Learn how Givebutter works with your Bloomerang database and how to set up a successful P2P Campaign and livestreaming event for COVID-19 and GivingTuesdayNow on May 5th, 2020.
Full Transcript:
Diana: Good afternoon, everyone. Welcome to Bloomerang Academy and thank you so much for joining us today. Today, we’re talking about Bloomerang’s integration with Givebutter. And we have as our guest presenter, Max Friedman. Max is the CEO of Givebutter, an online fundraising platform that powers donations, campaigns, and events for thousands of nonprofit organizations. Givebutter was founded in 2016 and already it has become one of the fastest growing and best rated nonprofit technology platforms out there. So we’re very excited to have him here. Please welcome, Max.
Max: Thank you, Diana. I appreciate you and the whole Bloomerang team. It’s so great to be here. So I am really excited to share more about Givebutter with you. You may not be familiar with Givebutter already, you may have a familiarity it sounds like or at least somewhat of a familiarity with peer-to-peer fundraising. We’re going to talk about that. We’re going to talk about virtual events and what that will look like in the age of COVID.
But first, I just want to say, obviously, these are very strange times. I’m here at home as many of you are, I’m sure, as well. And hopefully, Givebutter can be a way for you to not just support your nonprofit organization but maybe even have a little bit of fun while you do that, too.
So I wanted to just kick things off with the little mascot we have here of Blossom Butter. A big theme at Bloomerang is calculated reciprocity and the orangutan is one of the only mammals to do that and Givebutter is right there in the middle to help. As donors come in through Givebutter, you’ll be able to steward them in Bloomerang, and we provide a lot of really exciting tools to help you do that that I’m going to talk about today.
So we’ve got a packed hour. We’ll start off with a quick introduction to Givebutter, what it is and our story. And we’ll go through the products that Givebutter offers. I’ll spend a good amount of time doing interactive use cases and live demos. And then we’ll go into the integration with Bloomerang, specifically it’s a native integration that can take all your data and pop it right into your CRM seamlessly. A little bit of pricing and support, what that looks like, and then I want to leave time for questions and have you sort of steward the conversation however would be most useful. And with that, I also just want to say thank you all for being here and I really appreciate your time and interest in learning more, so I hope this is valuable to you and I’m going to do my best to do that.
So a quick introduction to Givebutter. A lot of you are probably wondering what’s up with the name? Well, we started Givebutter to build a better way to give, and it really started with that. We designed our little mascot that you might see in the top right corner of Mr. Butter and our hearts were sold. The premise is really we want to help people raise more, pay less, and give better, and I think that’s something that we can all get behind.
As you’ll notice with all of Givebutter’s products and everything that we do, we place a huge emphasis on the user experience. And for us, the user is really starting with the donor. A lot of fundraising technology is fundraiser first which we do, but the donor experience is often lacking. And so what we try to do is build a really incredible donor or giver experience whether they’re buying a ticket and going to a gala, they’re just making a donation on your website, or they’re participating in a peer-to-peer fundraising campaign. Our goal is to make their experience incredible to help them support your organization the best way possible.
And with that, I’ll give you a quick background on Givebutter. So our story is a pretty classic one. I started Givebutter as a junior at George Washington University in Washington, D.C. with my co-founder, Liran. The two of us built a lot of what you see on Givebutter today. We now have a great team to help us do that, but when we got started it was just the two of us and our third co-founder, Ari. And then we had a campus ambassador program that really kicked us off. So a lot of the first Givebutter users were college students and still are today. And we had 1,000 ambassadors at 300 campuses that were spreading the butter as we like to say and raising a lot of money for nonprofits, and that was in 2016. And over the years, what’s been exciting is that transition happening from a college student fundraising as they’ve entered the workforce and started or joined nonprofits. Nonprofits that they’re fundraising for joined Givebutter to give their own organizations the tools and things that we have to offer.
But Liran and I came from a bit of a different background. We were super passionate about technology and its ability to impact the world. We started three companies: an events app, a game, and an online charitable sweepstakes. And that sweepstakes will eventually turn into what Givebutter is today. And through that work, we got 100,000 users. We had press from everywhere, from Good Morning America to the Washington Post. And we got to work with some amazing customers and some of our later ventures, they were some of our first customers for Givebutter.
So let’s talk about the Givebutter products. We can do . . . Givebutter is really exciting because we basically have broken down the three sort of core digital giving components for a nonprofit organization. We actually started with the one in the middle, fundraise, social fundraising campaigns, and we kind of expanded to the sides. But what I want you to take away here is, let me see if I can grab my pointer. So collect is a simple payment form. That same . . . Whoop, I didn’t mean to click. That same payment form is the same form that powers everything you see in fundraise and everything you see in events. The fundraise product is the sort of template for what you see on events. Events is ticketing plus fundraising.
And so what we do is we basically provide all these great features for you to process payments like Venmo integration, PayPal integration, Apple and Google Pay. So immediately expands your opportunities for accepting payments for things like recurring donations, embeddable widget, and all of these things work seamlessly with everything you get out of our fundraise product, which includes things like peer-to-peer fundraising. Something I’m really excited to share with you today would be the, [built 00:05:44] basically in the last three weeks specifically with what’s going on today for live streaming. And then the last piece being events, where you can do ticketing and even virtual events which integrate with things like Zoom, Twitch, Vimeo, and the like.
As we like to say, we have three products but one platform and the platform comes with all these great features that work across all these different products. So everything from filters and exports, having user permissions, easy payouts and integrations, they all work with our website donation product, our fundraising campaign product, and our event ticketing product. And so I’m actually going to, the easiest way to sort of visualize what these look like is just to show you so I’m going to switch over to a live demo. I’ve already got this open over here.
