 Hello and good morning or good afternoon, whatever time it is that you're joining us. We are thrilled that you're here for another episode of The Nonprofit Show. Julie and I are excited to have with us our guest today, Neal St. Clair. Neal joins us from Be Generous, one of our amazing sponsors, so glad to have them. Neal is also the co-founder and the COO of this organization. We're going to learn more about him and the organization. So Neal, stay with us. We got a few more things to share before we jump into conversation. But Julie and I are always honored to have these conversations with rock star talent and leaders across the nation. Julia Patrick joins us as the CEO of the American Nonprofit Academy. And I'm Jarrett Ransom, your non-profit nerd, CEO of the Raven Group. As I pull for my glasses, they're never far. They're here and I'm totally ready to nerd out. Have to say thank you to our amazing presenting sponsors that keep this show going and growing. If you've been watching, this is old news, but we're coming up on our 700th episode this month, so later this month. And next year, we already have quite the lineup for 2023. We could not do this without our amazing sponsors. So a huge shout out to Bloomerang American Nonprofit Academy, Fundraising Academy at National University, Be Generous, where Neal's joining us from, your part-time controller, Staffing Boutique, non-profit thought leader, and the non-profit nerd. Thank you for your generosity, your trust, your investment in these conversations and ourselves as we move forward. And hey, if you missed any of our episodes, you know where to find us by now, Roku, YouTube, Amazon Fire TV, Vimeo, and wait, there's more. Just like a good old shamwell commercial. You can listen to us on the non-profit show wherever you stream your podcast. So do tune in and listen to that. Julia, I still hear from people that they jump on to listen one episode and then four hours later, they're still listening. So I love to hear that. That just says that we're producing some great content out there. So Neal, we are excited to have you. Again, for those of you watching or listening, Neal St. Clair, he is the co-founder and the COO at Be Generous. Welcome, my friend. Well, thank you very much, Jared. Thrilled to be here and making my first appearance. Hope it's all the last. No, we need to be getting you more and more. I mean, you kind of disclosed in the green room chatter that you had a little bit of broadcasting, a history and talent in there. So Jared and I glummed on to that right away. So we know you're our new best friend. Hey, before we get going and we have so many questions to ask you because this is such an important topic as we speak today in December of 2022. But talk to us about Be Generous. It's such an interesting concept. You are one of those co-founders. Can you kind of give us the journey that brought you here? Yeah, basically it would be Generous from day zero. So in short, Be Generous is the affirm, the clarna, the afterpay for charitable and philanthropic giving. So whether by now pay later, we're donate now pay later. And of course, we allow donors interest and fee free to pay their donations off over time. But the nonprofit gets all that money immediately up front to go out and do the good work in the world. The quick story of how I came to be generous. So Dominic Combs, who's our CEO, and I've known each other for many, many years, we're both members of a next gen philanthropy group called Nexus. We knew each other socially. He was also on the board of a child sexual abuse prevention nonprofit of which I was the president. That company was a client of his organization called Giving. And I also, my small family foundation on there as well. So we knew each other operationally. And we had always kind of said, you know, we're ever business single one day, why don't we maybe try to get together, you know? And that opportunity presented itself almost exactly two years ago. Dom called me up. He loves when I tell this story and basically said, All right, Neil, what do you know about by now pay later? And is it honestly more than most I've been looking in that space to start my next crazy thing on the entrepreneur by background and took that little turn into nonprofits as well. And so I walked him through my knowledge and said, All right, I'm going to pitch you an idea for a company, the company that is now be generous. And at the end of this conversation, if you're in, you're in, right? There's no all think about it tomorrow. I need an answer right now. And if you are in, then your tools down and everything else at a small consulting firm at the time. And oh, by the way, I need you to do it for six months of no salary and all on sweat equity, right? At the point at which my wife then walks in and is like, sweat equity, what's this all about here? And I kind of promised her I wasn't gonna do that anymore. And I kind of look at her and she had listened to the pitch and I was like, do you mind? And she said, No, this is a good one. And it's been great. You know, Dom and I have been