Yearly’s Nonprofit Crash Course: A 15-minute nonprofit crash course on fundraising and marketing best practices. Josh Kligman from Yearly was joined by Kent Stroman from the Asking Academy. Kent discussed four fundraising tips such as:

1. Spend 80% of your time where most of the donations are.
2. Use a gift chart: Know what you’re looking for, before you discover who you’re looking for
3. Faithful Stewardship: Communicate your impact often
4. Unleash the Secret of Volunteers: Equip them w/tools needed

You can read the discussion here:

Hey, good morning Kent. How are you? Doing?

Great. How about you Josh?

Good! Thanks for joining me. My name is Josh kligman and we’re here with Yearly’s nonprofit crash course 15 minute really crash course on tricks for how nonprofits can improve fundraising and marketing and engaged owners further and we bring on different experts every few weeks and I’m really glad that we’re joined today by Ken Stroman with the Asking Academy and and Kent is a fundraising and donor engagement extraordinaire and we’re going talk today can’t write about it different ways that nonprofits can further engage their donors in and maybe either unique ways or ways to have thought of before.

Absolutely, and you know Josh have to say this since you chose the profile picture that you did. All right. I thought I better show up my winter hat. Now we have that out of the way.

How is the winter hat is different than the summer hat?

Well, the summer hits actually straw the winter hat is felt one’s warmer than the other.

Oh, okay. All right. Great. Well, I love it. And when we were kind of talking and prepping besides sharing the photo with the with the great hat you were talking to me about about engaging donors in maybe different ways that that nonprofits may have not heard of so, what’s what’s kind of the most common problem that you like to try to offer.

We’re not profits come to you. Yeah, one of the things that I find that people spend an awful lot of time chasing too many gifts that are too small and when I say too small, they’re so small that they don’t make much of a difference on the charity and they don’t make much of a difference on the donor.

And any I want to underscore I’m not saying that we that we shouldn’t engage a large donor base. But actually there’s a balancing act which I think comes into play. So, you know, I say don’t act excuse me. Don’t neglect the large number of smaller gifts because we think every gift matters and every donor is important.

However, when it comes to really impacting the future the trajectory of the organization we say be sure to prioritize that small number of very large givers and larger gifts. Yeah.

So, if I’m running a campaign and we’re just coming out of end the year, so let’s use that as an example and I’m thinking about all my all my donors don’t put all my eggs in the Facebook donation basket while that’s while that’s great. But that may drive a lot of smaller, you know, five dollar donations here and there verse, you know, the collecting maybe some, you know, potential endowments or larger individual donors that are maybe living elsewhere in your ecosystem. Right?

Right.

And you know, the tough thing is I mean in our world everybody has more than enough tasks activities, then what we can ever accomplish, right?

So here’s a tool that I found really helpful both for me and my own business in my fundraising and for charitable organizations across the country and that is to align the time.

With the expectation so we recommend that you spend 80% of your time. So think about that for a minute 80% of my time. If I’m  working five days a week. It’s four out of five days. I should really be focused on the larger gifts that there are fewer of them. Right? So if you use the old 80/20 rule You know 80% of dollars kind of for 20% of the donors.

In reality, it’s more like 90/10 or 95/5 but the point is a whole bunch of money comes from not very many people. But from a time allocation standpoint, that’s why I should be spending most of my time about 80% of my time on that small number of larger gifts, which then I should spend time on the large number of smaller gifts, but that’s a 20% of the time so one day on the iceberg if you would and four days on the tip of the iceberg.

Okay.

All right. So, you know what about teams that aren’t quite large enough to be able to. Focus on that if you have you know, one or two fundraisers, you know, how do they divide the time? Do you have to pick one or the other?

Well, I’m too simple for that. Yeah. So again, I’d say, you know, if it’s a one-person show. Yeah, however much time on an annual basis that I’m spending on fundraising I should spend 80% of my time where 80% of the dollars are going to come from. And what most of us do is we spend 80% of our time where 80% of the activity is and that activity is low yield activity for the most part.