And so this is a demo of a collect campaign. So as you’ll see you’ve got your different amounts, labels. You can do one time or monthly giving, you can add a message or a comment and it’s really fast and easy to donate. So boom, I’m here, and then we actually integrate with Google Pay which is what you’re seeing here. And I could actually click that and pay and I’d be done, click, click donate, very fast. If I’m on my phone, I can donate with Venmo but since I’m not, I have the opportunity to add my phone number and they’ll text me the link. If I do PayPal, they’ll pop me over to PayPal and take me back, or I can pay with a card and autofill my information right here. That’s collect. You can also add custom fields in the middle here. So, if you wanted to add questions, text box, drop box, radio buttons would go right in the middle. So that’s collect.
Fundraise is our team fundraising product but you can also use this for standalone, individual fundraising campaign pages. This is where I’m going to spend the most of our time as well as our virtual events so I’m going to go through this in a little bit more detail. So as you see we’ve got a campaign page. It’s sort of a classic layout but with one, big difference. You have a huge emphasis on the supporter feed on the right-hand side. We’ve got our goal bar down here, we’ve got the big calls to action, donate or fundraise, title of our campaign, and then here’s all the different team members that are participating in that. A story section where you can add things like videos and texts, and even a customized DHTML to get really particular with the way this is laid out. And the best part is you see how engaging this is. So you’ve got people loving these donations, you got people adding GIFs which is really easy, I’ll show you that in a sec, images, and even drawings. Someone drew this right on there.
And so what I’ll do is I’ll actually head to my page, so I’m going to click on my profile. And you may have seen the URL structure change, now it’s givebutter.com/fundraise which is the URL that’s logged, and then maxfriedman which is my page. You’ll see I have my own goal, trying to raise $1,500 as part of the larger dance marathon campaign. It’s my page and I can even add my own story. So you’ll see I personalized my story to help share more about why I am raising money for this cause, the photo which is above the main story of the cause.
And I’ve got this really cool functionality so I can edit it right on the page. I’ll actually just modify my goal, now it’s $15,000, where I can edit my story really easily. And then I can go to share my campaign, so I’ll close out of that. So I’ll hit “Share” up here. I’ve got a personal link. I can just click that to copy it or the main link. I can one click share to Facebook, Twitter, or LinkedIn. Or I can send automated emails to friends and family so that you don’t have to do that manual work of making the email. We have a whole little guide but basically email gets sent and then we have this little reminder if they haven’t donated yet or check if they already have. It will check that based on the email or when they click the link if they actually convert and donate, we’ll track that as well. So I’ll make sure that gets tracked to a specific person in their outreach.
The donation process is very similar to what you saw in collect. As I said, the form is what powers everything but now we have this team fundraising element. So I can go $100, since I’m already on my page, I’m already selected. I can just continue. I can add what you’re seeing on the right-hand side which is the sort of extra slide that comes with fundraise, add my name. I’ll add a GIF. Let’s do dance since it’s a dance marathon. You shuffle through that. Find the one I like. There we go, hit “Continue.”
And then this is our demo site so I already have a test card saved, but I’ll show you just quickly how you could add a dedication. I’ve already credited myself with the donation so it’s a little bit meta here, but I could add an honoree and a recipient. I’ll just add here Jay Love and then I’ll pay now with Google Pay. I got my test card, pay. And here we go. So now if I refresh, you’ll see that appear over here. And I’ll show you later is how that populates into Bloomerang and credits the right person with that.
So now I’ll switch over to . . . so notice, again, this was fundraise. We just looked at collect, fundraise, and the third is going to be events. Events I’m going to spend just a quick bit of time on because that’s changed a lot in the current climate and I wanted to show you what the features look like, but then I’ll show you how they can apply to virtual events soon.
So, again, you’re seeing a very similar layout of the page. Some of the key differences is that you can add fundraising event elements like your event details. Here’s the description, date and time, location, and then you can even indicate whether or not tickets are required and you’ve got easy add to calendar options as well all in one place. But then you’ve got all the same elements, a story, you can add team fundraising. Right now it’s disabled. And then you’ve got all the ticket options, from free tickets to paid tickets, quantity limits, maximums and minimums, promo codes, really anything you’d want out of a ticket purchase process could be done through here. And then you could also collect fields in a per ticket basis so I’ll just show you that right here.
And then what I’m really excited to share is that in the last, as I said, sort of three weeks when we began to get our first users notifying us that their events may be cancelled or postponed, we said, “Well, what can we do about that?” Well, a lot of them were considering how do we do a virtual event? And so we launched this thing we’re called live stream fundraising. I’ll refresh the page just because the animations are cool. And here you’ve got this really exciting experience where the page will actually be able to embed a live stream and update in real time.
So you’re seeing myself and Tori, our customer success manager, live streaming on Zoom straight to a page. And then you’ve got our supporter feed updating on the side so that you can actually create a real time giving experience just like you might at a physical event. Just a quick, give a quick rundown of what that looks like. You’ve got all your digital event details the same way you do a physical event, you can do it digitally. It’ll explain it’s hosted digitally. It’ll include the live stream link in the calendar invite on the emails, etc. You can embed to YouTube, Facebook, Vimeo, and Twitch all through a platform like Zoom. You got the real time updating supporter feed. And then, as I mentioned, we’ve got some great partners to help you get that embedded on your page.
So now I’m going to flip back to the presentation. I might just do a quick pause to see if there are questions. Awesome. Thanks for responding, Jess, you look good.
Jess: Yeah, sorry. I just wanted to bring up a question that came in for everyone to hear because this could help a number of people curious about the integration with Stripe and if that’s possible with Givebutter.
Max: Yes, absolutely. So sorry, Jess, can you repeat that one more time. I was reading the questions, not listening.
