Ask the experts: maximizing event revenue

Ann Fellman: Okay. Doors are open. It’s Thursday.

Rachel Muir: It’s Friday eve.

Ann Fellman: Yeah. Someone today posted in our marketing team’s Slack. It was Betty White from The Golden Girls, dancing, like, “It’s Friday. It’s my Friday because I’m off tomorrow.” And I was like, ugh. Blasted. Here we are. But it’s Thursday, and this is probably gonna be the best hour of your day, I’m gonna guess, unless something really amazing falls out of the sky for you. We’re gonna learn a lot and have a really fun conversation.

So welcome, everybody. Here we are, we’re gonna make the most of our time together. I’m Ann Fellman, the chief marketing officer at Bloomerang. And you are in the right place, because there is a panel of esteemed experts here that you will probably see on your screen. Let us know, thanks for joining us. Tell us where you’re at, what’s your weather. I’m back in Minneapolis today. If you’ve joined us all week, I was in Minneapolis, Boston for two days, back to Minneapolis. I keep getting stuck in this forty degree and cloudy, gross weather. I missed the seventy-two and sunny in Minneapolis yesterday. So here we are. What’s your weather? Do you have good weather today?

Samantha Swaim: I have sunny spring today.

Ann Fellman: Oh, yes.

Rachel D’Souza: We are hitting ninety in St. Louis today. And then it’s going to rain tonight, and it’s going to be in the fifties tomorrow.

Lynn Wester: I’m in Chicago traveling, and it’s gonna be seventy-five today and rainy. And then tomorrow, it’ll be thirty degrees.

Rachel D’Souza: Yeah welcome to the Midwest, friends.

Ann Fellman: I think I have snow coming Sunday. This is great.

Rachel Muir: I’m gonna hit ninety today.

Ann Fellman: Oh, Rachel. Rachel one and Rachel two. We’ve got two Rachels today, so we’re gonna keep each other on our toes.

Samantha Swaim: Nancy is joining us from the Peruvian Amazon, where it’s cold and seventy-nine. Nancy, I wanna come join you.

Rachel D’Souza: Yeah. Same.

Ann Fellman: Cold and seventy-nine, how does that happen.

Lynn Wester: Sounds like my normal life.

Ann Fellman: Sounds like summer.

Samantha Swaim: But that sounds lovely.

Ann Fellman: That is awesome. Sometimes we get people joining from all over the world, so this is gonna be really fun. You’re in the right place. This is about Ask the Experts. We’ve been talking about events and how to maximize getting people engaged, making people feel welcome, how to connect with them emotionally, how to thank them, how to follow up properly to create a really strong relationship.

A few housekeeping items, as I like to always cover. Yes, we’re recording. There are really no slides today, so you just want the conversation. So listen, and you’re gonna learn a lot. We’ve been gathering questions all week that you submitted for our speakers, and Rachel Muir is gonna drive that. But if you have questions as we go, pop those into the Q&A as well, and we’ll answer them as time allows. It’s gonna be a great hour with all of us together.

Bloomerang is all about helping nonprofits thrive. We make great software that helps you manage your donors, foster those donor relationships, fundraise, make it really easy to get the gift, but also make it really easy to say the thank you, make it easy to have an event, all those good things. You can learn more about Bloomerang later. And if you love fundraisers and you wanna get with your people and network and exchange ideas, GiveCon is a great place to get together in person. This year, it’s gonna be in St. Louis. We bring it around to different cities every year. I know Rachel D’Souza is gonna be joining us, and a couple other folks will be too. If you can’t make it this year, there’s always next year in a different location.

So welcome back, Lynn, Samantha, and Rachel, and thanks for joining us. And a special thank you to our host and facilitator today, Rachel Muir. So with that, I’m gonna stop sharing. The floor is yours, Rachel.

Rachel Muir: Thank you so much. I am so excited to get to be with everybody, and I’m so thrilled to introduce these amazing guests. I’m gonna kick things off with Lynn, then Samantha, and then Rachel.

It’s such an honor to introduce Lynn to everybody here today. I’m a huge fan. She has been shaking up the fundraising world for over twenty years. If you haven’t listened to her Fundraising Is Funny podcast, you are in for a treat. It is hilarious and fantastic, and it’s the number one nonprofit podcast in the world. She hosts it with Clay Buck. Lynn is passionate about two things that I’m massively obsessed with as well. She believes that strong donor relations is the key to unlocking fundraising success, and she believes that organizations have to be just as dedicated to the donor experience as they are to the ask itself. I couldn’t agree with her more. She has a healthy obsession with donor stewardship and donor love, and I do too. It’s just the hill I would die on. She has her BA from the University of South Carolina, and she’s on their board. She has a master’s degree in strategic fundraising and a doctorate from the Disney Institute.

Lynn, you shared so many pearls of wisdom. You talked a lot about stewardship, about thanking people, about the thank you receipt, the personal thank you, the wrap-up after the event, reporting back on what you did with the money. You had a ton of questions. And we wanna invite you guys to type your questions anytime into the Q&A. You can also type them into the chat. I am monitoring those. I’m a multitasking super freak. So don’t be shy. You’re surrounded by some of the most brilliant event fundraising minds in the business, so ask us anything.

But beautiful Lynn, you were asked: is it better to send the gift receipt immediately after the gift, at the end of the calendar year for taxes, or both? Since you’ve got lots of fabulous opinions about thanking donors, I’m excited to share that question with you first.

