 to another episode of the nonprofit show. I hope you were able to join us in the green room chatter this morning because it was a lot of fun. We are super excited to have Jeremy Stern with us. Wow, Jeremy, tell us where you're coming from today. I'm zooming in. I'm zooming in from my home office in the Jerusalem area in Israel. Okay, international guest star, what a great way to kick off the week. Yeah, I'm really excited. Thank you, Julia. Well, this is going to be an amazing conversation. Jeremy Stern, director of partnership for Cosmatch. I can't wait to get in to this discussion because this is one of those hot buttons. Again, if you don't know who I am, I'm Julia Patrick, CEO of the American Nonprofit Academy, my trusted co-host, Jared Ransom, is I'm going to tell everybody, I think she's hiking in the Grand Tetons today. She's an amazing human being. So she's with her son for a couple days on summer holidays. So we'll see her back shortly. In the meantime, we want to make sure that we thank all of our presenting sponsors without them. We would not be here having these amazing discussions day in and day out. Bloomarang American Nonprofit Academy, your part-time controller, nonprofit nerd, fundraising academy, staffing boutique, and the nonprofit thought leader. Again, we are marching towards our 600 episode and you can find all those back episodes on Roku, Amazon Fire TV, Vimeo, YouTube, and we now have our episodes on podcasts. So stream us wherever you like to download your content. Okay, Jeremy Stern, I always get super excited when we have an international guest. You told us in the green room chatter that you were born and raised in Los Angeles now living outside. Do you say outside of Jerusalem or inside Jerusalem? How do you It's the Jerusalem metropolitan area. Yeah. Okay, great. Okay. And then before we dig down, you're my like inspiration for the day as a mother because how many children do you have? My wife and I have less than six. That's crazy. My wife is superwoman. That's what it comes down to. Well, I love it. You have inspired me and I'm sure a lot of our viewers today and listeners today. Talk to us briefly about what Cosmatch is and does. I spent some time on your website and your origination story is super cool, but I want to hear you share with us what Cosmatch does. Awesome. Thank you, Julie. It's really a pleasure to be here. I really appreciate it. So Cosmatch is a crowdfunding platform. And what we're doing is really fusing two things together. On the one hand, we are a tech company. And as a tech company, we are taking some of the best tools of the e-commerce world, tools that Amazon and Shopify and Zappos are all utilizing to get you and me as consumers to make purchases online. We're taking those tools and we're saying it's time for nonprofits to have these tools as well, right? That it shouldn't just be Amazon who's able to get you to make purchases online, but we need to enable nonprofits to inspire their donors to give and to give more. So that's number one is that we're a tech company and we're taking some of those tools and incorporating them into our platform. A lot to say on the tech side. I'm not a tech guy though, right? I'm a fundraiser. My background is in fundraising. I've been with Cosmatch for close to a year and a half, but before that, for 15 years, I worked in nonprofit fundraising. And so the other piece of what Cosmatch is and how we work with our clients is not just giving them a really powerful tech platform, but providing strategic fundraising coaching for their crowdfunding campaigns, for their peer-to-peer campaigns. So there's a whole fundraising professional team that's working with our clients. We have strategic coaches. We do copywriting as well for our clients. There's a campaign manager, our tech support. So a whole team that's working together with the clients in implementing the strategic approach that we've developed to peer-to-peer fundraising. You know, I love this because one of the things that you and I were talking about in the green room chatter is this desire for so many of us to elevate our sector to really, you know, before the best and the brightest were going into the for-profit sector and the technology. And you said something so interesting. These tools should not just be for the big players in the for-profit. We should be doing this. So I'm thrilled to have you on and to have this discussion. So first off, let's start off with kind of the basics. And I'm going to ask you to get the definition of what is matchgiving because I suspect it's changed quite a bit. Yeah. So matchgiving, when you have a match campaign, when we're talking about like a giving day, right? A crowdfunding campaign where an organization is seeking to raise, let's say, a hundred thousand dollars. So it might be a match campaign where they have major donors whom they've solicited before the campaign to match dollar for dollar every donation that's raised through the campaign. So that hundred thousand dollars that they're going to raise, what we refer to as from the crowd, right? The crowdfunding donations, those donations will all be doubled and in fact they'll raise two hundred thousand dollars through the campaign. And that's also part of the strategy that we've developed, which is that we work with our clients and which is that they shouldn't just be taking their, you