So in my in my line of business with yearly we’re seeing customers that are wanting to find different ways to show impact to donors if you want to target and I know this is what you you know, you you coach with the Asking Academy can if you want to target as a nonprofit the the donors that are gonna bring the most, you know value in terms of incremental donations to your nonprofit, you know throughout the year.

How do you show that type of impact? How do you stay in touch with them? How do you how do you Steward that donor to lead to you know this continuing donations every year assuming in this example there?

Well, here’s what’s really funny as a listen to your question Josh. It’s like 00:06:05.900 –> 00:06:08.900
you’re reading my notes because there wrote some notes for myself. I had a few things. I wanted to be sure not forget, right? Okay.

I just think of this stuff every day. So now that I meanI’m gonna ask your opinion.

Yeah. So anyhow, I thought you know, I’ve got three top tips that I would bring today and and number one is just to use a gift chart and that’s to know what you’re looking for. No what you’re looking for before you try to discover who you’re looking for?

Okay, and then tip number two is faithful stewardship. I mean it’s exactly what you just mentioned and that is that we need to be able to communicate well and often and one of the things I love about a Yearly (nonprofit annual) report.

Is that it’s such a powerful tool for engaging really an unlimited audience, right? Engage that audience in what we’re doing, you know, what did we ask for? What did we receive? What did we do with it? Whose life is any different? Right? What what impact i
more importantly what impact is our organization making in the hearts and lives of those who are contributing who can’t do the work we can do they can just fund it, right?

So yeah, that’s the stewardship piece and then the third thing at jotted down is is really to unleash this the secret of volunteers. And the point on that really is to equip volunteers because there’s an unlimited supply of volunteers. We have a limited number of Staff, right?

You know, you’re talking about one or two persons, you know, our number one job really is to engage volunteers people who work harder for free than they will for pay.

Yeah, and so how do we unleash that secret? It’s to equip them to give them the tools that they need to succeed.

And so we talked about the communication tool Yearly. For example from a training standpoint. You mentioned the asking Academy and that’s exactly what we do is to you know, we equip the actually the volunteers and the professionals to effectively collaborate together and impactfully go into the community.

However we define that and engage that small number of bigger contributors at the same time that we are also building the base the broad base of a large number of smaller givers. So that’s great. So I think if you if you’re a nonprofit that’s between five and twenty million dollars a year in terms of your operating budget and you have you know, somewhere between you know, 50 and and a thousand volunteers you can really take that advice that you’re giving to the Max and that third tip there and and have a lot of days where you can have volunteers come out and big numbers and then you know.

I don’t know if you ever see this but maybe invite invite those large individual donors out to those events so they can they can see things happening in action and I don’t mean just the annual gala or the big events, but right behind the scene type events where you know, you’re building that playground you’re you know going to distribute stuff at the hospital your distributing the food and you know the food bank, you know, you’re you’re rolling your sleeves up and maybe maybe they could be a volunteer for the day or something like that because you know with you know with my work I see a lot of annual reports and impact reports and that’s that’s good.

But what are those stories?

Made of exactly how does never thought about that before get those donors, you know involved in those stories and then and maybe they end up in the annual report or something like that. Well, yeah good point. So I’m I have a campaign client right now. The excuse me the impact of their work.

Yeah is amazing. They they live in it. You know, I’m going to say it a neglected neglected and kind of suppressed neighborhood and a metro area. And so what are the big needs one of his education? So they have a robust GED program.

Tell people who’ve never earned their their high school diploma. So, I mean that that’s crucial. They have a food distribution program food insecurity is such a big issue and then there’s also a medicine They provide a clinic, you know an eye clinic a dental clinic health clinic and any house one thing to read about it.