Lynn Wester: Thank you so much, and thanks to whoever submitted the question. Being around good people makes the day so much better. So I just wanna say that this hour fills our cups as well, and the fact that you all are here fills our cups. Thank you. I know that time is probably one of the most precious gifts we have, so just a little bit of gratitude before we start. And thank you, Rachel, for bringing us all together and for being the fabbest, most amazing. And thank you to Bloomerang for always giving back to the community and supporting our podcast, but also for having the best darn software out there. Bloomerang has been focusing on donor retention and stewardship for longer than I even knew Bloomerang existed, a long time ago. They don’t talk the talk. They walk the walk, and I think it’s important that we say that.

Speaking of walking the walk: donors need two things in order to give again. We know that from Penelope Burke. We know that from surveys with donors, from talking to donors. They need to be thanked, and they need to be told that their gift has had an impact. Part of that thanking is running an organization that is well run, and the receipting process. Whether you’re in the United States and you follow IRS guidelines, or in Canada and CRA, or whatever country you’re in and you follow their guidelines, the receipt signals not just that we received your generosity, but that we are an organization that can run a business. Because remember, just because we’re not-for-profit doesn’t mean we’re not running a business. And donors need to have faith and trust in those businesses. The receipt is the first indicator of gratitude and faith and trust in the way in which we run a business.

If you can’t get me a receipt in twenty-four to forty-eight hours, then you’re not running a good business. When I purchase things online, I get a receipt instantaneously. There’s no longer an excuse in 2026 not to provide receipts that have great thank-you language, but it is essential. It’s also the very first impression of your organization in terms of a communication. So what we teach is that you need to put your resources in there. Do not give me an eight-and-a-half-by-eleven with a horrible logo at the top and call it a day. Invest in the receipt, and that’s all gifts, all amounts. Yes, the IRS says $250, but if I give you $100 and don’t get a receipt, you and I are gonna have a conversation about worth and how you value human beings, because 70 percent of first-time gifts are test gifts and nowhere near my capacity. So if you don’t receipt me, we have a fundamental misunderstanding that I just gave you a gift. Right?

And then if I do a recurring gift, monthly giving, recurring giving, then a digital tax receipt in January or early February is welcome and adds another touch to my donor relations and the donor experience. But I have seen organizations say, “We don’t give an instant tax receipt. We wait until the tax year.” That’s very interesting, because I’m an entrepreneur, and I actually pay taxes four times a year. So you don’t get to decide when I need a receipt for the IRS or the Canadian government. It’s a little bit ignorant to say we all make our taxes on April fifteenth. I actually do it quarterly. So I appreciate a recurring gift receipt in January because it helps me meter it out over the year. But what if I made my gift in December, when most people make their gifts, and you don’t give me a receipt? No. We have a fundamental misunderstanding.

Rachel Muir: Yeah. And that’s exactly why. I mean, the latest research from the Fundraising Effectiveness Project is that we have a new donor retention rate of fourteen percent.

Lynn Wester: Yes, ma’am. Can you imagine if you were a restaurant and you had a recurring customer rate of fourteen percent? You’d be closed in three months. If any of us ran our businesses that way, if Bloomerang had a fourteen percent customer retention rate, Bloomerang would not exist.

Rachel Muir: Thank you for that. I’m gonna introduce our second speaker, Samantha Swaim, whose love affair with live events began long before she knew fundraising existed. She’s got a background steeped in theater and television, which led her to understand that magic happens when you feel the energy shift in a room and people go from being an audience to being active participants. She started Swaim Strategies in 2004. She’s the founder and strategic director, and she has a healthy obsession with turning a paddle raise from “okay, I guess we’ll participate in this if you’re strong-arming me into it” to “how high can we go?” She’s the coauthor of Planning a Successful Major Donor Event and the founder of the annual Elevate conference. I loved every minute of your presentation on Tuesday. You shared a couple of videos, and I’m gonna invite you to pop those into the chat, because they were fantastic.

You gave this great example of “ready, set,” and then not saying go, and you talked about the stress that people can feel. I just had a Boys & Girls Club tell me they had this great cultivation event, and at the last minute, the board members refused to let them make an ask. You talked about how there’s actual stress that our bodies feel when they’re not allowed to do that. And you got a lot of really great questions. One of them, and you said you wish you could do a webinar just on that, was: how does the paddle raise work logistically? Do we gaggle a bunch of volunteers running the room with a credit card charge thingy?

Samantha Swaim: No. We don’t. It’s fascinating to me, because we get into the neuroscience and the biomechanics of that moment and the storytelling and the program design, and then we forget the most essential piece, the backbone, which is the logistics of how you execute it. So we always recommend a couple of key structure elements.

One, you need a database tool that allows you to assign bid numbers in advance. A bid number is equal to identifying a human. You can do that in Qgiv [now Bloomerang Fundraising]. You want the opportunity to easily see when people are giving, because we know that when 102 goes up, Sam is making a donation. So you have pre-assigned numbers in your software system. When a guest checks in, we look up their name and see, oh, they’re number 102, and we pull number 102 and hand it to them. That way, every time they use it, they’re attaching it to themselves, like running a tab at a bar. So it’s that idea of being able to engage multiple times, multiple ways, without having a transaction every single time.

My favorite way to engage folks is that paddle raise. I think we constantly think about how we engage and trick and fool, and it’s not about transaction. It’s about inviting people in. It’s about inviting people to be a part of the work. And to your ready, set, go comment, Rachel, I was really moved by the idea that our brain feels a sense of release or relief when we’re allowed to be a part of the solution. If we’re only hearing, “Here is the need, here is the need, here’s what we’re doing,” but we’re not allowed to be a part of it, it’s a stress builder, not an opportunity to be invited in.

