 Welcome and thank you for joining us. Good morning, good afternoon, good evening, whatever time it is that you might be tuning in. We are so glad that you're here. We have Sasha Lewis with us today. Sasha is a CFRE and also one of our presenting sponsors with her company Moves Management Consulting. Thank you so much, Sasha. And Sasha will share with us today about your annual fundraising plan and hint, hint, it already exists. It's in your database. So I cannot wait to learn about this, especially as we're in Q4, moving into a new year and maybe looking to reiterate our annual fundraising plan. So this is going to be an episode. I'm pretty sure you might wanna watch again and again and again. But before we do move into our episode, we of course wanna make sure that you know who we are if we haven't quite met yet. Julia Patrick is here, the CEO of the American Nonprofit Academy. I'm Jarrett Ransom, your nonprofit nerd, CEO of the Raven Group. And we would not be here 400 plus episodes strong if it were not for these presenting sponsors. So we really ask that you do check out these companies, including Sasha's Moves Management. We are so thrilled to have their investment in the show and in the sector at large. These companies exist in your community. All of them are online and you can find them. They are all experts in whizzes when it comes to the nonprofit sector. So if you joined us for the Chitty Chat Chat, you heard a lot from our whizz that we have today. Sasha Lewis to share with us about the annual fundraising plan and all of our sponsors are just as much of a whizz and an expert as Sasha. And we're so grateful to have you back. Thank you for joining us Sasha. I always truly a pleasure to be here with you. Thank you. You know, Sasha, we tell the story every time you're on but one of the things that we just fell in love with you with when you made the proclamation and now I'm gonna call it a proclamation. We need to make data sexy. And I love that. And you have given us through the pandemic so many strategies that could help us navigate crisis. But I think the real gift is at the heart of so many of these things that you've brought to us. They've really been strategic and work outside the framework of these pandemics that we have been involved with and that we will continue to be involved with. So one of those things that you've done to really help me is to reframe the concept of data and what it looks like and how we should be using it. And so I really wanna dig into this concept about fundraising and data. And you're telling us we already have it. Absolutely. And so when we were, I was thinking through the topic that I wanted to speak about this month, it was always with the goal of how do I present something that is meaningful to nearly everybody that somebody sitting here could take and go back to their office and do something with. And then I started thinking through what it's been like working with clients over the last years, but just predominantly in the last year and thinking through what were the common questions that were coming up. And what became very apparent throughout the strategy was just how many times a fundraiser or a development director or the executive is marching forward with a plan and they really don't understand the foundation not that they don't know what they're doing because they're very skilled, they're very crafted and wonderful professionals, but when they're looking at a new organization that they most likely joined within the last 18 to 36 months, understanding its history. And then going through the data cleanup process, I very quickly begin to understand there has been a pattern to their fundraising from the time the organization has started fundraising. And so during my cleanup, I started to recognize that, well, they didn't realize they were doing this six years ago and they've been doing this pretty much every year for the last 20 years, but they called it this thing this year, this thing the second year, this other topic the third year. And so there was never really understanding of what they were truly doing. And then we had turnover. And so by the time I'm done doing my cleanup, I can very clearly observe, let's say 20 years of their annual plan just by common coding and cleaning up the structure of how it was recorded. And so when I started to kind of come back to again, how can I share something important today? It was, let's ask everybody to stop, go look at your guests from the last year and start using those to identify what your fundraising plan is and to help describe what I mean by that is you'll hear me talk in other sessions where I say using razor's edge terminology because we most of us use it but with the campaign fund and appeal, our appeals are our strategies that we use every year to track our effectiveness in fundraising. It's the direct mail, it's the year end appeal, it's the holiday, you know, gift giving, giving Tuesday appeal that's going on. And it's today, so it's those appeals, it's those strategies. And what we need to do is we need to look at what did we record every gift in our database to in the year prior. Because every one of those strategies that you recorded to, that is your plan. You basically need to create an Excel file of all of your gift transactions. And this is in a very simple way. So it kind of is a loaded statement depending on how your gifts are coded. But if you, you know, export out an Excel file and this will be the only time I ever tell you to work in an Excel file. But export your transactions out and then create pivot charts. Look at what funds or projects you are using, what appeals, maybe you use a custom field or an attribute on your gift codes to help you track your strategy. And look for those common buckets. And then what you realize is that is your plan for last year. Every direct mail, what time you sent it out and when you recorded those donations is when you plan for it next year. So rather than thinking, oh, I need to