But like you said, it’s quite another thing to ask somebody, you know could could we take just a few minutes and walk through and let you have a chance to see first hand. What’s happening how lives are really touching lives. And how that changes actually the trajectory of an entire family.

So and and for those who can’t come to us. With a robust report system, like Yearly, we can take us to them in the comfort of their own home their office their mobile device.

Well if you’re just joining us on on Vimeo or LinkedIn, we have Ken Stroman here for Yearly’s Nonprofit Crash Course, he’s giving great tips on how to further engage donors and Kent with the Asking Academy you probably coach your clients on around, you know, stewarding those donors, but I want to know a little bit more about the asking too. You know, what when is the right time to ask for maybe a different or higher donation or something else?

That’s that’s along the lines of those goals or are you just kind of stewarding the donor throughout the year and whatever they give they give and and does your answer very depending on the type of organization. Yeah, you know organization type really doesn’t determine it. Here’s here’s who we think has the answers. It’s the donors.

And it’s funny in fundraising so many times we sit around in dark rooms like these and try to guess what should we do? And and you know, one of our our top rules is always ask never guess never assume never demand and so in terms of the question, when is the right time for you to to make a gift decision?

I mean if we’re talking I’m just you know, the numbers don’t matter but just for the sake conversation. Let’s say we’re talking about a million dollar or multi-million dollar gift potential, right?

One of the questions I’m going to ask for a for a gift of this magnitude. What’s the right time for you to make a decision? So rather than me deciding, oh Valentine’s Day is coming up. It’s got to be before February 14th. That may be the worst time ever. Okay. I want to hear from them. And if they say you know what? Well, actually I was contact not too long ago some by somebody who’s the they set up a family foundation and they said our trustees who are our family members were all going to be together next Monday, which happened to be last Monday.

Well now that I know that that tells me we probably don’t need a decision on Sunday or Saturday or Friday, but the perfect time not because of us but because of them right. So I guess you do your job as an organization to make sure that your impact that you’re making in the community is top of mind for for that family before they go into that trusting me. That’s what movie right right and then afterwards you can ask them ask them how how it went.

Yeah that that’s interesting because you know marketing teams do sit around and think about well all right here the three campaigns we’re going to have throughout the year and then we’re gonna have, you know, a big event and and you know, we have these different touch points where we’ll we’ll work with the fundraising team and partnership to ask for money at a certain time, but you’re right.

What if what if Valentine’s Day is not is not the right and that they might not be but unless if they want to really show their love to the organization, right, you know, we were talking earlier about kind of these two extremes and The the greatest value of the marketing team really is where we’re where the ratio is one to many we have one ask and we’re simultaneously asking many prospects and that’s where the data.

You know the averages the the strains are important when it comes to that small number of larger givers and larger. There’s a lot of times people who fit that criteria are outside the mainstream. And so, you know, it’s one thing to say well most Millennials and then fill in the blank.

Yeah, and that’s going to be a good thing for most of the Millennials. But if the middle specific Millennial we’re talking about has a different profile then we’ve just come up with a high-tech way to miss them and that’s not what we want to do. Yeah, I I like that and I like the tips that you gave today.

So thank you Kent for joining yearly’s nonprofit crash course with Ken strowman here from the Asking Academy can’t anything coming up that that you want to plug for nonprofits on engaging donors and in a different way?

Well sure Asking Academy and actually it’s in two varieties. And all you have to do is just go to asking academy.com. We have the classic which is a five-month program that has two days that are time and place, specific. They asking Academy Express is on online.

It’s configured differently, but it’s a great way to really equip. Fundraising leaders to dramatically transform the results that but I really appreciate the nice mention the opportunity to hang out with you today. Yeah. Thanks for joining Kent, and I love the tips you gave for nonprofits.

We’re going to put those on a blog post and on LinkedIn. So everyone could see them, especially if you missed anything you just join now, so thanks for your time Kent and we’ll talk soon.

Okay. Sounds great.

Bye.