 Thank you for joining us today. We have a fantastic guest with us for another episode of The Nonprofit Show. Timothy Serrentono, help me out. Serrentonio, Serrentonio. Like San Antonio, but with roll the Rs a little bit, I suppose, but. Okay, Serrentonio, perfect. Thank you with me on one to talk to us about new donor behaviors and how to react. So we are excited to have Timothy with us. We'll get into this conversation. And of course, Julia and I are here. If we haven't met yet, Julia Patrick is the CEO of the American Nonprofit Academy. I'm Jarrett Ransom, your non-profit nerd, president and CEO of the Raven Group. And again, we are so extremely honored, blessed, grateful privilege to have the continued support from our presenting sponsors, including Bloomerang, the American Nonprofit Academy, fundraising academy, non-profit nerd, your part-time controller, the non-profit Atlas, non-profit thought leader and staffing boutique. So thank you, thank you, thank you to our sponsors that keep this conversation going and growing just like the one we are about to have here with Timothy. Welcome and thank you. Thank you for having me. Thank you for having me, Julia and Jarrett. It's really exciting. Well, you're like, you're our kind of person because already we've had so many connecting points. It's been really fun to chit chat with you. This is why the green room chatter is not to be missed. Yeah. This morning we talked about cocktails, beer making, people that we knew, somebody that spilled a cocktail on me at a recent event that led into a giving day. And it was a mutual contact who spilled the drink. And it was somebody that we both know. Yes. Okay, crazy, but that's what's a lot of fun. But let's back up. Talk to us about what Neon One does. So Neon One is a software and services company that focuses on connected fundraising. And so what that means practically is, a lot of times an organization might have their CRM, but the vast majority of nonprofits out there are juggling three to five different sources beyond that, right, they might have an email, events, you know, leveraging the thing in the giving day that's happening, then they have to download that. What we feel is let's streamline that. Let's bring that all together and kind of smooth out those edges of the donor insights that people need, enable them with the right resources and training, and just make the technology easy and personal to use. So that's what we do, we serve, you know, tens of thousands of organizations with our technology, but it also helps give us billions of dollars of insight for the research that we're gonna talk about today. So that's kind of what I'm excited about. But we also do partner with great organizations like Blumerang, Donor Perfect, Kila, when it comes to donor insights for the fundraising effectiveness project. So we'll be able to reference that as well. So this is research that is multifaceted. Wow, I love that. Well, here is what we're gonna be talking about. And now this report, understanding the future of individual giving, you're really the mastermind behind this, right, Timothy? Yes, I've been writing this since July of last year. The genesis of this report was I was at the Giving Institute, which puts out GivingUSA. Right. So we're a member. And that always has some really great insight on what's happening with individual giving and foundation giving and all that good stuff. But at the end of the summer symposium in Washington, DC, somebody stood up and said, wow, there's so many great things that I've learned. Now I have like 20 different reports that I can go back and read. And I sat there and said, wait, these are the most tapped in people, possible when it comes to generosity. The average nonprofit fundraiser is not going to have time to comb through 20 different reports to get that insight. Why can't we do one report to centralize that? So from that premise, evolved donors understand in the future of individual giving and what we're answering in this is six primary questions. Who are our donors? What do they give to? Why do they give? Where are they? Who, what, when, where, why, how? I'm just gonna speed that up. So who, what, when, where, why, how? So all the different facets and elements and so over $2 billion in transactions we were able to dive into just for our donor behavior for 2020, 2021. But then FEP data fundraising effectiveness project is so much more. It's actually the largest data set of individual giving data in the world bigger than all the other ones out there because we pool multiple providers into one unified database that giving Tuesday and AFP overseas. So. Okay, like hair on fire, my mind is blown. Well, if you're a nonprofit nerd and an academic you're gonna love this. Oh, I'm totally nerding out on this and I cannot wait to get my hands and eyeballs on I think you said 88 pages, is that right? Yeah, I have a methodology section and appendix. And one of the things that I'm also really jazzed about is, and we can get into this but one of the resources we're gonna publish is a interactive data hub to actually see this live. So one of the things that, and I know it