do a fall appeal, you can go in and go, well, we did a fall appeal, we did a holiday appeal, we did an Easter appeal, we did a Mother's Day appeal. Okay, I now have my five direct mails figured out. Now I just have to work on content. Okay, we did this Giving Tuesday appeal. We did, you know, all of these different strategies and they're already recorded in your database based off of how your gifts are recorded. File, save as in a sense and look at each one of those buckets and say, are we doing that again yet this year? Yes, how much did I raise last year? I raised $25,000 from that strategy. Now my goal is gonna be 30,000. So there becomes your goal. And each one of those strategies when you identify a goal for the next year based off of how successful you were in this year, those goals should already roll up into what your overall fundraising total should be. And so you should always have a predefined strategy to help you roll up. So I feel like I got a little winded in that because I was trying to truncate a very large statement but it is looking at those gifts, looking at how they were recorded and looking for those buckets. And that again is your plan. And that's every major donor was recorded, every annual gift was recorded, every mid-level gift was recorded in such a way. And we don't have to have such an unknown feeling of well, what did we do? It's right there. Now it may not be clean and it may not be easy for you to figure out but it's still there in some manner or mechanism. Well, I love that you mentioned the 18 to 36 months for that development professional regardless of the title, right? Chief Development Officer Development Director. So nationally and statistically, I do believe that is the standard of about an 18 month window of tenure for that professional to be with the organization. So I love so very much Sasha that you're saying this pattern exists well beyond this professional and it goes on perhaps decades in the database because once you pull this out in Excel and as you said, this is the only time you're gonna take to use Excel. And I wrote this down so Excel to a pivot chart and that will definitely tell you and help you analyze, track and trend what you've done. That is brilliant. So regardless of how windy you might have been it was all worth it. And I again, I just know I'm gonna go back and want to listen to it again. Well, thank you and I appreciate that. And it really is a challenge when you think about the 18 to 24 month tenure, half the time we're just learning our donors, we're trying to be familiar with names, we wanna get the mission correct, we need to understand the organizational culture and speak and it takes 18 to 24 months to get that under our belts. And that's when we're transitioning away into the next organization. And so we have talked about this in some elements and other conversations but the human capital crisis that we have in the nonprofit industry, especially right now around the database and data entry and data management, it is extreme. But when we look to see what we can do, I'll call it beautiful, it's amazing because when we start to say, okay, development team, you may be new here, but I can already tell you what we did for the last 18 months, 24 months, here's the trends, here's the history. Now put a strategy in place to build on these versus spend the next 18 months just trying to figure out what we did because nobody knows. I mean, it's a disservice to the industry and it's a disservice to the mission and it's a disservice to the professionals that we work with. Let's be all candid. You've again heard me talk about that. So when I encourage you to go back in and again, pull at least the gift transactions out to start with, run a pivot chart if you don't know how to do anything else. A lot of great Google instructions on how to do a pivot chart and just start looking into that. If you're considering hiring a new development director and you're trying to set them up for success, this would be something I would do if you do not have a well-developed appeal structure or a well-developed strategy structure already, start to help your team understand what those buckets are so they're not having to sit there and panic about well, when do I need to do a direct mail? We've told you now what I need you to do is focus on the content and the messaging that's gonna bring the donors in so that the relationships grows. We've got the data already taken care of. You know, Sasha, one thing that strikes me is that this should become a form of behavior, a management behavior. And I love the idea of calendarizing it so that it is being done every year and we're gonna have, I think it's gonna be in jeopardy as we move through the pandemic and we see a new way of working. I mean, it's not just all of a sudden all clear as we're learning this week and go back to the old ways, right? So it seems to me that this is, you know, a strategy that we need to be moving forward on and repeating. And agreed. And I think it's actually happening quite a bit partially looking back at even just the clients that I work with. They all know how to do this now and their expectation is at the end of their fiscal year that they're gonna be able to do this kind of file save as for their strategy. And then the next, you know, year's annual plan, you know, across the board's already crafted. And so now we can start going, well, what can we do better? What can we now add on versus always having to react? And it's those concepts of, you know, great business practices that we forget about in the nonprofit industry. We're not the profit, we're not business. Yes, we are. We are absolutely for profit. It's just not going into our pocketbooks. And these business behaviors and analysis of, you know, where do we spend our time? What is efficient? What is working? And I was starting to go somewhere with that and I lost it in the middle of it and I apologize. But it is these business practices that we need to take to the