The paddle is usually a single eight-and-a-half-by-eleven piece of paper with a three-digit number, so it’s easy for your host or your auctioneer to see it from the stage. Then, logistically, you have someone sitting with a tally sheet for every giving level, just listening to the auctioneer. The auctioneer moves around the room and says the bid number, and as they say the bid number, that is the cue for the individual to pull their bid card down, because they’ve been accounted for. When the bid number is read, I write it down. I don’t look around the room. I don’t look at bid numbers. I just listen and write. Then those all go to our auction software and we enter them in.

So there’s not a gaggle of volunteers running around. You don’t even need a gaggle of volunteers recording. I do love having two people so that you can double-check if you missed one. Because I have amazing tech AV people, I also have our AV team record it, in case I need to go back and rewatch and see what that bid number was. Then when the guest checks out, they’re able to say, “It looks like you made a $5,000 donation. Thank you for your generosity.” And to Lynn’s point, we now get an invoice in two minutes for something we just spent money on. If I don’t receive that, I actually wonder whether they received it. So it is such an important piece of the puzzle to have a data tool that allows you to charge their credit card and send an instant invoice with gratitude attached. That’s the logistics behind it. Thank you for asking that, Rachel.

Rachel Muir: I love it. Okay. I’m gonna introduce Rachel and share some of her pearls of wisdom, and I got a great question in here from Nancy that, don’t worry, Nancy, we are going to answer. It’s fantastic.

Rachel D’Souza is the founder and president of Gladiator Consulting, plus, let’s all give her some serious props, we are all so proud of her, she is running for the Missouri State House. Congratulations. You’re amazing, and we’re all just cheering you on incredibly.

Rachel D’Souza: A little unhinged, but doing it anyway.

Rachel Muir: I love it. Gladiator is a boutique firm serving nonprofits across the country. She’s a member of the Community-Centric Fundraising global council and president-elect of AFP Greater St. Louis. I’m excited to see you at GiveCon, beautiful friend. I’m excited to be there. Last year was so great. She is also an active supporter of the Young Nonprofit Professionals Network. In your session, you talked a lot about community-centric fundraising. You talked about what anti-racism means. My favorite pearl of wisdom, and you had a lot, was for people to think strategically about what they want donors to know, feel, and do at your event, and that is so important. Is there any other advice that you would give people about that? We also talked a little behind the scenes with Lynn about being thoughtful about your location and what it says about your invitation list. I’ll let you take it from here.

Rachel D’Souza: Yeah. No. I think we find ourselves in a very interesting space of time where we are still grappling with the fallout of a pandemic, and the businesses and communities we lost because of that. Then we have great shifts in policy changes that are having a financial impact on the sector. And we have technology that is meant to be helpful but is maybe also causing divisions in the communities we thought we were a part of, or centering the things that we don’t have in common perhaps more than the things we do. So individuals who are part of our communities, our volunteers, our donors, our employees, our clients, our board members, are really struggling to figure out: where is my community? Where are the people who share values with me? And how do I get to engage and be a part of something bigger than myself without feeling like I’m being extracted from?

In the sector, for better or worse, we’ve had this practice of “we have an event, we’re gonna raise the money, and we’ll see you next year.” That’s not what people are looking for anymore. They want to feel a part of our cause before, during, and after. They want to find a way to engage their coworkers, their friends, other potential board members, the other 364 days of the year.

So when we think about inclusion in our events, it’s not just about that day. It’s not about getting 100 percent of the people in that room to raise a paddle or participate. It’s about what we are building that creates a transformative opportunity for our organizations to be in relationship with folks year-round, which could lead to recurring giving, a planned gift, or an opportunity that we don’t even have time to think about because we’re trying to fill the holes in our budget. What doors do we close when we limit ourselves to the four or five hours that we have at an event together?

That’s where I implore people to say, at the beginning, as we’re thinking about what we want our donors to see, what we want them to hear from us, and what we want them to do after we’ve given them this experience, there should be an arc that doesn’t only affect the event itself but also how you’re engaging in stewardship and growing that relationship. I think it looks different for every organization. But if we can spend the time on the front end making those decisions and thinking about those scenarios, it gives us such an easier path to navigate what we want, how to build on what we’ve been able to do, and how to redirect ourselves if there’s a hiccup in the road.

Rachel Muir: Awesome. Kevin said, “I wish we could all vote for you, Rachel,” and I feel the same way. I know we all do. We’re so proud of you.

Rachel D’Souza: Aw. I appreciate it.

Rachel Muir: I’m gonna share Nancy’s question, and I’m gonna invite any of you, Samantha, Lynn, or Rachel, to respond if you’re compelled to respond let me know but I’ll go ahead and take a stab at it. She said,  I feel like everyone has their own way of doing this, but I have two major stress points right now. One is how to find more potential major donors. But the question I have here is, if someone can put themselves in the space of a nerdy person, me, who doesn’t have that fundraising background, I find I just don’t get to the ask. It peters out. I have a great conversation. I connect. I genuinely interact with that person, but the ask either doesn’t happen or it simply ends up being nothing. I guess what I’m wondering is if each of you speakers could model a quick ask.