Jess: No, no, no, that’s fine. And don’t worry about reading them, I’ll have them ready to go for you.
Max: Okay.
Jess: So when someone signs up to use Givebutter, can they use it with their Stripe account?
Max: Great question. So we use Stripe Express, so we do work with Stripe. But by adding payment methods like Venmo, Apple Pay, Google Pay, and PayPal itself, we also work with Braintree to process those and we streamline that through Stripe for you. So the short answer is you don’t need a Stripe account. We use Stripe to help you process those payments and withdraw to a bank account. But we are the payment processor effectively in that situation. So you don’t need a Stripe account but we use Stripe. And if you have a Stripe account, you would basically create almost a new one through Givebutter.
Jess: Okay. Also, and you might be getting to this a little bit later, that people are wondering how Givebutter compares to Classy. So not sure if you wanted to address that now or if you want to talk about that in a little bit later.
Max: Yeah. I’ll just address that really quick. We’ve got a great comparison article on our site, just givebutter.com/alternatives/classy. So, if you want to find that and maybe drop that in the chat it might be helpful with some folks. But the short version is we’ll sort of get into pricing later, but I think Givebutter has a unique offering of functionality and affordability that Classy just doesn’t match. We’ve been really diligent about building a lot in-house, being really, you know, considerate about our costs in the sort of capital that we’ve raised as a company. It doesn’t even come anywhere close to what Classy has done and they’re expensive as a result. Their product is very expensive. And so that’s a big part of it.
But then if you look at some of our fundraising elements like the stuff you’re seeing in fundraising events, the feature parity is basically there. We offer a similar if not better user experience. A lot of people come telling us that Classy was confusing for their donors. They’re having trouble setting up their pages, managing it. And so I think usability is a big factor plus the fact that Givebutter can actually embed directly in your website. So Classy creates kind of standalone domains. You can actually pop a Givebutter form right on your website in an IFrame and I’ll show you some examples of that.
Jess: Yeah. And you guys . . . Max has done a great job with all of the alternative solutions that are in their space. So whether it’s Classy or another platform that you’re looking to compare. They’ve done basically all of the footwork for you to see directly on their website how they hold up, how do they compare to the other competitors in their space, so I found that really helpful personally. We’ll keep going. I’ll keep collecting the questions, and we’ll address them a little bit later.
Max: Perfect, thanks so much, Jess. And the last thing I’ll mention that I can’t believe I left out is we integrate with Bloomerang. So, you know, what’s not to love about that. So it’ll be really easy, seamless, native integration. So that when a donation comes in, it’ll be right in your CRM and you can start taking action on that and stewarding the donor. So we’ll get into that later but hopefully that’s a compelling component.
All right. So we talked about the product, I gave you some demos, but now I want to talk about use cases. So we’ve got thousands of use cases for Givebutter. As I said, we got very much started with student and student orgs and now we’re seeing Givebutter being used by nonprofits big and small especially with what’s going on right now. We’re seeing small businesses use Givebutter. We’re seeing individuals take action to raise money to provide masks and meals for healthcare workers. It’s really incredible.
And so here are some examples here. Everyone will be having access to the slides in some form I believe after the presentation so I would encourage you to . . . all these links are clickable. And I would encourage you to, you know, find someone that might look like your organization and click on that link and see what they look like on Givebutter. But I would like to just emphasize that the beauty of the platform is that, you know, I wouldn’t even have been able to imagine some of the things that folks would be using Givebutter for. The products are very versatile so if you’re, you know, looking at Givebutter for any use cases, it could be a great fit.
And so I’ll talk through the products to show specific examples of how the product is being used. So I wanted to give some timely examples so the first I’ll start with for collect here is LearnServe. So LearnServe International is a nonprofit based on Washington, D.C. They help students build projects to support their local community and they just hosted a virtual gala on Facebook Live. They didn’t actually use our live stream product. It was right when it was launching but they did send everybody that was participating in the broadcast to this page. So they have a simple donation form that’s just embedded right on their website, just like I showed you. I believe this is either like a Wix or a WordPress site and they just were able to plot that form right on their page to be able to give their donors a really seamless payment donation experience, so that redirect. There’s a lot of data out there that just by redirecting your donor you will lose in conversion rates for that. So they’re right there. They can make a donation very easily.
Another quick example would be we’ve got this Kindness for Corona group that’s raising money for individuals in doing direct relief. And so each one of these folks here were people that they were benefitting to help pay their expenses that were in a hard time. And at the bottom here, they just embedded that form similarly to help them collect those funds.
But then Givebutter can be hosted on its site as well. So we have the New York City Ballet when they had it at luncheon a few months ago, did a live event ask where they were sharing this URL like a Bitly link. They had scanned to give QR code, and here’s just another example of our payment form in action. So I’ll just close out those.
Fundraise, where I want to spend a little bit more time in here is great because there’s so many different ways you can set it up. You could use team fundraising or you don’t need to use team fundraising. You could do multi-team fundraising or just sort of how we call sort of peer-to-peer teams. The first example I’ll start with is Lifetime Wells who used this for Giving Tuesday. And if you don’t already know, on May 5th will be sort of Giving Tuesday round 2. And so, you know, here is a great way to do both an online fundraising campaign with matching.
And the reason why I love this example is because this gentleman, Mark, when he was setting up this campaign was, you know, kind of worried about what this would look like because all these people, a lot of these people here are board members. So, you know, they’re folks that were part of the nonprofit board who he was sort of used to, you know, they were doing annual gifts. He wanted to convert them not just to do donations but could do, you know, help with the fundraising for the organization.
And as you’ll see a lot, some of these members, board members really just went above and beyond with their asks and brought in, you know, a great amount of donations for Lifetime Wells International, sort of like a Charity Water. And their original goal here was actually, they posted it in their update, $21,000 and they blew that out of the water, so they were thrilled with this on their Giving Tuesday.
