Oh, I think that means we're live. Hi. Good afternoon. Hello. Hello.

I'm Ann Fellman. I'm the chief marketing officer here at Bloomerang, and welcome to our session, the advice we don't put on slides. This is gonna be a fun hour, and I have some friends here with me to help me get through that. And before I introduce you all, I just wanna talk about, like, okay, the things we don't put on slides, the things that, you know, a lot of the advice in the sector is safe and it's nice and we feel good about it. But today, this conversation, it's not. It's not that.

We welcome disagreement. Okay? So, and nuance is more important than consensus. Right? So there's gonna be different, we want, although we have a lot of, like, similar ideas and alignment, but there's nuance and there's difference. And we all have different types of organizations and what we're facing, and so we are gonna get into that this afternoon and have a really candid conversation. And so before we do that, let's do some introductions. Julia Campbell, welcome. Thanks for joining us.

Thank you. I'm Julia Campbell, and I am a Bloomerang partner, a speaker, and marketing consultant. I host the podcast Nonprofit Nation, and I run the Nonprofit Social Media Summit every November, Bloomerang is a sponsor of.

Yep. And next, we have Sam Swain. Tell us about it.

I'm Samantha Swaim with Swaim Strategies. We are in the fundraising event space exclusively. So we advise, consult, teach, coach, but we have our Elevate conference. We have our podcast, The Fundraising Elevator, and we are Bloomerang partners as well.

And finally joining us is Christina Edwards.

Hey, everyone. I am a podcast host. I have the Purpose and Profit Club podcast, and I have two group coaching programs where I primarily teach organizations how to be email-first fundraisers and laptop-first fundraisers. So how could you scale more from your laptop?

Alright. Well, you have three fantastic experts here. So I think we're gonna just dive right in, and let's start. We're just gonna get into it about what do you see that nonprofits get wrong and get wrong consistently? Okay? So that is what we're gonna talk about. So let's just jump in. Any of you can jump in here about, like, what mistakes do you see that nonprofits are repeating consistently? You want me to go? Any takers?

Yes. I can take it. Okay, Julia. So for me, in my work, I do a lot of work with marketers or fundraisers or those all-in-one shops. And something I see that nonprofits are consistently getting wrong is not having, like, a cohesive messaging strategy and a cohesive content strategy and just posting and hoping it sticks and throwing out emails once in a while and maybe making a video here and there and also not measuring what they're doing. So not creating content, putting content out in the world with intention and meaning, but rather just simply maybe putting up a flyer on Facebook because they think they have to. And I understand the reasons behind that, but I think we need to absolutely become better in investing time into creating the kind of content that our audiences wanna hear and see from us.

That was fascinating. I had a lunch conversation today, and it was just about that kind of finding the someone that's more responsible for the email and consistent message with the social media person and, like, you know, how do I get them to like each other.

Yeah. Or fundraising and marketing. I think a lot of the work that I do, I call it couples counseling between the fundraising and marketing departments because they don't really know how to speak to each other. They need to all be on the same page. They need to respect what each other's doing. Maybe there's some resentments there. So this is something consistently I see, this division and this siloing around fundraising and marketing in nonprofits.

Yep. What about you, Sam?

Well, I have a couple of things, but I wanted to dovetail off of that because in the event space, so often, I think people are doing the same thing. Trying to simply just post on social and hope people come. Right? And they're missing that the way that you fill a ballroom of three hundred people that give you half a million dollars is through relationship. So for me, I think one of the big gaps that we see as a consistent issue coming up is that nonprofits do not value the relationship. They're working on the task list, the to-do list, but they're not valuing that key relationship. So if one individual at the organization leaves and there's not a deep bench or a deep relationship among multiple people across the organization with a donor, then they risk losing the donor. But I would also say the scarcity mindset, I think, is the number one thing that people are limited by.

We've talked a lot about scarcity today already. Well, I think abundance is a mental shift that changes. Is my mic going out? Thank you. Hello. I think that abundance is a mental shift that changes how you talk to donors. It changes how you approach the conversation. It also changes your own mental health around fundraising. Right? It removes a lot of the barriers and the obstacles when you start to think about, well, what are all the things we have? What are all the things that work well? What are all the impacts that we have? That abundance mindset can be transformative for an organization, and yet the name itself, nonprofit, is scarcity built into the sector.

Yeah. And when I work with organizations on their fundraising event, this shows up for me so much in things like, we're gonna have our entire staff spend the day building out the centerpieces, where all of those staff hours spent in a relationship with someone could have yielded so much more impact instead of the five hundred dollar cost of the centerpiece. Right? So that idea of leading with abundance and centering relationships, I think is a missed opportunity. Maybe not doing wrong, but a missed opportunity.

Yeah. Rethinking your time and where's your time better spent. Let's think about this. Can we do this a different way, and would that be better?

