 Welcome to our webinar, How to Navigate the Charitable Giving Landscape. I'm Susan Hope Bard and I'm going to be your host for today's event. We are super excited to bring you Melinda Rolf and Yuri Lukachev from the MasterCard Center for Inclusive Growth for this engaging and interactive webinar. Before we actually get started with the content, I do want to review a little bit about the platform that we're using today for the webinar. We are using ReadyTalk. ReadyTalk has a far left hand side which is a bar for your chat. So you can feel free to chat in any questions you might have. So at any point in time during the event there is no need to raise your hand. You can simply chat in if you have questions from Melinda or Yuri. If you are having any technical difficulties please also chat those in and we will try to work with you to resolve them. All of the phone lines if you did need to call in are muted. Sound should come through your computer speakers. If for any reason it doesn't, Becky has chatted out the dial-in by phone number or you can also use Skype and the passcode. If you lose your Internet connection you can simply reconnect using the link that was emailed to you in your confirmation or your reminder email. You can find upcoming and past webinar archives on our website at techsoup.org slash community slash events dash webinars. The great news is we are recording this event and you will receive an email with this presentation, the PowerPoint presentation along with a link to the recording archive and any links to resources that Yuri and Melinda provide. You can also tweet us at TechSoup or use hashtag TS webinars. Just as a reminder, audio does play through your computer speakers. If you are hearing any type of echo it may be that you are logged in more than once and need to close that instance of ReadyTalk. I am going to introduce our presenters today and then talk a little bit about TechSoup. We have two amazingly talented and kind-hearted people on this event today. Melinda Rolfs, she is the Senior Director of Data and Analytics at the MasterCard Center for Inclusive Growth and Yuri Lukachev. He is the Senior Specialist for Data Philanthropy. As I mentioned, I am Susan Hope Bard and I am the Training and Education Manager here at TechSoup. I have two wonderful folks on the back end that will help you with your chat questions. That is Becky Wiegand and Alicia Kitt and they are both here at TechSoup as well. I am going to talk to you a little bit about TechSoup. TechSoup is headquartered here in San Francisco, California. While I talked to you a little bit about TechSoup, I do want you to tell us where you are joining us from. Let's practice using that chat box. Go ahead and chat in the city and state that you are connecting from. Or if you are from another country, please let us know where you are located. I see folks coming in a lot from New York. So Melinda and Yuri, a lot from your neck of the woods. Yay! As you are doing that little bit about TechSoup, we are a 501c3 nonprofit like many of you. We have 62 partner NGOs and we have provided more than $5.2 billion to the nonprofit sector. So that is a little bit about TechSoup. As you are chatting in where you are coming from, a quick reminder, no need to raise your hand at all. You can simply chat in your questions or if you have any challenges with the technology, you can chat that in as well. And to get us started, before I turn it over to Melinda, our first presenter, we've got a poll question for you. So I want you to get your fastest fingers ready. We want to ask you, what are some of the issues that your organization struggles with? Is it fundraising performance? Is it access to data? Access to data analyst? Or is it other? You can select multiple things. And if it is something that is other, go ahead and use your chat box to chat that in. I see people are really fast. We've got a lot of people responding. And I'm going to give you a few seconds to do that. I have some people chatting in, turning audience members into donors. All right, all fundraising performance. There's a lot of folks chatting that in as well. So I am going to give you five seconds as we get in the last few responses. That is 5, 4, 3, 2, 1. And you can see here the results from all of your peers out there in nonprofits and libraries. And I see some folks are still chatting or indicating their challenges. So thank you for that. So Melinda, it does look like fundraising performance is by far the biggest challenge that people face. So that's really good for us to know as we begin this event. So Melinda, without further ado, I would love to turn this over to you to talk about what you do. Thank you so much. Great. Thank you, Susan, and hello everyone. And thank you so much for joining us today. This is our first webinar on how to navigate the charitable giving landscape. We are really excited to be here today. So we will start off with a brief introduction to the MasterCard Center for Inclusive Growth, who we are and what we are doing. Then we will go into donation insights. This is our guide for individual charitable giving trends. Then we will take you through some insights and share ideas on how to use the information. But first, I do need to just touch base on our terms and conditions. This reading and we are using this donation insights report or any data within it is subject to the terms of use and it's available on our website. So who are we and what is the MasterCard Center for Inclusive Growth all about? So Mass created the Center for Inclusive Growth as a separate subsidiary to address the issue of income inequality. And we do this by combining expertise technology, data, and philanthropic investments to empower on the front lines of social good. So at the Center we are working to uncover new approaches