exists because I've been quality assurance testing it so I can guarantee it's gonna happen. You go to the website, we don't make you fill an email out to see it, just go and then there's filters for what type of mission is the giving and the type of gift. Is it check? Is it cash? Is it online or offline? And December, day by day, December 1st through 31st what happened between 2019 and 2020, for instance. So live interactive data hubs, lots of research, 88 pages, full methodology, 50 different resources, one report though. One report. Cannot wait, that sounds super nerdy and exciting. I'm really excited about it. Like Pavlov, I'm like drooling because you rang the bell and it you know. Okay, well let's talk about this research and how COVID of course has impacted donors giving. What are you seeing by way of that? How can you talk to us about that research that's been done? So one of the things that's exciting about this is that there was a lot of headlines that went out last year if you remember about US household giving is down, right? Like we saw that in like USA Today and things like that. The reality is that that is referencing really excellent research by the Lilly School but that is panel data and data that's pre-COVID. And so what we wanted to actually do is get up to date COVID reality of donor trends and what we were finding, and this is FEP, this isn't NEON, this is FEP that started to find that. So when I say FEP, it's just short hand for fundraising effect in this project. So FEP found that the downward trend that we've been seeing is starting to potentially reverse because people during the pandemic started coming back. A lot of households did have been on a downward trend. There's a lot of different reasons for that. There's also the fact that it doesn't mean that people are less generous. There's more giving channels than 20 years ago. You have corporate social responsibility. You have things like GoFundMe, you have mutual aid, you have Facebook fundraisers, which that's a black box of data. So when you hear lily school data, it's very IRS driven versus individualized transactions coming out of a data set like FEP. So what we found was that, especially small dollar donors shooting back up, recurring donations, our client base, we actually did a massive analysis of 6.4 million transaction records with the University of Dallas, handed them that, anonymized it of course, and said what's going on and small nonprofits in particular recurring donation machines. And I think our clients actually saw new recurring donor schedules set up at a tick of 11.9% in 2021, which was actually a jump on top of an already stellar 2020. So the opportunity is there, but there is still lagging new donor retention in particular that is very difficult, where the likelihood of you bringing somebody who has donated for the first time back, yeah, you're probably gonna lose them. You're probably gonna lose them. They're probably not gonna come back if things continue once. So lot, lot to unpack there. And especially when you unpack all the who, what, when, where, why, how elements, it's a very interesting picture, very interesting picture. Now, one of the things you had mentioned, Timothy to us in the green room chatter was about these community day of giving. And I'm curious if that has helped to reverse that downward trend, I hear my community, we've seen it be so successful for a variety of nonprofits, small, medium, large. And I really think it brings in that peer to peer, ask opportunity and that campaign. We know that it's been a little different lately because not only was there a national day of giving, right? There was two national days of giving in 2020 or 21. 2020 that Giving Tuesday now occurred on May 5th. And then they did the December 1st, 2020 day. And then last 2021 was the third. The third. For Giving Tuesday itself. So two nerd elements here. There's community giving days and then there's Giving Tuesday. And the report does break these things out in particular. It took me about 18 months in all honesty because I came from a world where I was working at a Catholic school and running their annual fund program and doing the quarterly copy updates, all that good individual donor engagement stuff. And running my static queries at a razor's edge, all that type of stuff, right? And so dynamic is a better query. But what we found though, is that community giving days are completely different than even something like Giving Tuesday because it's a coordinated lightning strike of generosity where especially in those geographic communities, what we found, cause we actually started analyzing things like within the report on the community giving day growth, the peer to peer growth within those, and yes, things go up, but they're typically on off seasons, right? Like a lot of people focus on December giving, but Arizona gives for instance, this is in April. And it's not even the days that we do. There's bigger things like Minnesota has a long standing giving day that's been really, really powerful there. Miami gives for instance, is in November and another big one, North Texas is in September, but Canada