know, major gifts from the year, right? Two fifty thousand dollars donors and say, oh, it's a match campaign. The whole idea is to expand the pie and not just that, but to turn to their major donors and say, you know, we're asking you to give a major gift, a lead gift for this campaign to inspire others to give more, right? And that you as a major donor, you don't want us just to be reliant on you and your support. You want us to grow your fundraising base. And that's exactly what crowdfunding does, that you raise more from more donors and really broaden that fundraising base. Sure. I mean, do you think that donors are understanding now the term lead gift that this is something, you know, that people are saying, yeah, I want to do that. It's great marketing. It's benevolent, you know, whatever. I mean, it gets, you got to admit, it's great branding for whomever is in that lead gift position, whether it's one people or five or whatever. Right, correct. And look, there's a lot of education that has to go on through this, both education for the organizations and certainly for their donors and their donor base. But we've found donors to be so responsive to this because it's a great opportunity for them. And they want to be able to double down on their support for the organization for the right purpose, the right cause, the right campaign. Right. It's not just saying help us with our general operating fund, right, but help us for this specific campaign so that we can grow our fundraising base so we can inspire others to give more. Okay. So that leads me to my next question because I'm intrigued by something that you just said. And this seems to me that you're saying this is a call to action for a specific campaign, not just general funds. Correct. Do you think that works better? Yeah, absolutely. Because what a campaign does is it defines what the goals are, right? And something that we say all the time is goals create reality, right? That organizations, and we work with them in this approach, which is to set an ambitious but realistic goal for their campaign, right? That you want them to push for their giving day to raise as much as possible. So it should be ambitious, but also realistic, right? And so what you want is to get to a point where they're pushing hard and if they push hard and they inspire their ambassadors and teams to raise, they can really reach that goal. And so yes, about the impact of the matching gifts. Here, you know, major donors, lead donors see this as an opportunity to do something really great to invest in the growth of the organization and not just, again, cover their overhead, but really to invest in their growth. I love it. And you also said something too that I don't think we say enough of about going to those major donors and saying, look, we're trying to build our base of support. So all the pressure is not on you. Exactly. I like that you said that. And I'm because that's a huge impact piece. You know, I see more and more funders and major donors coming out and foundations saying, you know, we want to have a relationship, but our relationship are in three to five year segments. And after that, we take a break. So that we're not drawing, we're not creating this, this relationship. Dependence. That's a great word. That's a great word. So I've got to believe that that's a big impact attractor, if you will, for major donors. And the other pieces is when we do this strategically, when we do these campaigns strategically, we're not just thinking about the major donors, but we're also thinking about the mid tier donors of the organization. We really have three tiers, right? You have your major gifts, you have your mid tier donors, and then you have your smaller gifts. That's your crowd. And so part of the strategy that we've developed in Cosmatch has been around for seven years. We've run thousands of crowdfunding campaigns with our clients. We've passed the $400 million mark in terms of funds raised with our clients. And so we've seen what really works in these campaigns. And part of the strategy that we pursue in these campaigns is that we do a campaign that's for a specific period of time, usually between 24 and 48 hours, to create a sense of urgency for the campaign. But the thing is, is that when we're working with clients, we're usually working with them for about six to eight weeks before that giving day, before that hard launch. And part of that is what we call the soft launch. And so you have your major donors who you're soliciting for the match. And then during the soft launch, you're soliciting your mid tier donors, right? Let's say a major gift for you is $10,000 or above, right? But then in the soft launch, you're soliciting those donors who can give between, let's say, a thousand and 10,000 to give, also leave gifts for the campaign so that when you start your hard launch, when you start your big email push and crowdfunding push, you already have 30% of the goal raised on the campaign. That's what we found to be is like the golden, the golden number, right, is 30% because we all want to be on a winning team, right? Now when you get out, you're brought appeal and the other peer to peer elements. And, you know, my friend Julia sends me this link to this, this campaign that she's raising money for. Am I going to see, is this a loser of a campaign or a winner of a campaign, right? And