Welcome, everyone. The Council for Advancement and Support of Education is pleased to present this online webinar. Lessons Learned about the Annual Fund during a World Wide Crisis. My name is Anne Weller and it's my pleasure to introduce you to our speaker for today. Anthony Alonzo, President. Catapult Fundraising Inc is one of the nation's leading fundraising consultants with over three decades of expertise in direct marketing and telephone raising. Anthony's out-of-the-box thinking, visionary style and passion for success has led him to raise close to $1,000,000,000 for his clients over the past ten years. Prior to co-founding Catapult fundraising, Anthony served as the founder and president of Advantage, PLUS Consulting for over 20 years. Anthony has served on the boards of AFP, New Jersey, the Giving Institute, giving USA, the RFP Foundation for Philanthropy, and was a founding member of the RFP Industry Partners Council. He currently serves as the president of AFP Las Vegas Chapter. Welcome, Anthony. Thank you and it's my pleasure to be here and I thank you for having me. And I encourage everybody to join the conversation. So that intro was lovely. You know, I've been I was asked by Anne whether I've done this webinar before and I over the last year, I've done a variation of this webinar many times, but of course it changes almost almost certainly last year, almost on a week to week basis. We say if we lived through last year, every quarter seemed like a couple of years. So it's evolving as we go through this. But I always start off with this quote from Harvey macKinnon, who was a Canadian fundraiser. For those of you who don't know Harvey, very successful, there are direct marketing guys of Canada. And he said donor loyalty is not about the donor being loyal to you. It's about you being loyal to the donor. And he said this not during this pandemic, but 15 or so years ago I heard him speak. And this was something that he said. And when this pandemic kind of rolled around last March and and we were all hit with the shutdowns, it came to mind right away, because I work with clients all across the United States. And, you know, most of the university clients, although we do have social service agencies and health care, and the first thing that everyone wanted to do is hit the pause button and talk about how our our alumni aren't going to want to hear from us right now. They're not going to be happy about us calling them. We should stop fundraising. And this quote came to me because I believe that being loyal to the donor is letting the donor make that decision. And, you know, one of the things we found as we've gone through this is that it's critical to to let the donor make those decisions. And we say we get to get up every day. And what we do is having an impact on people's lives, you know, where we're raising money that's very needed for education, it's needed for students, it's needed in health care, it's needed in a lot of different areas. Most people don't have that advantage. We did during this pandemic, what we do has an impact every single day of people's lives, and we're blessed to be doing that. And so it's important that we let the donors make those decisions rather than us make the decisions for them. And I'll be talking about donor loyalty and how to be loyal to the donor as we go through this presentation. You know, yesterday's fundraising plan is out the window. That's the big lesson that was learned from this. And I think at this point, we've all kind of figured that out. It was time to be nimble in our fundraising with rapid changes. Every single day, some states more than others. But every week we had to kind of be nimble and change. It's important than ever. It's more important than ever before to believe in our own mission and vision. If we don't, no one else will. Again, you know, we work in a field where we get to impact people's lives daily. So we've got to believe that and believe in the mission. We have to be creative with short term needs identified in short term financial fundraising and, you know, for university clients. That was something that we quickly pivoted from the typical annual fund solicitation to. That's what this annual fund is all about. You know, the annual funds that is is here. So if there's emergencies like this, we stand ready to help the students, whether it be through emergency student financial loans, whether it be through laptops, any of the things that many universities did to help students. I have a college age daughter at Claremont McKenna. So I understand some of the challenges that went on with Claremont, which was one of her schools, and all of our other clients that we work with as well. And the Internet technology, our friends, you know, we didn't have any of those during the Great Depression, and yet we doubled philanthropy during that time. So some of the myths that are being dispelled during the pandemic, you know, one of the first things I heard with was donors don't want to hear from us right now. And that I mean, that's just not not the case. If we have a valid reason to go to the donors to thank them, to steward them, ask them how they're doing. It's part of that donor loyalty. You know, donors had no problems being called. We called thousands and thousands of prospects for our clients, our university clients in particular, and the number of folks who did not want to hear from the institution did not change pre and post pandemic. In other words, those who said I don't want to be called remained exactly the same. So the pandemic didn't shift that at all. Donors will get angry if we solicit, but again, we didn't find that to be the case as we went through and called folks after the pandemic for our clients, we found that the number of people that were angry at being solicited or being solicited by phone was exactly the same as it was before the pandemic. So it didn't shift. And I was like to say that, you know, our fundraising is is for those people believe in our cause. And that's your donors. And your donors are going to understand that what we do is just as important during the pandemic as it was before the pandemic. I think that's important for us to keep in mind every day as we get up and go to work. People hate being bothered with phone calls. This is one that I've not just been hearing during the pandemic, but I've been hearing for years now. And what people hate being bothered with is the way as fundraisers we've been doing telephone raising lately, and that is over the last 10 to 15 years, the emphasis has been on getting through as many people as quickly as possible, using automated dialers to make phone calls, not personalizing the way we're making those phone calls, not having conversations with our donors. We're not selling vacuum cleaners. We're building relationships. And so it's important that the way we do our calls, that we're doing that building of relationships, you know, I you know, I when I'm doing this live, usually I'm asking folks, how many of you still in marketing in your day to day fundraising activities? And more and more, we're getting less and less people, even in the university market or claiming that they use any kind of telemarketing. And usually that's where I turn to the audience and I say the rest of you are lying. When two or three people raise their hand and say that they did. Because the truth of the matter is that