helps even did a big summer campaign for Canada. And that hit that summer slump that a lot of people see. So regionally, that's very important. And then there's Giving Tuesday, which is decentralized. So the difference between a community giving day and Giving Tuesday is that there's a host, like the Alliance of Arizona Nonprofits for Arizona gives, that's like, come hither, come hither, come to this website. Right? And then they have hundreds, if not thousands of profiles where people can give. And typically there's a kind of shopping cart experience where people can donate to multiple nonprofits, which the data in the data report shows that is a verification that donors are supporting causes, not necessarily having loyalty to one nonprofit, the average affluent donor for instance, in a Bank of America study from 2021, found that they donate up to seven different nonprofits on average annually, right? So that's great for givestays. Giving Tuesday basically is like, if you say you're part of Giving Tuesday, you're part of Giving Tuesday. You don't have to go to a website, you can literally shove somebody at a PayPal button and if it's on Giving Tuesday, it counts, right? So what we are generally finding in those types of moments though, is that the giving season is extending out. That historically around, there's been some old data that a lot of people cite, 31% of gifts come in December. Well, that data sets online only and that's from 2015 basically. It turns out that it's about 20% in December. Still significant. But we are starting to see a trend backwards where November is. Now, the final item on this is the question for everybody. Are people giving because we've conditioned them to give during these periods by doing the appeals then? Or is it because donors actually like to give in December and things like that? And I think that's one of the most important questions that we can start to actually unpack in 2022 to truly understand giving behavior. Speaking of Pavlov, right? Like we are conditioning, we are conditioning our constituents on when the giving season is. And I will say, I have absolutely repeated that 30% for the season of December and you're right. Like it's constantly changing. Well, what about some of these implications, Timothy? Are you seeing these as short-term, long-term, really just, are they here to stay? Oh, I mean, that is the question, right? I think it's extremely naive to think that there is not some sort of permanent reorganization of our society as it comes to this. Now, that's a much larger philosophical question. So let's just focus in on individual giving for our sanity today. The big things that did happen. So one of our partners that helped facilitate this report is Visa. And so if you have a card in your pocket, that is a pretty good indicator of commerce. And so what we are seeing is that Visa's data that they provided us generationally as well showed that digitization of payments is accelerating because of the pandemic. I have not been a doubting Thomas. I work for a tech company that does online giving, right? But I've always been skeptical of the online-only narrative. I'm a big omnichannel guy. But there was a moment where in the beginning, like things like QR codes, things like Apple Pay and Google Pay, a lot of eye-rolling when these items started coming out. Now it's like you can't go to a restaurant without having the QR code. We pulled it out. We just did it. I think we just eye-rolled ourselves, like, oh, yes. But then you see Coinbase in their Super Bowl after putting the QR code, right? So we even rolled out QR code automatic generation in our CRM for online forms. It's just like click here, download the thing, and then throw it in your direct mail piece, right? And so that's where we're gonna see where you don't put that online necessarily. You start to think about the donor experience more. That's where I hope things go is that we'll get to this, I think, later in terms of where we meet people, but the permanent implication here is that people are much more in tuned to a digital experience now. And a poor digital experience will hurt your overall retention even for the donors who historically have been giving via check. We saw ACH, for instance, just skyrocket during the pandemic because donors, if given the option, were opting for it because they knew their checks would be sitting in an office untouched for weeks. And so I think those are the things that are permanent. What I think is temporary though is the events element. A lot of people were basically saying like, virtual events, that's it. And it's like, yeah, rich people really love Galas though. And that's like probably not like, I watch the Gilded Age on HBO. I get the role philanthropy plays in certain segments of society, right? And so... That's hilarious. So, but the thing is is that like people love recognition. They love the fact that there's certain elements of our brain that are activated by different implications of when we give. We talk about that in the report too, the why of it, that we actually go into the biographic or the biological and the psychographic reasons