So I will take that challenge. Yes. Brian Savers, we’d love him. This is Rachel. I’ve done my whole career in fundraising. I started a nonprofit called Girl Start to empower girls in STEM, right here in my hometown of Boston, Texas. My favorite way to do an ask is I sit down. Let’s pretend like I’m asking Lynn. I sit down with Lynn, and we do our small talk. We get centered. I check in with her. We recenter on what we were gonna talk about today. I ask her a question. “You’ve always supported our Send a Girl to Summer Camp campaign. Tell me what that interest comes from in your life. Tell me why that’s important to you.” I ask her a question to get to know more about her giving. And then if I know pretty clearly what I’m gonna ask her for and what she’s passionate about, let’s say she tells me it’s because she went to summer camp, and it was life-changing for her, and she made all her best friends there. Then I like to do this thing where first I say, “Your first gift was this, and you did this. And then your second gift was this.” I like to go through a short, micro history of her giving. As I’m doing this, I like to move a little closer physically to Lynn, because it signifies that something’s gonna happen now. I like to keep my body language really open. And then I come out and ask her, “Right now we’re doing our biggest campaign ever for Send a Girl to College Day. I know you’ve typically given $5,000, but if you could double your gift, we could do this much. We could serve this many more girls.” And then I just shut up, and I listen, and I let Lynn answer. That’s how I do it, and I wanna invite anyone who wants to share their favorite way to make an ask.

Lynn Wester: I was a frontline fundraiser for a whopping six months and figured out that I, as a control freak, couldn’t control the outcome. So I went back to donor relations, where I was happy. But I have met with donors. Being a big, bold personality, usually a loud person, my approach with donors when we talk about solicitation is I turn into a quiet, curious person. The quieter and more curious I am, the more money I’m able to raise. I always ask a donor why they made their first gift to our organization. I wanna find out what drove them and what passions they have. And being a very big extrovert, what I’m looking for are keywords. At Disney, they trained us in our doctorate program to be like Dumbo: big ears and a small mouth. So you listen, and the pregnant pause is in everything.

A donor might tell me why they gave their first gift, and then I might say, “Rachel, can you tell me more about what you want your legacy to be?” And then they’ll tell you what they want their legacy to be. If they don’t bring it back to the organization I’m working with, I say, “How does that manifest itself here? What does that look like for you with us?” And they say that, and usually that leads to a passion project, an endowed fund. I work a lot in higher ed, so they’re talking about wanting a scholarship. And then I simply say, “What would it take to make that legacy a reality?” I don’t ever say, “Could you make a gift of $50,000 for this?” The largest gift I ever closed was a little over $400 million in a single ask, and I never had to say to the donor, “Could I please have $400 million for this organization?” The donor actually asked us how much it would take to make his vision a reality. That’s what I’ve become comfortable with. I want them to tell me what it would take to have their legacy become reality.

Rachel Muir: Love that. Beautiful. That was a tough question, Nancy, but I love how Lynn answered it, and thank you for doing that.

There are some really great questions that are specific to events, and Samantha is the guru. I mean, everyone here is a guru, but in terms of events and benefit auctioneers, I loved that she had a whole video of all of these releases that are happening. And one of the pearls of wisdom you shared was why people give, from Susan Howlett. They give, number one, to be part of something, number two, to be known, and number three, to make a difference. And fifty percent of revenue for a lot of organizations is coming from that paddle raise. Here’s a question that people had. Some board members feel there may be too many asks at an event where people have already spent their money purchasing tickets, like the centerpiece raffle, the silent auction, the live auction, the paddle raise. What are your thoughts on this?

Samantha Swaim: I agree. First of all, I would say that the purchase of a ticket is typically independent of giving to a cause. You do that months before, sometimes weeks before. It’s typically a different decision-making process. To attend an event, to buy a ticket, is a decision that’s made and then left behind. Then people attend the event, and in your event, there is an opportunity for them to feel connected, to hear your story, to meet other like-minded individuals, and that is when there is another opportunity to invite people in. Sometimes people feel a sense of disappointment if that is not offered.

But I do think we do not need to transactionally nickel-and-dime people. We need to create equitable ways for people to give. We need there to be more than just a $50,000 gift option. We need to meet people where they’re at, understand our audience, and ask folks to give in all sorts of ways. So a paddle raise that covers lots of levels is important. A strategy where you have a matching gift challenge that maybe matches a first-time donor. An opportunity to invite folks to be a part of monthly giving, like Lynn suggested. Love that.

We had an organization, in fact, the video that I shared, and I’ll reshare the link again, that was specifically building toward community-centric fundraising. They set the price point of their ticket higher so that they could offer a hundred tickets to their clients they invited as their guests. And they made a matching gift challenge of fifteen dollars that was being matched by one of the founders of the organization. They started with that. So it was an invitation right from the beginning at a very specific, accessible dollar amount for everyone in the room. But we don’t have to have all of the other things. We can have one or two if we make them very mission-centered and they help tell our story. We don’t have to have the “and, and, and, and.” Those are all transactions that are very labor-intensive and very low-dollar.

So I tend to think more strategically about how I value the paddle raise above and beyond everything else, because that’s an access point we can create for everyone to participate in. And then how do we identify the one or two other types of transactions that can also center our mission? We just had an event on Sunday for an organization that is known for its extreme hospitality and its bottomless cookie jar, and we auctioned off a platter of cookies for $2,000. That was their only auction package, but it had a story to it. It was part of their mission. So I tend to go away from the list of “ands.” Those are all lots of labor on your part. Streamline and think strategically.

Rachel Muir: I love that. Rachel, that brings me to a question for you, which is about having plants. I love that in Samantha’s session, she showed a graph of how she helped an organization go from, oh, forgive me, Sam.

Samantha Swaim: I think it was $4,000 to $49,000.

Rachel Muir: Amazing. And she showed exactly how she helped them do that, and part of that strategy was plants. Tell me, Rachel, from the perspective of being anti-racist and being sensitive to all communities and everyone at your event, what do you recommend in terms of plants at an event?