in everything we do in fundraising every single day, we are using some sort of telemarketing, whether we're calling a donor to set a Zoom appointment or to set a telephone call or face to face visit, or we're calling a donor to thank them or steward them or build a relationship with them. We are using telemarketing, so it's not a matter of whether we're using the phone. It's a matter of how we're using the phone, how we're using the phone as the important thing. And as I get through this presentation, I'll talk about some techniques on how we can really start using fundraising in an effective way again, rather than try to get to the masses quickly as possible. They're very inexpensive ways now, digitally through email, through through through mail, where you can get to a large group of prospects quickly and solicit that phone is not one of those phones should be reserved for calling the right people. And we'll talk about who those people are and building relationships with them. Charitable giving declines during times of crisis. Again, something I heard over and over again over the last year and a half. And if you look statistically and mentioned that I sat on the board of Giving Institute and giving you, I say, what's up? Giving you? I say if you look statistically over time, giving has now gone down in this country. When the tax code has changed for obvious reasons, major donors are affected by tax code change. If you look at crisis is in the past, giving has actually gone up. So, I mean, the most recent being 911, for example, after 911, the expectation was that giving would go down and giving actually went up. What happens during those crises is usually is that donor loyalties shift because the nonprofits hit the pause button happened after 911. We saw giving go up, but it went to different organizations and people started shifting their giving to other organizations that were asking during that time. So it's critical, obviously, that we not stop asking. You know, one of the things that I told my clients early on is the sure wish or way to make sure this pandemic affects your fundraising is to stop fundraising. And we had clients that hit the pause button back in March of last year and decided to start start up again in September, October. By then it was still late. They're giving year over year went down significantly because they were afraid of going out to the donors and having conversations with the donors, clients who were up and running within three weeks of that shutdown. And we had quite a bit of that actually saw huge gains year over year. We reframed their case. We reworked the case. We talked about student loans. We talked about, you know, how the annual fund was helping students during this crisis and giving went up that we had one client that had a 36% increase year over year. We saw a lot of that. That happens to be the highest one, but we saw a lot of increases like that. Donors will not give during the crisis because of their financial uncertainty. Again, something that we were hearing all the time from from clients as we move through this pandemic and even boards that I met with. And, you know, if you look statistically at this at this pandemic and who's been affected, the folks at the very high end have actually fared better during this pandemic than they were before. The folks in the upper and middle class pretty much remain the same. It's the folks at the bottom end that were really impacted by this crisis. My argument always is that those are the people who need our help the most. Those are the folks that need us to continue to raise money. Those are the folks that need the scholarships you provide. And so it's important that we keep that in mind, that those are the folks that were hurt during this pandemic. And so part of that donor loyalty is letting the donor decide whether they want to continue to give and reaching out to them and calling them and sending them emails and all of the solicitation tools that you've normally used. I usually quote fidelity surveys. There was a lot of surveys done during the pandemic, but Fidelity had some great questions and an immense response to their surveys. One of the questions they asked was How will COVID 19 impact charitable giving? 25% of donors said they planned to increase their giving. 54% of donors said they planned to maintain their current giving levels. So that's huge, you know, and again, defies some of the myths that we were hearing during the pandemic. So what do we do now? And, you know, one of the things we heard often was, you know, how is COVID impacting, you know, the nonprofit, the educational institution? And again, fidelity surveys that are survey 82 said delivery of programs and services, 79% said were fundraising. And then 79% with engaging volunteers. I hope my presentation today helps in at least the last two of those with fundraising and and ideas on how to raise additional funds and also with engaging volunteers. But number one is to develop a plan and keep your board engaged. You know, I've said time and time when I speak on this topic that if we don't keep the board engaged and tell the board what we're doing and what the plan is, they'll tell us what we should be doing. And as we all know, we have board members in place for a lot of different reasons. Maybe they're a lawyer and have that expertise or or they're, you know, alumni that has a lot of connections, but they're not fundraisers. And so it's incumbent on us to make sure that we're developing a plan and letting the board know what it is that we're going to do and keeping them engaged in that plan and keeping them updated. And once we've got that plan, we want to share it with the donors. Now, one of the things that we asked our clients to do is send out quarterly emails to their donors telling them exactly what it is they're doing and how their their contributions are impact doing what is being done right now. And so it wasn't a solicitation piece as much as a stewardship and cultivation piece, but it generated revenue every time they sent it out, even though it was a thank you piece. And it was a way to keep the donors informed, to be loyal to the donors and let them know how you're using their gifts. And I think by now we've all figured number three out, but do not stop fundraising. As I said earlier, it's a sure way to make sure that the pandemic has an impact on your fundraising. So what's working right now? Again, from Fidelity surveys, one of the things that we've learned from their surveys is the younger generation plan to increase their donations in response to COVID 19. 