they're already at 30, 35, 40% and they just started two hours ago. That's amazing. This is something that I want to invest in that I want to be a part of. You know, Jeremy, it's interesting that you would say that because I have been hearing more and more, I would say like lost 8 to 10 years, the psychology of funders that want to be that person or group that gets, that makes the goal. Yes. And I find that fascinating. And I'm wondering if you all at Cosmatch have seen that. I mean, if you can see starting off at that 30%, can you talk about maybe that that time forced to the finish line? Yeah, it's a great question. Very few campaigns end in the 90% range. Okay. Because the point being is that once you get to 80, 90%. No one wants to see a campaign just reach 92%. Again, we want to invest in success. Let me tell you, I actually actually gave to a recent campaign for a school. And I gave a donation to a friend of mine who was who was raising money for it. And it was it was a major, major campaign. It was actually a million and a half dollar campaign. Okay, with a times four match. All right, they solicited their major donors to big school major campaign. A lot of our campaigns are not that large. But what I got to do, this is so cool. I'll obviously I was tracking this campaign very closely. And they were $8 shy of one and a half a million dollars. And you know what, I gave another donation for $8 just so I could be that donor to get past a million and a half finish line, right? Like that was so, that was so exciting. But the other piece here, the other piece here that's really important is that, and like I mentioned before, not all campaigns need to have matching funds, you can have campaigns that don't have that don't have matching funds. But what's so great about these campaigns is that it really democratizes the support of the organization, right? That fundraising is a numbers game. And we used to think about it being a numbers game in terms of major donors and major gifts, right? If you have a major that's great, you know, they can now support your programs. But here, our focus is not on size of donation, but number of donors, right? And it's about empowering the ambassadors and the teams to reach out to their family and friends. And the way we look at it is that the organization should value its team that raises its ambassador that raises $1,000, is more valuable than the donor who gives $1,000. Because that individual will raise $1,000 from 20 people who each gave $50, that's 20 new donors to the organization. That's such a stable base, right? And so that's how we're looking at it, not just on the major gifts, but really the value here in cultivating a broad base of support for the organization. You know, it's a cool thing that you recognize that. And I believe that's one of the foundational principles to becoming more sustainable. I'm curious, and this is like just an off the wall question. You said in the beginning of our conversation that this process involves a lot of education. Do you find that the nonprofits that you're working with really understand the value of building and acquiring new donors? And I asked this because we talked a lot about the donor journey and stewardship, because I think it's really easy for someone to say, whew, we made our goal. Okay, next versus like going back to that group and saying, okay, now you joined us, now link arms with us. And really, do you see that? Yeah, that's such a good question and such a good point. You're right that that organizations after they put their heart and soul into their campaign, again, whether it's raising $50,000 or $500,000, whatever is appropriate for that size of the organization, you know, they're giving all they got into the success of this campaign. They cross the finish line, maybe they have a bonus round, and they're like, okay, we did it, right? And they take a step back. So that what we do actually post campaign is do a post campaign meeting with with the organization, we analyze their data, right, of the campaign's number of donors, size of gifts, things like that. And we discuss how they're going to move forward in terms of continuing to cultivate those relationships. So that's, but we're really focused on the campaign, we're, you know, pre, during and post. But the truth is what what I focus on in partnerships at Cosmatch is, I mentioned before, we have, we have coaches, right, strategic coaches who work with our clients in implementing our strategy. So we have a team of in-house coaches who are Cosmatch employees, and they are awesome. What I what I work on is actually not with our coaches, but with our not our internal coaches, but our partner coaches. So what what we're doing is developing partnerships with nonprofit consultants around the world. And we have consultants, really in so many regions around the world in different countries, training them in our strategic peer to peer approach, so that they can coach campaigns for their clients. And one of the reasons that's so valuable, Julia, as you're mentioning, is that now they can build their crowdfunding campaign into a broader development strategy, communication strategy, donor cultivation strategy, that it's not a flash in the pan campaign, but now they'll continue to work with that consultant in cultivating those relationships post campaign. Okay, I'm going to put you on the hot