5 Key Metrics for Building a Pipeline of Major Donors

In this webinar, Terry Axelrod outlines Benevon’s metrics-based, high-touch process for building a pipeline of mission-focused major donors who will, in turn, introduce others.

Full Transcript

Steven: All right, Terry. My watch just struck 1:00 on the dot. Is it okay if I go ahead and get us started officially?

Terry: Absolutely.

Steven: All right. Great. Well, good afternoon, everyone, if you are on the East Coast and good morning if you are on the West Coast or somewhere in between. Thanks for being here for today’s Bloomerang webinar, “Building a Pipeline of Major Donors: 5 Key Metrics for Success.” And my name is Steven Shattuck, and I am the Chief Engagement Officer over here at Bloomerang, and I’ll be moderating today’s discussion as always.

And just a couple of housekeeping items before we get started here. Just want to let you all know that we are recording this session and we’ll be sending out the slides as well as the full recording later on this afternoon. So if you have to leave early or maybe you want to review the content later on or share it with a friend, you’ll be able to do that. Just look for an email from me later on this afternoon. I’ll get all those goodies in your hands for sure.

Most importantly, if you are listening today, please feel free to use the chat box right there on your screen. I know a lot of you already have. I appreciate that. We’re going to try to save just as much time as we can at the end for Q&A. So don’t be shy, send in those questions throughout the hour. I’ll be flagging them for Terry, and we’ll try to answer just as many as we can before 2:00 Eastern.

You can do the same on Twitter. I’ll keep an eye on the Twitter feed as well. You can tweet @BloomerangTech or @Benevon. You can use the #Bloomerang. I’ll see all those. If you choose one of those, I’ll definitely see it.

And one last bit of housekeeping, if you have any trouble with the audio through your computer speakers, we usually find that the audio is a little bit better by phone. If you have a phone and you don’t mind dialing in, try that before you totally give up on us, since it doesn’t rely on internet connections or your software or anything like that. If you want to try that, there’s a phone number in the email from ReadyTalk in your registration confirmation email. So just search your inbox for ReadyTalk and you’ll find that for sure.

And if this is your first webinar with us, I just want to say an extra special welcome to you all. We do these webinars just about every Thursday. I think this year we’re only taking a couple of Thursdays off. We have about 50 awesome guests this year. Already done a few, obviously, since we’re halfway through the year. One of our favorite things to do at Bloomerang is we’d love for you guys to keep attending those webinars.

So if you’ve never heard of Bloomerang other than that, we are a provider of donor management software. So if you’re interested in what we have to offer or if you want to take a look at the software, maybe if you’re thinking of switching soon, check out our website. Do that after the session, because you’re going to get a great session here over the next hour. But later on, visit our website. You can watch a quick video demo of the software in action. Actually, I just remade that video demo, so you get to hear my voice again. Hopefully you’re not sick of it already. But check that out later on if you want to learn more about Bloomerang.

So, for now, I am super excited to welcome back one of my favorite people ever, very close partner of Bloomerang. She’s a great friend of ours, Terry Axelrod. Hey, Terry. How’s it going?

Terry: Just great, Steven. Just great. Your voice has been a little scratchy, the connection. I’m hoping you can hear me well. Am I clear coming through here?

Steven: Yeah.

Terry: Okay.

Steven: You sound really good to me. I’m on a cell phone. I’m not normally on a cell phone, so I’ll . . .

Terry: That may be why.

Steven: Yeah. I’ll pipe down here in a minute. You guys will get some great content from Terry. I just want to brag on her really quickly. If you guys don’t know Terry, if you don’t know Benevon, you’ve got to check them out, visit their website. She is the founder and CEO over at Benevon. Been doing this a long time. She has gained a lot of knowledge. She’s been in your shoes. Before she founded Benevon, she work as a development director, her first gig, at a private inner-city school, where she raised over $7 million in just two years. She’s going to tell you a lot of ways that she did that today.

She sort of honed the Benevon Model over the past 20 years or so. She has helped over 5,000 nonprofits through that Benevon Model, raising billions of dollars. And the thing I love about Benevon is they give away that model for free. She does these webinars, and she tells you how to do it. Now, you can hire Benevon to help you, and I think you’ll be more successful. But she gives away the secret formula, which I really appreciate about her. So Terry, I am going to pass the baton to you so you can tell us all about raising major gifts. So take it away my friend.

Terry: Fantastic. Thank you, Steven. Thank you so much. That was a very kind introduction. Let me see if I can make it work. Good. Fixed it.

Okay, hi, everybody. Great to be here. That was, again, a very kind introduction. I want to talk today about how to build a pipeline of major gifts, major donors. We have at Benevon, over the 22 years we’ve been doing this, evolved our process down to 5 key metrics, that if you meet these metrics, you will be successful in building that pipeline of major donors. So I’m going to share with you today what those metrics are as I walk you through the Benevon Model.

First thing I want to show you is a book that I’ll be referring to. It’s one of the two books that I’ll tell you at the end about some of the resources we have. But this is my most recent book, “The Benevon Model for Sustainable Funding, A Step-by-Step Guide to Getting It Right.” You’ll notice this is the second edition. It’s got a red cover. The first edition had a blue cover, and we, in this edition, updated all the formulas and metrics so that it will reflect what I’m going to be covering today. In fact, I’m going to start by talking about a couple pages out of that book, pages 7 through 9, where we talk about the rules for getting it right.

And the very first rule is assembling a great team. People often ask me, “What does it take to come to Benevon? If we ever wanted to work with you, how will we know if we can do this, if we are ready?” And I say, “It’s pretty darn simple. If you can put a great team together, which isn’t so easy, that will tell us that you are ready to do this.”

So we will look for a team with a CEO or executive director, a development person, maybe one other staff, a program person, marketing person, two board members minimum, and the rest of the team, of seven to ten, will be people who are not on the payroll. So they could be donors, they could be former board members, they could be volunteers in your programs, or fundraising volunteers who have helped you with other events.

But you’ve got to have a team if you’re going to do this. We really want to dispel that myth of the magical development director who can come along and save the day single-handedly. Even if you could do that, it is not sustainable because you’re not going to be there forever if you’re the development person, and it kind of perpetuates that myth, that if we just get the next right person in, they’ll work themselves to a pulp doing all the work. So you’ve got to have a team.

Secondly, you’ve got to insist that team actually participates. So when you’re recruiting people, make it clear to them that they’re each — and there are several things, as I go through this, that you’ll be asking of your team — but this is a one-year commitment we would ask them to give you to participate. And to preserve the integrity of the model, which means don’t get creative. And many people involved with nonprofits think, “Oh, this is just a new version of the same old thing, and we can tweak a little bit here or there and get the same results.”