Rachel D’Souza: Yeah. Absolutely. I don’t know if Lynn said this before or during, but we sometimes tend to focus on who can write the biggest check, and that is the most exciting thing. We get that in the door, and then we maybe forget about the other 299 people sitting around tables in our space. I have found that oftentimes, even people who are excited and energized, when it comes to the public point of raising my paddle, I don’t want to be the only one. And sometimes I don’t even want to be the first one. So we get to these levels in an event that are more accessible for more of your attendees, and they don’t want to be the first person to raise their paddle. Then you have crickets, sometimes, at that $500 level or that $250 level, which winds up being the way the majority of the folks in the room are able to give. When we invite in people who might not be raising their paddle at a $50,000 or $100,000 or $400 million level, we give people a chance to feel valuable, to engage, and to bring people along. We are helping them build community.

The other thing I really love doing is having a matching gift challenge from sponsors that starts at the $500 or $1,000 level and matches all the gifts coming in at $1,000 and below. We have those people writing the bigger checks, and that’s great. But what is the incentive we’re giving to get to potentially 100 percent giving from all of our attendees? When we match the $25s and the $50s and the $100s and the $250s, we get more people engaged in the work. We have more people to steward and follow up with. We have more people, to Lynn’s point, to be curious with, that we get to learn about. So for me, it’s also not just thinking about the event as “we did it, we made our goal, we got 87 or 90 percent of people to give.” It’s that I’ve cracked the door open, and you did give a $100 gift, which was doubled to $200, so what do I get to learn about you? How do I get to engage you? And how do I make sure you’re not just a butt in the seat next year at this event? You might bring a whole table, because I created the space for you to feel belonging.

Lynn Wester: Oh, that is so important, Rachel. I wanna emphasize also “yes, and.” We love the “yes, and.” Are we telling people what we did with their money after the event? Can I tell you how many organizations have an event, say “we raised this,” and then you don’t hear from them until the invitation to next year’s event? And I’m like, I’m gonna need a stewardship report. If you raised $90,000 that evening, why are we not telling people who benefited and what we did? We help people just like you all do. But if I’m starting with my $25 gift the first year, you’re not gonna get $500 from me if you don’t tell me that you responsibly spent it and it went to the good. An invitation is not an assumption that you did it.

So the event actually isn’t always the thing. It’s the year-round. If we wanna go from transaction to relationship, if we wanna go from event attendee to donor, we also have the responsibility of saying, “Here’s what we did with your money, and we’re still grateful six months later.” Because let’s be honest, we don’t spend that money the next week. Most nonprofits take weeks, months, sometimes years to spend the money we’re raising. So I need to hear back within three to six months what you’ve done with the funds. And most events are not telling people, in this one night, “Here are the lives that you helped.” They don’t even bring it full circle with a speaker who benefited from last year’s event at next year’s event. So there’s a continuum, a journey that the donor is going on to deepen their engagement. But so many times, all we get is the recap of the numbers, not the recap of the impact.

Rachel Muir: A hundred percent. I couldn’t agree with you more. With events, staff are so wiped out, and we’ve got our out-of-office on. And all of us who went to the event are wearing this warm, bronzy, dewy glow, and we wanna know: did you reach your goal? Did it happen? What happens next? Or if I donated a live auction item, I wanna know how much you raised.

Lynn Wester: Rachel, I went in, and this organization was like, “Yeah, we raised this, and then our attendees and our raise keep going down every year.” I said, “Oh, well, did you tell folks, and when did you do it?” They said, “Well, we take the three days after the event off, and then we communicate with people.” I didn’t even have on pearls, but I was looking for some to clutch. I understand we’re all tired. You know that burning on the bottom of your foot that happens to some of us at a certain age when we do events now? Because events are a young person’s game, if you know what I mean. That bottom-of-the-foot burn is still there the next day, but that is the most important day for me to go into the office, do all of the feedback, have most of it prewritten, have it preplanned, and then jump in with the numbers and do the thank-yous. We don’t take days off after the event.

Samantha Swaim: Sorry. Can I just repeat what you said? Prewritten.

Lynn Wester: Oh, yes, ma’am.

Samantha Swaim: All of the event. Start there. Before you even start planning your event, write your thank-yous. Have those in place.

Lynn Wester: Like Samantha. With the invitation, we write the follow-up communication. We don’t write the invitation without the follow-up communications. Let’s make it easy on ourselves, so that as we take our ibuprofen and have our crispy Diet Cokes the day after, and actually eat food, we make it easy on ourselves, and then we drop in the numbers, because the numbers aren’t the story. And then we take the video that we showed the night before, and we send it. Here’s the interesting thing about your events: if you invite a thousand people and two hundred show up, that’s good engagement. That’s a good list. What are you doing for the eight hundred who couldn’t make it that evening or that afternoon? They too deserve an experience. You’re just gonna show a whole video to two hundred people? No. Those eight hundred, whose kid had a recital or who had a work meeting, didn’t go to the event because the timing and scheduling isn’t donor-centered. We pick a day and time, but they still deserve an experience just because I didn’t come. If you give me an experience, I will donate. Maybe I’m just not an event person, but that doesn’t mean I shouldn’t get the video and hear the stories. But you can’t take the next day off. Sorry. That’s a hard line I’ve drawn with people, and they’ve been a little surprised by it.

Samantha Swaim: And if you have used any tool to process gifts, you can send a note that night, with just a little tiny note. I usually pull the executive director aside. I have it prewritten, and it says, “Oh my gosh, you are amazing. Thank you so much.” And I ask them to add one line that simply says, “How are you feeling right now? I’m feeling amazing. Thank you so much.” And that is in their inbox by the time they are lying in bed scrolling their cell phones that night. It is two seconds, and it is so important, and it makes such a big difference.