14% of baby boomers said they'd increased 25% of Gen X and 46% of millennials. And that's critical, especially for universities right now, because the young graduates are going to fall into those millennials and gen. And so it's important to keep those alumni engaged because they're the future, obviously, of of of the fundraising program at your university. One of the things that usually millennials and Z Gen say when when they talk about fundraising is that they want to know how the nonprofit, how the institution is affecting the community, society and the world at large. And so when you're drafting letters to them, when you're sending out solicitations, make sure that you've got that in mind, that you want to talk about the impact that you're having, the impact that you're having on the community as an educational institution. It might be the scholarships that you're providing to needy students. But they want a story of impact. So one of the questions I'm often asked when I do this presentation is why I've got a whole section here on legacy giving in an annual fund presentation. And large part it's because it's more important now than ever. One of the things that we've seen during this pandemic is an increase, a significant increase in the number of folks who are drafting their first will. We've also seen a significant decrease in the age where someone is drafting their personal that's now somewhere around 46 years old when someone drops their first will. So it's no longer just for older folks, younger folks who are creating their their wealth. And there's a proliferation of websites and places where people could draft their was online. And people are flocking to those during the pandemic during crisis like this. People started thinking about their own mortality. One of the interesting numbers out of that is that 55% of folks who write their first will are leaving a nonprofit in their will the very first time they draft it. Well, and that's why it's so critical, because it's important that we be asking those people to give and consider leaving your educational institution in their will. When they do that, one of the things that we see over and over again is they're giving their lifetime giving, annual giving, capital giving tends to go up 6 to 7 times their previous giving when they commit to a legacy gift. That's why it's important to the annual book because of the impact that it has on your annual fund. Once they've become a legacy giver, and I know a lot of smaller institutions and education institutions, you know, don't have a full time plan giving director, don't have the ability to go out and reach everybody for a legacy gift. But it's critical that you do. The vast majority of folks who say that not considered a legacy gift have said it's because they've never been asked. And the simplest gift to give through legacy is a is a bequest. And you don't need to know by giving to ask. But it's a simple bequest. And that's 80 to 90% of the gifts that are given. And so one of the things that we've done successfully over the years for clients is we've actually asked the family for planned gifts. And it's amazing how many folks are willing to have that conversation and make a legacy commitment if they're asked. Face time in Zoom are great methods for visits right now. I think by now we've all kind of figured that out. But one of the things that we recommend that our university clients do right away is take advantage of the Zoom meetings that that are available right now for mid-level donors, the folks who normally are not on your radar. You've got the folks that are already on your radar that you would normally go visit. And obviously you're doing Zoom visits with them. But we're missing an opportunity in a world that's now become virtual and zoom to really connect with that mid-level donor that you just haven't had the time to get to or because you can't visit those folks. This was a unique opportunity to visit them. So we started quickly making appointments for clients, calling those mid-level donors and setting up Zoom appointments for clients so that they can have conversations with these folks, thank them, find out how they were doing during the pandemic, and and ask for a gift if it was appropriate during that that first Zoom visit. The end result has been that a lot of those folks have moved in to becoming major gifts or are now being stewarded to become major gift prospects from those calls. Again, a unique opportunity that we wouldn't have had pre-pandemic because Zoom wasn't the norm for these kind of visits. You got to frame your case around the current crisis and why, and beginning is more important now than ever. First thing we did was we changed all the letters. We changed all the prequel materials, all the social media that we were doing for clients, and really framed it around how the university or how the college was helping students during this crisis, the impact that they were having on students during this crisis, and why it was so important to support Retrace have gone up through the roof during this crisis with donors at home. One of the things we've seen now over the course of the last year is that retreats have gone up 10% over the previous years. So people are answering the phones more. They're picking up the phone. A large portion of the country still working from home. And that may be why they're picking up the phone, but they aren't picking up the phone at a much higher pace. And one of the things actually, even if you're not doing a mass telephone fundraising appeal, one of the things we recommended to all of our clients during the pandemic is we call that five, five by ten. And the idea was to call five donors by 10 a.m. every single morning and find out how they were doing through the pandemic and thank them for their giving. And so by the end of the week, you'd call 25 donors. Even if you can't call five, I said, call three by ten, but try to get on the phones by 10 a.m. with 3 to 5 donors every single day. Again, the end result of that work was that our clients that are receiving 20, 25,000, 50,001 case $100,000 check from folks that they were just calling to think to find out how they were doing. It was a stewardship call. One of the interesting side benefits of this, which I didn't design that way when I started recommending the five by ten was clients started coming to me and saying, you know, this is great because, you know, not only are we raising money and reaching out to donors, but I'm having a mission moment every single day because I'm reaching out to donors and they're telling me why it is they give back and why it's so important to them. So it's reminded me as to why I do what I do. And so excuse me, that was a side benefit of these calls and something that, you know, we're certainly encouraging clients to continue, you know, post-pandemic or as the pandemic winds down because of all the benefits that it had for our clients, personalized emails ring less voicemail and text messaging for cultivations, less session. I'm not a big fan of text messaging. I'm going to start with text messaging for solicitation simply because I don't think it's very personalized. And I think, you know, as fundraise, there's one of the things when I started my firm almost 30 years ago now, it was predominantly that mail and phone. And now, of course, we're doing social media. We're doing emails, etc.. But back then it was predominantly male on phone. The question I ask myself as a fund raiser was if this was a face to face solicitation, what would we do? And then how do we use the mass instruments of Ballot Bowl to duplicate that process? And so I think with everything we do, we should be asking ourselves, what would we do if this was face to face and how do we achieve that personalization? Text doesn't really do that. Text is a great a great tool for thanking donors, providing them with a link back to your site. If you've got some special messaging or to be used for giving their campaigns, it's a great tool for that. But for regular solicitations, it's very it's not a very personalized methodology. And I think that using it is not is part of not being loyal to that donor ring. This voicemail