partnered on this now with our third co-founder for, like I said, two years. And it's been a rocking ship. It has just been one of the fastest growing startups that I've ever had the honor to be a part of. And the nice thing is, it's one of those startups that allows me to sleep at night, right? I'm not rich people richer. I'm not putting people into loans for TVs that they can't afford. I am really materially doing some good in this world, which has been my raise on Tetris since day one, which is to marry profit and purpose. And I'm pretty thrilled to be here. Awesome. This is amazing. Thank you. I too was wowed by Dom and the entire platform of Be Generous joins you guys as a trusted advisor. So full transparency and disclosure there. I love what you're doing. I love what the platform allows. I'm all in for innovation, a little bit of disruption too. And I feel like that's what you're doing, but that's a compliment. I love it. I love that. And for those of you listening, there's also an end of the year campaign right now that Be Generous is participating in or actually supporting. So check them out. It's really important that you do so. But let's get right into the thick of this, Neil, because there is so much going on right now in our global community. I consider myself a local globalist because what I do right here in my neighborhood, I believe impacts the entire world. So talk to us about what you're seeing in current donors, as well as giving trends right now. Yeah. So a couple of different things. I think everybody was correctly fearful of the twin Rs of recession in Russia. What was that going to do with the instability that we were seeing? A little political instability, prices were rising, inflation was out of control. Who knew? Now, I would say generally speaking, giving is a pretty strong lagging indicator to the broader economy. So even when the economy goes down really far, like it did in 2008, giving a never goes down as far as the rest of the economy and typically lags pretty far behind. What we're seeing right now is a pretty robust amount of giving going on. And it's not just the billionaire class or the corporate class trying to get their tax breaks. It's your average people. I think you're seeing a maturation of the millennials and the Gen Zs who, myself being a millennial, do I think have a very strong philanthropic bent. They think of themselves a little bit differently and they are now in a position to get into that treasure part of the equation. But historically, when you look at millennial giving trends, the last number I saw was 80% of millennials and this is somewhat true for Gen Z as well, consider themselves philanthropists even though only about 20% have actually ever given a dollar to a non-profit organization. And now as millennials enter into their 30s and so forth and so on, they are getting into that treasure part of the equation. I would say just look at Miami Giving Day, which was just a couple of weeks ago. It was a record amount of donations if that's any kind of leading indicator. Now Miami might just be a little bit of a microcosm because of the crypto factor and a lot of wealthy folks moving down. But I think you are seeing that giving is not experiencing the headwinds that everybody expected overall. I think giving Tuesday was similarly robust to years past and I believe we'll see that through the end of the year. Gas prices are coming down, inflation is getting under control, the political situation seems a little bit more stable, all these things that can make people a little more nervous to reach into their wallet. And I think we're going to see a really robust giving season happy holidays for all of us in the non-profit world. I love that you tied these things together because it is critical for I think the non-profit sector to look beyond just what our internal mission vision and values are. We must understand what the ecosystem is of our donors and we talked about this all the time. Know your donor, have a relationship with your donor, understand your donor. But the reality is we need to kind of take that trajectory to the larger ecosystem so that we can understand more fully what our donors are experiencing. Absolutely. This is table top economics 101. People are talking with their spouse about the ways that they're giving. I just had a conversation with Mylalife about our giving plans for this year. These are the kinds of things that I think non-profits and I worked in the non-profit world at a child sexual abuse prevention non-profit, but I've also always worked in the private sector as well. So I've rotated through both of those. And I think many non-profit folks who've only ever worked in the non-profit space are shocked when someone won't make a donation. Because what we're doing is so great and amazing. We're saving lives, we're saving children, we're saving animals, whatever it is. How could you not donate? And why aren't you giving your software away to me for free? It makes no sense. And I even fell into that trap when I was working and running this non-profit where I would