I think we're starting to touch on it, but this idea of you can spend ten hours a day doing work that actually doesn't move the needle on donations, and it's actually very, very easy to be in like a reactionary mode. It's very, very easy to tinker on things, work on a to-do list, reply to emails, research grants, take a look at this task. You're doing a lot, but it's not moving the needle on the bottom line. There's inherent risk in that. There's inherent bravery that that takes, and so it makes sense that you would want to maybe just reply to an email instead. So I think it's easy to go, okay, what actually moves the needle here, and what do I need to do to put myself in that mode to take that action?

Yeah. I mean, probably all of us have been a victim of, like, being busy feels good. Right? Like, check, check. Because I've done it. I know. But back to that abundance thinking, I'm gonna just throw this out here for a second. So at lunch, we're having this conversation, and I was like, let's brainstorm for a minute. Just talking to a couple of other nonprofit leaders. What are you struggling with? And we came up with some really fun ideas, but it was giving them the chance to be like, there's no bad idea. Think of something totally crazy that you'd wanna do that would reach your donors and your supporters. We were talking about camp. Right? I was like, you know, when I was a kid, we had these really cool canvas backpacks. Wouldn't it be fun if you could do that? Or a day in the life of the water bottle at camp, like, on social. How could we reach our donors that way? So we were just brainstorming. Can't say they're good ideas, but they were ideas, and you could just see the juices flowing. And it's creating that abundance of there's no bad ideas. Let's just get it out there, and then see where it takes us, to open up to more abundance thinking versus, oh, we do it like this, and kind of that scarcity trap that we get pulled into. It was really fun.

Yeah. And I would add to that. You know, we see these reports of the fundraising effectiveness project. We see that the number of donors is going down. We see the number of smaller dollar donors is going down. We see how challenging fundraising is, federal funding being totally decimated. And, you know, I think other than the federal funding piece, all of that is a report card for us. Like, this is not something happening to us. We are responsible for the smaller dollar donors disappearing. We're not inviting people in. We're not making philanthropy participatory. So this scarcity mindset, it's so easy to blame somebody else. Like, oh, that nonprofit is bigger. That nonprofit has a better board. But we really need to start this introspection around, okay, this is not necessarily something that's happening to us. How can we fully get on board? Like, if my daughter came home and had sixty percent on AP bio and was like, well, the teacher's mean, I'm not the kind of person that would accept that. Right? I would say, okay, well, let's work on this. What are the strategies that you can do to get the grade up? But having this mindset of, like, well, there's nothing we can do, and there's just too many competitors out there. I mean, there are billions of dollars out there. Billions and billions of dollars out there.

Ninety-two last year? Yeah. Five hundred ninety-two billion dollars. Yes. And I know the small dollar donors wanna get involved, but they don't feel appreciated. They don't feel asked, and they don't feel connected. So that is something that I feel pretty strongly about, that makes nonprofits, I think, uncomfortable, because it is easier to say this is happening to us rather than accept that we can do better.

Yeah. Why does this keep happening? If some of these things are, like, well, maybe to us so obvious, but why does it keep happening? Like, how do we get out of the way here?

Sometimes I say it's like turning around a cruise ship. Like, it's not fast. Right? I think that even just a smaller shop organization, when there's more than one decision maker, opinion, board, right, you're asking a lot of people for opinions. Sometimes you're asking for actual approval, and so it can feel really arduous. But, like, to your point, the call is coming from inside the house, so what do we wanna do about it?

And I think there's also this thing that happens, which is if donors are disappearing, I'm saying it in quotes because they are not, right, then I think you start acting weird to the donors you have. You start to tighten. You start to disconnect. It's like in an effort to not lose more donors, you actually disconnect from the donors because you don't wanna be too much, ask too, and so it's like the scarcity piece you're perpetuating. And all we want is, we wanna hear from you more. We wanna know you more.

I also think that scarcity mindset limits innovation. To your point about brainstorming, in the scarcity mindset so often people get stuck in, and I'm sure everyone here has heard this, we've never done it that way, or we always do it that way. And that always statement, I think, gets us stuck and limits our ability to think out of the box, brainstorm, get creative. But in my space, in fundraising events, I've been doing fundraising events for thirty years, I've never seen more transformation than in just the past five years. And I think it's because we are living through a connection recession right now, a term that's been coined by the Wall Street Journal. This idea that we have a divide between COVID and technology, we are not in community in person as often, and we are communal by nature, human beings. And so that, I think, is part of why we are seeing repeat donors drop, why we are seeing retention rates decline. It's not that they're not there. People generally consider themselves generous. People generally want to be a part of giving to the things they care about, but we're not inviting people in in a way that they feel connected to. So I feel like right now one of the easiest things we can do is things like, I know this is gonna be controversial, but don't have your board meeting on Zoom. A simple solution is bring people back in a room together to be in conversation. Have a staff retreat. Get out and laugh together. Some basic, tactile things we can do to kind of inspire that connection again and invite people back into our organizations.