Ann Fellman: I wanna shout out, too, to Lynn’s point, maybe people who weren’t able to make it. But even the people who attended the event but didn’t win the silent auction item or didn’t end up participating in the paddle raise, there’s still an opportunity to cultivate, because they invested enough to go to the event and hear the story. So there’s an engagement there. Sometimes that opportunity gets missed.

Rachel Muir: Love it. You guys keep your questions coming. Feel free to put them in the Q&A or in the chat. I have one, and I think this person is so passionate about their question that they asked it twice, and I know Samantha is raring to answer it. It’s a fully remote organization, and they get the need for in-person fundraising work, but they just can’t do it. They want more resources on how to have engaging and meaningful virtual events, how to initiate and cultivate donor relationships in a virtual setting, and how to create a sense of community among donors who may never see each other face to face.

Samantha Swaim: I love that. The very first thing I would say is, if you do ever have the opportunity to be face to face with a donor, with a board member, with your staff, do it, because that connection in person is, from a neuroscience and biochemistry point of view, transformative. But the fact that we do have technology has opened a lot of doors for us, especially because the pandemic taught everyone how to use Zoom.

The thing that I have found the most impactful is that we have a couple of organizations that host a monthly donor webinar. In that donor webinar, they always have a topic about what giving is impacting right now, what the need is, and a way for people to participate in every single webinar. Sometimes it’s the board chair, sometimes it’s the fundraiser, sometimes it’s the executive director, but it is a monthly hosted webinar for all of their donors. They invite big donors, small donors, and the transformation they have seen from that has been unbelievable. We’ve been on the back end supporting them, literally running the Zoom and making sure they’re seeing questions come in, and by the time we have ended that call, we’ve had things like giant real estate gifts and huge major donor gifts made, because people feel connected, informed, invested, a sense of belonging. So just this simple act of telling your stories, engaging people, and inviting them in can be transformative, and you can do that with the simplicity of a Zoom webinar.

For other virtual events, I am a big believer that anything we are doing in the room, there is an opportunity to broadcast out. When you have spent so much time putting on an event, your stories matter. You’re putting together incredible storytelling from that stage. Why should only three hundred people see that? Right now, every event I do is hybrid, and I find that as many people are joining virtually as are joining in person. We do it as low as $4,500 to add on the livestream and the hybrid. We give all of those home donors a chance to give. We just had an event on Sunday where our home audience gave $14,000. It’s worth including everyone and inviting everyone in, and we do not charge to watch the stream.

Lynn Wester: Yeah. And like Ann says, record it. I also think, from the standpoint of inclusivity, and sorry, I don’t wanna step on Rachel’s toes, time is the greatest gift our donors can give us, not their money. And not everyone has the time to join live at that certain time. If we wanna talk about inclusion, we also don’t live in the same time zones or on the same calendars. I work with overseas folks in Singapore, and I’m doing it at eight o’clock at night. So with hybrid events, it was very sad to me to see them drop off so quickly after people went back in person. And yet people like Team Rubicon are still doing chats with their CEOs. We’re encouraging people to at least livestream or record portions of the event, and then you can clip it. It makes it so much more inclusive, especially for people with other abilities or neurodivergence, to be able to consume content in their own way. I work with a shelter in Naples where you can actually not attend the event but still bid on all their silent auction items, watch the video simultaneously as it’s broadcast, and then watch a video of the speaker. That’s the way to give an experience to people who may not have the ability to be there in person for whatever reason. Like, “I don’t wanna put on Spanx on a Tuesday.” So there we go. Hard pants.

Samantha Swaim: Or I don’t want them showing up if they’re sick. Here’s a chance to join another way.

Lynn Wester: Yeah. Right. Hard pants.

Rachel D’Souza: No, thank you. And just to add to everything you’re saying, I have two Gen Z humans that I am in the process of raising right now, and if there is not a digital option for them to engage in anything they do, it’s “Why, Mom? What is this?” So I do think there is the yes, we wanna be in person, Samantha, to your point, and it feels good. Things in our brain happen, and hormones, and we smell each other, and we’re happy, and yay. And we also know that the world is shrinking. In the world shrinking, our prospect pipeline is now more enormous than we could ever have imagined. Why would we not make it easy for people to learn about us and support the work we are doing? If we can livestream it, we’re doing it for free.

We’ve also had clients who have put together a little virtual participant basket. You don’t have to take that, but you might get a little wine and cheese box or a little raffle ticket. They’ve done some engagement where, for all the packets they sent out, someone got a golden ticket, and that person got fast-tracked in the live auction. There are ways that we can engage people that don’t take away from how we’re experiencing things in the room but allow us to grow our own pipeline by simply being available to the people who are curious about us. There may have been a lessening in hybrid events, but I do think that younger folks are going to start to tell us that that is something they want and expect, because it’s what they’re experiencing in every other aspect of their lives right now. It would be very foolish for nonprofits to leave that in pandemic times.

Rachel Muir: Yes. Thank you so much, Rachel. That was beautiful, and I agree with you a hundred percent. Someone asked about these events, and I was just doing a webinar before this webinar, talking about behind-the-scenes events. I’m a monthly donor to a conservation organization, and for monthly donors they did a special Q&A with their conservation team, with their marine biologists. And it’s like, yeah, I wanna meet with these people and learn from these people and let them bring a friend. Let’s get some other people in there. It’s free for them to bring a friend.

I’ve got so many more questions coming in, and I know that monthly giving is something that both Rachel and Lynn really lit up about, talking about it at events. I also want to mention that one of Lynn’s favorite topics was asked in the Q&A, a question about whether we can touch on the subject of donor surveys. This person said, “I’ve heard this mentioned as something the board would expect in the next year, but I’m not familiar with the process.” So I’ll let you ladies decide, Lynn and Rachel, if you wanna tackle monthly giving or both.