That’s why I wrote the most recent book about the step-by-step guide to getting it right because it’s so tempting. I would be tempted, too, to tweak a little bit. But every single formula I’m about to tell you has been tested over time with, as Steven said, we’ve worked with almost 6,000 nonprofit teams now, to customize this. And they each turn in a whole bunch of math and formulas and metrics to us at the end of each year, and we look back and calculate and see what really worked. And often, the formulas I’m going to be telling you about are even counterintuitive to me. But this is what we teach.

Prepare thoroughly before you ask anybody for money. This is one of the keys to the Benevon Model. Do not just jump right in and ask. Even if it’s someone that you know pretty well and you really need some money and you want to go out and do the ask, in the Benevon Model, we take the time to develop the relationship. And if your gut tells you, “You know, they’re not quite ready,” then we’re going to show you how to hold off and have some more contact with them to deepen that relationship.

By the time you get around to asking someone for money, we like to say it should be nothing more than nudging the inevitable. So they should be ready to give. They should be looking forward to talking with you. And it should not be the last time you ever ask them for anything. You want them to look forward to staying in touch with you afterwards.

Then implementing every formula. So now we’re going to get into what some of these formulas are as we go through.

So here we go — the Benevon Model. I want to say a little bit about culture of philanthropy. This is kind of the Holy Grail in the nonprofit world these days. This is a slide from CompassPoint out in San Francisco, with their definition of culture of philanthropy. And this is a really commonly accepted definition. It’s fantastic.

Everyone in the entire organization understands the value of philanthropy. They act as ambassadors and engage in relationship building. So it’s not just that fund development office down the hall that’s doing the nasty fundraising work and the rest of us are doing the holy mission. No. Everyone promotes philanthropy and can articulate a case for giving. Everyone down to the person at the front desk, the person who takes the used household items out of the trunk of your car in the drive-through, if you’ve got a second-hand store kind of place, everyone on your team can articulate, for the community, the importance of their involvement and specific examples of what that involvement has contributed.

Then down to the fourth one on here, organizational systems are established to support donors. You all have systems for every program you deliver. If you’re a homeless shelter, if you’re a Salvation Army program, or a hospital, you’ve got very specific procedures for how you deliver your services. But what we find is that often, when it comes to fundraising, most nonprofits have kind of a random smattering of direct mail, grant writing, and special events. They don’t have a system. So we want you to have organizational systems to support donors, not just to bring them in, but to support them after they have signed on with you.

Of course, the top leader being involved in fundraising, which is not a given in most nonprofits. If you think about a big university, the presidents of universities nowadays are not hired for just for their teaching and academic prowess, but really so that they can be out in the community and engaging with donors. That’s what is needed here.

But the groups that Benevon works with tend not to be the large universities that already have a readymade pipeline, if you will, of donors, alumni that are graduating every year that could potentially give back. Rather than that, the groups we work with do not tend to be groups that do not have the pipeline, nor do they have a system. They don’t have a readymade batch of major gifts officers who are each told, “Here are your 200 donors. Get to know them and increase their giving collectively by X percent.” The groups we work with do not have a pipeline of potential donors, nor do they have a system.

What Benevon’s about though, what we’ve found is that, over a number of years, most of the groups we work with get beyond that culture of philanthropy, which if you look back to the slide, all of this is internal. It’s within an organization. It’s everybody within is altering the culture so that there is that culture of philanthropy.

But we talk about bringing about a culture of engagement. And this is where the external community, the donors, the rest of your community so values your mission that they are breathing the oxygen right into your organization to keep it going. That’s what we find happens with the system I’m about to share with you. Yes, a culture of philanthropy takes place, but it also evolves beyond that to a culture of engagement.

And here we go with the five key metrics that I’m going to cover, and I’ll point these out slowly as I go through the model. One by one, I’ll stop on the different slides.

So the Benevon Model, and if you get the book or you want to watch one of the videos on our website, you can kind of find out more about the details that I’m going to give an overview today, highlighting these five metrics. But it’s a circle and you want to think of it like an old-fashioned toy train track on the floor going round and round. You want to get those donors on the track and have them go round and round with you for life.

They start at point one with what we call a Point of Entry. So a Point of Entry is a sizzling, one-hour get acquainted event about your organization. If I were a funder and I said, “You know, I’m thinking about making a $25,000 gift to your organization, to your nonprofit, but first I need to come and take a tour,” how many of would say, “Yes, no problem. We’ll figure out something to show you. We can do a tour.” In fact, what you would probably show me is more a tour of your facilities or a tour of your program.

What we find is that a Point of Entry is not that at all. A Point of Entry is a tour of your mission. You’ve got to give people the facts, emotion, and a way to capture their names with their permission. Don’t ask anybody for money at a Point of Entry.

First metric is that you will have a minimum of two sizzling Point of Entry Events per month, each one hosted and filled privately by an Ambassador. Privately hosted and filled. So what does that mean? That does not mean we’re going to put this all on the internet and on Facebook and get people to come and sign up that way. No. Each Point of Entry Event now needs to be hosted by one person. So that person we call an Ambassador.

So let’s just say that you are all in my book club and we’ve all known each other for many years. We’ve been in book club together, and finally I come to you one day and I say, “You know, here it is, this wonderful organization that I’m involved with, they’ve started doing these fabulous tours, and I’ve agreed to be what they call an Ambassador and host one. And I’d like to invite you all to come. We can do it next month right before book club, and we can go out afterwards or have our meeting. And they won’t ask you for any money there. I really want you to come to be thinking about other people in the community who ought to know about this. You all are connected in various ways, whether through your Facebook group or through your alumni association, your kid’s school, your place of business, yourself. I want you to be thinking about other people who ought to know about this. So when you get there, you know, in advance, that you will be receiving one follow-up phone call where someone will ask you both for your feedback about the Point of Entry Event and also if you might like to become an Ambassador.”

On page 102 of the book, if you happen to have the book, I’ll walk you through the agenda. You’ve got to figure out when you’re going to have these. At our school, as Steven mentioned earlier, where I started this all, we did them on Thursday mornings at 8:00. There was a student greeting people right at the front door, and then there’s a little sign-in table where people fill out an individual kind of three-by-five card with their contact info. And it’s not awkward. They know they’re going to do that because their friend, the Ambassador, has already told them. They trust that person. And all the other people at the event have been invited by that same Ambassador. There aren’t any “strangers” there to them. They all have in common the relationship with this one Ambassador.