and actionable insights that we then share with our community that we continue to build. So we will share our insights at presentations, on our websites, panel discussions, and webinars like we are doing today. We do have three key efforts. We have an academic research effort, a programmatic effort, and an effort on data for social good or what we also call data philanthropy. And that's focused today. I'm sure a lot of you have heard a lot about data and big data and there sure is an abundance of it available today. But there is a growing digital divide for those who are working to solve society's problems and those with the resources to unlock that data. We are at the beginning of our journey and using this data to help bridge this divide. Now we have a polling question. Great. It's another opportunity for everyone to get their fastest fingers ready. Does your organization currently use external data sets and or insights to help your fundraising efforts? Yes or no? And this is a super fast one so I think I'm going to give you 5 more seconds. 5, 4, 3, 2, 1. Wow, look at that, Melinda. Great. Okay. So I'm going to start off a little bit about a personal journey regarding data philanthropy. So for me it really started about 2 years ago when I was working at MasterCard Advisors. So what is Advisors? It's MasterCard's professional services arm which leverages the company's anonymized and aggregated transaction data to provide commercial products and services that helps merchants and financial institutions grow their business. Oh, there was a period of time while I was at Advisors in which there seemed to be one major international disaster after that. And in our office space, it's an open office space. There's this huge screen TV and there's CNN was playing every day. And I would see these images of people who had so little and had lost absolutely everything. I always wanted to do in philanthropy. So it got me thinking, is there something that we could do as a company to help have a positive impact? Is there something we could do with our data assets and our expertise? So maybe nonprofits could benefit from similar insights that merchants and financial institutions have, especially to help improve their fundraising efforts. And wouldn't it be if we could offer these insights for free, essentially creating a form of data philanthropy? So the more research I did, the more I noticed a real information gap around individual charitable giving trends, a gap that I thought we could stage. So I just want to give you an example of this gap that I was seeing. So let's think about retailers, right? They have access to free, open source, granular, and timely consumer data provided by the U.S. government. And this has been available for years. And typically, if a for-profit organization wants to have more detailed information or more detailed data, they have the resources to purchase it. And what they do with this information provides them insights into consumer spending patterns so they can understand, well, where are the inflection points? So where are consumers buying? Are they shifting from, say, apparel to restaurants or jewelry to travel? It also helps them to benchmark so that they can understand how they are performing versus ears. It can also highlight opportunities for which direction or strategy opportunities for them. But this type of granular data is not readily available to nonprofits. So this is the gap I was seeing. So I took this idea and I entered it into an innovation contest with providing me with a great platform to make this concept a reality. Ultimately, the idea won and I was presented with an exciting opportunity, a career move within MasterCard to bring this idea to life. And this is how I came to the center. The concept is now what we call donation insights. We launched it back in December of last year and it consists of a report and a data set that answers questions such as, are people donating more or less? Which types of charities are they donating more or less to? When are people giving? What factors impact giving? How do they donate? Are they donating more online versus in person? And how is that trend looked over time? The data set consists of monthly data for total donations with a breakout for 9 different categories. This is the first time we've open sourced MasterCard data and made it to everyone for free. And you can download the report and data at themastercardcenter.org and we encourage you to share any questions that we may not get to today, any suggestions, tell us what's on top of mind for your organization at donationinsightsmastercard.com. This way we can work on improving this offering and everyone can benefit. I am going to touch just a little bit on our methodology so you can understand how we're doing this and understand what donation sites is and what it isn't. We leveraged Anonymized and Aggregated U.S. Donation Activity on the MasterCard Payment Work. So this is not an estimate for all tenders, meaning we are not making an estimate for check and cash. It is a view of electronic payments. As I mentioned, there's total donations, 9 different categories, monthly data starting in January 2009 and currently runs through December 2016. Now these queries, because you might be wondering which category do I really fit into? We based it on the National Taxonomy of Exempt Entities or otherwise known as NTE system and this is determined by the IRS and you can find it on the web so it's publicly available. So some of the categories we have broken out are Education, Envoys on Animal Related and Human Services, just to name a few. So now we'd like to touch on some insights on donation growth. So this is a view of total growth. So if you look at the black line here, that's annual growth and orange bars represent the donation