why people give. So philanthropic psychology emerging field coming out of the Institute for Sustainable Philanthropy, Professor Jen Cheng, we talk about it in the report. And so people just, that's not changing the biological urge to feel validated. And so events do play a role of that, but they can be changed to build community, not be this kind of like major donor only thing. You can use it to expand and make everybody feel as part of your donor community. That's what I hope. That's the aspirational change. So part and parcel to that is you're really focusing in on meeting donors where they are now. And I mean, and to your point, and Jared and I have been talking about this a lot and our conversation has changed as we go into the third year of the nonprofit show nearly 500 episodes. We had doubts in the beginning. And I think we thought, oh, this is a temporary thing. And then we're seeing a realignment to behaviors and what the donors want. I'm wondering what you have started to see through this research. What one is, is definitely nonprofits who understand different giving vehicles and offering clear calls to action around those are going to be successful. So first of all, and it doesn't matter your size nonprofit, small nonprofits, especially if they stopped fundraising and stop engagement have found it extraordinarily difficult to climb out. Not surprising to hear that, but it accelerated during the pandemic. And what a lot of that meant was that they weren't comfortable with the fact that people wanted more digital options. So they don't know how to handle crypto. They don't know how to handle an increase in stock giving and things of that nature. They might not have the processes in place for legacy gifts, plan gifts. So part of the onus on the tech company side is to do that for them in my opinion. When we rolled out Google Pay and Apple Pay, for instance, we just like turn it on. There wasn't anything that you had to do. It's just like here, it's just on your form now. And then the things started popping up. But one of the fun things that we actually looked at, and this is another nerdy item that you can get in the report, we looked at timestamps on online donors. Because a lot of times if you focus only on check giving and stuff like that, it's like when the administrator enters it into the database, so you kind of have to let go. I hope that's right, right? Right. And we have guardrails for methodology to remove outliers there. But with online giving, you don't have to worry about that. You know exactly what the donor did. So I said, I had a theory. I said, do people get buzzed on the weekend and give more? And so I asked for timestamps for date and time of the day. And my theory is completely proven wrong other than the fact that there was a bump at 8.30 p.m. central time on a Sunday. So I'm like, maybe that is related to sports. But more often than not, when do you think people gave? Actually, I'm gonna throw it back on you. When we did online giving, we looked at millions of transactions, didn't matter giving Tuesday, whatever, just aggregate. When do you think people were giving online? I would think that when their paychecks hit their accounts. Okay. Okay, so. Sorry, Jarrett, what do you think? So I'm gonna say like a mid week, well, maybe Thursday, Friday, like three-ish p.m. Oh, you're so close. Thursday at 11.30 a.m. Thursday at 11.30 a.m. central time. So, because we're in Chicago, so that's why we did that. But yeah, you are on point, yeah. Paycheck stuff, we did see spikes, for instance, in the FAP data set around the $300 level going up, for instance. Remember where you're getting that type of money? But nothing relating to the larger payouts that we got during the pandemic. So $300, that kind of like universal charitable deduction level, our analysis saw something enough to go, there might be a correlation there. But as we know, correlation does not necessarily equal causation. Well, and then, you know, I love all these things that you're bringing up. And I think we have to take that like umbrella and put it over our heads and say, but we're talking about a global pandemic. Yes. I mean, it's such a fascinating thing to think about all of this, but yet, you know, we are in this really epic period of social adjustment. For many reasons too. I mean, other things, other influences undoubtedly. But so interesting to see you on this collection and redistribution of information. And I hope it's moving forward because, you know, as time moves on, because this is just such an unusual time. It is, it is. And we thought that this would be a critical time to release this type of research. We haven't seen anything to this level of post-pandemic future. And also actionable insight. So one thing that I hope people don't get out of this is start to send emails, for instance, at 1130 a.m. on a Thursday. That's not what we're saying. Don't do that. Central time. Central time only. 1130 Central. What the ultimate goal and action item that people should take away from this is that people are moving toward what our donors are not our donors. So we need to move toward a world where we're