industry because, you know, in the for-profit world we have long-understand data points and trends and analysis. And now I recall where I was going with this, you know, my clients, everybody is recognizing it and they see it. And we now recognize that it's important. And so the nonprofit industry is now saying, okay, we can't wait anymore. We can't stop and we can't wait for the, you know, and say the data will come next year. It has to come today. And so I've mentioned it, you know, a lot of the community and I work in, there is a massive need for these positions because everybody wants to do more. They're like, okay, well, we know that, you know, my director of development can do the great annual plan, but who's supporting it behind it? And I think that's a big part of what we have missed is the support and the business operations that go behind to make all of these things successful. My development director doesn't need to be the one running that CSV file or that Excel file and doing the pivot chart. They need to be working out the strategies on how to do a better job with those ones, but somebody else needs to find that information for them. And unfortunately, we're all one and the same people in a lot of times. And so it's a very interesting challenge moving forward, but I do believe the organizations that are recognizing and prioritizing it, they are already seeing extreme success and changes in the organization in many ways. So before we move on to our next question, we had somebody that asked a question, anonymous writes in, what is a pivot chart? So pivot chart is a great tool that you can use in Excel files. I believe Google Sheets may also have a similar concept, but basically it allows you to take all of the rows in a database and group them. And so let's say I have 10, a thousand gift transactions and I want to see how many were recorded to each fund in those. So I would take and create a pivot chart based off of the fund and then it would tell me of those thousand transactions on another worksheet within the same Excel file, how many went to the unrestricted fund, how many went to the volunteer fund or the program fund, and then I could see where the buckets that my dollars were going into. So you could pick funds, you could pick your appeals as basically your summary classes, and then it would group the information under that bucket you picked. All kinds of fun, nerdy data. Yeah, honestly. Let's get a little nerdy or let's go into like, what are we really looking for in these data sets and in the data points? You mentioned a lot previously when it comes to, now you know when your direct mail is and now you know when you did your annual giving for a specific campaign. And again, today being Giving Tuesday, that's something that we want to look into. So what exactly are we looking for? So in this conversation, we are really talking about the donors you already have, the gifts you already have. It's not the data mining to find new donors. But what we wanna do is we wanna go look at the gifts that we were given. And again, look for those common patterns of where was it recorded? And it's so hard to answer this because there are such a wide variety of structures to databases. Sometimes people have coatings that allow them to see what gifts came online versus offline, what gifts were coming in through workplace giving campaigns, which are the, not your employees, but the giving by other companies to your organization. And you can look at those strategies. And so again, it's the data of the gift itself. It's how many had an indicator that they were on a memorial gifts and what strategies are you putting into place? How many of those were in-kind donations and what are you doing to engage donors that are in-kind donors? Cause all too often like, that's just an in-kind gift. I can tell you multiple experiences of an in-kind donor being a 10 year, $100, how our donors are engaging with us already, we're not gonna understand what's important to them. And so for me, I really love looking at the data and trying to see it okay, are they giving through Facebook? Are they giving through PayPal? Are they giving more through their personal checks or are we seeing more donor advice funds now? All of these are data points that you should have recorded. And if you don't, when you start looking through these pivot charts and you pick a field and it doesn't tell you something and you pick another one and you're not really starting to see something, what that will help you understand is you need to start recording more information. So we need to work with your team to say, how do we get into the database if they gave this through a donor advice fund? How do we make sure that we're tracking that? How do I make sure that if we are getting tribute gifts that we're ensuring every tribute gift is recorded so we can look at it? And so if you can't find stories in your database when you start looking at that Excel file with pivot charts, then that tells me we need to find some more data and start planning to put data into your database so that we can tell those stories next year. So a million dollar question. What if we are changing our CRM? What if we are changing to these data points transfer in pretty much seamlessly? I know you mentioned Razor's Edge and some terminology there. We of course have our grateful sponsor with us, Bloomerang. So how might we consider looking at this data if we recently transitioned to a new donor database or maybe that's something we're considering for the new year? So it's one of those very kind of loaded questions because whether you're in a new database, going into the database, that conversation of how is your data structured is still present. There are a lot of great CRM systems. Again, we have examples of them here but their professionals do one job and that is what they are contracted to do which is to map first name to first name, last name to last name, fund to fund. That does not mean you used the fund