If they get there early, there’s a little time to walk around and look at maybe photos on the walls or observe some of what’s going on right in the room or the room next door if that’s appropriate. And then the program starts on time with everyone seated around a table. Quite informal. We don’t need a podium. There is no PowerPoint or video at a Point of Entry. It’s much more like kind of sitting around your kitchen table with a group of friends.

The first person to speak is the Ambassador, you know, “Thank you all for coming from the book club. I’m so grateful that you trusted me enough to come out and give an hour to learn about this fabulous organization that I love so much. And you all know how come I’m involved here, but I’ll just remind you of my own story of why I’m involved,” and then tell that story. And then, “I’d like to introduce Susan who’s going to be the person who’s going to be following up with you afterwards, and she’s going to be calling you afterwards to see if you might like to know . . . if there’s anybody else you can think of that ought to be invited to a similar event like this. So as you’re here today, be thinking about who else we could be inviting, who else in your world.”

Then there’s a talk from the Visionary Leader. The Visionary Leader is the CEO or executive director, and I’m trusting that there are many of you on the line today who are the executive director or CEO. It’s a five-minute talk, and the first two minutes of it tend to be the hardest part for most Visionary Leaders, which is: Why are you involved in this mission? What is it that’s so compelling? You see, the guests don’t know you if you’re the Visionary Leader, and if they’re ever going to become involved, they want to know that the leader really has their heart in the game.

Then the results, one minute where you’re going to brag about your accomplishments, a recent accomplishment in each of three bucket areas. So what are the buckets?

If you have 5 programs or 20 programs at your organization, we cluster them into 3 broad areas of impact, for example, supporting individuals, strengthening families, building community. So at this point in the Visionary Leader talk, the CEO or executive director will share something exciting that’s happening in each of those three program areas very quickly, just to kind of tempt people for what they’re going to be hearing on the rest of the tour.

And then two minutes on your vision for the future. So every Visionary Leader has a big vision. The problem is they sound almost too good. When they stand up or sit down to tell people about it, everybody thinks, “Oh my gosh, no, he doesn’t need my help. She doesn’t need my help. They’ve got it all figured out. I’ll go down the street to another nonprofit organization that needs me.” So this is a tricky talk to craft. Our coaches spend a lot of time working one on one with the Visionary Leaders to help them get it right and customize it so it’s in their own words.

Then we get up and walk around. People take a tour. Each of the tour stops of the three focuses on one of the bucket areas. So we start with a myth-buster fact, a story, and a need. So what do we mean by that? Let me give you an example.

I don’t know if any of you work in the area of transitional housing. That’s kind of halfway between being homeless and back living independently on your own. We work with a number of groups where housing of some type is one of their bucket areas.

So I took a tour not too long ago of a transitional housing program, that was one of the stops. And the woman who took us on the tour, we walked up a nice, kind of an older, three-story, walk-up apartment building. We got to the top of the stairs and we opened the door and we were in this nice, clean, empty apartment.

She said, “Many of you may not know this, but the average age of a homeless person here is just nine years old, and that’s because we have so many children that are homeless in our community. In fact, just this morning, we said a very bittersweet good-bye to Maria and her nine-year-old son Johnny. They had been with us for six months, which was almost twice as long as the average family stays with us. But that was because they had come from a terrible domestic violence situation. Maria had not been working. Johnny had been kept home from school. There were health issues, mental health issues, job training, finance, housing, transportation, you name it. They needed everything. And by the time they walked out of here today, there were a lot of hugs and tears when we said good-bye. For every family like Maria’s and Johnny’s that we’re able to help, we have to say no to eight other families. And that’s why our greatest need is for another case worker that would allow us to serve 40 more families a year and greatly reduce our waiting list.”

So there you have it. You get a sense of the myth was about the nine years old, the myth-buster fact. The myth is that people assume the average age of a homeless person is a lot older than nine. The fact is it’s nine in this community. The story has to relate. And usually at a real Point of Entry, it wouldn’t be me telling about Johnny and Maria. It would be reading a letter or playing an audio tape in their own words talking about their own story.

And notice when I talked about the need, I did not say how much money we needed. I just said what that money would buy. It would buy us another case worker. Now, most people don’t really care that you need another case worker. What they want to know is what that will allow you to do mission-wise. That’s why I said, “It will allow us to serve an additional 40 families a year and greatly reduce our waiting list.”

So you’ve got to do that each stop, three times, one for each bucket area, and then you end with a live testimonial where someone gets up and talks about how your organization changed their life.

Now, at our school, because we were doing these, we started off doing the points of entry twice a month, and eventually we were doing them at least twice a week, if not, sometimes twice a day. They caught on so quickly because they were really powerful. Once we refined them and tested and took everybody’s feedback into account and improved them, they were happening quite frequently.

So for our live testimonial, we didn’t want to have to find a different speaker every time we did a Point of Entry. We had a teacher. We were very fortunate we had a teacher right there on the premises every day who had been a student at the school himself. And he, just right at this point in the program, right at the end, he appeared, he came down this rickety old staircase and told his own story, which was amazing. Mr. Green, and he told his story about how he’d grown up always wanting to come back to the school to give back. It was extremely moving.

By then, people had been moved to tears several times with the different stories, the tour, the Visionary Leader talk, and then Mr. Green. So by the very end, the last person to speak again is the Ambassador.

So I’m now back to being the book club lady, and I’m saying, “Thank you again for coming. I really appreciate it. I hope as you’ve been walking through, you’ve been thinking about other people in your life who might want to know about this so that when Susan calls you in the next couple of days, you’ll take her call and perhaps offer to become an Ambassador, like I’ve been, and introduce the work of this wonderful organization to a group of people that you know.” So that’s how it’s all set up with the Point of Entry.

Now second step in the model is a one-on-one follow-up call that must happen two to three days after the Point of Entry. And the metric there is that a minimum of one new volunteer Ambassador must be generated out of each Point of Entry Event. So that means if you do 2 points of entry per month with 10 people, each one hosted and filled privately by an Ambassador, that you would get 2 new Ambassadors each month, one from each of those points of entry. Now, we have groups we work with that get 10 out of 10 or 5 out of 10. You don’t have to just get one. It’s minimum one new volunteer Ambassador out of each Point of Entry.

