 We have a really interesting show today because we have roped Ms. Jarrett Ransom into the hot seat. And so I can't wait to really have you help us with this. The reason why I wanted to bring you on and to talk about this is that I feel Jarrett and I don't know if you've noticed this, but in the last, we always talk about fundraising, okay, always. But in the last, I'd say 60 days, we've had a lot of guests, different guests, guests coming in to talk about different things and they all weave in this fundraising plan. They don't really tell us what's in the plan. We've had a lot of guests that have been like, we need this plan, but we don't really know what it is. So we're here to have you talk about that. Happy to share. Yes. And for anyone that is watching live, please do take full advantage of my brain. This is when you can pick it. And so we always have the Q and A available. So if something comes up today, now's a great time to really ask your questions. I love it. I love it. Well, we're thrilled you're here with us. Again, I'm Julia Patrick and Jarrett Ransom, CEO of the Raven group is going to be our super guest. We want to make sure to thank all of our presenting sponsors without them. We would not be here. Blumeran, the American nonprofit academy, your part-time controller, the nonprofit nerd, fundraising academy, the nonprofit Atlas, nonprofit thought leader and staffing boutique. And hint, hint, I think we have some new sponsors coming on in the next couple of weeks. Thanks. Thanks. Exciting stuff. We're very, very excited. And again, if you want to find more of our archives, we've done more than 500 fully produced and edited episodes. You can find those on Roku, YouTube TV, Amazon fire TV and Vimeo. We are also very excited to announce that we are now on more than 20 podcast streaming platforms. We're really finding that this is a great way to consume information. Check us out and you can upload our content in many, many cases, queue that up and be with us every day. So again, the nonprofit show now and podcast format. You know, Julia, we have really expanded our digital footprint and I love that for the consumption of so many leaders across the world. You know, as we are all doing more good and this whole global citizenry to help one another. So I'm really excited that we have so many episodes and the podcast on 20 channels. That's a huge digital footprint. Yeah, it really is. And I want to give a shout out to our executive producer, Kevin Pace, who, you know, people don't get to see him. You get to see us every day, but he's with us from the minute we are on in the background working away. And he's the one that really pushed us forward on this. I didn't really believe that it would be as strong as it has been. Not all 500 episodes are on. We started about a month ago testing it. And so now every day as we move forward, we're uploading a new show and it's really been a lot of fun and we'll continue to be something that, that grows and is a part of what we're doing. So thank you for that. Okay, sister, Jared Ransom is our guest today, CEO of the Raven group. For those of you and us and me, where does the word Raven come from? Thank you. That is my middle name. So it's a family combination. Ray is a family name on my mother's side. Van is a family name on my father's side. And so Jared Raven Ransom is my full name. When I started the Raven group 13 years ago, and in fact, Julia, we couldn't have planned this better. Today is the day 13 years ago that I filed with the Arizona business corporation. Yes. So the Raven group is my company name. I'm glad I did not know that. And I am just so thrilled to have you here to talk about this. Thank you. It's something I can nerd out forever. I don't have to cut me off at our limit. Well, you know, like I said, when we started out, so many of our guests bring up this like. Mysterious fundraising plan and everybody needs a plan. And yet I was like thinking about this. What is in the plan and who sees it. And yeah, having a plan sounds good, but I don't know about you, Jared, but you know, it's a part of a lot of plans for nonprofits, for for profits, my own company, my own family. You do a lot of work and then it sits on a shelf. Yeah. How do we make this something that we can use and actually what is it? Right. Well, and this really is, you know, it's a moving, breathing, living document. So it's really, you know, it's a very, very important thing. And so I think that we can create a plan, which means you have preemptively thought about how you were bringing in revenue for your organization, hopefully diversified revenue streams and we can get nerdy about that. And I know Julia, you're going to ask me statistics and numbers and all of that good stuff. And I hope that I can retain them. But the fundraising plan in its bear definition, like very basic is simply your roadmap, which is to bring in the amount of money that your organization needs to bring in. For most of us, let's say you are a $3 million organization. That would be your operating budget. So your operating budget is $3 million. We all have to zero balance our budget at the end of the year. So you're essentially looking to raise $3 million or bring in $3 million from sources. It could be earned revenue. It could be grants. It could be individual donations. It could be events that could be planned giving. There's so many more. That's not all. But it's really this whole like. Composition of your roadmap for your next 12 years. So you could do it by way of fiscal year, or you could do it by way of calendar year. If those are different. So I have heard you say this before, and I'm going to put you on the spot like what else is new. I've heard you say that there is a very simple. And a measurable number that if you want to achieve. A goal in terms of fundraising, that you actually need to have in the pipeline. So much more so that you can achieve that goal. That's right. So I will throw out this research tip. Giving USA, write that down, Google them. Every single year giving USA puts out reports based off of last year's fundraising trends, the dollar amounts, charitable donations. So I tend to say 75% based off of their report again, giving USA 