In this newly updated edition of his popular “Power Prospecting” seminar, Jay Frost explores how you can find the top prospects within your constituency, throughout your community, across the country, and around the world.
Full Transcript:
Steven: All right. Jay, I’ve got two o’clock eastern. Is it okay if I go ahead and get this party started?
Jay: Sure.
Steven: All right. Awesome. Well, good afternoon, everybody. Good morning, I should say, if you’re out on the West Coast, and if you’re watching the recording, hope you’re having a good day, no matter where you are. We are here to talk about “Power Prospecting in a Pandemic and Beyond.” And I’m Steven over here at Bloomerang, and I’ll be moderating today’s discussion as always.
And just a couple of quick housekeeping items. I just want to let you all know that we are recording this session, and we’ll be sending out the slides and the recording later on this afternoon. So, if you miss anything, or want to review the content later on, share it, or maybe if you get interrupted by a kid doing virtual schooling next door, it’s okay. We’ll get all that good stuff to you. That might happen to me that’s why I say it. But don’t worry. We’ll get all the good stuff to you later on today. You won’t miss a thing.
But most importantly, please feel free to chat in any questions or comments along the way. We’re going to save some time at the end for Q&A. So don’t be shy. We’d love to hear from you. Introduce yourself in the chat if you haven’t already. But don’t be shy about asking questions. We’d love to get to them at the end. There’s a chat box and a Q&A box. You can use either of those. We’ll get them. We’ll see them, I promise. You can also tweet us. I’ll occasionally glance over at Twitter. But we’d love to hear from you. So don’t be shy.
Now, if this is your first Bloomerang webinar, I just want to say an extra special welcome to all you folks here for the first time. We do these webinars a couple times a week. We love doing them. But what we’re most known for at Bloomerang, if you’re wondering what the heck is Bloomerang, we are a provider of donor management software. So if you’re interested in that or just curious, want to learn more, check us out. Check out our website. There’s lots of videos there you can watch. You’ll get caught up on all things Bloomerang. But don’t do that right now. At least wait an hour because my buddy, Jay Frost, is here. Jay, how’s it going? Are you doing okay?
Jay: I’m doing great.
Steven: This is awesome. I can’t remember the last time we had you on, which I feel bad about, but I feel like we’ve been buddies for years. We used to run into each other at conferences when we were traveling. Of course, we’re not now. And Jay has graciously had me on his webinar series. So I thought, “Why don’t we return the favor?” Because he’s way smarter than I am. So let’s have him talk about all of his knowledge.
If you guys don’t know Jay, check him out. Boy, he’s been doing this for many, many years, tons of accolades. He is the president over at Frost on Fundraising, which you’re going to want to check out. He also hosts, I alluded to this, the DonorSearch webinar series, the “Mastermind Series,” which is a really, really good webinar series. You should definitely get plugged into that as well, lots of cool discussions and guests he has on there. Also, a senior consultant over at Brian Lacy and Associates, and Visionary Philanthropic Consulting and our friends over at Jerold Panas and Linzy & Partners, knows his stuff, can vouch personally for his work . . . for his clients, and the folks he’s helped out with. And I’m excited to hear all about prospecting because that’s a topic that he really knows something about, especially with his connection to DonorSearch. So, Jay, I’m going to pipe down because they want to hear from you, not me. I’m going to stop sharing my screen.
Jay: Thank you.
Steven: We’ll let you bring up your beautiful slides.
Jay: That was overly generous, Steven. You’re definitely the master here, not just of this domain, but in general. It’s really a pleasure and an honor to be, you know, hanging out with you today. This is a subject that I do have a lot of passion for, and I’ve had it for a long time. So that’s why I have been doing so much work with people at DonorSearch. Can you see my screen?
Steven: Not yet. We’re still seeing just you. We had a little trouble before. We’ll get it going.
Jay: Okay. And let me know if you can see it yet or if I need to share again.