So let’s walk through the five-step follow-up call process. First thing, and I made these calls at the school myself. After every Point of Entry, a couple of days later, I called every single person who came, and I thanked them for coming. And you have to be really sincere about it. It’s a big deal for people to come out and learn about something new. Ask them, what did they think? And really wanted their feedback. What did they think about the stories? What did they think about even the weather that day? I just wanted to kind of get them talking. And then I listened quietly for the kinds of cues as to which of the bucket areas might be of greatest interest.

We work with a group that’s working to cure a disease that has seven strains to it, and when they call people afterwards, people will say, “Well, I’m really glad you’re working to cure the whole disease. But I’m most interested, say, in that third strain of the disease, because that’s the one my mother has.” That’s a big hotspot. That’s somebody telling you, “When you call me back next time, focus in on that one strain of the disease. I don’t need to hear about all the other ones.” And you won’t know what that is if you’re not listening closely.

Number four, “Is there any way you could see yourself becoming involved with us?” Any way at all. It’s very open-ended. This is where people might say, “Well, you know, I noticed you mentioned you need some old computers.” Or, “I saw that on your wish list that you need some computers,” or, “I noticed that it looked like you might have some volunteers over there tutoring the kids. Maybe I could help with that.”

And then, “Is there anybody else you can think of we ought to invite?” If they haven’t already told you this, which many people will just start right off at the beginning saying, “I’ve been thinking about the tour ever since I took it, and I want to be an Ambassador. I’ve got people in my own life right here in my workplace. We do these brown bag lunches every so often. I heard you say you can even bring this out on the road. Could we do an hour long presentation for my own team here at my office?” Anybody else you can think of that you ought to invite.

Now, don’t go thinking that everybody you invite, everybody you call is going to necessarily want to get involved with you. That is not the case. I’ll tell you a funny story.

We had a man who came to the school. When I called him to follow up after the tour, the first thing he said was, “I’m not giving you any money. Do you want to know why?” I said, “Well, I wasn’t going to ask you for any anyway, but, okay, why?” He said, “Well, I believe in the work of your wonderful inner-city school, but yours is a private school, and I’m giving all my time and money to the public schools, so I’m not going to get involved with you.” To which I said, “That’s fabulous. Good for the public schools. They’re darn lucky to have you.”

And I knew, because he was very touched by our tour, as was everyone at that point, because we had refined it and improved it enough, I said, “I know you’re not interested in getting more involved,” so I skipped down to the fifth question and I said, “Is there anyone else you can think of we ought to invite?” You won’t believe what he said, “Absolutely.” He said, “You’ve got to call my wife. She would love this.” I thought, “Oh my gosh, what do I do now?” He said, “Well, I’ll go back and talk to her tonight. You call her tomorrow and invite her. I bet she’ll say yes.” His wife is still involved with the school. This is over 15 years later. It never would have happened had we not followed all the steps.

So we say don’t ask for any money here at all. Notice there’s nothing up here that says ask for money. And bless and release people liberally. That’s our terms. Fifty percent of the people who come to your points of entry, that’s factored into our formulas, 50% of the people will either nicely or not so nicely be letting you know that they do not want to be followed up. You do not put them on your mailing list. You do not send them stuff.

You put their name in your database, which hopefully you’re using Bloomerang, which is fabulous, and we’ll talk about that later. But you put them in there. You keep their record going, because they may come back to you in one way or another, but you don’t mail to them unless you have their express permission. And we don’t even recommend that you ask them, “May we put you on the mailing list?” because people will say that to be nice and they don’t necessarily mean it. It’s far better to truly bless and release people and trust that they will come back when they’re ready. They’ll have great respect for you if you do that.

Step three in the model where we finally ask for money. Notice we didn’t do any asking in steps one or two. We wait until the donors have been properly cultivated, the potential donors have been properly cultivated before asking them for money. So everything between steps two and three is what we call the Cultivation Superhighway, and this is where we hasten the ripening of the fruit, so to speak. What is it that makes that happen? Our contacts.

See, I think of the Point of Entry like a first date. You don’t tell everything on a first date. You can give them the overview. You tell them the three buckets. You give them the stories that are powerful. And the follow-up call you’re going to find out which aspect of your work most impresses them, most inspires them, most resonates with them. And the subsequent dates, if you will, as we’ve labeled them Contacts on here, are focused in on that area, the bucket area of greatest interest. So if they’re interested in your art program or your music program or they really want to help you improve some other aspect of your work, that’s what you want to focus on in the subsequent contact.

So I’ll tell you a funny story. Actually, a true story, true and a little bit funny. We had a lady who came to the school. When I called her to follow up a couple of days later, she said, “I already know what I want to do.” She said, “I’m on the board of the ballet here in Seattle. The ballet has a wonderful program where we go into inner-city schools. We teach dance to the children. I’d like to be the matchmaker between that ballet program and your school. What do you think?”

Now you have to know I’m thinking to myself, “Lady, were you even paying attention when I took you on the tour? Didn’t you notice?” And I didn’t set this up for you all to hear yet, we didn’t have one book in the school. We had 600 kids at the school and not a book, not a piece of paper. And she’s talking about ballet. I’m thinking, “I clearly blew it here. I did not connect the dots for this woman.” But because I knew we did not need ballet, but I knew the facts, which are that 90% of people in America who volunteer for a charitable organization also give money. It doesn’t mean they necessarily give money to the same place as they volunteer, it just means volunteering kind of people are giving kind of people.

And I didn’t want to lose her, so I said to her just what you would have said, I said, “Ballet? That would be fabulous. But I’ve got to tell you,” I said, “I’ve only been here a couple of months at the school. And from what the teachers have told me, there are so many more basic needs that would have to be met first.”

The next thing she said was one of the most important lessons I learned. She said, “Like what?” You see, I had been so busy showing off my cute kids and great teachers that I had neglected to make crystal clear, to this very intelligent woman, what were our needs. Do you know how easy it would have been for me before I brought people into each classroom to say, “When you walk in there, count the books, check out the shoes we had to get donated. Notice the buckets around the perimeter of the room collecting the rainwater leaking through the roof.” It had not occurred to me to say that, because it seemed so obvious to me. But I tell you this, because if people could not connect the dots at our school, which was desperately in need of everything, they probably cannot connect the dots at your place, so you’ve got to make it really clear.

Once I told her what we needed, she said, “Oh, I didn’t know you needed all of that. Let me see how I can help you.” And she became an Ambassador, and she hosted a number of tours, and out of her tours in the follow-up, we had a man, when I made the follow-up calls, one man offered to donate a pair of the latest, greatest sport shoes to every one of our 600 students before school started each year. That was amazing.