75% of your operating budget should be made up of individual donations. That's not always the case. And then no more than 30% should be made up of grants and earned awards of those sorts. But what you're referring to Julia, I believe is that award rate. So for grants, it's also a standard national statistic that 30% of grants, 30% of the grants that you actually submit are awarded. Like that's the national standard award rate. So for that you essentially want to triple the amount of monies that you're looking to bring in. So if you need to raise $100,000 for very simple math, we are actually prospecting over 300,000 using that award rate. Again, national standard. There are many tips, trips, wait, tips, tricks and techniques. Although I am going to take a trip here soon, but tips, tricks and techniques to help get your, your personal award rate above that national 30%. Wow. Okay. So this would be the type of data that go, it goes into that plan and it helps you figure that out. I was at a board meeting recently and there was discussion about what the budget, you know, the fundraising budget should be. And I was amazed at the number of highly educated, successful people that just started throwing out numbers without any regard to what was going to be going on. They were just like, well, we need to raise. And I remember, I'll tell you the number, we need to raise $5 million. And I was thinking to myself, we haven't even raised a million. Right. You're just like throwing these numbers out. And obviously you need to have this backup in this methodology for your plan. So that goes to kind of the second part of, of what I was asking, like who sees this. So that's a great point. And it is actually going to move us into our data point. So I'll kind of pull these two together for us and all of our viewers and listeners, Julia. Who sees the plan? Absolutely your development team. They should be a part of creating the plan. If marketing communications is part of development, they too need to be a part of the conversation. Doesn't mean that everyone's creating the plan, but elements within the plan, right? Because there has to be objectives. There has to be actionable, you know, executable items to achieve. So when we are able to share this plan, it also shares these data points with our board or our key leaders. What I didn't say also is really that executive team should also see the plan, right? Because they play a part in it. But when you said we need to raise $5 million and you're like, hold the bus. We haven't even raised a million. These are the data points that we need to measure to help us set and chart our fundraising plan. So if we are not at 75% of our individual donation giving, how might we do that, right? How might we increase from a 50% you know, individual giving pool of donors that make up our, our organizational funding? How might we increase that? Same for grants. If we are only at 5% right now, how might we, you know, increase that rate to 30%? And this is not dialing for dollars. That is something I often hear from boards is, you know, I've even been at a lunch with a board meeting or member. And during that meeting, they said, I'm gonna let you go. I know you got a dial for dollars. And I thought, no, that's actually not what we do at all. And, you know, it's really about this relationship. So I was actually interviewed yesterday by one of our guest, Julia Anthony, right? Anthony that does this beautiful podcast. And, and I said, you know, it's really shifting and it has during COVID, but it's not so much about your return on investment. It's that return on relationship. So dialing for dollars does not build relationships. So I said, you know, it's not about your return on investment. It's not about your return on investment. It's about your return on relationship. So dialing for dollars does not build relationships. So that is a way that we increase our fundraising is by increasing our relationships. So would you say that would be one of those, those data metrics that you actually put in. And that is like the number of donors that you have and the number of donors that you're moving towards or that you want or even going down to how many people you've met. Okay. Get your pen, paper, whatever ready or be, be ready to go back and watch it on Roku fire TV, all these other places, right? Okay. So I would really take a look to see how is your operating budget currently broken down, right? So how many, how much of your dollars come from individual donors, how much from grants, how much from earned income, how much from government, federal contracts, a lot, a lot of our organizations have received cares act funding, right? Recently. So it could be possible that an organization has gone from, let's say one and a half million to four and a half million over the last six months. That, that is real. That's reality. Yeah. So I would say let's get a baseline of, of what have we currently brought in? What is our current financial and revenue stream makeup? And then we can get granular and we should be able to do this from our donor database. Blumering makes it really easy to run these reports, you know, and we can say, okay, what is our donor retention rate? And I won't go into the algorithm for that, but it's very simple and you can Google it. What is our donor retention rate? What is our largest gift? Right? Like if we say our major gift is $5,000, how many of those major gifts are we receiving? There's, there's several data points that we can pull in, you know, another one of those is the grant award. How many grants are you submitting? And what is your true award rate? I helped one organization a couple of years ago, Julia, off the charts increase their grant revenue by actually submitting less grants. So how did we do that? So increase our relationship with the donors, increase our ask amount, right? So we're not asking for a lot of $5,000 gifts. We're being very intentional. We're building relationships and we're making an ask more, like $25,000, right? And so you really want to be intentional because it could mean that maybe you're doing less grants. Submissions, but your, your award rate is higher. And your dollar investment is higher. Wouldn't