The tactile thing is a really good point. Even it can be as simple as go get your team outside. Or I used to have, like, Lego kits and coloring books and other things. I heard that. Love Lego. But those things get our brain on a different plane, if you will, so that we can break out of the mindset thinking of, well, we do it like this. And I was like, well, but do we have to? Let's just for a minute allow ourselves to think crazily. If we had everything under the sun, what would we do?

And that's really good to bring together people that have really opposing viewpoints. So I'm on the school board where I live, and we really have some very divisive people and opinions on the school board. And it was coming to a point where we couldn't function. Like, we couldn't have consensus, disrupting the board meetings. So we did, like, a half day Lego tactile thing. We were paired with the person we least wanted to be paired with. We had to complete these challenges. And while it's not gonna help me change my views and my values and what I stand for, it's helping me understand the thinking of another person. So if you have that kind of division in your organization or on your board, I think it's a great idea.

I just feel like being in community is one of the number one things we can do right now. And Clay Buck, who's a fundraising consultant, once said, stop asking, start inviting. We've terminated things like volunteer programs because it was just easier. Right? During COVID, we weren't utilizing volunteers, so we let go of our volunteer manager, and then now we don't have robust volunteer programs. Find ways to invite people back to your organization.

I love that. The inviting back. You hit on something, and I don't think we're gonna get to it later, so I'm gonna ask you now. Your idea was when we were doing fundraiser focus week, Sam, and you talked about the paddle race and you talked about inviting people at the twenty dollar planting, you know? Can you just talk about, like, that's a beautiful invitation. And I was like, oh my gosh. That is such an awesome idea.

I mean, you wanna go back to your first question of what do people do wrong in my space, they don't ask. That idea of inviting people to an event that is a fundraising event and then they say this is going to be a friend raiser. Don't do that. Because when you have invited folks to be a part of something and then you share with them, this is the work, this is the impact, this is what we could be doing together, and you never give them an opportunity to be a part of that, it's literally like you're saying, ready, set, ready, set, and you're never giving their mind the ability to go. And they leave honestly disappointed because they didn't feel like they could be a part of it, sort of like why did I spend my time here? So it can be a great party, but if you don't invite people in or make an ask, you don't give the brain that relief. When you do a paddle raise, having one critical element is the lead gifts that kick it off so you know you have momentum. If you don't have those lead gifts already committed and pledged, you risk creating distrust, and it has happened so fast. You ask for ten thousand dollars and there's nothing, you immediately tell your audience, oh, why isn't anyone giving? I don't trust this.

And this happens online too. You, like, launch your campaign. You post it out. I click on it. Zero. Because our brain is literally going, is this something I could contribute to? Is this safe? Are other people doing this? And when the answer is no, more people exit from that. And I think just seeding it and having a few people ahead of time, same thing. And then also having an accessible level. An accessible level. Earlier in opening, the chat about the ladder, I think is so important, that if you don't have that accessible level, whether it's in a campaign or an event or in your media, if you don't have a way that people can reach you, it says this isn't for you. And I feel like the number one thing you want people to feel is this is for me.

Okay. So inviting people in, we've talked scarcity. Sometimes there's gonna be trade-offs. Right? Like, we have to make choices. We have limited staff and time. There's only so much we can do in a day. But let's talk about the trade-offs that nobody talks about. So what are the trade-offs that nonprofit leaders avoid making?

To me, I don't know if it's a trade-off, but it's definitely a decision that a lot of nonprofits make. And I was talking with Rachel Baerbauer, if any of you are familiar with her, at lunch, and she has a session tomorrow. And she said something that really stuck with me. She said, nonprofits need to stop being so precious with their brand voice. And I thought, absolutely. We need to stop averting our eyes to what's going on all around us every single day. We need to stop pretending like we don't exist in the world and in our community and in our society. We need to talk about these issues. And this could be a trade-off because, yeah, if you are doing something important and saying something important, you're going to get pushback. If you are just simply toeing the line and putting out content that makes everyone feel comfortable, then either people aren't listening or they're really not gonna trust that you can get the hard work done, and it does come back to trust. So to me, I really want to see more nonprofits just talking about how current events are affecting their work, how the demand has risen, how resources are stretched thin. And if you say you like apples, someone's gonna say, why do you hate oranges? And obviously, that's gonna be a thing, but we have to get over that. The work that we do is so important, and the people that support it wanna know that we have a line in the sand and we stand up for the people that we serve.

I would say asking more often and more than you're comfortable with. The big trade-off is comfort. If your revenue is plateauing, if your revenue has declined year over year, it's a comfort issue. It is easier to do exactly what you're doing, and you will either see a plateau or diminishing returns, and it takes more guts to have more campaigns, more fundraisers, and more asks, because when you do that, you will hear more no's, and then you will also hear more yes's. But the no's, that muscle that you will have to build to metabolize the no's and keep going to hear the yes's, that's the trade-off. Am I willing to do that, or do I just wanna keep doing what I'm doing because that's comfortable?