Another example that just launched the other day that I just added to this slide here is Wake Up Local. It was a fun, exciting example where they used not just team members but they used them like teams, where each one of these here is sort of like a paper. So you’ll see 24 minutes ago they were still raising money. They moved their goal from yesterday, it was 30 and now I guess it’s 40 and they’re just really crushing it. And they’ve got this sort of peer-to-peer set up where when I go to donate, you know, I see the different members here and I can contribute. But then all these different papers, you know, if I was on the GVL Today page, you know, they would have their own link that they’re able to share. And if I go to share, I’m sharing their page. If they go to donate, I’m donating to them, very seamless.
Then Trinity Habitat, just one more I will show. So this is what we call our giving hub, it’s a landing page for all your fundraising activity. And so they’ve got a couple of ongoing fundraisers. They’re using Givebutter for a lot of different peer-to-peer efforts. You’ll see some of their campaigns here. Here is just a campaign. I believe this one might have ended or June 2020. So this might have been a postponed campaign with what’s going on but you’ll see they’re using peer-to-peer to see their Habitat trips. And this is something we’ll discuss a little bit more later but, so this is a multi-team fundraising effort where you’ve got the teams here, the peer-to-peer fundraisers here. And when I go to donate, I can donate to a team or a member very easily.
And so all these slides you’ll sort of have a demo link down here which will take you to the demo site. And over here, you’ll have a fundraise, I’m sorry, a learn more link where it has a sort of more information about the different features for each product. And on left-hand side, you’ve got links to every single one of these features explained in more detail as well.
And last here we got events. Again, events, you know, sell your tickets while fundraising but you can also just do the ticketing piece or you can add event details where you’re only raising money, it’s very versatile in that way. One example I will highlight here is UGA HEROs who’s using Givebutter for registration plus fundraising. So this is their landing page again. They used Givebutter in 2019 to do a very successful student fundraiser. They used CrowdRise, now GoFundMe Charity, the year before. And then they moved over to Givebutter, wanted a more modern sort of user experience, kind of like I was discussing earlier with Classy for their donor base, and there are students who are participating in the event. Switched to Givebutter and had a super big success.
This year they’re using Givebutter for their 2020 campaign and you’ll see they’re doing, they’ve got tons of their teams, they’ve got tons of members, 39 teams, 182 members part of these teams. And then what’s happening is, you know, you can come in here and register as a team. And when I go to register, just doing one registration type. I can either join a team. I can create a team. And when I do that, I have to purchase the registration and then I also join the team in one step. So, like I said, I can create a fundraising page at the same that I’m buying a ticket or a registration in this case.
And then I’ll just show you how if I go to say Abby’s team down here, the UGA HEROs exec board Ashley. She’s got her own page, her own link, her own goal, which looks great, and all the teams down here in the leaderboard format with all the team members on the left. And similarly, I know right now they’re pairing this with sort of some virtual event stuff, so everyone’s at home and they’re doing some virtual events, and then their sending people here as their donation page to kind of create sort of a two for one experience.
Now, we got live streams, the thing that I kind of touched. I showed the marketing page right after events. So live stream is brand new. We’ve got some really exciting new features to embed that live stream right in place of a cover photo what we had before. You can do public events. You can do private events. So you can . . . A private event would be something where you only get access to the event details if you purchase a ticket. So a lot of folks are using that for everything under the sun. It’s been very cool to see.
So we’ve got on the right side . . . let me see if I can go my pointer again. We’ve got the Kitchen Rodeo is doing long distance cooking. So, if you want to, actually, just click on that. “Cook with friends, eat tasty food and give back, what’s not to love?” We’re seeing them do, you know, they’re baking bread, fermentation. These link out to Givebutter. They made cinnamon rolls. So they’re doing a class where basically you’ll see the events are going to be hosted digitally and details to view the event are private and will be provided upon ticket purchase, so it’s almost like a class type of experience.
We’ve got the Jewish Teen Funders network which was one of our first partners who helped us kick off this virtual event product. They did a live stream but they’re originally going to have a day of service that was going to be in person. And they had to basically in a week move this virtual, and I’ll show you a great testimonial from them in a little bit. But basically, if I head over to one of their team pages, you’ll see the historical Facebook Live video embedded here that was happening in real time a week ago, as people were tuning in, experiencing this virtual day of giving, and then donating all sort of as one experience all in one place. So it’s just a really exciting way to kind of combine the different online giving elements when everyone is sitting at home.
Jess: Max, I have a question coming from a few people about have you seen some of the virtual events also running a virtual auction and then using Givebutter to help process the payments for those?
Max: Yep, yeah. We’ve seen, I would say it’s not been happening as much yet, but I know folks are planning to do this. And it’s sort of a workshop of both, so you’ll have a sort of a separate, whether that’s an Excel sheet or a form and they’re sort of a live, there’s sort of a mechanism there. I don’t have like a playbook exactly but it’s definitely feasible and Givebutter could be the place that the payment is processed to do it.
The thing that we don’t have that might be helpful would be like a pledge. So you add your credit card information then you can process it later if you win the auction. So that wouldn’t necessarily be possible on Givebutter but there’s different ways to do that. And I would definitely be excited to talk to anyone that’s interested in that and sort of what that would look like because we’ve seen it done a couple of different ways.
Jess: Thank you.
Max: Certainly. Great. So I will move past this but yeah, just some really great examples on the right-hand side I would encourage you to check out. Got some 5K . . . We’ve got a 5K fun run, birthday fundraising, high school team, climbing team that they live stream, just basically everyone hung out and they’ll all did sort of a fundraise campaign all together at once. Musicians doing tours and asking for tips, like a virtual tip jar, again classes.