Steven: No, I think you might have to share again.
Jay: Let me do that.
Steven: It might have been because I brought mine up.
Jay: So, everybody, just put up with us as we go through this little process.
Steven: I think people are used to the Zoom, the fun of Zoom.
Jay: I have everything open on the side. I’m closing it all, so we can do that. And there we go, and I’m back to sharing my screen. I’m going to share my . . . Oh, I can actually share the PowerPoint.
Steven: There it goes. It’ll be worth the wait. Beautiful.
Jay: Now, Steven, are you seeing just the slides? Are you seeing all the stuff on the slide?
Steven: I’m just seeing PowerPoint right now, but go ahead. Try to play it, and we’ll see if we can.
Jay: You’re just seeing one slide? Are you seeing . . . ?
Steven: Yeah.
Jay: Okay. Good.
Steven: We’re seeing all the slides right now.
Jay: You’re seeing all the slides. Okay.
Steven: Yeah.
Jay: There we go. All right.
Steven: Perfect.
Jay: Now that we’ve used half our presentation talking about the presentation, I’m going to take some time to talk with you about this subject of power prospecting in a pandemic and beyond. And you probably saw from the preview for this that this is something I’ve talked about a lot over the years, and I’ve updated a bit for our current environment. But I think that many of the things that we’ve been living through as fundraisers, whether you’ve been doing that for the last six months or the last 60 years, and who knows, there might be people who are in both those buckets here today, that many of those things hold true. And you’ll see that in some of what I share with you.
But some things I think are very new, not just in respect to especially the pandemic, but also the real fight, which has been going on for many decades, of course, but especially vigorous fight now among many, many people for greater social justice that those things are, I think, putting us in a position where we can make some really good strategic decisions as professionals in our sector to be, not just welcoming and think about having more diversity on our boards and these things, which we should have done forever, but rather do things that are also going to really truly advance the mission of our organizations by welcoming enough people with resources to make them possible. And I think we can do it even right now in the middle of this pandemic. So I’m going to take some time to talk to you about that.
And Steven is going to be hopefully letting me know if some big question, comment, or criticism comes in. And I really want to welcome all of the above, especially at the end. Don’t hold back in the middle but especially at the end because I don’t want to assume that . . . well, I don’t want to assume anything, but particularly that the information I share is any sort of gospel truth. It’s just one view of this from my perspective, and I hope that you will push back a bit but also . . . and especially share, not only your questions, but your ideas for how we can do better at what we do, not just today, but tomorrow.
I’m going to start right here with something that probably is well known to everyone, which is that . . . in fact, I think this is from . . . not this year but the previous year, from 2018. I should have had the 2019 slide here. But the amount of money that’s generated in terms of philanthropy right now in the United States is just enormous. We know that at this point that we’ve seen the lion’s share of that money come from, of course, people with resources that there’s a constant discussion about where is that money coming from.
Well, first of all, we know it’s coming from individuals. I’ll just state the thing that we have to say at every one of these presentations, that if you added up the categories, even from 18, not 19 in this case, but 18, you’d see in the Giving USA data that giving by foundations is about 18% of the pie. Probably about half that is coming from the people who have founded those foundations. The balance would be coming from more professional entities, and so that’s more institutional thinking. Then you have giving by bequests, which, of course, is from decedents or individuals who have passed away. And then you have giving by individuals at 68% in that year.
Now, we saw a little bit of a shift in the last year. But the main reason I’m bringing this up is because no matter if you looked at this year or last year or the year before, two years before, you find somewhere in the neighborhood of 85%, 86%, 87% or more of the money coming from people, just like you and me. So whatever their background is, however recently they accumulated those resources, whether there was inheritance or all newly made, whether it’s by a virtue of great thinking or by accident, they’re people. And those people are making decisions with respect to where they want to give. That’s an obvious fact. What may be a little less obvious or at least we don’t necessarily talk about with all of our stakeholders within our organizations is that giving is unequal because of the nature of the inequality which makes that giving possible.