that be nice? Yeah. Absolutely. And it puts you in a less precarious. Situation, you know, I think you can easily become hot tied to a large funding source. And then sometimes you chase that shiny object, the money. And you do things that aren't really in the wheelhouse. That don't really align to your mission. You know, sometimes we call that mission creep, but a lot of it is, is generally financially motivated because you, you kind of dance to that dollar, right? Right. You, you do. And, you know, we also need to be able to say no to a funder or an investor or even a grant opportunity. If it's not in alignment or if it's not as, you know, in part of our plan, right? And so we need to, we need to create that ability. You know, that's a muscle that we need to practice is saying no. Right. I love that. I have a question that, that, um, has been kind of bubbling up from me. And that is, and I've heard this from some of the questions that we've received. Um, for our Friday ask and answer episode. And I think sometimes we talk about some of these strategies and they sound really good, but then some of our viewers go back to their teams and they're all amped up. They're really excited. And they're like, Hey, we've got to get this going. And then that's like, yeah. We don't have time. Is this the sort of thing that you could do individually for yourself? If you can't get the bigger group on the team, you know, I'm thinking of a development officer or somebody that is, you know, maybe leading a small team or maybe it's just themselves. Can you do this type of thing? And still. Absolutely. And in fact, I love, um, coaching this and working with teams to do this. So you can work as an entire development team and set the chart for your course moving forward. And you can break down every individual as part of that team to create their piece of the roadmap for the chart. And, you know, very similar to that work with that one individual to say, okay, maybe you're a startup nonprofit, or maybe you don't have the support that you would like to have, or perhaps your CEO or executive director or executive director is not very fond of fundraising. And so they just say, you know, you do that. You do that, Julia. I trust you to bring in this money. I don't know how it's going to happen. It's going to fall from the sky and it's going to be there. So these are absolutely ways in which you can create this. And I'll just go through this, this very quickly. How much money is it that you want and need to raise by the end of the year? Now, if you watched any of my previous videos, where I am kind of the masterclass, I like to set three levels. A good, a better and a best goal. Okay. So you, let's say you want to raise a million dollars. Your good goal, you know, would be something less than that halfway. And then kind of a big stretch goal. And then you're going to create from there. What is your quarterly benchmarks look like? So we're reverse engineering. This is our end goal. And then we're going to start with, you know, what does that look like? What does that look like? What does that look like? What does that look like? So we're reverse engineering. This is our end goal, reverse engineer into quarterly. And then keep going into monthly and then into weekly. So that could look like, you know, every quarter, I want to have, you know, 20 face-to-face meetings with my, uh, supporters. Well, what does that look like then every month and then every month and every month? It's going to look like this. If you're not in it, you're not in it. So often in a plan, you wait until that 11th or 12th month. And then you're like, Holy cow, I got to get back. I gotta get down and see where I am. And you know, it's too late. And then if you're not near it or you're not in it. You're just devist law. I'm speaking for myself. I get overloaded. Yeah. I'm like, screw that. That was a bad plan. And one of our viewers, we also use our annual SWAT program, and that stands for Strength, Weakness, Opportunity, and Threats to assist us in developing our goals, such as a strategic plan. What do you think about that, Jared? First of all, hello, Pat. I'm so glad that you're joined us today. I do really enjoy the SWAT. I would add another T, and that T stands for Trends. So what is trending that you're seeing? What is trending in fundraising? What is trending in your community, political climate? All of that takes a toll when it comes to fundraising. And that's definitely something to consider. I love doing the SWAT for strategic planning, but we could also do that in a very granular level when it comes to fundraising and to create a fundraising plan. So why not? I think any of these resources that you can start to glean and really analyze your strengths, your weaknesses, your opportunities, your threats, and your trends, I'd love to see you add that in there, Pat. I think that really does help us just start at the basics of knowing, right? Knowing what do we have? What are our resources? Maybe a weakness of your plan is your donor database, right? Well, what do we need to do to increase that and remove it from our weakness into an opportunity for it to be a strength the next time? Well, I'm sitting here thinking as you say that and Pat, thank you for that question because you have to remember that you have two camps. You have that group that's inside that knows the organization is working with it and they're there. And then you have this other group, the board, leadership, you know, stakeholders, and they're coming in maybe once a month, maybe once a quarter. Maybe. Yeah, how do they know what that ecosystem is that you're living and breathing and working in? And so I like this approach because it helps kind of to centralize some thoughts and some issues. Love, love, love the concept of trends because if that's anything that we've learned during COVID is that there are new and external forces that create trends, right? Right. And we have to recognize them. Look at the tandem events now, right? We can, I don't think we can move forward without having a live streaming or recorded version or something to share. That is a trend that we need to consider in fundraising. For the last two years, we did virtual