brickle-Grace, who wrote the individual major donor chapter in the book, beautifully articulated, people don't give to you, they give through you, right? Your organization is a channel. And so the idea is what you want to be able to do, especially with online giving, but the idea of a fund and need at a fundraising event is really powerful, is being able to say that if you give $50, then a child is going to have textbooks for the year. If you give $100, we're going to be able to open a school. $1,000, we can build a well and provide clean drinking water to the whole village in perpetuity. Whatever the case may be, you want to take the time to really think about what kind of impact you can associate with different levels of gifts. And this can be a challenging exercise for many nonprofits. So one method for accomplishing this is to think of it in terms of people hours. If someone gives $100, that's four hours of employees time, and with four hours you can counsel five homeless people. You can connect 10 veterans to job opportunities. You can teach 100 children art and music, whatever the case may be. So you can think of it in units of time, but the notion here is again, people don't give to you, they give through you, and you really want to clearly articulate exactly what kind of impact they can make possible. And I'll talk a little bit more about this in a second because I want to connect the dots between these levels of impact and your donation button when it comes to online giving. Because as it relates to online giving, what's really fascinating is for those of you that might not know about Network for Good, they have collected over $1 billion for thousands of nonprofits all around the world through their website. So it's kind of a donor portal if you will. And they helped write the online giving chapter of both my last book and this current one. And what's interesting is they shared the results of this study they did that kind of blew my mind. We are talking about a huge volume of online donations that goes through this website every day. And one day they ran a little experiment and they changed their donate button from gray to red. And boom, in one instant their online giving went up by 30%. So we are literally talking about hundreds of millions of dollars here. So the point I want to make is that making sure that your donate button is really prominent and in fact that you really take the time and the energy to optimize it is absolutely critical to your success with online fundraising. And in fact, I would take it a step further and promise you, if you believe it or not, that if you do three experiments which should take you no more than one or two months, you will, I guarantee, double your online fundraising results. And this is something that is a beautiful project for an intern or someone who is a little bit more technically savvy and comfortable with tools like Google Analytics which nonprofits can access for free. I will share a link for that later. But the idea is you want to look at the data and you don't want to use your gut. You want to look at the numbers and you are going to run three what are called AB splits. And AB splits is sort of an experimentation term where it means you are going to change one thing at a time, one variable, and then you are going to compare the control group, the original donate button in this case to the new donate button that is now red instead of gray, or that is now circle instead of square, or that has a different font than it used to have. And so the point is you are going to run three experiments. This will take a little bit of time and energy, but again, every group I have ever proposed this to has at least doubled if not more increased their online giving. So step one is to tweak your donate button. Again, play with the color, play with the size, play with the font, and look at Google Analytics to see what optimizes, what maximizes the one key metric. And the key metric here is what percentage of the people that visit your website click on the donate button. Very simple. You can get that data very easily from Google Analytics or other tools. So you are just going to play around with it. And okay, today it's green. Tomorrow it's purple. The next day it goes from circle to square or triangle or whatever. And look at the data. Hey, this one we had 3% of people click through. This one we had 1%. This one we had 8%. Okay, we are going with green. And OzR it will be counterintuitive. It won't be the one that you would have guessed if you just sat in a boardroom and looked at different donate buttons. So take the time to look at the data and optimize your donate button. Once you've got that dialed in, now we are maximizing the percentage of traffic that comes to our donate page. The next thing we are going to do is optimize what is known as our gift string. And this is the idea of those default donation levels. Not the impact associated with each and I will get to that next, but the actual numbers. Now the method for coming up with what these numbers should be, and again you are going to experiment with these, and now the key metric we are optimizing against is not getting people to the donate page because they are already there, but rather what is maximizing the average contribution per person on this page. We want the most income, the most revenue possible. And so we are going to start by looking at our average online gift, and let's say it is $70. What you want to do then is you want to come up with a gift string where as a starting point, a number that is just above that average is the second option. So maybe it is $50, $80, $150, $250, and other. You always want to have other in case someone wants to fill in $1,000 or $10,000, which is becoming increasingly common by the way. But the point is that the goal here is to increase your average online gift. And the research shows people tend to not like to give at the lowest level, so they will at least give it the second level. And if that second level is just a bit above your average online gift, the average online gift is $92. So maybe your second gift if you don't have any data to start with is $100. And so it is $50, $100, $250, $500, whatever the case may be, but try that. And then try $25, $50, $100, $200 other. And then try $100, $500, $1,000 other. So play around with that for a week or two. And again, look at the data and see what maximizes online giving results. And then finally, once we have our journey button dialed in, and we have the default donation levels in, that is when we are going to play with those levels of impact