One of her contacts from one of her Points of Entry had a big-box store and he offered to send stocked backpacks filled with school supplies for every one of the 600 kids. Again, every year. And a pair of jeans he put in. So the kids are in heaven. They’ve got the shoes, the backpacks, the jeans. But they had to wear uniforms to school. So sure enough, one of her other friends, who had come on the tour, said, “Give me one of those cute uniforms in every style and size, and I’ll take them over to my factory. We’ll manufacture them and donate them back to the school.” So it was a huge savings for the parents.

And then she had friends who are on the professional sports team. They came out and said, “You’ve got to be kidding. You’ve got nowhere for these kids to play.” They were cooped up in 11 third-hand portables and a very old school building that we were, shortly after this, evicted from because of the bad conditions. And they bought a piece of property for us across the street, built a covered outdoor play area, and equipped it with all the balls and hoops, and paid for a physical education teacher every year.

My point is, by the time we got around to asking this woman for money down in step number three, she’s wondering, “Why hasn’t anybody asked me for any money yet?” When she’s out with her friends, guess what they’re saying to her as they’re asking her, “Tell me dear, what are you doing these days?” And guess what she’s saying? “I’m involved with this school.” We had become her most cherished volunteer organization. We didn’t want to let that go.

So let’s move on to step number three where we finally do get to ask for money. Again, we didn’t do it at steps one or two.

There are two ways to ask in our model. Either the one-on-one asking, which is where more than half of the money will ultimately come from, using this approach, major donors, major donors. And how we start that is with the free, one-hour ask event. Do both of these together. They kind of run parallel throughout the use of the model. So I’m going to start by taking a minute — I’ll come back to this slide — but I’ll take a minute now to talk a little bit about the free, one-hour ask event and show you some of the metrics.

The metric number three is that 100% of your Table Captains at the ask event must have been successful Ambassadors in the prior 12 months. So this is not an event where you’re going to just get people to fill tables. The only people who can be a table captain at this free, one-hour breakfast or lunch fundraising event are the people who have been the successful Ambassadors just in the prior year. Not three years ago. They have to have done it in the prior 12 months, and a minimum of 40% of the guests at their table must have attended their Point of Entry event in the prior 12 months. So it’s all based on those relationships that they have with people. And, of course, we don’t invite the people who have been blessed and released.

Now here we go with the event projections. So these are the projections from the event that I did when I did the first event here in Seattle. We had had 1,100 people take the tour in the first five months of doing this. That’s a huge number. So we were able to meet the metrics and be able to put on a very large ask event. I wanted to have 1,000 people there, 100 table captains and 10 people per table. So that’s what I figured.

But now the groups that we train and coach in our Benevon program, we only let them have between 200 and 300 people at their ask event. And that’s because we have to meet that second metric on there, which is half, 40% to 50% of the people need to be the well-cultivated people who have come through the whole process.

Now at our first ask event, at the school, 85% of the people had been through the Point of Entry and the dating process, so to speak. So they were more than ready to give, which is why our event was so successful. I’m going to show you the numbers for that in just a minute.

Let’s pretend that you’re in that last batch. You’re somebody who’s never been to a Point of Entry. I call you in a pinch at the end because I have a last-minute cancellation. I don’t want to have an empty seat at my table. I say, “I know you’ve never come to the tour. You haven’t been able to make it to one of the points of entry,” we don’t call them that, “one of the tours that I’ve hosted, but I’d love for you to come anyway. I’ve got an extra seat at my table. Could you join me?”

So you’re driving there thinking, “Big mistake. Why did I tell her I would go to this thing? It’s a dark, rainy, November Thursday morning in Seattle. You’re thinking, “She said I was going to be out of there in an hour. But I know I won’t be. I’ll be late for work. She said I don’t really have to give money. I’m going to feel guilty and pressured. I know I’m going to have to give. Inner-city education, it’s a very important cause, but it’s not really my thing. I have other things I’m involved with.” But you show up anyway. Why? Because you told me you would.

You get out of your car in front of this lovely downtown hotel, and who’s there to greet you? A little girl standing at the front holding hands with another little girl, hair braided, freshly scrubbed faces, plaid uniforms, looking up at you at 7:20 in the morning with those big bright eyes, “Good morning. Are you here for the breakfast?” You’re thinking, “What time did these kids have to get up to look so cute and be downtown ready to greet me?”

And you go inside, over to the base of the escalator that takes you to the ballroom level, where you’re greeted by two older boys in their blazers and ties, big strong handshake. They look you right in the eye. “Good morning. Thank you for coming. Thank you for coming.” You go up the escalator to the ballroom level, where you are out in the lobby area. You pick up your name tag and you walk in and you’re greeted by your friend, the table captain, with a big hug or a handshake, and before you know it, the program starts with a welcome. You take your seat for the next hour.

Program starts with a welcome from a board member who, again, says a little bit about the organization, “Let me introduce . . .” In our case, we had a pastor, for the short, emotional hook, who did an invocation with a little girl in the second grade. It was so moving. People were in tears in the first three minutes.

But if we’re working, for example, with a domestic violence group, they might have a 911 tape played. Somebody calling into 911 for help, which is pretty darn startling. It’s a short audio tape. Some groups will do a poem or a song. But something that’s relevant to their mission. Very short there at the beginning. Something that says to the guests, “We’re not just here for breakfast.”

Next, back comes the board member, “Enjoy your breakfast. While you’re eating, take a look at your tables. Right in front of each of you there’s a little fold-over table tent with a photograph of one of our kids or a drawing and their story written out next to it in their own words. Read yours and pass them around. There are 10 at the table, so you’ll learn about 10 different students at our school.”

Also while I’m eating, I feel a tap on my shoulder and look over and who is it? A little child with a basket of apples, giving each person an apple and looking me right in the eye, “Thank you for coming. Thank you for coming.” It’s so impressive. It’s not about the apple. It’s about the mission. It’s about the eye contact.

When we work with the Alzheimer’s Association, they’ll have people with volunteers passing out packets of flower seeds. Guess what kind? Forget-me-nots. And when we work with nursing homes, they might pass out a holiday greeting card with a pen and say, “Please write a message to one of our residents. It may be the only card they’re going to get this holiday season.” So the gift has to be something, not a gift in the sense of monetary value, but something that will connect them to your mission.

And then breakfast is over. Up comes the Visionary Leader, and who’s that going to be? That’s your same CEO or executive director. This talk is a five-minute talk, and, again, it’s similar in format to the talk that is given at the Point of Entry. But it goes deeper and is usually themed somewhat for the theme of the ask event.