amount. So in 2011, you can see the growth was nearly 5% going down to 3% which was pretty much below in 2012 and then we steadily see an increase up to 8 and then we're at about 6% for 2016. Some of the category drivers in 2016 were Public Safety, Access to Relief and International Affairs because there was certainly no shortage of US and international natural disaster in 2016. So then if you look here on the right, we can see quarterly donation growth. So if we look at the first quarter of 2016, the growth here is 7.5%. And what we mean by year-to-year growth is that's the percentage increase from 2015. So first quarter of 2015 compared to first quarter of 2016. And what we can see in our data is that with each quarter we can see a decline in the growth rate, ending at over 4% in the fourth quarter. We believe that could be in part to the fact that people do donate in US President election cycles to political organizations and Yuri is going to touch on that in just a little bit. So now let's look at the actual data set that's on the website and it's in an Excel file. So on the far left you can see we have the month and as I mentioned earlier the data starts in January of 2000. Keep in mind this is a view for electronic payments. And the column here for growth and donation index amount. So you can see here in December of 2016 there was a 2% growth over December of 2015. Other information we have is the number of donations. So the growth in the number of donations so the number of times people are donating in a given time period. We also have the average donation size. So that's the average size that people donate each time they give. And then off to the far right we have an online index amount which is a growth that we're seeing in online transactions. So you can get a sense of how that is shifting over time. And then here on the left in the second column is what we call donation index amount. And the purpose of this is really to help people who want to look at the information on a quarterly basis or an annual basis like I showed you before. You can easily do that by doing further insights. So now we are going to touch a little bit on insights by cats. So this is to answer questions such as which types of causes are capturing more or less donations. So here in the yellow bars is environmental and animal related donation growth on an annual basis. Orange is disease and medical research. And if you look here at this black line this is total donation growth. We talk about total donation growth. It's not just the sum of the 9 categories that we have broken out. It's actually all of them. So they go from A through Z according to the NPEE system which I mentioned earlier. So what's interesting here is if you look in 2011 you can see that the donation growth to environmental and animal related causes started to exceed, well exceed, that of total donation growth. So you can see 7.8 and 8.2. And that is consistent throughout 2016. Conversely you can see that the growth in disease and medical research causes is actually significantly underperformed. And that too has been consistent through 2016. For reasons we suspect that the growth in environmental and animal related causes is so strong it's just potentially building more awareness out there about environmental concerns. So this slide is an example of how you could use your data to compare what we're seeing in the category. So again we're using environmental and animal related causes as a guide or as a comparison. And then the orange this time is just a sample charity that falls in that same category. So if we look here from 2010 through 2013, this particular charity pretty much inline to outperform the category. And their growth was pretty stable and strong from 2014 and into 2016. But if you didn't have access to data or how your category and peers are performing you wouldn't know that you're actually significantly starting to underperform your category. And so just having this knowledge gives you an idea of where you can start doing some research to understand what's changed. Is there something in our organization that's changed and is something different that our peers are doing from a fundraising perspective? So now Yuri is going to take you through some of the additional insights, factors that impact giving such as how people are donating and when people are donating. Thanks so much Melinda. So on this slide we combine charitable and political donations data and learn that there appears to be a substitution effect during US election cycles. So this effect is reflected in both Senate and presidential elections. And basically here just to look at the graph a little bit the access to the right is the share of political contributions. So it ranges from 0 all the way to 14%. The access to the left ranges from 80 to 100% and that's the share of charitable donations. So one thing to note is that charitable giving is consistently the lion's share of total. But it does seem that those donations to political causes are a headwind for charitable giving. And similar to how we talked about NTE categories in the beginning, political organizations are another factor that we can track within our payments framework. On the next slide we have a breakout that's similar to the previous slide, but here we're looking at the monthly distribution of political contributions. And we see that historically donations to political organizations start to increase in February of the year in which there is a US presidential election. In 2016 the share exceeded prior years for nearly every month leading up to the election with a surge in November relative to historical trends. So here again we look at 2004 and the 2.5% is the total share of political contributions within that year. In 2016 the share has almost more than double to 