field correctly. That does not mean you were using those fields as they were supposed to be used. And so that's the bigger question at hand and it's not necessarily something that these software platform professionals are intended, designed or meant to do but to ask you, is your data in the right place to begin with? And so if you have, take just the concept of our appeals or our segments or how we fundraise. I can take one client that I'm visualizing and thinking of right now that within the same year recorded the same strategy three different times because they had that many different temp people into their organization. And so it's, you know, it's that kind of thing of being able to just say pause, stop and before you do anything else, answer the root cause of the question of is it right to begin with? Yes, great. If there was an answer in that Derrida, I'm not sure. That's a hard one for me. It's hard because it is a, it's one of those things is to stop and evaluate is really hard to do, especially when you've got like that stack of papers going up. If any of you joined us for the Chitty Chat Chat, Jared was talking about an organization that was in transition or transit made just as figuring out that they're recurring gifts are having a problem being processed. And I mean, these are the things that just make us go crazy. And then I think we over, maybe overreact is not the right word, but we are so pressured and compelled to move quickly that we don't take a deep breath and try and figure out, you know, a longer game plan. It's hard to do, Sasha. It's really hard to do. It is and it's interesting because let's, if you were in the for-profit world, they would never consider doing a platform transition and no less than 18 months from the time they decide to do it to the time they execute it, no less than 18 months. You have a phase implementation plan where you go through and you go through the design, then you have a build up and get everybody bought in plan. Then you have an execute the actual plan. Now any company that does one in a much shorter time, they reap what they sow and it's a nightmare and it's a mess. And so when I hear these organizations go, oh, we decided to change our CRM system. We bought one and we did this all in the matter two months and we're converting and we have to be converted in that time. I'm like, oh, this thing's gonna be a nightmare and it's gonna be a mess and this is not gonna be good for anybody. And by the time you're done, everybody's burnt out. It's not a good experience. The new system is just as hated as the old because we didn't do the plan to say, hey, in your old system, you had these reports and your new system, here's your new reports. Let's talk about the design process. It's the end user experience. And so if I have anybody listening and if I can encourage you into 2022, do not make a technology change, transfer or change on your technology without a very thoughtful and long-term strategy of how to do that change. Because if, Jared, you don't mind me saying the transition or the change that you talked about this morning, most likely is related to not realizing that we needed to actually call every single donor and have them re-sign up for their reoccurring gift because most of the time when you transfer reoccurring gift payment processors, the donor information transfers, but not the actual authorization. They a lot of times can't or if they can't, it's a very hefty price from a programming standpoint. So those are things that we have to ask and back to what the for-profit world would do, we would go through and we would do a discovery and we would look for all of these things but we can't even get thank you letters out and we're talking about adding on new platforms and new bells and whistles and we're still trying to get a dear thank you out with actual, you know, a first name that's not friend and maybe their nickname that they gave us six years ago that we still can't get correct because nobody knows how to pull a salutation from the nickname field. They keep pulling it from the first name field. I mean, let's get our excellence in order from that standpoint. And I remember previous episodes and you've said this numerous times, Sasha, is about these bells and whistles and you just mentioned the bells and whistles just a bit earlier and stating that most organizations, you know, will say, well, this database doesn't do what we need it to do and you're like, well, let's, let's again, go back to the root cause and let's figure out does it have what we need and are we actually utilizing it thoroughly in the way in which we would like to use it? So that has stuck with me as well as the let's make data sexy and I wanna know how do we make data sexy for our entire team? How do we rally the team and get them all, you know, on board to say this is why our donor database and these data points are so critical? So it's starting with small wins and it's building confidence. We've all spoke about it. These donor databases CRM historically have not been helpful tools for the organization. They've been veins of everybody's existence because data doesn't go in well or whatever the reason may be. And so there's not a lot of love for the CRM and the donor database. And so you have to start building that excitement and that trust in small ways. Maybe it's very strategically with your Giving Tuesday campaign and appeal strategy. Did you go through and say, hey, we sent this out to X number of individuals. We were able to bring in X number of dollars through our online strategy. We saw success right here. And I know that because I recorded it and I reported it in my database with confidence. And then you repeat that for the end of the year campaign and you show them again, hey, here's the information because I recorded how many people actually we sent this appeal to. I took the time to make sure that was in the database or maybe it's again about your event. Did you add everybody that you invited? Did