has become a great and effective, ineffective, I'm sorry, effective and inexpensive tool to use in the arsenal right now. For those of you who are not familiar with it, Ringo's voicemail allows you to drop a voicemail in the in the inbox of someone's phone without the phone ringing, and it's relatively inexpensive. It's pennies to do. We've been doing it for clients thank you's typically from students, students who have benefited from scholarships, students who have benefited from alumni giving, actually thanking the donor. And so we drop those voicemails right on into people's phones without the phone ringing. And it's very personalized. It sounds like it's coming from a student. It shouldn't be very scripted. It should sound like you're normally speaking. You could have the president of the university do it. You can have the VP. For the moment, I like using a student to do it because in a lot of cases the students are benefiting from the annual fund the most. And so having a student make that connection I think is great. And then personalized emails, which I think by now we're all doing in terms of Dear John or Jane. But what we're not doing is finding out what the interest of the donor is and then making sure that we're sending them emails that speak to that. So perhaps the person is a graduate of the business school. Well, the messaging in that email should be about the business school. It should tell the story about the business school and how the business school is doing, perhaps the nursing grad. So not all emails should be generic. So when I talk about personalized emails, I'm not talking about just the name or the assignment. I'm talking about personalizing the email to something that's going to be of interest to that donor that a lot. And so it could be, you know, that you have a story about what was going on in the seventies, if it was a seven years grant and how the university is still the same, the values are still the same, even though, you know, the faces may have changed and so those are the kind of stories you want to tell. And I like those stories to go out from alumni. I like an alumni volunteer to tell the story or multiple volunteers to tell that story because it's coming from the donor perspective. That way they could speak as to why they give back, how the institution changed their life, how going to school at night, let's say, changed their life in their career. You know, how getting a degree from X, Y, Z University impacted their life. That's a very powerful story. And it's much more basil necessarily, and if it's coming from the institutional perspective. So I like those any emails, letters, even social media posts that are put out to really come from a donor. It gives you an opportunity to engage volunteers and ask them to tell their story and engage donors and cultivate donors by asking them whether they'd be willing to share their stories. And segmentation is key to that, because going back to what I said about what would you do if this faced faceless station, in an ideal world you'd have a volunteer come out, make the ask with you. I know that doesn't always happen because of timing and schedules, but that's the ideal solicitation methodology for a face to face. You can do the same thing using mail using email. Have a volunteer, make that ask rather than these traditional perspective making matters because it's a much more powerful story to tell. So some ideas for fundraising during the crisis. And one of the things that's worked real well is virtual events and meetings with donors. You know, we encouraged our our clients to invite influential donors that are in their database. Perhaps you have somebody who's a doctor or somebody who's a financial planner who's a donor. The same thing you're doing here in a webinar I suggested to clients they provide to their donors as a as a service, as loyalty to that. And so have alumni who come in and speak about the pandemic, have someone come in and speak about financial planning and invite donors to these free webinars. And again, what we found is that people were coming on, they were listening to the guest speakers and they're making gifts after that, you could do donor recognition events. You know, you don't have to wait a year to have a donor recognition event. You could do it now quarterly with these webinars and Zoom meetings that are out there now, webinars about your organization and the impact it makes about your educational institution and the impact that it makes. And one of the things again we recommended is that once a month the organizations we work with do a webinar that what a PowerPoint that talks about the impact that they've had over the last month and what they've been doing, and they started getting people signing up for this, that a client called me early on and said, I've got eight donors that are signed up for this, should I do it anyway? And my response was, well, you know, owning a business by people willing to listen to me speak, I would be there, right? So I would recommend you do it. So she went ahead and did it and did the webinar and talked about the impact that they were making and what they were doing. And after that call, she ended up getting a $25,000 gift. So needless to say, she called me back and said it was well worth doing. And we've seen that across the board with different institutions where they've done this. They've taken advantage of this virtual world and started doing these type of webinars to talk about impact virtual town halls and crowdfunding campaign. Politicians have been doing these for years. It's where folks are called and told, you know, they're they're called on Tuesday and told on Thursday at 7:00 the president of the university will be speaking and give you an opportunity to ask questions. Now, please take the call at seven on Thursday and then everybody's called back at 7:00 on Thursday. And then the president of the university or the VP for Development or whatever you want to put in there, is speaking about the priorities, speaking about what it is that you're doing. And the folks on the call are able to ask questions by pressing a button on their phone. And then a screener comes on and they they ask the question. The question is put in front of the screen of whoever's speaking on your behalf, and they're able to say, you know, I see John from Milwaukee has a question and the screener will open that line. And John from Milwaukee will get live with your president and ask the question. And so politicians have been using this for years, for years to do their virtual town halls. Universities have started doing this over the course of the pandemic. This is a great opportunity to reach out to the masses and have conversations with them. It's almost like taking the feasibility study and expanding it. One of the things that we can do with those is questions can be asked of prospects like, you know, our top three funding priorities this year are X, Y and Z. You know, press one. If you think X is the most important, press one, press two. If you think Y is the most important and press three if you're busiest, most important, and people press one, two or three on their phone and that data will show up live to whoever the speaker is. So speaker could not talk about that says 60% of you think that y should be our priority. Let's talk a little bit more about that. But more importantly, all those questions