The Bill and Melinda Gates Foundation partnered with this group called Inven Global and they did a campaign on Twitch. So I’ll just quickly show you what that looks like on Twitch. So you got a Twitch embed here, a lot of gamers are on Twitch. I can talk more about Twitch specifically but this Inven Global is one of our largest esports online publications, and they partnered with the foundation to do that. Basically, sold tickets like a, I guess the button is still here, a free ticket, basically like a registration.
But then the great part about events which I didn’t really get into is that you can add a donation on top of your ticket purchase, so that’s a big component of this is that sort of upsell. And we see on average 60% donates . . . Attendees will donate additional $10 or more just by making that very direct ask. A lot of people when they have events will sort of include like a little, “Please add a donation,” and it’s not very pointed. Here, you have to actually hit a continue button to go past this with the zero dollar selected. And so having this here will be really helpful. This is the place where you can convert attendees into recurring donors. This is a place where you can add labels in custom amounts so that’s very personalized. This is a really fantastic feature of the events product that works with live stream as well that I would highly recommend checking out.
All right, come right here. One more thing I want to mention is down here. We have a great article on the Bloomerang blog, “7 Easy Steps to Move Any Fundraising Event to Virtual.” Definitely would check that out if you’re interested in running a virtual event in general. There’s a lot of great tips and advice in there, but also with Givebutter specifically, I think there’s some good ways to think about how do we move this and to how the sort of feasibility of that so I definitely recommend checking out that article.
And then the platform, so this is something that I will touch more on later when we talk about the Bloomerang integration. But the short thing I want to . . .
Jess: Max, sorry, can you pause for a one second? I have a question here about whether or not you host a thermometer to show the progress for an event. I didn’t know if you would be able to quickly show . . .
Max: Yeah.
Jess: Yeah, that would be great because I know you offer that so I want them to see that.
Max: Absolutely, yeah. I’m glad you mentioned that. So thermometer is sort of, I guess, term that could be interpreted in bunch of different ways. We call it is a goal bar, so for us that’s what looks like. At events campaign is you can set a fundraising goal and that goal bar will, basically show goal bar progress as you raise more dollars. And so I always recommended if it’s, you know, some folks choose to hide dollars raised. The beauty of Givebutter is it’s very flexible. In general, we recommend showing a goal bar but the goal bar is optional. So, if you want to show a goal bar, this is what it would look like. You can hide it, you can just show money raised, you can show no money raised, but this is what it looks like in events campaign with ticketing currently.
Jess: Great. And on personal fundraising page, is there, that term, that goal bar exists as well, correct, for the personal fundraiser?
Max: Yep.
Jess: Perfect.
Max: So here’s what that would look like. You have a, I can have a personal goal thermometer and then a campaign-wide goal or thermometer as well.
Jess: Thanks for that.
Max: And then one thing we don’t show, I feel like this used to be in our demo site. I could maybe show you on our page here but we have . . . Here we go, just sort of showing. You can basically do peer-to-peer fundraising in combination with events really easily if that wasn’t clear. So you could have a member with a goal, team with a goal, a total campaign level goal, and then you can even track tickets sold on a per member basis if you want to track that and display that. So that, you know, your team members, your peer-to-peer fundraisers are effectively also promoting your event and getting credit for that the same way. All the benefits of social proof of peer-to-peer fundraising which we’ll get into in just a moment of why, like why was this, like why do all this stuff? What’s the benefit? You have something that I think it’s really exciting about the events product is being able to combine these elements with ticketing.
So, quickly on the platform, the platform is where you, it’s almost like a campaign management tool the same way of a donor management tool. Givebutter is where you would do all your campaign management. And so we’ve got a really, really beautiful backend where you can show all your campaigns, see all your campaigns in one place, manage those, edit those, your transactions your tickets your payouts, and so on.
The thing, again, I’ve said this already but I want to stress is that all of these stuff has no limits. So we’ll talk about pricing towards the end but you can add as many users, as many campaigns, as many ticket types as you want as part of our base product, and you’ll have full access to all of the sort of bells and whistles of the dashboard from recurring donations to donation dedications, to embeddable widgets, all of that is possible. Everything that you would expect out of your sort of campaign management system is possible.
In Givebutter, we even have the ability to have trackers where you can have sort of sub-accounts managed within your dashboard. So I’ll show you the dashboard once we get into the Bloomerang integration but for now I want to talk about, again, sort of why, what’s sort of the main benefit of all this. Okay, it looks good, it sounds good, but like what’s the data say? Well, we did some digging recently specifically for this webinar just to sort of show you what is the latest and greatest look like on Givebutter from statistics point of view. And in just the last two weeks, we’ve seen the enormous spike in traffic and the fascinating thing it’s been . . . It has been largely on mobile.
And so I know I’m presenting to you from my computer and a lot of you are probably tuning again from a desktop, but the most fascinating part has been how many people are accessing Givebutter from their phones. And so, when you think about what your donation page looks like and your sort of fundraising technology stack, it’s incredibly important now more than ever that your technology is sound and strong, and mobile friendly. And so I think it’s something that’s sort of overlooked when you think about your mission and the work that you’re doing, and, you know, the need to raise funds. You might think about million other things than your donation form, but I would just emphasize that having it to be mobile friendly, easily accessible, accepting a wide range of payment methods.
As you’ll see here, across all Givebutter donations, we’re seeing 64% are giving with traditional credit card but almost 40% are giving with alternative payment method. So a digital wallet is Apple Pay, Google Pay, or Microsoft Wallet is what digital wallet means. So we’re seeing almost 10% of people are giving with their native browser payment gateway. And as you saw when I was doing that Google Pay transaction, I’ll do it again, how fast that is. It’s incredible how once you have that how high the conversion rate will go up just because you have that super easy donation method.