5.8%. So basically this growth is increasingly a headwind for charitable giving. We're basically seeing that the share of political contributions during those cycles increases. On the next slide we look at recurring payments share as a percentage of total donations. And here again we see that there is an increase. And in 2012 recurring payments share was around 3.8% and in 2016 it was 6.1%. So in this context when I say recurring payments we're really looking at recurring donations. So a donation where a user chooses to contribute either on a – it could be on a daily, it could be on a weekly or annual basis, but more frequently than not people elect to make contributions on a monthly or quarterly basis. So in this case this is something that's important to watch out for because as recurring payments share grows it's important to have this functionality enabled on your website so that you're able to participate in this trend. Now the next slide is a slightly different breakout for how people give and we're looking at the average recurring donation and comparing it to the average total donation. And what we see is that essentially the average recurring donation size increased to $43 from $41 in 2015 after experiencing decreases for six consecutive years. And this is the case for both average recurring donations and average total donations. And one of the things to note is that this reversal was driven primarily by strength and education, human services, and environmental related causes. So this 43 right over here compares to the average donation size for total donations of $63 which has also been steadily declining. Basically the reason for this decline is that the frequency of donations has increased. So people are donating more often but they're donating smaller amounts. On this slide we're looking at recurring giving and we're looking at again the different NT categories and what the average donation size is by category type. So now we see that the disease category has the highest average donation of $86.60. And environment has the lowest at $34.40. So this compares to total average recurring donation size of $43.20. So even though environmental causes have the lowest average recurring donation, people are still donating more often but with smaller amounts. So that's like the one thing to keep in mind in this case. And here we see that the average recurring donation size differs wildly by category. That's actually also the case in terms of share. So some categories have a much higher share of recurring donations than other categories. And now we have a poll question. Great, thanks Yuri. Another opportunity for you to participate. So the question is does your organization leverage digital resources for fundraising? And check all that applies. You use your website, you use email marketing, crowdfunding, mobile, or other. You can select as many as you want. And if you do select other, chat in what your other is. And I will give you, you guys are getting really good at this. Maybe five more seconds. Five, four, three, two, and let's take a look Yuri. Wow. And I see some people putting in, they may not have been able to click, but Facebook, social media, and for some folks they don't do that. They don't have some of the technical resources. So thanks for that question and thanks for answering everybody. Wow, that is very interesting. So here on this slide, this is a different slice of online giving. And now we are looking at just pure online donation growth. And we are comparing that to online and in person card donation growth. So the yellow bars represent online and in person growth. And orange represents just regular online donation growth. So here in 2010, we see that online and in person donation growth was at around 3%. In the same year, for just online, it was 9.3%. We see that the difference between the two is quite substantial. It is at around 6%. Now when we look at 2016, online and in person donation growth was at 5.9%. And just online donation growth was at 8.6%. So the gap here is at around 2%. So this basically signifies that there is increasing maturity within the donation space for online giving. But nevertheless, the industry has not really kept pace with online growth for total retail sales. So in 2016, annual online growth for total retail sales continued to exceed growth in online charitable giving. And this suggests that the shift to online is happening at a faster pace for retail purchases compared to donations. And when we speak about online retail growth, we are really talking about any purchases that are made through a website, any retail purchases. So whether you go on Amazon or whether you buy through Target online. Now on to the next slide, we are going to explore when do people give. And we see that increasingly, December is a very important month for giving. So in 2016, December represented 11.1% of annual volume. And same as for recurring payments, within the monthly distribution, some causes are much more reliant on donations in December. So for example, food and agriculture category received around 36% of their donations in December, while the international and foreign affairs only 23%. So you can also use this data set to basically compare how reliant your organization is on year-end donations versus year peers. And specifically within December, December 30th and 31st ranked as the top two volume days from 2013 through 2016 as people likely wait until the last minute to donate in order to give their tax deduction benefit for the year. So how does giving vary by day of the week? Essentially we know that more donations are being made online. But what are the variances when people donate in person versus online? And we see that people are more likely to donate offline on the weekend compared to online. Nearly 24% of