Rachel D’Souza: Can I tell a horror story? Is that okay? This actually happened to me personally. Years ago, probably in my late twenties, I was invited to a fundraising luncheon for an organization that focused on a particular disease. It was beautifully done. It was so inspiring. And I thought to myself, oh my gosh, is little baby twenty-something Rachel going to make her first major gift? I think I’d been working in the sector maybe for a year. I think I was still in grad school. So I bravely raised my paddle, thinking to myself, I can make this gift if they let me pay in monthly installments. I raise my paddle. I’m so excited. I’ve done the math. I go to check out at the end, and this person is just looking at me like, “We can’t do that. We can’t take your $1,000 pledge monthly, can we? I need to ask someone. I need to get some more information.”

I’m sitting here thinking to myself, why is my $1,000 less valuable if I pay it out over a year than someone else’s $1,000 that can write this check at the same time in this event? They made it incredibly hard for me to be generous after being shared with, after feeling moved to give, and they actually couldn’t take my contribution that way. If I wanted to set something up, I could go online and do it. So don’t do that. That’s my one thing. I want you to make it easy for your event participants to give. There are gonna be people who wanna be generous with you, and it’s not gonna fit into what your director of operations wants to hear or your finance manager wants to hear. And let’s not even talk about the PayPal and Venmo and Cash App donations at this point. Please, please make it easy for people who are literally writing the check. Please let us give you our money. Because I’ll be honest with you, that was when I was probably twenty-eight or twenty-nine. I have not written another check to this organization. I get their emails. I pay attention to things. I still care, but I don’t feel compelled to support them with my resources. Alright. Lynn, did I just break your heart?

Lynn Wester: You did, but it reminded me of my monthly gift to my alma mater. I’ve given for a long time, and I tried to increase it online and wasn’t able to, because they don’t have the systems for that. So I called the number suggested on the website, and I said, “Hi, I’m a donor, and I’d like to increase my monthly gift.” And the woman said, “Why do you wanna do that?” It wasn’t a hopeful thing, because she was a gift processor, and she didn’t wanna have to cancel the gift in the system and rebook a new one, because it caused her a lot of work. She would appreciate it if I could just keep it the same.

Rachel Muir: Oh my god.

Lynn Wester: So I did. I granted her wish. And I can’t express enough that if we continue to judge people based on the amount of money they give to our organizations, then we are the dregs of society.

Rachel D’Souza: And we don’t deserve it.

Lynn Wester: We do not deserve it. Well, Rachel, to your point, I spend my days teaching people to thank donors. In rooms full of people, there’s always someone who says, “You say to split the receipt and the thank-you, or to thank donors seven times, but you do realize that would cost a stamp. I can’t imagine justifying sending two letters to a donor. Where are we gonna get the money to thank donors or send them communications?” I’m like, then you don’t deserve their gift. If you cannot live a life of gratitude, then you don’t deserve these donors. I’m gonna hard-line it, and I’m big on centering in community and centering in inclusion. However, I mean inclusion for the people who are generous to your organization regardless of the amount.

So here’s why you thank every gift. I was working with Cook Children’s Hospital in Fort Worth, Texas, and I love them. They received a gift of $3 and some change from a young man named Alex, and he wrote a note that said, “This is for the kids.” And they were like, “Should we receipt this? Should he go through the welcome donor series?” And I was like, you bet he should. We treated him special. They have a Child Life program with therapy dogs, so we put some stickers in there. A couple of weeks later, they got a letter with a $100,000 check in it from Alex’s mom, because Alex had taken his piggy bank for his birthday that year, broken it open, and sent it to ten charities in the area. We were the only one that responded and treated him like a donor and a human being and a generous human being, and told him he had done a good thing. So his mother wanted to reward us for doing the good thing with $100,000. I don’t know. It might be worth the 78-cent stamp to thank Alex. But also I wanna raise generations of generous people.

We must reward all generosity, whether it’s a penny, well, we don’t have pennies anymore, a nickel, a dime, a quarter. Anybody being generous, I want to encourage, because forty percent of Americans aren’t generous, and those are the folks I wanna hone in on. So the idea that we would say to you, Rachel, that your gift at $100 a month, which is actually $1,200, but hey, math is hard, is not as welcome as a $1,000 gift, that’s just not the world I wanna live in. That’s what I teach, and it’s been radical for a while, until now people are like, “Oh, okay.” If somebody is generous, you just never know what kind of situation they’re in. So I’m gonna encourage that generosity at every turn, whether they give at an event or however they do it. It’s generosity. That’s why I don’t even use the term philanthropy anymore. I use generosity, because everyone can be generous, and because we also know that women, people who identify as female in the United States, actually make 76 percent of the giving decisions in the United States, either solo or jointly with their partner. That’s from the Lilly Family School of Philanthropy. So we know that women are making giving decisions, but oftentimes they’re overlooked in the household, when direct mail is still addressing the male in the household. So I wanna encourage generosity, and I wanna encourage inclusive generosity, not just generosity that worships money.

Rachel Muir: Preach.

Lynn Wester: Okay. Let’s go to church, girl.

Rachel Muir: I love it. Thank you so much. This is an interesting question for Sam. What are your thoughts about the paddle raise being before, in the middle of, or after the live auction? That is, giving a chance for those to give before the paddle raise and then bid on live items, or after the live auction, so those who didn’t give have the opportunity to give.