I think that we tell ourselves often that we can't ask because we just asked. And yet there's so much data that proves if you ask more, it actually helps the donor to feel more connected. It's another outreach point, it's another engagement point. I also think that if you're not asking, you're not receiving. But I also think that the world is political and people fear talking about the politics. But to your point, being able to step up to this is how it's impacting us helps your donor to see where they can step in. There's actually a great story. I was talking to Ellis Ferris, who is a consultant. She works a lot in the public broadcasting space. They had a huge deficit, multimillion dollar deficit. And she advised that client, you need to be talking about this to your donors, because it creates distrust if you're not talking about the fact that you're losing funding even though this is very public and in the news. And the very first donor conversation they had with one high stakes major donor, she asked, how is this impacting you? They had their stats ready. They had their information ready, and she filled the gap for them singly. They had no idea she had that capacity. But to her, this was the benchmark lifetime gift she wanted to make. So I think it's not just important that you're speaking to your values and holding your values and not being as scared to hold your values, but also speaking to your donors about that implication and impact.

It's almost like the pursuit of professionalism. Yeah. It's hurting. Perfectionism is holding us back. Professionalism. We it's like the pursuit of, I have to present like our organization's doing great so that everyone will trust me. But in fact, the invitation to say, like, it's really hard right now, our grant funding got cut and that means this, donors are like, oh, we would love to help.

Well, I also think you can do both. Right? Like, to be able to be like, we're really good at this. This is our mission. This is our program. This is what we excel at. Unfortunately, this is what we're facing. Exactly. When I was a development director, I worked at a domestic violence program, and it was in Virginia. And we received a pretty significant state budget grant cut. And I do remember being in the room with the board and the executive director and all of them saying, well, we can't say anything because it was very politically motivated and specifically against programs that served women and girls. So to me, I thought, okay, it's a fact. We're not expressing an opinion. It is an actual fact that our budget was cut twenty-five percent. And if we can't talk in facts, then we've totally lost the plot.

Yeah. I mean, that's what builds trust. You have the knowledge of the organization, what you need, what you're really good at doing, and this is the gap. I had this conversation in a session I was in earlier today where someone is tasked with raising, I believe it's seventy-six point five million dollars, and they're at seventy-one point five. Wow. And, you know, how do I get past this last mile? Right? And it was like, let your community know about your gap. Talk openly about your gap and how good you've been getting to this point, because we've had customers talk about they went to the next major donor, they were just having a conversation, and all of a sudden they're like, I will do a match if you raise another hundred thousand dollars by the end of the year. And they did it, and they surpassed their goals. And so it is about acknowledging that gap, making that ask.

You tapped into something with a match that I think is important, that people wanna be a part of something successful and they also wanna be a part of something that's collective. Right? Like, I want to join that. If everyone else is joining, I want to be a part of that. So I think that that's a powerful tool that doesn't get utilized.

Yeah. You realize your dollar can be doubled. You're like, oh, yeah, that sounds like a great way to contribute. And oftentimes, I'm a sucker for that. I'm the first donor to be like, oh, I'm gonna add into the match.

We should briefly address matches because I hear all the time from my nonprofits, like, do matches even work anymore? And I feel like, you're nodding, so you're with me. Yes. Like, we see it too much. We are like, yeah, yeah, yeah. Match. It totally still works. It absolutely works. Well, it's that sense of why this, why now. So when I teach social media, you always have to have a why this, why now. It could be a great story. But when you're fundraising, especially, why am I paying attention to this right at this moment? And a match is a great way to do that, and the data does show that it does work.

Can we talk about discomfort for a minute and just thinking about clients that you've advised over the years? What's something that you often advise that's really uncomfortable to hear? Is there anything we haven't hit on there?

Well, for me, it's always the client story. So often we work with organizations, especially organizations that are dealing with any direct social service support where someone has been in a state of crisis, the immediate response is we don't tell our client's story. Confidentiality, we do not tell our client's story. And yet there is a ton of data behind the fact that one, a client's story moves giving significantly more, and two, the client's story is something that if done well, if done ethically, if done with trauma-informed care, can actually be a healing part of someone's journey. So we frequently are coaching an organization toward the paddle raise moment at their event, which is your biggest revenue opportunity at an event, hands down, in which we ask everyone to turn their focus on one story, not every story, one story that represents the impact of your work, and then move into the fundraising paddle raise. And so often the barrier to get to telling that story is this fear of poverty porn. That idea of like the sad kitten in the cage sort of fundraising. And it is an old, old model of fundraising, and you know what, we've learned better. We've learned that you can actually tell a story in a very ethical, trauma-informed way with kindness and care that is part of a powerful journey that connects people deeper to the giving. So I frequently run into that kind of gap. The safe model is frequently, we'll just go to the list of programs we offer.