offline donations are made on either Saturday or Sunday compared to almost 18% for online. However, Tuesday is the strongest day for online giving and Friday is the strongest day for in-person. Sunday is the weakest day of the week for both channels. And this intuitively makes sense because people have a lot more time on the weekend to get out of their office or out of their house and make that in-person donation. And now I will pass it on to Melinda for closing your remarks. Thank you, Yuri. And we are certainly getting a ton of really great questions here through the chat. So thank you everyone. We are working diligently to answer them. As I mentioned earlier, please go to MasterCardCenter.org, check out the report and the data set. We would love to hear from you. Any questions we can't get to today we need to answer via email. Please feel free to review all the insights, share your learnings, tell us what's top of mind for your organization. I mean, you are the fundraising experts and we would love to hear from you so we can learn as well. Thank you all for your attention. And I think Susan, we are ready to move to the Q&A portion of the event. Great. Thanks so much. We do have a lot of questions and maybe a few little bits of things that we want to clarify. Some questions came in to the chat about comparing the MasterCard data to other cards. And I just wanted you to clarify where this data comes from and how you share the data with nonprofits. Sure. So this data is based on MasterCard's transaction data. So we do not have access to competitor's data. And this is not something that is estimated for all of the tender. Great. Thank you. And I think I want to go back to the slide where we talked about the comparison between the performance of donations during political campaigns. And I think the question was, it was more of a speculation about the Johnson amendment which prohibits nonprofits from either endorsing or opposing political parties. So we think that there would be any effect of removing that amendment on the insights or the donations. Yeah, that's a really interesting question. Just keep in mind that these are trends in individual charitable giving so I'm not sure that it really would have an impact from that perspective. Thanks. What about categories? Now we talked about NTE and a lot of folks have questions about where their organization fits in. Because it's determined by the IRS, we always recommend that you, I did shoot out a link where you can find out more about the NTE categories and perhaps determine where your organization falls. But which category has the highest volume of reporting in your data set? Yes, so the highest in our data set is education. So as a percentage of the total donations education in 2016 is 14%. Arts was second at 12.4 and the environment came in third, 10.2%. Great. Thanks. And I think what about strongest and weakest growth? What categories had the strongest and the weakest growth? Yeah, so what we saw in 2016 is we really saw strength in public safety, housing and shelter and also education. And so as far as the weakest, we saw weakness in food and nutrition but I would tell you that category tends to be quite volatile. Human services was another weak category and then the health related as we talked about earlier was also pretty weak. Thank you. A question from Sharon, do these numbers, the data that we're sharing include purchases of merchandise that benefit an organization or are they only reflective of cash donations? So we try to decide for merchandise but we can't always do it. So it is possible that there are some merchandise purchases from an organization in here. Great. Thanks. Also I believe we reported that there was some decreases in both. I believe it was on the slides. I'm trying to find it. Eric had a question about decreases in both of the years in 2013. So I don't recall if that was total donation around total donations or? In 2013, yeah. We can go back to that slide. Right. So total donation growth was 3% in 2012 and 3.5% in 2013. And if you look at what was happening in the economy, there was a blip and we think that there is a relation to that. Great. Thank you. Thank you for that insight. And there are people who want to make sure we've reach out at the link and actually download the report. And we will continue to chat that out. And I will also include that in the follow-up email. And we'll also include the email address where you can connect with the MasterCard Center for Inclusive Growth to ask any specific questions. So if you do have any other questions you don't need to raise your hand. You can simply chat them in. And I will ask Yuri and Melinda. And as I do that, I wanted to make sure that you guys were aware of the frequency of the reports and when you can expect new reports to come out. And we also chatted out where you can connect with the most recent reports. So Melinda, will you talk a little bit about the frequency of the reports where you house the archives of previous reports and when we can expect the next one? Sure. So although the data is monthly, what we are doing is releasing the report and data set twice a year. So the release will come out in September and the next one will be early fall of this year. Great. And just to double check, where can people archive previous editions of the report? They'll be able to get that from our website. Perfect. Thanks so much. And a quick reminder to everybody, we are recording this event. A lot of you folks are looking for the PowerPoint presentation and links. Not to worry. We'll send out the follow-up email today. And that will include a link to the recording, the PowerPoint presentation, and all the links that we've chatted out and we've talked about. We do have a couple other questions for in-person donations. What does