often be like a front-end. Wait, you want to charge me for your donation management platform? It's crazy. But the reality is there is a for-profit side of this ecosystem. And of course, there are also these microeconomics happening in households that I think you do need to understand those broader trends. And that will make the way that you make your ask a little bit more impactful. And you have to be sensitive to that because everybody's making those calculations around the kitchen table right now. Well, and the kitchen table is virtual, right? It's remote. So many people are nomadic. I just shared about my goal of becoming nomadic more and more. And then we talked a bit about digital versus hard copy because Q4, we've trained our society, Neil, and you know this, that this is our giving season. October, November, December, this is when we expect the majority of the operating dollars for our 1.8 million non-profits to receive their funding. You would share this stat, and I'd love for you to nerd out with us on this, you know, how many gifts come in through the digital platform, which be generous is versus something like a direct mail appeal, a solicitation, you know, the envelopes that we're always waiting for. And I remember Julia back at, you know, it's like, okay, someone had to be in the office December 31st because it had to be stamped and, you know, all of that. So Neil, take us away with this digital versus, you know, your USPS. Yeah. So most of the folks on this know it's a $500 billion year industry, more or less 1.7 million non-profits, more than 200 million people donating just in America every single year. Still, only depending on who you ask, as low as 12% as high as 20%, that's the number of donations that are given purely digitally, right? So out of that $500 billion at most, it's 20% and it's realistically probably in the 12 to 14% range. Now that digital transformation was somewhat accelerated by COVID because, you know, people weren't in the office at that point, but not so much say compared to the e-commerce trend, which went up from like 20 or 30% of all retail transactions through e-commerce, it left up like 15% during COVID. That was a major digital transformation, though it's gone back down a little bit. Now I will tell you that that transformation to digital online giving is rotating, again, depending on who you ask, in between 2% and 4% per year. I'm going to give you a pretty morbid statistic, so please don't be offended, but that number maps to one other very clear statistic, which is the death rate in America. And if you actually look at, say, court cutting, for example, where generally older people still have their cable, there's also a similar trend of digital transformation about 3% to 4% per year as that older person passes away and younger people are coming into their wealth, that transformation occurs with that pattern. The same is true of giving. It's not a perfect one-to-one, but it's pretty close. So the reality is, while it's still effective, although I personally don't love mail or campaigns because I think they can be quite expensive, but if you've got that flow and you know that that little old lady is going to get that envelope and just going to write that check for 75 bucks, well, the ROI is pretty clear there, but you do have to take one risk as a non-profit organization, which is to start recognizing that millennials and Gen Z are going to become your primary donor base, probably within the next five to 10 years. And we, and I say we because I'm a millennial, live in digital space. I genuinely don't know the last time that I even checked my mail. I don't expect to get anything in the mail other than unwanted solicitations. So it's still an effective pathway, but you've got to start thinking of digital transformation because that number I think is going to start to J-curve up very rapidly. And you're going to start to see not 14% of giving being done online or probably north of 50% within the next five to 10 years. So along with that, because I think that that's a message that we have really been, you know, talking about in these three years. But now I want to throw in another kind of conundrum. And that is, will donors try new portals when there's this economic dare I say fear or uncertainty? Or does that envelope that comes in the mail seem a little bit easier to tolerate? Yeah. So I would say for your older donor that's set in their ways. And when I say an older donor, let's say that that's somebody that's maybe, you know, nearing towards retirement. I don't want to give a specific age because, you know, it's all about mentality. Those folks probably they're probably not going to try new modalities. And that's not even due to economics. That's just due to, you know, not wanting to go in its habit and not wanting to go in and learn a whole new system, right? My parents are a great example of that. They're in their early 70s. My dad still writes a check to Memorial Sloan Kettering Cancer Center who care for my mother for many years. And he gets the little mailers and that's the way