Now, I’m not taking a position yet, but you’ll see that I do have a position on what we should do with our time as we dive into what prospecting is all about. But I’m going to start with an obvious image, which is this gift pyramid. And I just pulled this one from the 10 million gift pyramids which are out there on the internet. This is from a school campaign. I was not involved with this campaign. But it just gives you an idea about the typical, you know, kind of Egyptian pyramid approach to fundraising, which so many of us are familiar with. And there’s a reason why we do that kind of diagram, and that’s because it usually works, which is to say, there are usually a few people who are responsible for some very significant gifts. And those ratios change according to the organization, its history, the nature of constituency, etc. But you usually find something like what you see here, where you might have, you know, a $56 million goal anywhere between 10% and 20% of the money coming from perhaps one individual and so forth.
Now, if you were to look at wealth in general, that’s because . . . or rather I should say that pyramidical quality is because the wealth itself is unequal. So what I mean to say about that is if you were to look at, for example, where the wealth is today, and we’re going to talk a lot about that the next few minutes, this is a slide looking at the real-time billionaires list, which is from Forbes, the wealth is so heavily concentrated as we know and most especially now in the last few months that it means that those people not only have more resources to work with but they’re also being asked to consider what they wish to do with those resources. So quite simply it means that, in the end, we’re going to focus on people who have the resources to give because quite obviously, they’re in a position to give them. It doesn’t mean we don’t care about the others. It’s a function simply of resources and time.
Now, there is a choice to be made here, of course, which I’m going to talk about. But I will keep returning to this concept about who has the money and who doesn’t at least now as well as where that money might be in the future. Because quite simply, if we want to fund our activity, we have to focus on where there is opportunity. And I think there’s a very important debate going on about how we want to move forward, which, again, we’ll talk about together, but how much of our energy we want to spend on what might be described as the base of the pyramid are all the people that we know and love who wish to make some kind of contribution to our work, and then that small group of people who really can fund the lion’s share of what happens either today or through testamentary gifts.
In order to talk about that, I want to start with a pie. Okay. Hopefully, this doesn’t make you hungry. And for those of you who don’t know, I thought that this webinar was going to be an hour ago. Now, you may be in a different time zone, and you may have no interest in food right now. But I think it’s important to at least talk about pie because in the context of wealth and how people distribute it, we often talk about the pie and how well, you know, it’s carved up and how equal or unequal wealth distribution is in the country.
And I’m going to start with just a comment, which is that I’m talking about wealth today, not income, and there’s a simple reason for that. For those who are newer to our sector, there’s often a conflation especially in media reporting on these things we’re talking about today between wealth and income, but they’re quite different, of course. Of course, wealth is an asset. It’s something that people hold. It’s a store of something quite literally versus income, which is something that we receive for either doing some labor or based on an asset or what have you. It’s a distribution that comes on a regular basis, and we usually use that to pay for things that we’re utilizing right now. But I’m going to be talking about wealth because wealth is where the gifts come from in capital drives, almost always. Gifts are being made from assets versus from income.
So income-based gifts, which might be responsible for much of what happens at the end of the year, sustaining giving, is very important. But when it comes to any kind of large effort where we would want to do some real prospecting to find who those people are who have those assets and might wish to give them now or in the future, we have to think about the pie in terms of who owns the wealth.
Now, there was a really great story in “The Washington Post.” It’s been now a couple years ago, actually back to 2017. I apologize, December 2017. It talked about this. I love the graphics they put with it. It talked about 100 slices of pie. If you took that big apple pie or whatever pie you like, and sliced it up into 100 pieces and evenly distributed as if every piece of pie represented 1% of the population or something like that, then that would be equal. Everybody gets their piece of pie. Everybody’s happy assuming people actually like pie. But that’s not the way life is. We know that the ultra-wealthy have taken more of a slice of pie historically, that the top 1% owns a very, very significant share versus the bottom 90%. And that inequality has continued to grow. This is all pre-COVID.