that you could frame within that virtual town hall are our is data that can be captured. So when you're doing personalized emails, letters in the future, you know exactly what that donor cares about. And you're able to then address those areas that they care about social media retargeting for most of it for for those of you who are not doing that, you know, those are those ads that you see when you go to a website, you then go on your social media page and you'll see an ad for a website that you've visited that's being done through social media retargeting, the pixel that's put on a website and then an ad will appear on people's social media or anywhere they log on to with social media. So if they play words with friends, for example, and they've logged in through Facebook, they'll see an ad, you know, those companies charge for those ads based on click through or back to your site. They don't charge for impressions. In other words, people scrolling through and seeing your ad, they only charge for people who go back to your site. And so it's a it's a great opportunity, especially when people are sitting at home and going through their social media to make sure that you're doing that social media retargeting right now. Because if someone went to your site and intended to make a gift but then quite finished, they'll then see an ad right on, right on social media, they could click through and finish making that gift using social media influencers start campaigns. You know, one of the things we encourage our clients to do is look at their databases and see if they had anybody in their database that was a social media influencer and then send that person an email and ask them where they consider putting information about the university on their social media. You know, in encouraging people to get. And you know, what we found is that, you know, we got people in some cases, one particular case with over a million folks on social media that were following them, we actually put it out. We also got smaller social media influencers, but it really expands the reach to folks outside the alumni base and parent based and friend base that you already have. So it was an ability to really expand that reach. And I encourage my clients to make sure they weren't only reaching out to those influencers and asking them why they do that, but give them the exact verbiage you like to put out their picture that you'd like them to put out there, make it easy for them to do it. It's critical that you make it easy to create surveys for donors and prospects. That's a great opportunity now to find out what donors are thinking. You know, why they believe in your organization, why they give back. There's a lot of tools out there for doing this now from SurveyMonkey to others. But even within Outlook, if you use Outlook, there's now an ad and that allows you to create surveys and send them out to your list, merge in your list. And so it's a great opportunity to reach out email, texting and calling scratch strategies. And we'll talk a little bit more about that as I get through this. For all these things, the webinars, the virtual events, etc.. So this are virtual sponsors. You know, one of the things we encourage our clients is to go out, solicit virtual sponsors for these things that they were doing. It was amazing how many folks agreed to do it. We allowed in some cases for them to come on and introduce themselves and to a minute at the beginning of the presentation and then show their their logo. And they were thrilled with it. We were able to sell these virtual sponsorships, sometimes from from sponsors that we would normally not get because there were smaller sponsors who couldn't afford the other sponsorships that were being offered. You know, So we had sponsorships now at the 500,000 level and some of the small mom and pop shops were able to take advantage of that. And so it helped in that way as well. Have fun with social media. We've all been scrolling through our social media during this time and looked at things like, you know, share pictures and flood Facebook with pictures. We've all probably seen those of happy events or past events or places that you've visited. Well, I encourage clients to do the same thing. It's not just about having social media followers, but it's about engaging with those social media followers. And so one of the things we encourage our clients to do is go out and engage them by asking them, their donors and followers to post pictures that reminded them of the institution and of the university. It was amazing how much we found out in terms of what pictures they put out and all that and all the content that we were able to get from those pictures that went out. But it was a way to engage the donors and not just put information out. You know, we've all seen these surveys out there, Family Feud games and all these other games. But we encouraged our our clients to put these out to learn more about the donors, ask questions. You know, what what first prompted you to give in one word? You know, what's your fondest memory of the university? All those type of questions and let people play those games and interact with other folks who are following you. What was amazing about this is how much information we find out. You know, we always look at engagement scores with the universities that we look at, and now all the wealth ratings are out there. But some of the information that we found out through these things was that was amazing. And you can't find out through through some of those wealth ratings and engagement scores that are out there. So learning about your donors by using these kind of these kind of techniques and games was it was a lot of fun during the pandemic and it got people engaged. I know a lot of institutions don't have somebody who could put out content daily, but this is also a way to gauge volunteers at your volunteers engaged in this by assigning them each day, or even board members assign them each day to create content, send it to you so you can really get robust content going on your social media page. And one of our we have clients, all university clients all across the country, but here in Southern Nevada, the College of Southern Nevada put out a direct fundraising post. And what they did was they took a donor who would normally give and asked if they can if they can use their gift as a match this year. It was incredibly successful campaign and it spoke to the need for this student emergency fund. So we encouraged a lot of that as well. You know, with social media, make sure that you're telling donors stories. You know, take somebody who's made a legacy gift and ask them whether they be willing to share their story on social media. Take a donor who's given and asked them whether they'd be willing to share their story, share videos and pictures and stream live. You know, the more you do that, the more people will become engaged with your site. Post pictures of past events, and then encourage your your followers to post their own pictures of those events. Remembering those times, creating birthday fundraisers. You know, that's one of the things that we've encouraged over and over again of our clients is is to go out and send any. If you have a birthday, great, send it out for the birthday, you know, along with what a birthday wish for that donor or that alone. But if you don't on a quarterly basis, send