Then there’s a video. There is a video at the ask event. No video though at the Point of Entry at all. And the video at the ask event is seven minutes. It needs to move people to tears three times, not two times. Why? Because they’re inspired. These are tears of joy and inspiration. You’re not manipulating people. This is an inexpensive to produce video. It does not have a lot of music or high production value. It does not have a talking narrator. It can really just be the basic three vignettes videoed of the impact of your mission through the buckets.

Then there’s a live testimonial where someone gets up and talks about how your organization changed their life. Now at our school, we had 10 kids from the choir get up, and these kids had already been singing as people came up into the ballroom at the beginning. And they were young. A lot of them were younger. The school went from preschool through eighth grade. So a lot of these were like first, second, third graders, who were kind of squirmy, and we had a lady interview them. She asked them three questions as they were squirming around in front of this big audience downtown here.

She said, “What do you like about going to this school?” “Oh, I love the hugs I get.” “I love my hot breakfast.” “What’s your favorite subject?” “Math and science and reading.” They couldn’t wait to tell you how much they loved the academic subjects.

But it was the last question she asked them that mesmerized the room. She said, “What do you want to be when you grow up?” And in that moment, these little children started to say the kinds of things they had written on those table tents. Things like, “I want to be the first one in my family to graduate from high school and go to college.” “I’d like to come back and be a teacher at the school like Mr. Green.”

But they didn’t just write it like that. They wrote out their whole story. “This is my third foster family. This is the longest I’ve ever stayed in one school, and I’m hoping to finish my first year here, the fifth grade, this year. And if I could, I’d want to go on beyond to that to the eighth grade,” which was as high as our school went. “And after that, high school. I’d want to be the first one in my family to finish high school and go on to college. If I could go to college, I’d want to become a teacher so that I could come back and be a teacher here like Mr. Green.”

So when she asked them though, “What do you want to be when you grow up?” they didn’t say, “If only,” or “I’m going to be the first,” or “My three foster homes,” they really each focused on the vision for their lives that the school had given them. Each child knew what they were going to become. “I’m going to be a teacher.” “I’m going to be a pilot.” “I’m going to be an engineer.” You could have heard a pin drop in that room of nearly a thousand people, and now you’re sitting there thinking to yourself, “Wonder how they’re going to do this money part? I know that they’re going to be asking for money. But what am I going to do? How are they going to do this? And what will I want to do?”

The pitch, the last part of the program, the pitch person needs to be someone we refer to endearingly as a credible, school teacher-like person. Credible in that they are truly linked to your mission, and school teacher-like in that they will follow a script. If you’ve ever written a script for someone who’s going to be asking for money, you know you’re heart is going to be almost in your stomach worrying whether they’re going to get it right. And I’ve certainly seen many pitches that have not been done well and truly botched up because there was not a proper script to follow and because the pitch person was not really familiar with the mission. So we say, again, the pitch person needs to be a credible, school teacher-like person, credible in that they are truly linked to your mission and school teacher-like in that they will follow a script. And here is how it works.

This is taken from our first ask event at the school. Up came the pitch person. In our case, it was our board chair that year. He was the board chair. And he said, “My name is so and so. I want to tell you why I love this school so much,” briefly, in like in two sentences, explain why he was so passionate about the school. And he said, “We know that many of you didn’t know . . . you knew we were going to be asking for money, but you didn’t know how much we were going to ask for. When we thought about what to ask you for, we realized we ought to just tell you what it is we really need.” And he went on to tell them the story about we had given raises to the teachers, causing a shortfall in the operating budget of $600,000, and we had about 600 kids in the school.

He said, “If you believe in what you’ve seen today and you’d like to help to support the ongoing operations of the school into the future, you have an opportunity today to become a founding member of something we’re just launching called the Sponsor-A-Student Society. Now I’d like to pause and ask the table captains to pass out the pledge cards.” You see there was no pledge card conveniently waiting at your seat so you could fill it out and leave early. No.

He said, “Let me walk you through this. Box number one says, if you would give us a $1,000 a year for each of the next 5 years, you’d be making up the operating shortfall for the equivalent of one student.” Notice how I said that. Making up the operating shortfall for the equivalent of one student. In other words, and he said this several times, “You don’t get a kid. This is just a gimmick.” That was how he said it. “We’re going to use your money for the gas for the school busses, the electric bills, the teacher’s salaries. We’re just calling it Sponsor-A-Student.”

Out of how 850 people — we did not get 1,000 people there — 115 of them checked this box. Now, the IRS requires you must report all pledges as if they are received on the day they are pledged. Therefore, by IRS standards, we had just raised over $500,000. I hesitated there, but over $500,000.

He went on. “We know some of you are capable of giving even more. If you give us $10,000 a year for 5 years,” 8 people did that, to sponsor 10 students. And $25,000 a year to sponsor a whole classroom of 25 students, 4 more people did that.

He paused and said, “I want to thank those of you who’ve just become founding members of our Sponsor-A-Student Society. And now I’d like to ask the rest of you, who may not have checked off a box, to tell us in box number four, how much you’d like to give and for how many years.” In other words, a fill in the blank box, leaving the donor right in the driver seat. Some people said, “I’ll give you a $100 once.” “$50 three times.” Whatever they wanted to give was absolutely fine.

The last box we had typed it in, it said, “Please contact me. I have other thoughts to share.” This was for the people, even if they had already checked a box up above, maybe they wanted to give them stock or transfer real estate or have us come talk to their foundation or they just had some advice for us. Whatever it was, we were happy to give them a call.

So when you stand back and take a look from fewer than 130 people, out of 850 at the top, which is less than 15% of the people there that day, we had raised nearly a million and a half dollars when you include the pledges. And I wanted to know why. What had we done right? So I got back on the telephone the very next day and I started to call these people in the top three boxes and one by one asked them for their feedback.

The final metric is that a minimum 10% of your ask event guests must join the Giving Society at one of the three giving levels. So looking back to this slide, we had 850 people up at the top left there. That means we should have had 85 people join the Giving Society. But, in fact, we had 127. So we had half again as many as we needed, to meet our formulas, to join the Giving Society, which is like about 15% of the people joined, not just 10%. But that’s our metric — 10% minimum must join at one of the giving levels.

So I called people the next day, all those donors who made the bigger pledges, and I thanked them. I said, “What did you think of the event yesterday?” I was quiet and I listened. It’s a good thing I was, because they all told me the same thing. They said, “If I had known how great that event was going to be, I would have invited other people.” That seems to be the natural human response when people feel they’ve made a true contribution from their abundance, as opposed to a one-time donation from scarcity, and they started telling me the names of their friends and family. I was writing down names of people I’d never heard of.