associated with each donation level. And again, the metric will be the same here, which is what's the average online gift, and how do we increase that and maximize revenue? And so sit in a brainstorming meeting with your team and come up with three or four different things that you could do with $50, with $100, with $1,000. Think in units of time if that's helpful like I said earlier. So that's really some keys to maximizing online giving. The other thing I'd like to just quickly share is in terms of the actual giving experience, make it as easy as possible and get out of your own way. First of all, remember the three-click rule. And if you have five minutes later tonight, go onto your own website and try to donate from every page in your website. And the key is, if it ever takes you more than three clicks to contribute, you need to revamp your website. Because I promise you, if you look at the data, you will see you are losing people at every click. And after the third or the fourth click, instead of losing 10 or 20% of the people, you are losing about 40%. So this is the equivalent of people filling up a shopping cart full of stuff in your store, getting to the front of your store, and seeing that the line is too long and saying, I'll forget it. But you don't want that to happen. Get out of your own way and make it easy to give. When people do give, I suggest looking at Charity Water is a really great example of a best practice in terms of how to make that giving as smooth and as easy as possible, and also how to really effectively promote the value of monthly giving. So you can have some sustaining members instead of just one-off donors. What they've done really cleanly is broken out the process, and they are only asking for the absolute most important data fields. Just so you know, every field that you add on average will decrease your conversion rate by 2%. Again, these are people that have clicked donate. You want 100% of those people to make a contribution, and the longer you make this form, the more fields it includes, the more people you're going to lose. Get out of your own way. Now once people give, what is absolutely critical, and this is really about leveraging the power of social media, is that you want to turn your donors into fundraisers. And the way you turn your donors into fundraisers is by asking them, just like the way you get gifts. And the point here is that when someone makes an online contribution, instead of just saying, thanks for giving, see you later, and here's your receipt, what you want to say is, thanks for giving, click here to share on Facebook, or click here to share on Twitter, and invite your friends, your family, your social network to follow your lead. And if they click that Facebook button, what happens? A pre-populated message pops up saying, I just gave to TechSoup, because they're an amazing group that provides nonprofits with technical resources that they need to thrive. Won't you consider joining me in supporting their good work? Right? And here's the key, when you do that, because the most powerful form of ask is a peer ask, which sounds like, I invite you to join me in supporting the good work of this organization. That is the best way to raise money. That's why I started with board members and getting them to give, because then once they give, they can say, I invite you to join me, which is really key. Now, we're talking about people on your website that have just given, so you want to facilitate them making a peer ask. And when you do that, your online giving, in addition to the 100% doubling that I already talked about just from making those three tweaks, now your online giving goes up another 20 to 200%. So if you combine these tips, you're talking about potentially a six-fold increase in your online giving. In order to facilitate that, thanks for giving TechSoup to spread the word, you will require a platform that integrates with social media. There are a wide range of those platforms out there. There's been a couple on this slide, and there's some more listed in the resources. But that's a really great thing to keep in mind. It's not expensive or difficult, but really improves results. So let me wrap up with one final tip, which I consider to be probably the best kept secrets in the nonprofit space. And then I've got a couple questions that have come in I want to answer, and I also want to maybe briefly talk about corporate giving, since that was such a big interest area for you all. So the last tip and this best kept secret I want to share is the idea of applying for a Google grant. And the idea here is that any established nonprofit in the US and in about 60 countries around the world, I know we have someone from Nairobi, that's on the list. But the point is you can apply for $120,000 a year from Google. And it's not actual money. You can't take it to the bank or buy other stuff with it. It's essentially company store money that you can only use on Google to buy AdWords. And if you're not familiar with AdWords, those are the sponsored links that appear whenever you type in a search in Google, and at the top of the results page you see those sponsored links. Now there are some limitations with the system. First and foremost, they're going to give you $10,000 a month, and it's either use it or lose it. So if you only use $1,000 or $2,000 this month, it doesn't roll over. Number two, you have a $2 per click limit. So it's basically an auction environment. And if you type in Chief Airfare, who's ever willing to pay $5 per click is going to appear at the top above the people that paid $4 and so on. Now for the nonprofits that get Google grants, you are limited to $2 per click, which means you're going to have to identify and pursue what I call long tail keywords, meaning you're probably not going to get homeless, or homelessness, you're probably going to have to get homeless shelters in Minneapolis. And so you and your team will have to brainstorm and come up with two or 300 different words and phrases that are not as common, but the benefit is they're more targeted. So the traffic that's going to come to you, and that's ultimately what these Google grants do is provide more traffic to your website, are going to help you raise more money and achieve all of your goals, the word, etc. Now in general, you're going to want to budget probably an hour or two to send in the application. They say yes to almost everyone. They do not accept groups that are fiscally sponsored, unfortunately. But if you've got your 501c3, it's a super easy process. And then you're also going to want to