needing to understand their behavior more implicitly on where they wanna be. People wanna have a personal experience because that's what's happening in the shopping cart on Amazon and Shopify and things like that. And if the nonprofit space does not, I don't think we need to run ourselves like businesses, but we can definitely take experiences and understand that there are peak moments to activate generosity and lean into that. People wanna personalize. They wanna feel loved. Just like they love you. They wanna feel that love back. And we don't need to do that in a way that gives donors primacy when they don't deserve it, but we can do it where it's like, let's treat people like humans and talk to them like humans and go from there. And so we can do a lot more listening with our donor behavior. Well, we have like, I wanna get this back up on the screen because we are almost at the end of our time, Timothy. And we warned you at the beginning and you have just been like speaking our love language. I mean, I have a bajillion questions. And I saw that shimmy. I mean, you were like really getting it. I do love this stuff. I really do love this stuff a lot. That's awesome. Well, here is what the report looks like. Donors, understanding the future of giving. Talk to us about when and where and how we can get this information. So we're gonna release this publicly on the 8th of March. So this is imminent in terms of the time of this presentation. So would you call this that the nonprofit show got a scoop? You got a scoop. You definitely got a scoop. There's some elements that I'm talking a lot about this. I won't shut up about the report obviously, but like I am excited to personalize the experience for every audience because different types of people are learning different ways. And that's another thing that we're learning is that one size fits all education on fundraisers. I got my start. I thought it was gonna be a labor historian, right? Like I didn't know what I was doing. I got fired from two jobs before I landed on something that I actually figured out. And the reality is is that a lot of nonprofit professionals, especially younger folks coming up, they don't have that privilege or time that I did. They need to know what to do a little bit quicker. And that's why we're excited to put this report out because it'll help give that objective guidance because we're citing research from Bloomerang. We're citing research from Blackboard because those are firms that know what they're doing. So let's cite that. But there's also objective things from Lilly School, emerging cryptocurrency analysis, emerging e-commerce stuff, you name it. The visa trends. Well, congratulations on being fired. I for one think that that's an accomplishment because it also got me to where I am today. So I know that trajectory. Yeah, exactly. It's just because I was a bad fundraiser. I didn't know what I was doing. Oh, I think it's fantastic. You're clearly passionate about this. You and your company have done so much great work in a variety of communities across the nation. So we're so thankful. Julia, let's get his contact information back up so that everyone who is interested in nerding out, this sounds like a great weekend project to read. So whatever that weekend is of March the 8th, neon1.com. Take a look there. You can find Timothy, director of corporate brand, Neon One. And again, thank you, thank you, thank you for all that you do. Thank you. Thank you for having me. Tim at neon1.com or look me up on LinkedIn as well and cannot wait to unpack this further with y'all. Let's do it over some juniper liquid. You know, I'll tell you, we do need to have you come back in and drill down, I think, a little bit. And when we're done, let's reconvene to figure out how we can help bring even more information to our viewers. I mean, Timothy, San Antonio, this has been really cool. And I think that Jared and I always, always appreciate somebody that has passion and is willing to share knowledge. We have a lot of organizations that will do amazing research, but they don't always want to share it. And we've got the glasses to prove it. Passion and nerdiness, like that is what's needed. I love it. I love it. And that's why we're doing the public data hub too, because I got so many big plans for that. But that's a big piece there too. We'll definitely, we'll have you back. Yeah, you're our new best friend. And we have a lot of best friends here that help us day in and day out to get this show. We are marching towards our 500th episode. We are now in year three of the nonprofit show, the nation's only daily broadcast dedicated to the nonprofit sector. And so it's remarkable. So we want to thank Blumerang, the American Nonprofit Academy, Fundraising Academy, Nonprofit Nerd, your part-time controller, staffing boutique, nonprofit thought leader, and the nonprofit Atlas. Amazing, amazing collaboration happens in this globe, across this globe every day. And we are delighted to be a part of it. As we end this episode and every episode, we want to remind everybody, I think and ourselves, stay well so you can do well. We'll see you back here.