Finally, I stopped myself. I said, “You know, here it is the day after this event where you just gave so generously. We’re thinking we ought to have this event again next year. Would you be willing, while you’re excited right now, to agree to be an Ambassador between now and next year? Introduce those friends and family at a Point of Entry. We will educate and inspire them there. We will follow up. Bless and release them if they’re not interested, or continue to cultivate them if they are, so by the time they’re sitting at your table next year, they will be the people ready to give, or they don’t need to give at all.”

By following this process year after year, it continues to grow. And how does it turn into major gifts for you? Number one, we start off with the people, like the lady from the ballet, let’s say that she had been out of town on the day of this event, but she was well cultivated, I would go and meet with her in person. “So sorry we missed you at the event. Here is the pledge card. We launched this new Giving Society. We’d love to have you be a member of it, one of the founding members.” Of course she’s going to say yes at one of those levels.

And we also went back, we didn’t have this at the school, because this is a brand new program, but with other groups we work with, they will go back to the donors they already have. Many of you have donors who are already giving you $1,000 a year. And if they knew that you were launching this new giving society, they would be delighted to be one of the founding members. So we would go back to them and say, “You’ve been doing this for several years, giving us $1,000. Would you be willing to make a pledge to do that going forward, and, by the way, would you consider increasing?”

Over time, as I said earlier, more than half of the money that you raise, using the model, will come from one-on-one asking. And it’s usually asking people who already have joined the Giving Society, making those five-year pledges to increase their gift or to make a separate gift beyond the five-year pledge gift. So the two ingredients, whichever way you ask, units of service are these top three box levels, without which we never would have raised that much money. If we had had that great ask event and the pitch person got up at the end and said, “Please give generously. Give from the bottom of your hearts.” What does that mean? People don’t know. The ones with a lot of money don’t want to show off. The ones with a little bit don’t want to be embarrassed. Nobody knows quite what to do. By having these levels, people did the math on that top level and said, “That’s $83 a month. I believe that much. Sign me up.”

And then multi-year pledges. When I was trained in major gift fundraising, I was always told the only time you can ask for a multi-year pledge is when people make a large gift, like a capital campaign gift or an endowment gift, where they want to spread it out over time. But you would never ask for someone’s annual gift to be paid over time in pledges.

We found quite the opposite. I’ll tell you why I think that is. I believe the people who check one of these top three boxes are telling you something. They’re saying, “I can read the form. I see that fourth box on there. If I were to give you $1,000 a year for one year at a time, that’s still a lot of money. And you would take good care of me, I know, and cultivate me, so to speak. But by virtue of the fact that I choose box one over box four, I’m telling you something critical. I’m saying, ‘I know I don’t have to make a five year pledge to you. I want to.’”

And that is the magic of this whole model. That allowed me to know who those 127 new best friends were and to do the thing I think is the hardest in fund development today, which is to know where to focus. Suddenly, we stopped doing any other events and fundraising things we were doing, and we just said, “If people could give that kind of money at a one-hour breakfast, what would happen if we actually got to know them better?”

And we do that in the model at something we call a Free Feel-Good Cultivation Event. This is not free tickets to the gala or the golf tournament. No. This is a program event you’re already doing, like our graduation, where we put a little reception right before it, once a year we had a graduation. And the principal spoke. We invited all the big donors to the reception, and the principal spoke. He bragged about the test scores and the grade point average of the kids. We had a grandmother and her grandson speak, which was incredibly moving.

And then everybody was invited to go back into the big room for the graduation and stay as long as they wanted. You see, if you do it right, this Free Feel-Good Cultivation Event becomes what we call a point of reentry and it gives people there the facts, with the principal with the test scores, the grandmother for the emotion. Capturing the names with permission was no problem. We had the names. Those were our donors. We had invited them.

So three days later, I’m calling people saying, “Thanks for coming. What did you think?” I would listen quietly, and one by one, people said, “I’ve got a group of people now. That reminded me. I’ve got some others.” So suddenly we were getting more and more Ambassadors. Six months later, we were evicted, within six months we were evicted from the school building and had to raise $3.2 million for capital. The only donors we had were those 127. Within six months of our first ask event, we started putting on points of reentry about capital, where we started inviting these small batches of those multi-year donors to evening events, where we told them about the new needs, those on the pyramid chart, the naming opportunities, and within 6 months from 18 of those same donors, we raised $3.2 million and got back to work.

That’s when I left the staff at the school. I went on the board. The second development director came in. She had never done any fundraising at all. She tried to back out, actually, but we told her there was a system. Just follow the system. She was there for three years, tripled the results, and by the time she left, we had over 500 donors in our Giving Society at all those levels.

And the board said, “What about endowments? Wonder how much we need to raise to generate an interest of the $600,000, our gap money, our treadmill number?” They decided it would $15 million, and we finished that at the end of 7 years, all from donors who had come through this process. These donors, in this Giving Society, are always for unrestricted operating funds, but they’re the same pool of donors that we go back to for capital, endowment, and things like restricted major gifts, like the library and the technology center.

So there you have it, all five key metrics of the Benevon Model. And let me just say quickly so we have a little bit of time for questions, some of the resources that are available to you.

The very best resource, if you want more information about anything I’ve shared, get our E-New$. We send it out every Monday morning. All kinds of rich articles in there with good content and blog posts, Q&A. There’s quite a bit in there. And any time we offer something new, this is what it looks like, “Get Benevon Updates.” So go to Benevon.com and you can sign up for our E-New$. I really do recommend that.

And then our books I’ve mentioned, the book on the left is the one I’ve been referring to. On the right, “Missionizing Your Special Events,” very popular topic. It’s how to take all the events you’re doing and fit them into this model or do away with them, etc. There’s quite a bit in there that’s meaty. And you can see there’s a discount if you buy the whole starter set there down at the bottom. Quite a nice savings. Those are available on our website. Including that middle is the video, actually offered for free on our website also, of me doing a live introductory session in Seattle.

And then we have Bloomerang. You know about Bloomerang. But do you know about Bloomerang for Benevon, a private label version of Bloomerang that we have developed with our partners at Bloomerang? We are so delighted. Many of the groups that use the Benevon Model will use the Bloomerang for Benevon. It’s all customized for Benevon. In fact, there’s a webinar next week, that we’re doing on Tuesday, if you look on the Benevon website, talking about that product. Actually, the webinar has already happened on that. It’s recorded on our website, so that’s the one you should watch, a special webinar about Bloomerang for Benevon.