Yeah, that's sanitizing it, right, versus an emotional story. Emotional, yeah. Also, you don't have to cry. That story does not have to lead people to cry. We have over three hundred plus emotions we feel. You do not have to. You could feel nostalgic, you could feel excited, you don't have to cry.

I would say send more emails than you're comfortable with. Sending more emails can change your fundraising life, and it's gonna be uncomfortable. You're maybe gonna hear some pushback about it, but email and social media are not the same. Social is great for awareness and visibility, but the conversions, everything we heard in that first session this morning, donations are happening through email. Email is your foundational backbone. And I'm kinda thinking, as we're speaking, like, how come for-profit brands and businesses get a totally different set of rules? Like, I can discover a new brand and be like, I like that brand. I can order something from them. And three days later, they're inviting me to buy something else. And I am not offended. I'm excited. What do you get from whatever you just bought or you looked at, a pair of shoes, bed sheets, whatever, and you're getting five emails a day. It must work. It does. I think we think we are not for-profit. We are not capitalistic. We are not going to be like that. And yet that is what your audience knows, is seeing, and how they are buying and shopping for their product. Why don't you want your brand to be in front of them in the same way? Retargeting campaigns, marketing campaigns that do geofencing. People go, I would never. And I'm like, but the shoes you just bought came to you that same way. Why wouldn't the mission that you care about come to you that way?

Yeah. I agree. Get your story out there. For me, teaching marketing and digital marketing, what really makes people uncomfortable is that the social media algorithm doesn't care about you. Right? Doesn't care about you and your mission and how great the work is that you do. You have to create content that matches the platform, that matches your audience. We have to kind of get out of our own way and our own agenda. And I know we have a million things to share and so many events and great awards and milestones, but we have to start understanding how people are consuming content and engaging with content. The old rules, which were never really the rules that worked anyway, but we were all taught that social media and email and our websites were just these broadcast platforms where we could just put up our promotions and leave and call it a day. And the second piece that I teach is being vulnerable. So when I say vulnerable, if there are any Brene Brown fans here, I know that you know what I'm talking about. I don't mean you have to be crying on camera, but you do have to be on camera, or at least telling me from a human-centered perspective what's going on. Like a letter from the executive director, a walk and talk about snap benefits in your community and how that's affecting you. People really need that behind-the-scenes content, and that makes so many nonprofits uncomfortable because we just wanna put our heads down and do the work. But sometimes we have to be the face of the work as well.

Okay. We're gonna go from discomfort to disagreement. Let's talk about where consultants disagree. Right? I mean, there's a lot of opinions. But what's something that you disagree on when advising your clients? So Sam, do you have anything for us on disagreement?

Yeah. I think there's a couple of things. One is, especially in my world of events, the theme and the association of showcasing big money associated with a gala style event. I think there's a lot of disagreement in community-centric versus donor-centric fundraising around this idea that the gala feels like a conflict of, we have to set aside our values and mission for one night where we can reach our big dollar donors and raise a lot of money and sacrifice our values. And my disagreement there is you can do both. You can be community-centric in a way that also appeals to those big donors. You can be very true to your mission, but the key to do that is you have to center your mission. So like, get rid of casino night, get rid of the acrobats if that's not your mission, center your mission and design every element of your event to be really focused on connecting people deeper to understanding the impact you have. We had a dinner once where it was a furniture bank and their biggest need that year was silverware. And so we served dinner without any silverware to make a point about the value and the impact of silverware. And just as guests were trying to figure out how to eat their soup and looking around the room, we then noticed something missing, and it became a storytelling piece that we could physically, tactically immerse them in, and when we brought them their silverware, we were able to say this silverware tonight will all be cleaned and donated back to the furniture bank. That instead of feather dancers removes that conflict of like, it's not just a showcase of money. The other thing I would say is we don't have to have an auction, and that's where I probably disagree the most with people in the event space, that the biggest impact you can have is sharing your story, immersing people in your mission, and asking them to be a part of it. If you don't have the people and the bandwidth, you do not need to spend hours and hours putting together silent auction packages, live auction packages. You can really simplify to something even more powerful and raise more money and spend less time. You do not have to have an auction. It works for some people, but it doesn't have to be there.

Yeah. Sometimes the event is like a long walk to make a dollar. Right? And if your event is the event you just described without the silverware, I'm all in. Right? Where there's this depth or this meaning. There's, like, a before and after. It's a story. Like, before I came to the event, after, I'm changed. Right? But I see a lot of people think their five k is gonna fix their fundraising problem. And all they did was tire out their staff, their board, their volunteers, everyone. And it was a hard dollar, a hard twenty k, a hard two hundred k, whatever it raised. And I think as a donor, there's this mentality sometimes of, like, I have to give them something. We don't want anything. I don't want the auction item. I remember years ago, I was voluntold to be on the auction committee. Voluntold. For my child's preschool, and my husband was like, hang on a second. So you're asking small businesses to donate gift cards so that we can pay to go to the auction and buy them back. And I was like, yes. That is the plan. That's it. And he was like, what are we doing? I was like, I know, I know, I know. So, yeah, it's like, is there another way to reimagine the event, or do we need the event at all?