that he's going to get. And he's not going to change it. He doesn't need to. He doesn't want to. I mean, they still balance their checkbooks. I don't know the last time I actually looked at my checkbook, right? So the simple reality is younger donors who are always easier adopters and evangelists are going to do things like cryptocurrency. They're going to pay out of their Apple wallet, right? When they go to do a digital transaction. There are a lot of opportunities with that sub 45 year old set who are definitely open to new ways of giving. And let me throw another couple of statistics out to you. When you're dealing with the younger sub 45 audience, we are an audience that grew up in the shadow of 9 11. We grew up in the crucible of 2008 financial crisis and we obviously just dealt with COVID. So I don't want anyone calling millennials snowflakes anymore. We've been through the soup here, right? Let's be clear. But now let me throw another stat at you. On top of those sort of major events that have obviously curtailed our ability to economically grow wealth and even intergenerational wealth. Over the last 40 years, real income has gone up 4% on an inflation adjusted basis. At the same time, the consumer price index inflation adjusted has gone up 400%. It has never been more expensive to be an American than today right now. And by the way, the CPI just takes into account sort of a basket of goods. It doesn't take account things like getting a mortgage, paying off student loans, right? Right now, two thirds of all millennials that are making more than $100,000 a year, two thirds of millennials making more than $100,000, live paycheck to paycheck. They do not have extra money to give away. And so if you want to start dealing with that next generation, you have to start breaking up those modalities, whether it's recurring gifting, a little chill for a second, something like be generous where you're able to pay over time, allowing them to give through different types of things like cryptocurrency. You've got to start meeting your donors where they are, because the reality is there are structural economic differences between the sub 45 year old set and the generation previously who has that extra capital or might have that intergenerational wealth. So it is a change of mindset. And as we know, I love and care for the nonprofit space. We're not always at the forefront in the vanguard of change. But if you want to survive as an organization, you need to do this and take a look at the American Red Cross United Way. They started accepting crypto pretty early. There's some great innovators at these various organizations. So follow the leader style here and start leaning into those trends if you want to survive for the next 10, 20, 30 years. Neil, I love that you said we because I barely squeak into that sub 45. And I just want to just want to own that for the time that I can because it's not going to last long. So devil's advocate, I, you know, there's so many portals, Neil, we know this. There's so many passwords. There's so many two factor, you know, authentication. I can never say that word, right? Like the last thing I want is another login, another password, because I'm just, I just feel like everything's online. It is, I, you know, I'm paperless as well. I don't get much into the my mailbox. If I do, it's addressed to Mr. Jared Ransom, which definitely tells me they have no idea who I am, right? So talk to us about this devil's advocate of too many things online. And maybe we're just overwhelmed with the amount of online everything that we're doing because I'm feeling it. Yeah, no, you're 100% right. So it's what I like to call the Baskin Robbins Dilemma, right? I got 31 flavors. So I'm actually now sclerotic because I can't make a choice. There's too much choice, right? But I could choose between vanilla chocolate and strawberry, right? So sometimes limiting that down. Now, I would also say sometimes when everybody is going in one direction, right, you may want to go the other direction. I often call this the salmon analogy, right? If you want to, well, everyone's swimming upstream, if you don't want to get eaten by the bear, go the other way. Somebody else pointed out to me that then you can't spawn either. And I was like, Oh, that's an interesting trade off, right? You kind of make those decisions. But bottom line is, I think, you know, in a world that is highly digital with all these passwords, it's not the worst thing in the world sometimes to test out with that younger audience. Does a mailer stand out a little bit more? Now I'm going to tell you probably no, because most millennials are going in and just chucking things out. What millennials and that younger generation, what we love, we love in-person gatherings. We love getting together with people. We love having reciprocity and feeling more involved with the charitable organization than just writing a check. So again, it's all about meeting donors where they are. And the reality is where we are, we live online. Hit us up on, not even Facebook anymore, right? Hit us up, not