Venmo obviously very exciting to engage with younger audience. We don’t see a huge amount of people giving with Venmo but just advertising that it’s there we found to be extremely compelling. And then PayPal, of course, people know and trust PayPal and they, you know, it makes it easy to accept that as well all through Givebutter so I thought that would be interesting to share.
We’re very excited about these peer-to-peer numbers. So, you know, peer-to-peer benchmarks vary a lot. But when we pulled our data specifically, we looked at fundraising campaigns that are raising greater than $10,000 that are using peer-to-peer fundraising on Givebutter across, basically since we’ve started since 2016 across millions of dollars processed and so on. We’re seeing six to seven new donors per members, so peer-to-peer fundraiser. Those members on a per member basis are raising around $1,372 exactly around $1,300. And then we’re seeing 43 members per campaign and, you know, just start to multiply those and you’ll see $58,965 per campaign.
So, you know, hopefully those are sort of helpful when you think about your own peer-to-peer fundraiser. Obviously, the members are a big part of that so one thing we talk a lot to people interested in using Givebutter as well, what’s sort of an attainable number you think you could get to in terms of people participating in your peer-to-peer fundraiser, and you can kind of work backwards through that. And if your fundraisers typically raise over $10,000, here is like a guideline for what you could be looking at and I think those numbers are very exciting to a nonprofit who might be sort of decide should I make this leave, should I do this something different or new that I haven’t been familiar with before? And I would just say, you know, give that a look.
And then, you know, in the last two weeks especially, we’re really excited about the stuff we’ve been able to do with the virtual events piece. And here’s what, you know, BBYO, one of the largest faith-based organizations in the world had to say about their experience using Givebutter for their virtual event.
And I know I’m running a little over time, so I want to try to speed through the, or what I wanted to be our time at this point. So I’ll just say that, like I’ve been sort of stressing all along about user interface and the experience for the donors I think it’s second to none on Givebutter and we’ve seen 93% of donors on Givebutter covering fees and 73% are leaving messages of support. And one of the things that people say they’re most surprised about when they use Givebutter is the messages that they received, so I think, in a good way. And so you’ll see all these people outpouring their support in a very visible public way which will just generate more support for you from other donors to participate. And so I think that would be a great reason to consider this as well.
All right. I will now show you quickly what the Bloomerang site looks like. So, as you saw earlier, I made that test donation, in the interest of time I won’t repeat it but you’ll see here I have sort of a blank Bloomerang dashboard in terms of . . . Actually, my first time in here. Maybe I’ll just do another. Some already in there. Let’s go back. I’ll just quickly make another donation here. Do $10, credit Teddy, just breeze through this and then I’m going to do it under a different name, so we make sure that it shows up as a new donor. Test Friedman. All right. Now, right over here and refresh. So, again, you see Max as the first-time donor over here. That was from before.
Jess: So, Max, it may take up to 10 minutes for the first time . . . Oh, but there it is. Great, never mind. Good.
Max: Yeah. So, yeah. You know, like Jess said, it can take up to 10 minutes. Fortunately, you know, we’re able to see that populate right away and in our experience in all of the testing that we’ve done and are working with folks so far it is very fast. So, as soon as . . .
Jess: It’s not 10 minutes on the Givebutter side, as far as like getting the transaction into Bloomerang. It’s just that first-time donor call list with like the polling that we do for that could take 10 minutes. But yeah, the getting the transaction from Givebutter into Bloomerang is almost immediate.
Max: Yeah. Thanks for clarifying that, yeah. So it’s great because as soon as these donors are coming in, you’re able to see them in almost real time and then take whatever actions you would like from there. Assign a task or enter a call. And then if I head over to my constituent list, you’ll see that I’ve been added as a constituent, Test Friedman. You can see my giving summary and even on the timeline view you’ll see the email that was sent out as well as a receipt. And so I know we don’t have a ton of time, but if anyone wants to look more at the receipts, I’m happy to show what that looks like.
Jess: Yeah. And one of the things that I want to mention is if there is a recurring transaction coming in from Givebutter that the recurring donation schedule gets created along with any payments associated with that recurring giving schedule.
Max: Right.
Jess: Yep. And if you’re receiving any peer-to-peer transactions into Bloomerang, then we also capture the peer-to-peer fundraiser which I think Max is about to show us here, yeah.
Max: Yeah, exactly. So, yeah. You’ll see here Teddy was soft credited with that donation that I just made. You’ll see that in his timeline view as well. Past, these are past tests we’ve done. I want to quickly show, I just had this already pulled up. Liran here who has a more detailed timeline view and these are all things coming from Givebutter. And so, you’ll see your full timeline view of all the sort of Givebutter transactions that are happening as well and be able to click into that.
And so, if you go to a specific transaction, you’ll see here I have a fund mapped, the campaign mapped, the appeal mapped, and the tribute data all on my transaction so I know what this transaction was, where it came from and sort of what to do with it. And I’ve mentioned the dashboard a few times on the Givebutter side but integrating those cannot be easier. It’s literally copy, paste and then a map on the Givebutter side. So you’ll see here Bloomerang is already here, I’ve added my API key. And then I’ve mapped this campaign by basically putting the fund, I have all of my funds populating here, my campaigns, and my appeals. And I just say which campaign on the Givebutter side I want to populate what data on my Bloomerang side all through this native integration.
Jess, is there anything else do you think I should highlight on the Bloomerang integration side of things?
Jess: I think that’s it for now. I’ll just, you know, mention or piggyback on what Max said. It’s just super quick and easy to set up and it’s instantaneous which is wonderful, so we are really happy with the integration on our side.