out an email asking them to create a birthday fundraiser on their birthday. Again, not only send out that email it, send them the picture in the verbiage that you'd like them to put on for this birthday fundraiser. Make it easy for them to do this. We had one client, we asked to do this, and they sent out ten thousands of emails the first quarter that they did it and they they ended up getting 35 folks who created a birthday fundraiser and it generated $25,000. That's birthday fundraisers. And those are folks that go beyond your normal reach. Now, these are friends of friends who have given to the institution because of that birthday fundraiser that goes beyond the reach. And I've heard throughout, you know, this past year, we don't get those those names from Facebook. It's hard to get those names. You know, my response? You wouldn't have gotten those names any other way. They were not people who were going to normally give to you. But one of the things you can do is go back to the person who did the birthday fundraiser for you and ask them whether they share the names so you can send them a thank you personalized thank you know, some well some will, you know, give you that information create your own Facebook groups again a very effective tool right now to engage with donors is to create your own Facebook group with all belong to university go bad at fundraising or fundraising COVID groups. It's an opportunity for you to create, you know, a COVID related group for your parents, for your alumni, so they could communicate with each other. Then you can you can kind of moderate that monitor and see what's important to them, what it is that they're talking about during this time. I know one of the one of Claremont McKenna, oh, my daughter, the school my daughter goes to does this, and they've created a parents group. And it's just been incredible information that keeps me engaged with their Facebook page all the time and then create fun means. And why not just keep in mind that things are tough right now. And so not every post should be about giving. Every post should be serious. There should be some fun post that you're putting out. You know, even within our own company, I tell my marketing folks that I want at least two days a week for there to be something fun posted on our social media. And not just that you know, something about fundraising. Then the phone. You know, I always post this picture here of a phone because we have an opportunity now and that is that everyone is walking around with a computer in their pocket. And we didn't have that 20 some years ago. 30 years ago when I started, we had all those of yours, all this meme. I remember when you had a pager and you had a phone and nobody dared call your phone because it was down 15 minutes. They called your pager and you decided whether to call them back. Well, that's all changed now. People are walking around with a computer in their pocket where you can reach them, you know, by phone, through use of social media, through email, through text. You know, I'm often asked, well, which one should we use their responses? All we should be using all over and taking a look at which prospects, which alone are going to react better to each to each methodology and then continue to solicit those folks that way. So telephone solicitation, I talked about this earlier and I said, you know, it's become a bad word lately, a dirty word in this field. It's because we haven't been using this tool effectively for years. And now I believe it's time to get back to basics. And one of the things that's happened over the last ten, 15 years is there's been a proliferation of predictive dollars out there and companies that are using predictive dollars to make phone calls. And it's just not personalized. It's those calls you get where you go on and say hello three times before someone comes on and butchers their name. You know, you you wouldn't call your uncle Harry or your or your aunt and and have her say hello three times before you come on and butcher their names. Why would you do that with your donors? This is your family. And the idea is to get through as many people as quickly as possible. And that's just not the role of of telephone raising. A number one step for a successful call is prospect screening and research list review and segmentation. You know, I always tell prospective clients, look, if you're looking for someone to call a hundred thousand names in a month, we're the wrong firm for you. If you're looking to do that internally with your students, you're also making a mistake. What you should be looking at is who are the prospects you should be calling, you know, who are the prospects that are going to be receptive to that phone call and then build relationships with those people and not try to get through them as quickly as possible. But remember, you know, my last bullet on here, which is it's important to create a two way dialog with that. It's not telephone telemarketing, it's the fundraising that we're doing, and it's all about building relationships and going through a list as quickly as possible and asking somebody to consider making a $50 gift because it's what they did last year is just bad fundraising. So it's much better to take a look at who you should be calling in, calling and narrowing those people down and setting personalized task amounts for those people. And segments for those people so that you're talking to them about things that are be of interest and that it takes longer. It's more work, but it's also going to yield significantly higher average kids sizes and create a pipeline for major gifts, which ultimately is is what the job of the phone program should be, should be. If it's doing its job. It's not to get $50 gifts, but it's to create a pipeline. It's to create those mid-level donors that will eventually become your major gift prospects. Social Media Messaging. I always like to put out social media messaging ahead of any of the phoning that we do, just to let the donors know that are watching on social media that a phone call will follow and that we're reaching out to get their and their feedback and to thank them for their prior giving and engage them in a conversation about what's going on at their alma mater. Pre call letters from from volunteer peer solicitors. Again, it's become a lost art, sending out a pre call letter or email ahead of the phone call. And we believe that it's critical and, and always recommend it to clients because for a variety of reasons. Number one is it tells the story from a from a the volunteer perspective is why I give back. This is why this university changed my life. This is how it made an impact on my life. I remember when that's the story you want to tell with that letter. You also want to say in the letter, within the next few days, someone's going to be calling you. They're going to be asking you, you forget before the call. I don't want to share my thoughts with you about X, Y, Z University and why it's so important to get back. That should have a specific ask about it there that has come out should be based on previous giving. I know that there's a lot of tools out there right now for wealth screening and those are all great. But I always say just because someone has the ability to make $100,000 gift to you and the capacity doesn't mean they're going to want to give it to you. So it's critical that utility ask