even to an extent on Instagram anymore. Instagram is kind of losing some traction. Hit us up on Snapchat. Hit us up on TikTok. Get comfortable with these new modalities. And also get comfortable with the fact that the science of donor marketing and donor acquisition is now going to become an art form that you have to change over every probably two years at least, right? And I think a lot of folks right now are just like, well, this is the way I've done it for 20 years. It's like, that's just not the new normal. Facebook has been around for 20 years, but the reality is people aren't really utilizing that as their primary social media network anymore. It's not the place where they're learning. A certain subset will. And you're right. We're all online. It's all digital. Our children have been raised online too. And that's where we find our information. So it's very telling kind of where we're going. So looking at the future, Neil, we always like to inquire, especially as we're soon to flip the calendar into 2023. Pull out that crystal ball. I have a feeling you have one, Neil, right next to you. Shine it up. And you shared a little bit about the forecasting of our philanthropic space. What does, what else do you share in your crystal ball forecast for those watching and listening today? Yeah, absolutely. And just to leap back on that last question, one other really important point, if you read the FIS world pay study, now they're focused mostly on merchants and retail and e-commerce, but for each additional checkout option that you give someone in digital space, you can usually add another one to 2% of additional revenue transactions being completed. So yes, don't give everyone 50 options, but do add those additional options because the reality is you will lose a donor if you don't offer the way that they want to pay, right? Just all stop. You blew my mind because I do online grocery shopping, very busy, right? And I'm like, the last thing I want to do, I do not enjoy walking through the aisles at grocery stores. Some people do, I don't. So I do online groceries. And then it does say in that, you know, suggestion right before I check out, we've noticed that these are some of your regular items. Would you like to add any of them into your cart? And I'm like, yes, I need bananas. So basically they upsold me. And I think if we can take that retail merchant mentality into our donor platforms and portals, that I think will up level and, you know, our donations. 100%. Don't be afraid to learn from the private sector. They're experimenting in other ways but really focused on consumer behavior, which has parallels to donor behavior. At the end of the day, it is just, it's psychology, right? And so leaning into that makes sense. Well, so now let me give you some crystal ball trends. I don't know the lottery numbers. I don't know who's going to win the World Cup, but I will give you some bold predictions here. I will tell you that I think the acceleration of digital, as I've already mentioned, is likely to increase and perhaps even exponentially so as the older generation, you know, is now getting more on a fixed income. They don't have discretionary income. They're dying off. That younger generation, which is a very different generation, is going to start coming into the forefront and they're already there to a certain extent. It's a missed opportunity to not pay attention to them. Now I will tell you on another side, I don't know that the crypto giving trend is going to be as sustainable as people think it is. I think that it will always be there. And I think it's going to be one or two major market leaders, but I would say at the same time that crypto is going through some major changes right now. And I don't know if that's going to be the most effective long-term investment for you overall as an organization. If you're a bigger organization that can make that quick investment, there are a lot of crypto folks out that are looking for a great tax haven. But is that an investment that you, as a smaller medium-sized organization, should be making, you know, looking out five, 10 years? Can't say for sure, but I've been a long-standing crypto skeptic. I've not invested in it. And I would say, you know, this is going to make me a lot of enemies in Miami where we are very crypto friendly. But I don't believe that that is something that is going to be perhaps a very long-term giving trend for smaller organizations that, you know, it's a large investment of time and treasure. I do think that you're going to see an acceleration of the digital wallet. So right now it used to be PayPal, right, that you would go and you would check out. And PayPal still does about $19 billion a year in transactions that are non-profit payment processing. There'll still be a market leader in that regard. But I think what you're going to see, this speaks to that previous point about giving options. If you're an iPhone user, you're going to want to check out with your Apple Pay. It's quick, it's efficient, it's simple. Same with Google Pay, Amazon Pay and so forth and so