And if the answer is we don't need the event at all, then I'm like, let's email fundraise. Let's do this. One of the things I would say is a couple of things I would love to see people do more of. We don't need the ominous brand voice. We don't need x y z organization sending the emails. Like, we wanna know you. We wanna know the people. Besides the executive director, like, she's awesome too, but I wanna know the different voices in the organization, and that is really the difference between the organizations that have that connection, that trust, the people who give multiple times a year. I was talking to a fundraiser yesterday, and I was like, you know your donors who give three times a year? I was like, who? Like, once a year. And I was like, no, the people who give multiple times a year. That's what you can do with email very, very quickly.

I think I disagree. The philosophy in digital marketing and in nonprofit marketing I most disagree with is that there are a set of best practices that we all have to follow. There's no one size fits all. So I can't stand those articles that say, oh, the best time to post on LinkedIn is Tuesday at ten AM. Like, that doesn't mean anything. That might not be the best time for you. Or you have to be on three platforms posting three times a week. There's suggested guidelines, but all of us are so unique and our audiences are unique and our missions are unique that there's just not one best practice. And I also think you should break up with platforms that are not working. So if you don't wanna be on X, get off X. If you don't wanna have five Facebook pages for your organization, you shouldn't anyway. Feel free to consolidate. Don't worry so much about what the experts are saying you should do, and look at your capacity and your audience and your messaging and focus on that. I really think less is more and quality over quantity now, especially in the age of a lot of AI-generated content online.

I would add too, in the same way that if you don't need to be on every platform, your staff also does not need to be an expert in all those platforms. And so often our mission is so specific. Our work has a specific tangible goal that we're working toward. We don't also have to be the marketing expert, the social media expert, the comms expert, the platform expert, the analytics expert, the data expert, the fundraising expert. I think it's okay to hire people who are, because being able to save your staff the heartbreak and the workload by bringing in someone who can do it in five minutes versus your staff spending weeks learning how to do something new. I think so often in that scarcity mindset, we try to stretch our dollar and then don't understand that someone who really is truly deeply an expert can have an exponential growth opportunity for you and ease, and not burn out your team.

And to add on to that, something that we had talked about before this panel is that so many people in the nonprofit sector come from programs. So they don't have a marketing or business background or a fundraising background necessarily. They have passion for the mission, passion for the cause, but yet think they have to be experts in every single little piece like information technology and HR and all that. That's really distinct in our sector. Absolutely. I mean, so many hats that we're wearing, and then tapping into the experts. I've talked to countless development directors, heads of nonprofits, in terms of when I would ask them about, like, how did you evaluate technology? And it was just like, well, I didn't. I was like, oh, you know, I'd love to teach you or walk alongside you of, here's how I look at technology. These are the things that I do. I'm gonna make these things that are most important to me right now, but I know that I might discover something along the way that I'm gonna need. But, again, tapping into those experts. And it's okay to do that, and you don't have to be an expert at everything. And we all collaborate. Right? Like, call Bloomerang and say, this is my need, and they're gonna know someone who does that. I'll be like, oh, you're gonna wanna text Sam.

Yeah. It's a lot of hats. Okay. So let's transition now to talk about things that move the needle. What's really gonna make the difference for our organizations? So when you look across your clients that you've helped over the years, what consistently gets results?

I can go first, and it's consistency. It's sort of picking, it's a consistency in experimentation. So when you experiment, having a goal for your experiment. So a great example is candid.org. If you're familiar with the nonprofit Candid, they decided they wanted to do short form video. So that was like, okay, we wanna do short form videos. So what does that mean? Okay, well, we wanna create twenty-two videos that are under sixty seconds over a three month period. That's a perfect experiment, because then you can see if it worked, if it didn't work, how much time it took, and you can analyze it. And they were consistent over this three month period. Whereas what I see happening is posting here, sending an email here, throwing up an event there, and not doing anything in any consistent way, and then throwing up our hands and saying, well, that didn't work. So I think picking something, sticking with it, even if it is an experiment, measuring it at the end of the day, analyzing it, taking the time to debrief and see what worked and what didn't work, I wish I saw more of that in fundraising and marketing.