seat. And I'm gonna, I'm really interested in what you've said about the post campaign. And I'm going to push you to come back on the show and do a show with us just about post campaign strategies. Because I think it's really, I think it's a missing link, you know, and into your point, we all everybody gets all amped up. I mean, you said there's an eight week window before you go in, you're working on this. Yeah, 30% in the door. And you've already been working so hard, it's got to be super easy just to say, okay, we made the goal next. That's exactly right. Yeah. And so one of one of these we talk about is ask, think update, right, that like that needs to be what they're doing post campaign, right, but now that they made that the ask, thank them over and over again, thanks to you, we're now doing this things to end the that's part of the communication strategy. So you're right, it's very, very important. Okay, so let's move into that because I'm a big believer in this concept of boy, because of you, because of you, yeah, absolutely, you know, and, and because of you, we've been able to do this. Talk to us about what you're seeing in the communication side of things. I love, you know, I love your your strategy, but what are some of those things that you feel can really help us move forward on this? Yeah, boy is so important because of you, right. But fundamentally, what that's about is making the donor the hero of the story, right. And that's one of the reasons why we part of the strategic services that we provide is storytelling and campaign copy. And because and I say this with love because I sat in the nonprofit development director seat for 15 years, nonprofits do not know how to market themselves and they don't know how to sell themselves right and especially in a digital campaign. And so so that's one of the reasons when, when, you know, it's crunch time and they need to need to need to develop really compelling campaign copy that we work with with our clients to write that campaign copy and tell their story. And so a huge piece of that is making the donor the hero of the story, right. And I can't tell you how many organizations, I've seen this get this get this wrong, not on Cosmatch, but another platform to be quite honest, where where they'll say things I like the following. Help us feed a hungry child, right, click here to help us feed a hungry child. We are doing this then the other thing, right. That's not what converts donors that's not what inspires people and gets them within a second because that's all you have when they're looking at your campaign page to decide whether or not they're gonna gonna give. If you change the help us feed a hungry child to click here to feed a hungry child, you're gonna feed the hungry child, right. And it sounds like a small difference, but it's fundamental in the way in all of your the whole communication strategy in this campaign and beyond. So that's a really, really important piece making the donor the hero hero of the story. And as you were talking about before Julia that BOI right boy because of you right makes the donor the hero of that story. And I love that you use the word make that or the phrase make the donor the hero of the story. You know we hear this a lot, but I loved how you gave us the two examples because it really brings it home. Because I feel especially and I don't know if you have seen this Jeremy or any of you're the folks on your team across the planet, but you know there's a point with with which we're getting really close to donor fatigue because we've had a lot of tough things. We always say in the nonprofit show we haven't just had one pandemic you know the health pandemic, but we've had economic pandemics. We've had social justice, we've had political, civil unrest, civil discourse. And there's a lot of fatigue if you will and I'm wondering if this could be one of those things that helps somebody feel more empowered like they're they're making a difference versus oh I don't care how many people give this will never get solved. Do you see that or not? Definitely and but the other piece is that there are so many important causes to support right there are so many organizations out there and and they fill my inbox right every day with their with their solicitations. So how do I decide who to give to right and we know that people give to people and so since you know Julia you and I have been friends for decades right and not just the past of 52 minutes right but but that you know that that that we go way back and you've reached out to me for this organization that means so much to you your stamp of approval your recommendation the fact that you're serving as an ambassador for this organization that that sends an important message to me that in in considering the the the the range of organizations that I can support I'm gonna support the one that my close friends are saying this is worthy of your support as well. Yeah yeah well I mean I think we all like to be you said this in the very beginning we all like to be on winning teams yeah exactly and I think I think also too Jeremy there's um you know we want our dollars to work we work hard for our dollars so we want our dollars to work hard uh for the organizations that we support so when you have that that voice that that accompanies you know you that says yeah I know I can attest to this the value