you follow up and updated whether or not they attended? And then what you can do and go back and say, okay, for everybody attended our event, I looked at our donations and for all those that attended, they gave 20% more than those that didn't. But guess what? If you're not recording that all in a single place, you're gonna have to pull this Excel file compared to this file and you just waste a whole bunch of time. So load it up into your database and then start allowing your database to tell your success stories instead of you trying to figure them out in an Excel file. Well, I think, to your point, I think if we don't have this data, we're not really looking at it. We have a lot of charismatic leadership and kind of gut feeling decision-making going on. And that I think is really where the rubber meets the road. We've got to be moving towards data that helps us understand how we can make better decisions across the team. And it might be painful, but ultimately to begin with, I think ultimately it will lead to greater success. Absolutely. That's a hard sell. It is a hard sell because it makes us have to look at things honestly and sometimes having those hard conversations and we're in the nonprofit industry, we want everyone to do well and we don't ever want to fire anybody and we don't ever want to let anybody go. And so we've all been in those places where we've kept that individual around longer than they needed to be. This is a time we've got to stop and we have to stop doing it because our donors deserve better, our missions deserve better and let's be candid. It's a waste of donor dollars. And so if we're ethically responsible for protecting those assets, making sure your data is correct and not wasting operational resources, to me is just as important as any other kind of integrity part of being a nonprofit fundraiser. If we're not doing good on the backend too, we're wasting just as much money on previously as well. So let's change the mindset to say, no, let's make an informed decision because this is representing how we're really spending donor dollars even though we really don't talk about it that way. Wow. A reality from Sasha Lewis. We can always count on you Sasha to really just say it like it is. Julie and I really appreciate that. One of the things that I know you've heard me say numerous times before is that our sector has been long overdue for a shakeup. And what you just mentioned, holding on to employees or holding on to individuals that make up our workforce in some way, shape, or form longer than we needed to is doing a disservice to our community. So... Yeah, it's not the easiest topic and I know we're supposed to be talking about databases, but I often see this especially in this position and role and it creates compounding problems. And it's so nice when those compounding problems go away and people enjoy their work and they get fulfillment out of the missions that we're serving. And to me, that's again, why I want to be able to help and facilitate it is let's get rid of the not pretty stuff which is the things when the database isn't working. Let's make it work so that we get to spend the time on the important things. We get to work on those mission moments and we're not spending our time beating our heads against the wall over a port or a list or wondering what our annual plan is for the year. It's already there for you. Let's just assess and move on and get on to fundraising and get on to the other important stuff. Well, it's all intertwined and I believe we all have homework to do. And first of all, it might be to Google Pivot Chart and how to do that. But I think that that is our homework for today is to pull out the Excel file that you mentioned from our database, create a Pivot Chart so we can start to visually see the representation of our data and these data points. You are always fantastic, Sasha. We are so grateful to have you here as a thought leader in the sector and also as one of our sponsors that continues these conversations going. So if you're interested in Sasha and what she offers through Moves Management, reach out to her, she's fantastic and as you can tell, really knows and loves the subject. So she is the point person that you want to contact and thank you for being here with us. My pleasure, good thanks for having me. You know, it's always amazing. I've always learned so much from you. It goes way beyond the data point. You talk about a lot of things that are structural that are value-based to our service and both Jared and I really appreciate that because those are the strategies that I think ultimately will help our sector. So we both thank you very, very much. As we thank our presenting sponsors every day, they are with us in and out helping us share the message of how nonprofits can be more effective across their work and their sectors. And we have 1.8 million registered nonprofits in this country and they're all doing a lot of amazing and wonderful things, but they need help and our sponsors are here to do that. Hey, Jared, I'm totally amped up, ready to go. I want to really think about so many of these things that Sasha said today. Absolutely, me too. I've got a lot to take back to my clients that I'm working with and future fodder for, you know, to think about later. So thank you, Sasha. Thanks to our presenting sponsors and thanks to our viewers for being here. We are so grateful that you choose to spend your time with us. As I said earlier, good morning, good afternoon or good evening, no matter what time it is that you've chosen to watch the episode, we are glad that you are here. And I hope that you'll join us tomorrow. I'm going to do a masterclass on how to finish your year strong. And then you have Ann McCauley on talking about content writing and blogging and all of those great backend hyperlinks. So make sure you join us tomorrow and for the rest of the week, we would like to ask all of you to please stay well so you can do well. Thanks again for joining us.