amounts and then you bring that donor on board and then upgrade them, then move them up the giving permit. So, I mean, this is where I usually lose my half my audience because I'm often asked, well, how long should that recall Letter B or email be? And, you know, my response is always every study that's been done by all direct marketers, whether it be in fundraising or those that that do direct marketing for sales, shows that the longer the letter, the better the results. And we've been testing this for 30 years and we find average gift sizes about 20 to 25% higher when it's a longer letter. And so I know that most fundraisers say, well, I've never read a long letter, and my response is always, thank God you're not your audience, because the the numbers speak for themselves. And I think you know what you usually have. And so the way I always try to explain is you have a group over here that's not going to get to you no matter what you do. You have a group that's going to give to you no matter what you send them. It's that group in the middle that you're trying to move with that letter. Right. And so that letter should really tell a story from the donors perspective. It should tell to provide the case for support. It should say the impact that their gift is having and it should have a specific ask them out of their have. You could do that in one page. You're a much better writer than me. But I always like to say that the letter or the email should be as long as it needs to be to convey those thoughts that haven't been said. It should be short, punchy paragraphs that tell a story not longer along with the paragraphs. And I'm not a fan of putting bullets in letters, but I always say bullets are something you send to people you don't like. If you were to write a letter to one of your family members, you wouldn't say, Let me tell you how my vacation went. And then put bullets in that letter. Why would you do that with your donors? You tell them a story, and that's what we should be doing with those letters. So you want to make sure that the callers are well-trained and educated. And I always say it's all about the caller, whether you're doing it in house, using your students, you know, or you're using a firm like ours to do the calling, you want to make sure that the callers are not just trained. You can train somebody on just about anything. You want those callers to be educated. You want them to understand your mission, your case for support, and be able to have conversations and not just read a script. At the end of the day, it's all about the callers. And so if you're using an outside firm, you need to make sure you're engaging with those callers that you're training those callers along with the with the with whoever it is that you're using, that you're monitoring those callers remotely. You know, that capability exists. But every firm that's doing this right now and you should be engaging in that and listening to those calls and providing constant education, You and one of the things we found is that the more mature and I used to call all that I got old, but the more mature callers tend to be much better callers even than students. They're not afraid of the ask. And so they're they're willing to to make that ask. They have life experience. They're willing to have conversations. And this is where that pre call that are become so critical because the phone call dynamic is completely changed by that pre call letter. Sure. The pre call that has an ask in it sure it tells a story. But where it really makes a difference is in the way that call plays out. Your typical telemarketing call starts off with how are you today. You know and I always say that's the disingenuous question. The reason because you don't know the person and you likely don't care. The reason most telemarketers use it is because they need to engage the prospect in a conversation. Right. That's why they use it. I always say if you want to get a telemarketer off the phone when they ask articulate, I'll spend the next 20 minutes on my or they want to hang up on you. They need to get the next call. But seriously, the pre call letter changes the dynamic of that typical telemarketing call because. The volunteer that wrote the letter, the one that sent the letter is the solicitor. The caller is simply a facilitator. The caller is calling to find out what the donor, what the prospect thought about the letter they received. So using the methodology, I'm suggesting the caller would call and say I'm calling in reference to a letter that was sent to you by Jane or John Smith. Did you receive that letter? That's the how are you today that engages the prospect in a conversation. What did you think about what Dana, John Smith had to say? How did you feel about the goals that were mentioned in the letter? So that becomes more of a conversation that a scripted call, and that's really the key to having that pre call material ahead of the phone call is that it completely changes the dynamic of the call from your typical confrontational telemarketing call to an and be conversation about see this third entity. So even if the prospect you know the caller gets the ask and says you know in the letter Jane Smith suggests that a gift you know of a $100 a quarter over the next year for a total gift of $400, what did you think about that? If the prospect thinks I thought Jane Smith was crazy, the caller's not offended. You know, caller's not the one making the ask. The caller's job is to find a place that's comfortable for that donor to get. And so it completely changes dynamic. If you're using students try it, you'll you'll be amazed at how it changes the dynamic and how you'll end up raising more money by doing it that way. You want to make sure you're doing personalized callbacks. And one of the arts that's been lost, you know, with some of these new systems that are out there, automated systems is then when a caller sets a callback, has a conversation with someone, and the person says, Can you call me back next Tuesday at five because I want to discuss this with my spouse or I want to think about it. I'm under the weather. You know, that call gets pushed back in a queue and usually get sent back that Tuesday five to whoever's available to take that call rather than the caller who initiated the conversation. And I think it's critical that the caller initiated the conversation, continue the conversation. Again, going back to the what I said at the beginning of this about what would you do if this was a face to face solicitation? If you were doing a major donor ask, you wouldn't change the solicitor in the middle of that. Ask. You know, the second visit, you wouldn't have a different solicitor or client. You'd keep that same person. So why would you do anything differently when you're talking about phone that caller started the conversation. Should be able to call back Tuesday at five and say when we spoke last week, you suggest that I give you a call back today rather than have a new person come on once again address the bunch of prospect's name and it's starting from scratch or trying to read notes on the screen before they talked to the prospect. And so again, personalization is key to what we're doing. And all of this takes a lot longer and a lot more work than just calling 50,000 people without sending them letters. You know, I like those letters not just to be from volunteer