Again, I’m stating something that might be obvious to you, but I think it’s really good to see it. Because if we were to take this and try to graph it today, and we don’t have good data for this, but we have a lot of good indicators, you would see this differential has grown even more in the last six months. We know a lot of the reasons for that. There are a lot of people out of work, maybe somewhere between 30 and 40 million people we know in the United States alone. We know that a lot of businesses are challenged right now, and I’ll give you stats on that later. And we also know that some businesses or especially public businesses and their shareholders, particularly the chief executives and the board members and the other insiders, who I’ll define for you in a minute, that those people have done especially well, even better than they’ve done historically. And historically insiders, who I’ll define again in a moment, outperform the rest of us by 11% a year, but that number has grown. Only history will be able to tell us how much it’s grown, but we know that it’s very significant.
Now, if you divide up the pie as it looked about a year and a half to two years ago, it would look something like this. The top 20%, 90 slices of pie, second, 20%, 8 slices, middle, 20%, 2 slices, fourth, 20%, zero, and then finally, bottom 20% are actually underwater, an average net worth of almost $9,000 under, you know. So that’s their debt. Now, the reason why I’m holding here for a moment is that this is where the conversation about wealth usually ends. There’s a kind of political discussion where people talk about the 99% and the 1%, which is interesting and fun kind of to talk about and a great way for us to think about how do we want to be different as a country. But in terms of philanthropy, we tend to stop talking about this issue at quintiles, but there’s a lot of unequal distribution at the very top, which should inform what we do generally as fundraisers and specifically in our prospecting.
So this is the same graphic here from this Wonkblog. I just thought it was really cool. So, hopefully, they don’t mind my sharing it liberally and crediting him. This is Edward Wolff there. And so you can see here the top 1% actually has 40 slices of that pie, so 40% of the wealth of the country, and this was as of two years ago. And then the next 4%, 27% and the next 5%, 12 slices of pie.
Another way to think about this if you don’t like this pie analogy is this. Some of you have children, and some of you don’t. Some of you own a house. Some of you don’t. Around 65% of the country has their name on title to property, but, in fact, they don’t own it outright. There’s smaller percentage of people who do. So many people are paying a mortgage. The people who have kids know that it’s expensive to raise a child, especially multiple children. And it’s something we love to do, but there’s a cost to that in not just the food and other things that we need for taking care of our kids but for education.
So the reason I’m mentioning that is up at the top in that top 10%, you have people who have the equivalent of, well, $2.6 million at the bottom tier in their net worth, but they are paying maybe $200,000 or more a year in education bills, and they might be paying for a jumbo mortgage and an additional property, and they might have a past debt associated with business. There could be a lot of things going on. That mean that $2.6 million is not really as liquid as it might sound versus the people at the very top, in the top 1% and especially top 10th of 1%, where as you can see right here in the slide, the average net worth, even the top 1% two years ago was 26.4 million versus around, again, as they said then 1.6 million in that next 5%. So this is a very, very big difference between the people who are usually lumped together. There’s a lot of good reasons why this happens in our perception.
These people might live in the same zip codes. They might drive the same cars. They might work at the same companies. They might even have similar titles sometimes in business if they’re associated with a business. So there are a lot of things where the cohorts appear the same. It’s sort of like a “Friends” episode, you know, to draw back from pop culture from the ’90s where they kind of all look alike in a way, and they all seem to live in the same building, but they aren’t necessarily earning the same amounts of money.
I have no idea what those characters were supposed to be doing or earning, except one was a paleontologist. But my point is just that you can’t judge these things or these people because they’re in the top 10% of the top 1%. There’s a lot going on up there, and their situations are quite different. So understanding that and having some sympathy or at least empathy for it is going to be important when we then start to say, “We’re going to serve a lot of people. How do we make sure that we’re talking to the people who have the resources to help right now?” And then understand that there’s a difference between this person over here and that person over here, even if by appearance’s sake they would seem to be kind of in the same cohort when, in fact, they may not.