races, virtual hikes, virtual fundraising, that could still continue even in the IRL in real life scenarios. So, you know, again, the trends, I think is something that we should certainly be looking at. I love, I mean, this is getting nerdy, but I love generic and competitive benchmarking. What are other organizations doing and not just in the nonprofit sector? Like, dig deep, reach out beyond that sector. I love it. We've had a lot of people that have written in really quickly, love this, love that, love the extra team. Thank you, Jared. Oh, good. Now, we don't have a lot of time left. I knew this would happen. No, it's like hard. But I got to ask this question, who is accountable for achieving these goals on this plan? So, we all are. And everyone within the team. It's not the grumpy old white man that I put the picture of. I know this show, for those of you that are listening, we have this older Caucasian gentleman, right, in his suit holding money. I think those are Franklin's. A lot of Franklin's. Nothing but the Benjamin's baby. Okay, so really who's accountable? We all are. So, it comes from, you know, the CEO or executive director, the development team, the board, our committees, our staff. I firmly believe that we are all part of the fundraising plan, fundraising goals, fundraising success. It takes, it takes all of us to be successful in achieving our mission. And that is also achieving our dollars to support our mission. But at the granular granular level, right, this really does rest within the development team. So maybe you have a director of development or a chief development officer, as well as the CEO or executive director, those are typically interchangeable titles. And then if you're lucky and you have a development committee, fundraising committee, event committee, these individuals are pivotal and critical in helping to achieve these goals to keep that accountability going and growing. And again, that's why I love creating these quarterly metrics. So you're not waiting till, you know, giving season at Q4, which is your October, November, December months. Like we're working on this day in, day out. Our marketing and communications supports the fundraising side. And it's just one big happy plan. You know, so I'm glad to you, that was gonna be my follow-up, is that if that's true and we're all a part of this, how do we know where we are, you know, instead of that, okay, well, this is how we ended the year, boo-hoo, you know, which is awful. And I've been there and there's not a person, you know, in this ecosystem that hasn't been there. I love this that you are reporting out so that everybody can understand, hey, we need to grow a little bit, you know, stronger in this direction or we need to focus on that. I think it's really important and I appreciate you bringing that up. Well, and it needs to be reported to the board, right? So we need to say we've gained X amount of new donors or we're behind where we intended to be. This is our year, our month-to-month comparable for last year. We need your help, you know, we need you to share our posts on social media. We need you to invite your friends to come in and tour our campus or to attend our, you know, our arts exhibit, whatever it is to lean in to your board members because we've talked about this before, Julia, that often our board members, they want to help and they don't know what the heck to do to help. Right, right. And I love the way you phrase that. I think that's just, you know, super powerful. And I think it's also really an important task of leadership to keep this in the forefront. We have to. It's not pleasant sometimes. That's right, yeah. And I'm all about, you know, putting profit back into nonprofit. So we really want to bring in the dollars because the more dollars, the more we can retain our rockstar talent, we can, you know, increase our technology and our software systems that maybe haven't been updated in decades plus. So let's look at those big dollar signs. And yes, let's raise that 5 million but we need a plan to get there. I love it. You know, I'm always, and I'm not just saying this, I'm always amazed at how much is in that little blonde head of yours. It's like, it's really cool. And I learned something new from you all the time. For those of you watching or listening to the show, you know, Jared and I are almost 20 years in age difference. I know clutch the pearls. And I always learn from you and I'm always inspired and you tend to bring me information that I feel like I can achieve because you break it down, you make it, you align it to a methodology and a reasoning and you make it more natural. So, hey, good job, nonprofit nerd. Jared Ransom, CEO of the Raven Group. If you like what you've heard today, you can actually see and hear from Jared every day because she is the co-host of the nonprofit show and she is the brave soul that did not turn me away when I called her up and I said, hey, sister, I got this crazy idea. It'll only last two weeks because this COVID thing will be over in two weeks. You wanna do this daily show. And she's like, yeah, sure. And then here we are going into our third year. I still say yes every day, Julia. I love it. You do and I appreciate that, Jared. I love it. Today has been great. I've really, really learned a lot and thank you for reframing this concept of a fundraising plan because we bandied this word about and there's so many guests that have come on and that will come on and talking about this plan. You need the plan. You need the plan. And to talk about what the heck is in the plan and how do we manage it has been really magical thinking. So thank you. Hey, everybody, we wanna make sure that we extend our gratitude and thanks to Blumerang American Nonprofit Academy, your part-time controller, the nonprofit nerd herself, fundraising academy, the nonprofit Atlas, nonprofit thought leaders and staffing boutique. Again, these are the folks that really let us have this moment in this time to reflect, to teach and exchange ideas. And we are very, very grateful for that support. As we like to end every show, what do we like to say, Jared? We hope that you stay well, so you can do well. We'll see you back here tomorrow.