that mean specifically as opposed to online donations? So how does MasterCard Center for Inclusive Growth define that? So in our database what we have is we have a flag for when a transaction is online. An in-person donation would be, say for example, if they go to an event, or you run for a particular cause or do a walk or those types of things, that would be in-person. So where there's what we call a POS system where they can take a card. Okay, so I think that answers the question. Great. Thank you. You're welcome. As I move through the end portion of this event, do feel free to chat in any questions you have about the data that was shared. We do want to know at least one thing you learned today. This has been very data-centric and pretty data heavy. The goal is to help you understand how the charitable giving landscape, the data that MasterCard is providing for you, and also their insights how it can relate to your nonprofit. So we want to know one thing you learned, one thing you might try to implement, or one thing you might share with a co-worker. So go ahead and chat that in as I talk about some of our other opportunities. We have TechSoup courses which is our online and on-demand learning management system. So you can get tech training online anywhere, anytime. The majority of our courses are absolutely free. We have a lot of design courses. We also have some branding courses and some tips on fundraising, specifically using social media. We have something called TechSoup 30s, and we've run a series of those. You can go to that at techsoup.course.tc.catalog. You create an account, and then you can go in and register for any of the courses. It is just like a library card. Once you get your library card or your account, you can go in and check out any of the courses. And we do want to hear your feedback on the courses. We have some additional upcoming webinars. Next Thursday we have a very interesting topic. It is the third wave of nonprofit technology, technology for social change. So how nonprofits can be more active in instigating social change. Also on the 27th we are going to talk about security, getting the most out of semantic endpoint protection. You can go to our webinar events page that Becky will chat out so that you can register for those events that are coming up. Or you can also look at our archives where you can view previous events. We do record the majority of our events and post them on our archive pages. You can do a search by category or simply do a search in our search bar. And you will come up with webinars, articles, or other resources to help you with that particular topic. Wait a minute, is there one more question? There is. There is one more question from Jill. How do you account for a sudden mass increase in giving like the Cecil the lion campaign or the ice bucket challenge? That's an interesting question. Thank you Jill. So it's captured of course if people are using the MasterCard so I can tell you that when I looked at when the ice bucket challenge happened and I looked into the category for disease and medical research we did see an increase overall in that category around that time. So we are capturing that. And I also wanted to add, the one thing that it's kind of difficult to say is whether there's statistical significance, whether it did happen because it's Cecil the lion campaign or whether it was just some other increase but we do observe those sort of campaigns occurring in other categories as well. So for example, I'm forgetting now the date but whenever the movie about Blackfish came out there was a very big increase in donations specifically within the environmental related sector. So we do observe those spikes. It's hard to attach statistical significance due to those campaigns or whether it's some other reason but it is likely that it is as a result of the campaigns. Great. Thank you so much both of you for the insight on that question. Let's see, I think we don't have any other questions specific to this event so I do want to extend a heartfelt thank you to Melinda and Yuri. Everyone on this call, all nonprofits and libraries, any of you that have joined they worked really hard in this presentation to make sure that it was relevant to you and that's why we wanted to give you lots of opportunities to ask questions. Like I said they worked really hard. They practiced a lot so I want to thank them from the bottom of my heart for doing this for us and we hope to perhaps do it again or perhaps take a different angle and do another event. I tell you that I also want to thank Becky on the back end for chatting out all of the resources that we've mentioned and Alicia for also monitoring our chat. And most of all to all of you because if you're working in nonprofit or libraries I know your most valuable asset is your time so we appreciate all of your time today. We're ending a little early which is we're giving you back a little bit of time but we also want to make sure we answer your questions. So please do chat in any questions for Yuri and Melinda now before we sign off. And also everyone keep your eyes on our webinar and events page on TechSoup.org and please do join us for other events. Okay, well Melinda and Yuri I guess I want to thank you again. I don't know if you'd like to say anything to our guests today and then we can sign off. So thank you everyone so much for joining us. I hope you found some valuable insights here. And feel free to reach out to us. And thanks so much Susan and the whole TechSoup team. We really appreciate it. Great. So I also want to thank our webinar sponsor ReadyTalk for providing this platform. And again everyone have a great rest of your week. Have a wonderful weekend. Have a great summer weekend. And we'll be seeing you on another webinar soon. Thanks so much. Bye-bye.