of this organization or the strength of this organization or the impact of the organization I think it's really powerful right 100% 100% wow well I've learned so much from you um today it's been really really interesting I do want to get you back on to talk about this post action plan I mean because I think I mean we know this to be the case I mean I think that we for any of us and all of us who've worked on campaigns we get so amped up we work so hard and then there's just this exhaustion and then we're kind of looking around the table saying now what do we do think what I heard your big message today was is that you need to think about all of this before you start so that as you're moving forward um you know you have a more complete action now I gotta ask one more question we don't have a lot of time how many of these campaigns do you think you can do as an organization every year or every two years do you have an idea of what that looks like such a great question such a great question um so at the very least organizations can do these campaigns annually um but what we've been what we've been moving towards is for organizations not to see this as a one time thing but to build in crowd funding into their broader fundraising strategy right and you know historically organizations have done appeals a few times a year right we'll have your spring appeal and your fall appeal and your end of year appeal right we all get a lot of end of year appeals right now no and no one ever said there's don't think about the fact that people got three letters in the mail over the course of the year right um and so what what we're encouraging our clients to do is to maybe you know three times a year you're not going to have a major peer-to-peer campaign right but rather than only sending out a hard copy mailer or just an email right put up a campaign page where you have a goal and that donors when they give they're not just writing a check and putting in the mail or they're not just going to your website and filling in their information on on the donation page but there's immediate feedback loop they give to the campaign they see their name there on the donor panel they can express their gratitude to the organization into its leadership into its staff and whoever it is right and not only that but now for for your end of year appeal uh i see that you have a campaign goal of $50,000 my gift of $50 made a difference i see the campaign goal go up a little bit i maybe i was the one who got you from 89% to 90% right um so it's so much more engaging for the organizations to to do that uh what we also see i'll just add one one other point to this is that um other organizations will do two big peer-to-peer campaigns annually one of them will be for the the the general fund right the general operating expenses of the organization and the follow-up the follow-up woman or maybe six six months later they'll do one for a specific project right um and in order perhaps to expand in a project or to start a new project so that gives a new purpose to uh to having a campaign like this yeah i love that and i can see that um it's it's a it's a wonderful thing for the organization and the staff to understand this and have that be on the radar okay this is this is the time of year for mother's day campaign or father's day or Easter yeah whatever to hold that so that you're navigating that successfully every year and at the same time not bombarding you know donors you're right exactly yeah wow well i want to make sure that everybody can um see and hear about uh jeremy stern director of partnership for cause match you can find them at cause match dot com um really an interesting website because you have a lot of information you have a lot of uh white papers and information that um talks about folks their different campaigns and what they learned um it's fascinating to read about it because you can really see people that have been in the trenches and what their outcomes have been so jeremy stern we're going to get you back on my friend thank you julia i really appreciate it it's it's been a blast and also i'm i'm active on linkedin i love linkedin so if you want to find me on linkedin uh just search uh jeremy stern and you'll find me there so thank you i love it well we will definitely um be seeing more and more of you again i'm julia patrick ceo of the american nonprofit academy jeremy ransom the nonprofit nerd herself is off for a couple days but she'll be rejoining us later in the week again we want to thank all of our presenting sponsors who are with us day in day out most of these sponsors have actually been with us since the very beginning bloom around american nonprofit academy your part-time controller nonprofit nerd fundraising academy staffing boutique and the nonprofit thought leader without them again we would not be here having these amazing conversations from our international guest coming to us today from jerusalem metropolitan area jeremy stern it's been a delight to meet you to hear what you have to say i love your energy and your enthusiasm i think um you share that vibe that jeremy and i love so much so it's been a lot of fun having you on thank you thank you so much it's been fun we'll see you back here tomorrow and as we like to end every episode we want to remind everyone to stay well so you can do well thanks so much everyone have a great day