This is where we get to sort of a parting in the road or, you know, where the road . . . I think of the Robert Frost poem, “The Road Less Taken,” right, where we talk about how we could go down one road or another, the road diverged in the wood and, you know. Now, that poem is often misunderstood. We can talk about that later. But the reason I mention it now is we do usually come to a point where we say, “Well, we only have so much time and so many resources,” especially in our fundraising world. So we’re going to have to make a choice here. We’re going to either choose to go double down and do a lot more in the direct marketing sense or talk to a lot of people about smaller things because there are a lot more people there, or we’re going to have to focus on our energy and our time on a few people with significant resources.
Let’s just hold on to that thought because I think that it’s possible to make another choice than just going right or left. But I’m going to explain that with a few more pictures and then looking at some data with you. Let me jump out of this for a second. Oh, there we go. I don’t know why that image appeared there. Sorry, that’s a mistake. Oh, it looks like something happened to my slide deck here, Steven. Take back the helm for a moment, will you?
Steven: Sure.
Jay: Yeah. When I saved it, it did something strange. Oh, no, you know what, it’s the way it’s displaying. It’s really, really odd.
Steven: Yeah. We were seeing chairs instead of those smokestacks for some reason.
Jay: Yeah. All right. Well, just hold on there and entertain our team here while I get the other version, the slide deck up. It’s really odd. Do you see what’s happening? All right. Okay. Okay. Steven, I’m going to stop sharing for a moment. It looks like PowerPoint somehow corrupted my file, so my apologies. Sorry, folks, this is the first time that I’ve had this happen to me. Okay. Steven, do I still have you there?
Steven: Yeah. It looks like it’s showing up now.
Jay: Well, you have a version here. This is an older version of the presentation. So I’ll fill in with where I can, my apologies to everybody. So I’m going to start with this image, which I meant to show you anyway, which is a little . . . an image from a lot of the past of how people made their money. So if you live in a place which was formerly industrial, you know that the smokestacks were off in a way that you knew where the money was, and, of course, that’s really not the case anymore.
You know, whether you’re living in Bridgeport, Connecticut as I once did, or you’re living in another place, that you’ve seen the decay of those communities over time. And oftentimes, they were replaced by something entirely different which wasn’t as visible. So you may or may not recognize this. People with a keen eye often can spot what this is right away, not because they’ve been to the building, but because they recognize one of the flags.
You may be one of those people, but I’m just going to go ahead and say what it is since you can’t really raise your hand. And this is the Apple headquarters. And the great thing about thinking about a company like this is that you don’t necessarily see what’s going on, but we all feel it. We know the market cap of Apple is absolutely enormous. And in the other version of the slide deck, which blew up on me, I would have shown you exactly which companies are the very top of that food pyramid right now.
Apple is, in fact, not the very top. If you wanted to guess which was, you might also think Amazon. Wrong again. It’s actually Saudi Aramco. And if I showed you their headquarters, you probably wouldn’t recognize it at all. And, in fact, if we looked at the headquarters for Amazon, some of you might recognize it because it looks so incredible and futuristic. It’s a whole bunch of these bubble domes. It looks like something out of an old movie called “Logan’s Run” from many years ago. The reason I mention it is that you can’t necessarily guess where the money’s being made. The same thing is true about where people live.
So, for people, again, who are used to looking at either travel logs or traveling a lot, you may recognize this building as The Breakers in Newport, Rhode Island, a place where the wealthy often lived in their . . . what were described as summer cottages. And this building is, of course, enormous and beautiful. If you look at the old records about how people spent their money back in that day, you’d see that one of the biggest items was not just the food budget, but it was also the laundry bill, which you can imagine, washing all those sheets in a house like that for your summer guests. But that is the days of yore.