on. I see a lot of nonprofits that do not offer that. And I will tell you, I will make a guarantee that what you will see of that 65% digital drop-off, that abandoned shopping cart rate that nonprofits experience, it's because at the point of transaction, at the point of donation, I've now got to go get my credit card and I've got to type it in. And I'm, you know, as a younger person, I haven't done that for a while, right? All my stuff's already saved and stored. And so being able to offer that, it sounds like a small change, but it's actually quite material because that's the way that millennials and younger folks transact. An idea of having a piece of plastic that you've got to go and type in is anathema. So I would say that leaning into those major trends of the idea of digital wallets and digital payments is something that all nonprofits and donor management platforms really need to lean into. And then as a final point, 80% of millennials in this maps to Gen Z as well and likely my children's generation, so-called Gen Alpha's, 80% think that they are philanthropists. That's a very specific word, right? Philanthropist is a very specific word, but 20% have only ever given a dollar to a nonprofit organization. Philanthropy is taking on all sorts of different shapes and forms. It's about giving time, in-kind gifts, things like that. It is taking on new shapes. Now, all of us that live in the nonprofit, well, we know the treasure side of the equation is incredibly important for us to go out and do the good works that we need to do. But you do have to start thinking about some of the ways that maybe you can operationally lean out a little bit by leaning into the philanthropy side and mentality of that younger generation, who frankly, because of the systemic economic reasons I laid out earlier, may not have the cash to give today, right? And so that can be a really material change. So those are some trends that I'm seeing right now, but I would say I'm a big ballyhooer for giving overall. I think that we're going to see a continued increase in nonprofit giving and a more charitable American going forward. So I have a lot of good faith and a lot of upside I see as our industry continues to grow. Amazing. I've loved your comments. I mean, I think it's been super powerful to have the economic ecosystem discussed in relationship to how we operate, you know, our nonprofits. And so it's really been a pleasure to have you on. For those of you who were following us from our marketing this week, you might have expected to see somebody else, Dominic Com, who we have had on. He was traveling and got stuck somewhere in an airport. Neil St. Clair jumped in like within minutes. And so this has really been powerful because Jared and I know that you had to respond very quickly. And when you can articulate what you have with us and our viewers and listeners today, I think it's even more powerful because you didn't have time to script this. You really engaged with us in a manner that was true and immediate. And so I want to give you a shout out, Neil, for that because it was super powerful. Again, Neil St. Clair co-founder and COO of Be Generous. They're one of our new sponsors. Jared and I don't take on a lot of sponsors and we don't have room for it and we don't want to muddy the situation. And so this is a new partnership that we have. It's really been fun to learn more about what you're doing and your approach and in your vision of how our nonprofit sector can work and can grow. So check out Be Generous.com. Super great website. Very interesting process. And I think the adoption of it can really be something that is not horribly taxing for any size of organization. And so check them out Be Generous.com. Again, we want to thank ourselves. Hey, right, Jared? Jared Ransom. Jared Ransom, CEO of the Raven Group. I'm Julia Patrick, CEO of American Nonprofit Academy. Again, we want to thank all of our presenting sponsors. You know, Jared, we were talking about this and we haven't really addressed this too much, but you know, our sponsors don't dictate what we talk about. It's a total laissez faire kind of thing. And so we want to thank Blumerang, American Nonprofit Academy, your part-time controller, Be Generous, Fundraising Academy at National University, Staffing Boutique, Nonprofit Thought Leader, and Nonprofit Nerd. Hey, I just enjoyed today so much. Really, really cool. Thank you so much. Thank you. I really appreciate it. Wonderful questions, wonderful topic of conversation. Hope to be back to express my nerdiness with you all as well. I'm a proud nerd. It was super nerdy and I love it. We will definitely get you back on. Thanks for jumping in the hot seat so quickly. And we have quite the lineup this week. Next week and as I mentioned, 2023 as well. So thank you for joining us today. Thanks for those of you watching. Maybe one of our recordings. Hope that you'll join us tomorrow. And as we end every episode, as we have every single episode before this one, we invite you to stay well so you can do well. Thanks again. We'll see you back tomorrow.