from a volunteer peer, but multiple peers. You know, when we're talking university, as a lot of times we segment into schools, you know, colleges will segment sometimes by older generation, a newer generation, especially with a lot of the religious schools, Catholic universities and Lutheran universities and some of the other religious schools that we work with, because the older generation, a lot of times thinks that the institution has really changed, you know, over the years. And so we like to have an older signer send a letter that talks about, you know, remember when and the values back then and then talks to the fact that, you know, this university is still the same today as it was that, you know, sure, the faces have changed and the people have changed, but the values are still there. And so, you know, because that's the powerful story there from the donor perspective. And so it's important that there be multiple segments because that's what's going to interest the donor and that's what's going to engage them in that two way dialog conversation. And that's what you want to create with the donors. So some of the next steps now find out what other similar organizations are doing. One of the benefits of this pandemic right now has been that you get to have Zoom meetings like this or or where you get to go out to other universities and create your own conference, you know, find out what other university is doing, get on, zooms with them, have meetings with them, see what's working for them. We have an opportunity to do that without leaving our house or going to a big conference. Tell what you're doing as an organization to help with the situation. Be specific and transparent. Tell stories of impact that are mission driven. You know, how how are we staying with our mission through this pandemic? What are we doing to help the students explain clearly why you need help now? Set an example. You know, it's amazing how many solicitations I received that still don't have an exact model. People like being a part of something that's going to be successful in knowing exactly how much you want to raise, make an exact ask about and bury it by previous getting. And yes, look at the wealth capacity ratings. But I always like to factor in previous giving. And and traditionally what I look at is if someone's made $100 gift, I ask them to consider making four $100 gifts before the end of the of the fiscal year for the university. So they're comfortable writing out one check for 100. I ask you to consider four. You're going to have folks who will say yes to that. Now, folks will give half to the alphabet, which is a significant increase and folks that are fall back to what they originally. But the net result of it is you'll increase the average gift size significantly when you're asking for that. The other effect that will have is that when you ask somebody like who's giving $100 to consider $400 in installments over the course of the year, you get them into a habit of giving becomes a lot easier to renew them. We've seen renewal rates go up 10% one where we've got people on multiple installments during the year. The other thing is the person who received their first reminder, Thank you. And instead of sending you 100, might send you the full 400. And the great news about that is that they've identified themselves. They've in essence, raised their hand and said, You ask me for too little, do some research about me. And so it really starts identifying who could go into that mid-level donor and start moving up the pyramid. Which are your supporters? Good health and wellness, right? I'm assuming everybody in this field is doing it, but I'm amazed at how many emails I get still, you know, solicitations which are never talking about wishing good health during this time and staying safe during this time develop and build upon a short term strategy during the crisis. You know, take a look at what's working and what's not working and make changes as you go along. Again, you know, every quarter you have to take a look at this. Right now, you can't look at a year plan, create a social media committee. I talked about that earlier. You know, you haven't you likely haven't been able to use some of the volunteers you normally get. This is a great opportunity. Engage volunteers to help and they can do it from home, stay away from telemarketing at any non-personalized the one identify targeted segments. We've talked about those perhaps colleges perhaps a decade clusters or or by year of graduation. You know, your prospect who has the money right now. And we talked about that upper middle class and the higher end during this pandemic, ongoing cultivation and stewardship of donors. We talked about several techniques on how to do that, from webinars to providing alumni who may have a special skill to present, use a multichannel approach, use all the different approaches and see which one works, which one your your folks react to. And one of the conventional wisdom nowadays is that busy job is not reactive to direct mail. Well, one of the things we've been finding more and more as we test this is that they're actually one of the most responsive groups to direct mail right now. And so in large part because they don't get any mail, they're not used to getting mail because everybody assumes that's not the way they want to be communicated with. And so we're seeing a huge influx with the Z Gen and the millennials when it comes to the mail during their opening and responding to their mail at higher levels than some of the older groups or more mature groups, as I like to call, and then educate your own organization internally on the right and wrong ways to fundraise in this crisis. And one of the things that I've found along the way this past year is that, you know, as fundraisers, we've been doing a lot of educational opportunities like this. We've been going to webinars, we've been talking to peers, but we're not taking the time to then go back and talk to our team, our staff, you know, our board and what we've learned and what's important during this crisis. It goes back to something I said early on in this. You know, you've got to manage your board. You need to let your board know what you're doing. It's the same thing with your staff and your team. You know, you've you're doing all this education, you're doing all lessons, all these webinars. Go back and talk about the one or two things that you may have learned that you want to implement that you think were important during this pandemic, because that's that's critical so that's my time. My email is on the screen here, Anthony at Catapult that Viacom if you have any questions, please feel free to email me. I'm happy to answer them or you can pick up the phone and call me. I'm happy to take your call as well. I want to thank you all for having me be a part of this case presentation. I'm looking forward to being at a case conference again and speaking there live as I have many times in the past. But thank you so much for your time and I yield the floor to and thank you and. Thank you so much, Anthony. This concludes the webinar. Today's program is. Copyright 2021 by the Council for Advancement and Support of Education. 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Lessons Learned

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Anthony Alonzo

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