budget about two to three hours a quarter to go in and optimize your campaign so that you can keep using as much of that money as possible. There are some resources out there that can help you with that if you need. Some of which can even be done pro bono like media cause or volunteer match. And so with that I'm going to transition into some questions. At the end of the day, ultimately we're all in this together and the rope is much stronger than the thread. And so my hope is that the tips that I shared are things that as I mentioned can be very easily put into practice in your nonprofits and NGOs whether they're here in the US or in Kenya or anywhere else around the world. And things that are not going to take you a lot of time and energy but deliver huge benefits. So I hope that was the case. Again, as I mentioned, if you want a free copy of the templates for the board member agreement or the board matrix, feel free to email me. You can also call me on my personal mobile phone or send me a tweet at the address in the upper right here. And just really quickly before I headed back to Susan, there were one or two questions that came in. George asked about how long I've been working with NGOs and nonprofits. I actually started in the for-profit world, started co-founded one of the first digital advertising agencies. And after selling that in 2001, moved into, you know, decided to really devote my entire career to social impact and philanthropy. So I've been doing this work for about 15 years mostly with the focus on nonprofit management and the green economy, the world of sustainability. And maybe just one other question that came in by a couple folks is, Emma asked about do I think that cold calls for individual apps are a good idea or should a board member or contact open up the door for fundraisers? And again, I think it's pretty similar to the comments that I shared about Foundation grants is cold calls are typically not a great way to raise money, especially if you're trying to raise money from millennials. They hate those. You know, senior citizens are a bit more comfortable with fundraising calls whether they're an existing donor or it's a cold call. Millennials hate them and they don't respond well to them at all. But again, I would rather have you invest time in the energy that you would spend making those cold calls and paying for that list into stewarding donors and building up relationships with people and getting their invitation to work together more closely. Even if that's just getting them to like you on Facebook, now you've got a conversation started and you can build on that relationship with what I call a ladder of engagement. And so I hope that's helpful. I know we have a couple other questions, but I want to make sure that Susan has some time to wrap up. And also for the book giveaway, we're going to give away a free copy of the newly released nonprofit fundraising 101. I do want to encourage everyone to spread the word about that and to consider buying a copy on Amazon. Put a lot of work into that. There's over 150 contributors and partner organizations. It's really intended to be the first very comprehensive and yet incredibly practical guide to all aspects of nonprofit fundraising. And I'm really grateful to TechSoup for being one of the 75 partner organizations as well as one of the 50 interviewees that I talked with in the case of TechSoup about in-kind fundraising and media sponsorships. So hopefully that's a resource that many of you will find helpful. But more than anything else, just really wanted to thank you all for your time and transition it back to Susan so she can bring us home. Thank you so much Darian. That was an incredibly informative and engaging presentation. I want everyone to know that it's on the call not to worry. We are collecting all of your questions in our chat box, and Darian has generously agreed to answer those questions. So in part of the collateral materials that we send out in the email and on our archive will be that Q&A. So don't worry over much. We will get to those unanswered questions. Hey listen, don't drop off now though. Really quickly we want to find out one thing that you learned in today's webinars or one thing you want to try to implement. While you're chatting that in, we are going to do our raffle. What I'm going to ask Darian to do is to pick a number between 1 and 99. 27. 27. All right while you guys are chatting in what you learned about, I'm going to find out who lucky number 27 is. It is, you ready? Esteban Duarte. Esteban Duarte. And I apologize. I hope I am pronouncing that correctly. Esteban, if you would raise your hand. Oh he's saying yes, that's me. Yay. Great Esteban. Thank you. I'll be in touch with you after the webinar to connect with you to get to that book. Congratulations. All right, a couple of other things before you drop off. It is important for us to let you know we've got some other great webinars coming up and kind of to tag on to what Darian's talked about today. Tomorrow we have another fabulous webinar from the GrantStation folks. It's Grant Seeking Trends. These are the things you need to know. Who gets funding and what this means for your nonprofit. So you can still register for that. Plenty of time left. And then throughout the rest of the month we also have a technology skills for library staff effective in engaging training presentations. And then bringing up the very end is Power BI, Bringing Your Data to Life. Great. Oh people learn so much Darian. Wow. People are very motivated. They learn getting an invite to invite only grants the pasta test. Fabulous. Great. All right. Wonderful. All right, one last thing as you know it's part of our fundraising January. Our partner GrantStation does have a special offer. We want you to check that out on our website. That will be available on January 26 and 27. And I love some of these chats. Some people are new in the field Darian and they have learned a lot today. And they are excited and motivated to put all your strategies to work. That's great. Thank you so much. I can be helpful moving forward again. Everyone's got my contact info so please feel free to reach out. Great. Thank you so much Darian. I also want to thank Allie on the back end and most of all we want to thank our attendees, all of you on this call and those of you that have stayed on to the end. Thank you so much. Don't forget to do that survey for us. Help us get better at helping you. And thanks to our webinar sponsor ReadyTalk. Everyone have a fabulous rest of your week and great weekend. Bye-bye. Hello? Hello? Hello.