Samantha Swaim: Some of it just depends on how many live auction items you have. Ultimately, what we’re trying to do is build energy and momentum toward that big fundraising ask. If you have too many live auction items, you tip over to the other side of the arc, where people are losing energy and momentum. If you have one or two, it’s a great warm-up, because it actually gets the paddle in people’s hands. It teaches them the paddle raise action. People see it happening. They understand what to do, that that signifies giving. I love having that. It also gives your auctioneer an opportunity to be on the stage, get connected to your audience, make eye contact, and start to see who’s engaged and who’s giving. Those are all helpful as a warm-up to your paddle raise.

But if you end up having six or seven auction packages and then your paddle raise, you’ve moved your giving into the back end of the energy, and you want that giving at the height of the energy. So I will often put a couple of live auction items first and then the rest of the live auction after. I’ll split the live auction around the paddle raise. Or if I’m in a hybrid format, like I was this past week, we will hold the live auction to the very end and make it only for the in-person audience, because there’s a one-minute time delay. You don’t need to broadcast your cocktail hour, when you’re socializing. You also don’t need to broadcast something people can’t participate in.

Rachel Muir: Love that. Lynn, you and Rachel talked a little bit about monthly giving and your passion for it. You mentioned it a few times in the chat. Is there anything you wanna add to encourage people to think about asking for monthly giving at events?

Lynn Wester: I think it should be included. I’m shocked at how many events don’t actually have a paddle raise for monthly giving at any scalable amount. I also think your auctioneer, if they’re doing a great job, will mention, “This is a $5,000 paddle raise, which is X monthly.” Because I don’t know about y’all, but I don’t pay my mortgage yearly. We need to break it down. If you ask me for $1,000, I’m gonna say no. But if you ask me for $100 a month, I’m gonna say yes, no matter what stage of life I’m in, because that’s how I manage my finances.

Rachel D’Souza: I will also offer that I actually just got to participate in an event that was specifically for monthly donor acquisition. It was a smaller reception. I think they had 150 people there. But it was people that you don’t see at trivia nights and you don’t see at galas. They brought in a completely new set of people and did the same steps. We had a networking reception, and then we had some speakers. And then we watched, my son actually spoke at this event, it was very adorable. And then they made their ask. They had the QR code up there, and they said, “This is what your monthly gift means over the course of time.” They were still able to talk about impact, and then, Lynn, to your point, by the time I made it home that night, I already had a clip of my cute child’s face in my inbox and a reminder of all these different giving levels and what they meant, not just money for the organization but also that you get to be a part of this wonderful community of people. And here are the other things that the Sunlight and Soil group can expect from us year-round. Here’s the newsletter you get. Here’s the day we invite all of you out to come plant the vegetable garden with the kids at the school. Here are all these things we do, and you get to be a part of it because you joined us as a monthly donor. I think that when we make it easy for people to connect and give, they get to be a part of things in ways that we might not even know when we started out, and now we have things to build on.

Rachel Muir: I love that. I know that Ann is gonna put up a poll to invite people to get follow-up information from Samantha, from Rachel, from Lynn, from myself. Ann, are you also doing an Uber Eats giveaway today?

Ann Fellman: No. Not today. We’re skipping it, but I’m gonna bring it in next quarter. Fun. We like to layer in some fun here too, right? Life’s too short not to have fun.

Lynn Wester: We have to have fun. Work hard and play harder.

Rachel Muir: Lynn, do you wanna close us out by answering a question that someone asked? I know how passionate you are about reporting back to donors. How would you recommend reporting back to donors in a field where results can sometimes take years to come to fruition? This person says, “I’m in the anti-trafficking space, and sometimes all we can report on is the amount of time we spent helping a client, and the win doesn’t come for a couple of years afterward.”

Lynn Wester: Absolutely. I work with a shelter that has a human trafficking shelter specifically for people who’ve been trafficked, and I work in the university world, where we do research and the research may not have results for decades. So the impact is talking about the people who do the work. I really love talking to them and telling their story. Why do you work with victims of human trafficking? Why do you work in research? You don’t need an outcome, but what have you learned? What have you learned from some of the people you work with who, unfortunately, have been trafficked? What do you wish people knew about it? So you ask deep questions. Again, curiosity. I’m a big fan of curiosity. It doesn’t have to be “our work did this, and here was the outcome.” An outcome is an incremental learning. An outcome is “I have a new story to tell.” An outcome is “here’s what’s changed in human trafficking in the last year and a half,” because it has changed dramatically since January of last year. For example, our census count at the shelter went way down when ICE immigration activities went way up. So we had to find more creative ways to reach out to members of trafficked communities. One of the ways we did that was through emery boards, nail files. We have nail files in places where people can secretly take them, and they have some contact details on them that are a little bit hidden, because you can’t carry around a pamphlet about human trafficking if you’re being trafficked. That’s a result of the work. And I think the other thing is remembering to center that this work is made possible not just by the community but by the donors who are generous. It’s not us at the organizations who are the heroes, and I’m not suggesting hero worship. What I’m suggesting instead is acknowledging that there are human beings who are generous who make these things possible.

Rachel Muir: You guys have all been so amazing, and I’m so grateful to you. Max wants to say thank you so much, everybody. We love getting to spend our day with you. Happy Friday eve. Thank you, Lynn. Thank you, Ann. Thank you, Rachel. Thank you, Samantha. It’s always a gift to get to spend time with you brilliant ladies. Thank you for all the brilliance you shared today.

Samantha Swaim: Thank you for having us.

Rachel D’Souza: Thanks, everybody.

Ann Fellman: Have a great day.

Lynn Wester: Thanks.

Rachel D’Souza: Bye.