Max: Awesome, super. So, on the ease of use point, I just want to, while I’m in the dashboard to very quickly show how easy it is for you to create everything I just showed on your side. When people come to us, obviously I’m familiar with our platform and say, “Hey, I’m looking to create this campaign.” Sometimes we’ll speak for a long time about this or that and there’s sort of a hesitation to get set up.
A great thing is Givebutter is completely free to sign-up. You can sign-up for Givebutter and create an account and try it out and see what it looks like. You can go in and you can create a campaign by clicking this new campaign button, fundraise, add my title, the next thing you know you have a campaign page that looks like this. You can fill in your details and it’s all templated. So, as soon as you add that information, you would just visit your link right here and the page will get filled in. So you can create everything I just showed you typically in less than 5, maybe 10 minutes if you don’t have the information readily available.
And then you’ve got everything you need here as donations come in, you can see them. Your tickets when you do events, you can see all your ticket data. Even have a live event mode for when live events come back and you want to do ticket scanning and check-ins, we’ve got those featured here, check in, filters, search. This is where you manage your payouts, your integrations, your analytics, and your chapters. So I’ll just pop back.
I’ve got a little more detail here on the Bloomerang integration, the specific features of it and then we’ve got some, you know, the marketing pages and the integration guide or overview. All worth checking out if you have more questions about that.
All right. So some quick notes on pricing and support. I’ve talked a lot about ease of use. I mentioned a few times how it’s free and affordable. I think that one of the biggest things about Givebutter that I’m so excited about and I’m constantly smiling when I share it is that fundraising technology does not need to be expensive or difficult to set up. Givebutter has no monthly or hidden fees. We do not charge anything outside of what you are seeing in terms of the Givebutter platform side to access basically every feature that I’ve just shown you. And what you’re able to do is essentially use collect. So each project that I showed you will be treated like its own rate in terms of the fees. So collect will be a 1% fee, fundraise has a 2% fee, and events has a 3% fee. And then platform is a separate sort of section I have there that’s just included with all products.
And as Bloomerang customers, you will have a special 0% platform fee for general donations for just basically like our equivalent of collect that you can embed on your website. It’s like a single campaign type that you can create. That’s a simple form that a lot of folks use as their main donation form, and so as Bloomerang customers were doing a special discount with that.
The only exception to what I said would be the integration itself. So integrating Givebutter and Bloomerang may be subject to additional pricing but that’s something that you will talk to your customer account specialist about. But for Givebutter, there is no costs aside of what you’re seeing here for the ability to use everything that you see. So I just wanted to emphasize that you might be looking at the tech, you might be looking at what we’ve, some of the examples and thinking it’s hard to set up, or it might be expensive. It’s not and I would encourage you to give this a look and consider that.
From the support perspective, I will not get into this really at all except to say that we are very available and accessible. So, if you have questions, please message us on the site. We’ll get back to you very fast. You could email us. And you do upgrade there’s an opportunity to basically get a higher level of priority support so that option is available to you.
And I’ll just let our users and our reviews sort of speak for themselves. We launched a single Capterra asking, you know, when you might seeing, you know, leaving a review for us and we got overwhelming responses. And we’ve gotten 63, almost one or two not five-star reviews. Excellent overall product, ease of use, customer service, and we’re Stripe verified partners. We have been a Software Advice FrontRunner in 2019, and we’re just very proud of the, you know, folks that we get to work with every day. And I hope that we can count you all among them because we love our users and, you know, hope that we can support more people in what we do.
So there’s some additional resources down here. We have a public roadmap so we’re very transparent about the features that we’re building, what’s coming up the pipeline. We’ve got a great blog and a good newsletter where we share useful resources every week. And some additional guides, videos, and FAQs if you want to sort of get started yourself and answer some questions like that.
So thank you. I have a tendency to talk very fast, so I’m sorry if it was a little bit hard to follow at times. But I just wanted to say thank you and please connect with me on Twitter, on LinkedIn, send me an email. If you have questions, you want to chat, I’m very accessible and happy to speak with anyone so please reach out.
And, you know, these are very just crazy, strange times. You know, I think that now cannot be a more fortuitous time to partner with a company like Bloomerang and vice versa where I just think we have so much opportunity to help so many nonprofits that are out there, whether that’s, you know, a small organization, a big organization, regardless of the mission who, you know, is looking for a more innovative solution to do online fundraising or save money in their existing solution, or needs to figure out what to do about their virtual event. I hope that we can provide tools and resources to help you do that. It’s really an honor to get to do what I do every day, so thank you for making the world a better place and I hope to make it an even better one together. So that’s all I have. I’d love to answer any questions that might have come up.
Jess: Yes, we have so many questions. So we may not get to all of the questions today, but we will definitely make sure to email you if you asked a question we aren’t able to get to during the last 10 minutes. We don’t want to take up too much of your time. We know everyone is really busy. We will be in touch with you if you have answered any or if you have any questions about what’s been covered today. And then at the end of this presentation, there is an email address that you can email as well if you want to reach out yourselves, so that’s always an option.
And if now is not the right time for you, you know, maybe in the future you’ll have the need or the desire so we can always circle back with you at another time, if now is not, you know, the best time for you. So don’t hesitate to reach out to us.
All right. So, Max, we have a lot of questions. One of the questions is what type of process or tools do you offer to communicate with someone who is a peer-to-peer fundraiser through Givebutter? Or can you send out emails through Givebutter to people who are individual fundraisers for you?
Max: Yeah. So the most common thing is sort of, well, there’s two-fold. If you want to do individual outreach, we make it really easy to, a), respond to the email when people join. So, when you have a peer-to-peer fundraiser, join. You can respond and say thanks for joining and provide additional instructions, do that one-to-one outreach. The other way you can do one-to-one is in the dashboard, it’s very accessible to basically see, you know, who are my peer-to-peer fundraisers and their emails. So here is the team tab inside of a campaign and I can see Timothy or, you know, Tori, me, Liran and then a bunch of, you know, all of our peer-to-peer fundraisers here. And I can just click on that and it will open up my email client I can reach out.