I mean, an event needs like three years before it fully actualizes. Say that again. An event needs three years. Typically we see kind of a slow growth pattern over three years before you really start to see the maximum yield of what it could benefit, and sometimes it continues growing beyond that. Sometimes it plateaus. If it plateaus after two years, that's typically when we would rethink, reevaluate based on all the data analytics we have from those four or five years. But I would really emphasize the importance of responsive versus relationship and getting out of the, the world changed so much in the past six years of like, we are constantly in an information incoming stream, right, like emails coming to us. That can be a hundred percent of what we do all day. And some days it is for me. Yes. And how do we move into, I'm carving out this dedicated time to be my relationship time. That in the afternoons, I am making calls, I'm scheduling coffees, I am scheduling lunch dates. We had a client that specifically set on her calendar a call time, and then her team, this executive director's team, would give her a folder of, these are who you're calling in your next call time, and it was a four hour block every week that she had on her calendar. And then in addition to that, she had one day where she had three meeting spots, and it was dependent on her board and staff filling those three meeting spots with, bring them in and tour them of our facility. So it was just relationship building. A system. Yeah, it was a system dedicated toward relationships. So you're not just stuck being responsive, but you're actually carving out that time to be in relationship with people. I think that's what is gonna get, I love time blocking too. I love it. Me too.

I call those power hours. Power hours. Close everything out. I'm not leaving. Like, I'll put my phone in another room unless I'm calling people. Right? But, like, that's it. Do not disturb. We're not leaving until it's done. Power hours. And you get better at it, and you just start treating it like going to the gym. Right? And so you're making those calls. I think even just, we do this in some of my communities where we'll actually do it as a group together even though we're actually not talking. Right? We're just on Zoom together, silent. So if you can even do it with a coworker or partner, I think that that's even helpful even if it's across Zoom.

One of the things I wanna touch on that Julia said is this idea of, like, you're doing a little bit of this, you're doing a little bit of that, you're never really seeing it through the way Candid did. And it's like, if we go upstream and we're thinking, why? Well, you don't have the resources, or you haven't invested in somebody to help you buy your time back. I sat with somebody at lunch and she was talking about her constituents, her email subscribers. They live in three different places right now, and so she's talking about data migration, and she's like, you know, it's gonna be a lot and I have to do this and this. And I was like, you know, you can just hire somebody to do that. Don't get good at that. Right? Like, that's not something for you to get good at. I don't need to get good at coding for my website. That's not it. Even if it's expensive for me to hire that out, it's still a stronger ROI for me to have that power hour. Right? And so there is a culture inside the nonprofit world. It's like, but I could just. And especially now with chat, with AI, and all that, it's like, it could help me DIY it, or can I hire somebody to help me with this migration, or can I hire somebody to help onboard me with this tech so that I can go do the thing I'm really great at and go raise some money? And sometimes that's like a tough conversation with your board and really you being a hundred percent all in and going, I need this. And then sometimes it's even another conversation of, like, do I even need board approval for this in the first place?

That's a great question. Do I even need board approval for this? Or do I just want board approval because I feel nervous about this investment? Yeah. Yeah. I was like, I saw some people sit up like, oh. I get it. Stop asking the board. Stop asking the budget. So it's just like the school board. Okay? We do not go to the public for every line item in the school board budget. That's not possible. We discuss with shareholders and stakeholders as we build the budget, but then the budget is presented and voted on. So that's kind of how I, if I served on a nonprofit board, that's how I would approach the financials, that I know I have a responsibility for the financial sustainability of the organization, which includes fundraising, includes talking about the organization, but includes making sure that there's adequate fiscal governance. But occasionally, if there's a huge project like the high school roof falls in, you then. But, like, your board approving printer toner. My favorite executive director was like, you don't want me to call you about this. And they were like, no, we don't. Printer toner. Sometimes there's a clutter of that.

I've got a funny story on this. So someone that works at Bloomerang is on a board and they were in finance and they were saying they were arguing over spending another twenty dollars a month at the board meeting on some subscription for something, and it was like, we have so much, we are doing great financially. We do not need to have this argument within the board itself. Can we have a rational conversation of where, like, the board, if you're a board member, trust your staff. That's right. That's so undermining. I know. Isn't that terrible? But I'm sure we've all felt that, right? And that's a hard conversation we need to have, and that's a disagreement we're gonna need to have with our board or executive director, to be like, let's spend our time elsewhere than the twenty dollar printer toner approval. It's just like you said, not giving staff the discretion to make those kinds of decisions, with, there's guardrails, there's guidelines, there's policies and procedures, but you have to trust your staff. You do have to trust them at some point, and then if you don't, it's a different conversation. But you're in your role, and especially for somebody who's been in their role for more than a few months, I'm like, you're in your role for a reason. I do think energetically sometimes it is about stepping up into it, and I call that, like, CEO energy, and being like, this is what I need. This is what we're doing. It's not the roof has not caved in. It's not an emergency meeting. It's me running this organization, and we're hiring somebody for the data migration, and they're great, and I've vetted them, and they're the one. Like, that's it. Yes. Wow. CEO at the gym. Yes. You wanna talk to me? I know. I'm gonna call you when I need a pep talk. Yeah. And when my clients need a pep talk.