This is a house in Cupertino, California. It was in the market I think about two years ago for about $3 million. Now, it’s not as small as it looks in this picture. There’s actually a little apartment in the back. I think it’s the total of 3,000 square feet, but it’s sure ain’t fancy. And the main reason for mentioning this is because you, of course, can’t judge a house by the way it looks.
Now, in the version of this presentation, I created today that just blew up on me, I wanted to show you also what just happened. Now, in addition to kind of Saudi Aramco and Amazon experience of going from something which was vigorous and visibly a marker of where money is made to something which is less so but still a big part of our lives to this extravagant display of corporate prowess, the same thing is happening in the real estate front.
Now, it’s been true for a long time that there was a very small group of people, the very, very tippy top of that pyramid of wealth that did live extravagantly. But it would be hard to find a $150 million house in the market until the last few months. And that’s exactly where the biggest house or not biggest house, it’s not the biggest house, where the most expensive house in the market right now is the United States and it’s in Beverly Hills. But if you were to look in Manhattan, it’s $74 million for a six-room penthouse suite with a garden. And that’s not an enormous place. It’s just the nature of the market, which, again, has been split like that road in the woods between the rest of us and a very, very small group of people at the very top who are themselves outpacing like the rabbit originally in the race between the tortoise and the rabbit, the rest of the people at the top of the 10%, which is why I was calling so much attention to those statistics.
This is a picture you may have seen if you are a fan of looking at historical philanthropy because the gent in the middle who looks like Santa is actually Andrew Carnegie or maybe it’s Carnegie, I never know. But in any case, he’s the one in the middle, and all the rest are there. And you can tell they’re all on the fancy gentry. But you wouldn’t necessarily know today who the richest people are.
This picture is from a few years ago in the state where I grew up in Connecticut, and there are three people here. One is the mayor of a town, another one I think is a local pizza shop owner who does some politicking, and the third is Ray Dalio. If that name doesn’t mean anything to you, he’s in the top 100 people in the world and definitely in the United States in terms of wealth. He runs a major hedge fund in Greenwich, and he’s the guy wearing a really awful Hawaiian shirt. People in Hawaii have told me that’s not a Hawaiian shirt. But it just shows that you can’t judge people by what they wear.
Now, again, in this slide, you’ll have to imagine it that I was going to show you, you would be able to see, not necessarily the clothes that people are wearing, but how different things are beginning to look now that there’s, again, this stripping away of a very top tier of people from the rest of us, and it’s become a little bit more visible in some ways but also more removed. So while the real point, as you can tell in these images, is that we can’t judge a book by its cover. At the same time, there are some books that are not available to us in the library at all unless we’re really good at prospecting. So that’s what the pie was about. In this version of the presentation, the pie came later.
So I’m going to just talk for a few minutes about the giving by these folks. It’s really important to recognize that the top 1% are now worth in excess of the 30 trillion when I did this original version, and roughly a third of all the charitable gifts come from the top 1%. In the last study done by Giving USA, that number has risen, and the work that’s done by the fundraising effect in this project makes an even more dramatic point to that. And Steven’s heavily involved in that. So I’m sure he can give us the most recent statistics as we get towards the end of the presentation today.
I don’t have a stack here, but one thing I wanted to call attention to is one part of the fundraising effect in this project data from I think it was a year ago, which said about 88% of the money especially in capital efforts is coming from the top let’s say 1% of the population. What we’re finding in capital campaigns, we have seen this for at least seven years, is that in $100 million plus campaigns as much as, you know, 95% of the money might be coming from as few as 2.5% of the population.
There are lots of different people joining us today, those who could stick around while I try to make PowerPoint work, and those people are probably . . . some of them are thinking, “Well, yes, I knew that” because we’re in a capital drive or have been in one. And so we naturally have been focusing our attention on that top 10th of 1% who are making those very significant gifts, and they’re doing them to lots of different kinds of things. But there are others who are saying, “Well, we don’t have those kind of people in our midst, or how do we find people who are really interested in giving to us? And we haven’t seen that kind of thing here, and we don’t even have a goal that large.” These are all really important considerations and not just for one group or the other in that situation.