And then we have live introductory sessions we do around the country. Check our website out. Webinars like this that we do elsewhere. We are launching the Benevon Model Video Tutorial. This is a brand new product. We just came out with it a couple of months ago. It’s for smaller organizations, budget size half a million dollars or less, that want to get started with the Benevon Model and don’t feel they’re quite ready to bring a team to one of our two-day workshops. It’s six videos. Here they are. Five, sorry, five videos.

These are the topics that gets you . . . it’s fabulous. It was recorded in a studio. Our lead instructor did all of this and shows you how to design a Point of Entry and get those Ambassadors out of every Point of Entry, how to do the follow-up calls and how to customize your events. Very, very valuable. Notice it does not show you how to put on an ask event. This is all the basics that we find. Everything in this tutorial series is the hardest part for people, getting that point of entry launched. You have access to the videos for six months, and it has a special introductory price of $595, because we just launched it.

And down at the bottom left there, see that coupon code? If you put Bloomerang in, we give you an additional 10% off, but just until the end of this month. So you’ll be hearing more about that in the email that we’ll be sending you after this.

Okay, and our workshops, if you’re interested in knowing more about Benevon, coming to one of our workshops with a team of 7 to 10 people, we have two more workshops happening this year, one of them in Seattle in September and one in Orlando in November. Let us know in the survey that you’ll be getting what you’d like in the way of follow-up.

There you go, Steven. I’m sorry I didn’t leave you very much time for questions. So if people have more questions, they can certainly email them. But go ahead and take it away, and I’d love to have a couple minutes to answer questions.

Steven: Yeah, we got a couple minutes. No worries. We should be thanking you for giving us for all this great knowledge and kind of giving your secret formula away. So thanks for being here.

Got a couple of questions. A few people asked a variation of the same question, Terry, and I’m sure it’s one that you hear a lot. Organizations that don’t really have kind of a physical location that lends itself to a tour or an event, what do you recommend to those folks?

Terry: First of all, actually there’s quite a bit about that in the book. You can take the Point of Entry out on the road, but we do not recommend it initially. We say probably there’s something that you could show in your own office that you may not think you could show. Even if it’s super confidential work that you do, there’s a way to have a Point of Entry in your office and let people just kind of see, get the feel of your organization. But there are what we call — I’ve written all about this — Boring Office Syndrome Point of Entry. You can do them, though, in board member’s offices, conference rooms. There are ways to design a Point of Entry in a box, we call it.

Steven: Okay. Very cool. This one is from Daniella. I thought it was pretty interesting. An organization that doesn’t have a lot of individual donors yet, what do you recommend they do when they’re trying to find those first Ambassadors to get the Benevon Model going? So who do you think they should ask to be Ambassadors?

Terry: Excellent question, Daniella. That’s the team that I said at the very beginning. The first team of people, the seven people that you put together in that team to work with you, whether you’re going to do it for the video tutorial or whether you’re going to come to one of our workshops, those seven people, when you recruit them, you let them know, you have them watch one of the videos, say, on our website, and understand what the model is and then you say, “One of the main roles we’ll be asking of you, team members, is to be one of our first Ambassadors. So be thinking about your own book club or your own yoga group or whatever group you’re in that you could invite to one of these points of entry.”

Then the metrics take off from there. If you do the points of entry well, in the follow-up you’ll get new Ambassadors out of every Point of Entry. We do not recommend that you immediately require your board members to all be Ambassadors, because they don’t even know what this is yet. Hopefully, they’ll come to a Point of Entry that’s hosted by a board member, they’ll fall in love with the Point of Entry method, and they will offer to become an Ambassador, just like anyone else would, very organically.

Steven: So don’t start with every single one of your board members. Maybe just one or two that really gets it?

Terry: Yeah, just don’t require it of board members. We don’t require it of anyone. The board members who are on the team, if you’re going to put a team together of seven, and I said at the beginning at least two of them need to be board members, two people on your team, those two board members, yes, they need to be an Ambassador, just like the other five people on your team. But we don’t want to require anyone to be an Ambassador until they know what this really is. Then they should be volunteering to do it because it’s fabulous.

Steven: Makes sense. One last question. We’re a little bit over time. This one is from Sarah. National organization, where a lot of their donors and supporters are spread out nationally. So she’s had a little bit of trouble putting together that Point of Entry event and getting people to come. Would you recommend she take it on the road, or what would you say to an organization like that, that’s more national?

Terry: No, I don’t know where you’re located, but we work with many national organizations, and what we usually recommend is that you start with one team in the main location of your headquarters office, even if you have branch offices all over the place. But start in one central location, where you are located, Sarah, because this takes work to get this thing going. Make it convenient for yourself, and, again, put a team together there and start there, and then you’ll be able to scale it over time. But you’ll need a different team in each location. You can’t just fly around and put on a Point of Entry and then ask people for money. You’ve really got to do the whole model in each location.

Steven: Cool. Well, we’re over time, and I know there’s a few questions here that we didn’t get to. But Terry, are you willing to take questions by email for folks we didn’t get to?

Terry: Sure, you bet. Yeah, any other interest people have in anything, you’re going to send out a survey, Steven? What are you sending out next?

Steven: Yeah, we’ll send out the slides, the recording. You’ll get a little survey. Tell us any questions and we’ll get that to Terry. Or you can reach out to her directly. Yeah.

Terry: Thank you.

Steven: Cool. All right. Awesome. This was great. Thanks to all of you for hanging out with us for an hour or so. And Terry, thanks as always. It’s always a treat to have you. We really enjoy the partnership too. So if you’re not using either of our services, definitely check them out. You can check out our website for more free resources of course.

And we’ve got another webinar coming up this Thursday, another free webinar, same time, same place. It’s going to be talking about annual reports. So it’s June. It’s not going to be very long before you’re going to have to be putting those together for end of the year. So check that out. It’ll be a really fun one. Mary is super awesome, super smart. It’s going to be a great presentation, so check that out.

If you’re not into annual reports, that’s okay. There’s lots of other webinars you can register for. Just visit our website, and we’d love to see you some other Thursday.

But we’ll call it a day there. Look for an email from me with all of the goodies. I’ll get the recording out today, this afternoon. I promise. I’ll get that in your hands. And hopefully we’ll see you again next week. So have a good rest of your day. Have a good weekend. And we’ll talk to you again soon.