Okay. I think I have like two more question areas. I'm just trying to be mindful of time. But is there something that people think is difficult but is actually simpler than people are really thinking in their head, that actually works? Like, they're like, oh, that's hard. No, no. I mean, it's not that complicated and it works. Try this. Is there anything where you get the resistance to wanna do a thing but you're like, no, it's much easier?

No. It's not. You know what it is? I feel like it's the rumination. And I know that's why I do this. It's like the dread of something takes more time than the action of doing something. For me, this would be like, I just really don't like getting ready for my taxes every year. Like, it's all there. I'm just in QuickBooks, and I have somebody do it. The anticipation of it, I'll dread it for a month, two months. The action, because I've timed it before, it's like three hours of my time. That's it. That's all. And so I think we do this with a lot of very important things, calling donors, following up with donors. Doing the hard thing actually doesn't take a lot of time. We do, like, board textathons, board phoneathons. We can do it in thirty minutes. It is the dread of it of, like, what? It's the rumination.

I went, at asking for money, like, I think that people think it's really hard. They put it off. They have a million other tactics of things that are keeping them busy. I don't have enough time, because the ask is intimidating or scary, and that is an area where I feel like it is actually so much simpler, so much easier, because it is really just inviting people in. It's asking, tell me your story. It's listening. I mean, Make A Wish, right? Tell me your Make A Wish story. How did you first get involved? They start to tell you, and then it's really easy to be able to invite them to do it again and invite them to participate again. We would love to have you donate again. That, I think, is something that people put off, put off, put off, and yet without that, people feel a sense of, I can't figure out how to participate, so I'm not going to. People don't just give because of altruism, they give because of the relationship, the sense of collective action, the community, and we put off that one thing so often, and yet it's sometimes the best part of the job.

I think building on the ruminating piece, I get Seth Godin's blog every day. They're really short, and some days they're just so spot on. And he sent one a few weeks ago that really was, like, one sentence, and it said, with two sentences, you don't need more time, you just need to decide. And I was like, are you, I felt so, like, you're like, how dare you? It's absolutely true. I have seven notebooks of ideas and things. I have, like, my next book. I have this. I have that. I have podcast guests. And I get so overwhelmed that I tend to just shut down and be like, I'm just gonna watch Real Housewives and not think about the work I have to do. But you do not need more time. You just need to decide. What are the priorities? What are you working on? What are you best at? So those two sentences, I printed them up and put them in my office, just as a reminder that, just make a decision. And, you know, you gotta trust that sometimes you will make the wrong decision, and the world will ultimately have data. Then you have data. That's true. Exactly. That's a data point. Failure is a data point. Okay, now I know what my audience isn't into. Yeah. Perfect. That's a perfect way to think about it. Well, that was very sage advice.

Kinda this is the last piece. So let's just kinda wrap it up in terms of a piece of advice that you give all the time that, so again, it's not just your words of wisdom, but what's a piece of advice that you give all the time but wish you didn't have to?

Perfect. Oh. That's good. Clap that one out. Snaps. I would say events don't need to celebrate money. They need to celebrate your mission. Nice. I would say people aren't paying attention nearly as much as you think. That's true. And for me, that's permission to ask again, to send again, to take another action. Like, we are up in our business, but people are like, they missed the email. They missed the phone call. I didn't listen to the voice mail. We're busy. We're distracted.

So I tested that theory recently. Someone had told me once upon a time, like, you need seven touch points for a decision, and then that number has gone up. What do you think it is? I tell my clients about seventeen now. Okay. They make that face. Fifteen is what I heard. I've heard fourteen. Yeah. No, I'm not really surprised. So I did a little test. And? I counted every single touch point, and when we hit fifteen, all the revenue came in. And I was like, oh my gosh, it's true. If you knew it took fifteen touch points to raise more this year, then that's it. So then that's the decision.

Well, that's, I mean, like, folks that are on the Bloomerang marketing team laugh when they say, you know, people don't wake up thinking about us every day. No, no. We wake up every day thinking about organizations, but the world doesn't. And so we do have to get in front of them and tell them about us, and that's why we have to send so many emails and so many posts and so many things, because they're not thinking about us. We're not the number one thing, but we have something important to say and share, and that's how we're gonna get it.

I also try to think of my own patterns and behaviors and how those apply. Like, the email that Bloomerang sends out, I may receive while I'm sitting in a conference and say, not right now, but the email that I get first thing in the morning, because I was at my desk that day, I might read all the way through. And so that idea that no one's receiving the information exactly the same every single day advocates for why you need more touch points.

So more touch points. So I think we're gonna wrap it up. So Sam, Julia, Christina, thank you so much for your advice and your thoughts and what's not on the slides, and let's make it a great week. Thank you all for the work you do.