To do bulk outreach, you can’t do it natively through Givebutter if I wanted to just send to all of them an email through Givebutter. But we’ve got Zapier integrations with things like MailChimp to get all your data from Givebutter into another thing like that. Obviously, you’ve got our Bloomerang integration so you can message people through that as well. And then, you know, this is all stuff that you could, you know, take and still do email. But as far as market, like email bulk to your peer-to-peer fundraisers is not something you can do natively in Givebutter.
Jess: Okay. Great. All right.
Max: But it’s a great idea.
Jess: Yes. One of the things that, one of the questions that we have was surrounding the Bloomerang integration and if interactions are created when someone registers for an event and, yes, we are creating interactions in Bloomerang whenever there is a ticket purchase. So you would be able to, you know, send an update, an email out of Bloomerang based on those interactions that are being created, not just the transactions. So definitely creating interactions based on the event registrations there. Let’s see, we have more questions about Stripe and we answered that one. I’m sorry, I’m just trying to get through all the questions here.
Max: No worries. While you’re doing that I’ll just . . . go ahead.
Jess: And then what about customizations? So, if an organization wants to let’s say customize anything on their event page or anything like that, how much customization is possible?
Max: Sure, yeah, it’s a great question. So this is the main sort of layout for our event ticketing, but you can do a lot of different things with it. So this form when you click “Donate & Tickets” here, you can embed this form totally separate from the page. So a lot of people what they’ll do is they’ll create a landing page on their website separate from Givebutter. They want to sort of create their own look. You can do that and then you use the ticketing from Givebutter on your website directly, just embed it there, kind of like you saw that LearnServe donate example. You can embed this form on your website.
The other thing you can do is there’s a couple of different layouts for our pages, so there’s something we call nested. This is sort of in beta so if you’re interested in this just send us a message and we can enable this. This is a sort of more grand layout. This is something you might see like on Classy or sites like that that use sort of a full-width cover photo with all the details stacked under it. So this is an option if you want to do a nested layout, same functionality, you got your tickets, your event details, your teams, team members, and so on.
And so this is another layout option, but they are templated so it’s very turnkey and if you want to customize it, most of those customizations are possible and take place all inside of that dashboard. So you’ve got setting and options for a lot of these different colors and like here I can add a theme color. Let’s just change the primary button color. You know, I can add different photos, the live streaming, I’ve gone over that and date elements. And so all these stuff is possible through this campaign manager tool. Just to quickly breeze through those so you can see the different settings and options.
Jess: One specific question that we have is if they wanted to change the text of like any of the buttons or anything like that, is that possible at this time or is that a feature request that you’re tracking?
Max: It’s possible, that’s another contact to us to change but we have it, it’s totally possible. I’m trying to think of like an example off the top of my head but you can customize this text and this both primary and secondary button text. So you can say, we have like a spelling bee that we work with that says, their fundraiser button says, bee a speller B-E-E. You know, and say donate. We had a local restaurant that just asked us, “Can we change that to ‘buy us a drink’?” You know, and they’re selling tickets like drinks so that one, their restaurant opens up again you’ll get a free drink. So that’s yeah, you can customize that text easily just by contacting us.
Jess: Wonderful. And we are almost out of time here. Can you talk a little bit more about the text to give functionality?
Max: Yes. I’m very glad you asked whoever you are because I did not mention that. So text to donate, there’s a lot of different ways that folks will talk about text to give or text to donate. The way Givebutter’s works is we have a phone number, you can add a short code very easily through the dashboard to any campaign. So I add my short code here and you’ve got a phone number that you will tell supporters text, short code, text Max to 2028581233, and they will get a link back to your campaign page. So this link will get texted back to them immediately and they’ll be able to donate through that. And that’s our text to give functionality, we have a page about that here, features/text-to-donate, with a little bit more information if you want to check that out.
Jess: Wonderful. All right, Max, we’re about out of time but I wanted to thank you so much today for presenting your wonderful platform to Bloomerang customers. I’m so excited for them to get up and running with Givebutter. It really is one of the easiest online giving platforms I’ve ever tried personally and I’ve used a lot of them out there. When Max said, it only takes 5 to 10 minutes to set it up and get up and running, he’s telling the truth. It is so fast. You guys have time to do this before Giving Tuesday now on May 5th which was one of the reasons we wanted to have this webinar this week, because even though it, you know, it takes very little time we know that sometimes you have to think through your strategy and, you know, have multiple people buy into maybe a new initiative like this.
So we wanted to give you time to do that but once you make the decision you’re going to be up and running in no time and you’re going to love the experience, your donors are going to love the experience, and I just am so excited that all of you joined us today so that you could see it for yourselves. And any questions that you have, please contact us at [email protected] And then once we get you connected with Max’s team, they’re great. One of the reasons we wanted to partner with them is they believe in the same level of service that we offer to our customers. So it’s been a great partnership for us and we’re really looking forward to a long-term partnership with them so we can help address all of your peer-to-peer and online fundraising needs. So thanks, Max, you’ve been awesome.
Max: Thank you. This is such a treat. I couldn’t have said everything that you just said better so I’ll leave it at that.
Jess: Yeah, all right. Everyone, stay safe, have a great rest of your week. If there’s anything else that we can do for you, please reach out. We’re here for you. You know that everyone is going through a very interesting time and Bloomerang is here for you however you need us. Don’t hesitate to lean on us and we’ll see you again very soon. So have a great day. Bye.
Max: Bye.
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