Where COVID puts us is in a position where I think that people are reevaluating where they give and also reevaluating who they’re asking and for what and over what period of time and in what ways. That’s all to the good. But if we looked at it through the lens, again, just shortly ago, what we’d find even then is that a lot of money was going to places like higher education and health. And I would argue that the reason for that is simple. It’s because we talked to them about projects. We built the relationships over time, and we asked for very significant gifts for very significant projects.
So there’s a debate right now in philanthropy, and it’s a very vigorous one and an honest one about whether or not in philanthropy the richest people should be deciding where all those philanthropic dollars go, if there should be more equity introduced by changing the nature of decision making in philanthropy. There should be pressure, for example, on foundations, more diversity on those boards, that people who have masses of amount of money, they should pay higher taxes, that if people are going to give, there should be some kind of advice provided to those people where those dollars can go, or it should impact tax deductibility. There’s a lot of a range of discussion about this, especially about decolonizing philanthropy.
But the reason I’m mentioning all this here is because I think we have a role to play, and that role could be simply by virtue of deciding, “What kinds of projects do we wish to offer people? And are we identifying people who can actually invest in those projects and then giving them an opportunity?” And the reality is that in higher education, to name one simple example, is that the universities have outpaced the rest of us in terms of both developing those relationships with alumni over time, but most arguably building an entire sales process founded on prospecting and research that informed who they talked to and when about what.
So it wasn’t just the relationship that mattered, although that’s critical that they build that relationship with trust, and it wasn’t just that those people have more money, which they do because they’re graduates. It was also that they talked to them over time about being invested in things that they said that they wanted to invest in. It was donor centricity, not in terms of letting the donors decide what to do, but donor centricity in terms of listening to the donors first. It’s what Jerry Panas used to describe as listening a gift.
And I think we can use that operating principle when we think about, first of all, the high net worth individuals and particularly ultra-high net worth individuals. Those are people with between $30 and $50 million in investable assets and the rest of the population, all of whom we love and care for, and do want to give but simply cannot give in the same ways at this moment in time. But if we choose not to say, “You know what, it has to be one or the other, but it can be both,” we can start to do some prospecting in a way that allows us to build a portfolio of people who do want to give in lots of different ways who don’t have the same level of resources as the philanthropic market changes. So, again, I’m going to focus first on the money because that’s where the money is right now and especially now.
But I think it’s really important that we get our gears moving towards not just hitting everybody who’s below a high net worth individual level or below $1,000 gift level. You know, you pick your metric and just hit them with mail or email until they just give up and run away in fear, but instead find ways to truly and honestly and sincerely cultivate relationships with them, so that as they emerge as people who can make greater investments that are closer to the heart, that they will do it with us. And that will mean that the other areas of interest will take a greater role in their philanthropy. It won’t be just all higher education and healthcare anymore. We’re seeing this already in terms of giving especially to things that involve racial justice and social justice issues.
As you probably know, there’s an article right in the front of the current “Chronicle of Philanthropy,” I don’t know if you see my face right now or not, about five billion incoming, and this all is about commitments to racial justice. We also know that with COVID specifically that there has been as much as I think it’s $11.9 billion that’s been earmarked for COVID related philanthropy in just the last few months since COVID really emerged for most of us. And that is coming not just from individuals, although that’s true, but also from corporations who have been laggards in terms of giving usually about 5% of the pie as we talked about it. Now it’s much more significant. In fact, about two-thirds of that money is coming from corporations, which is pretty remarkable. 49% of the total awards from community foundations is going to COVID.
And donor-advised funds, which have justifiably taken a little bit of heat for not being as transparent as we might like, they think they are being transparent, they’re definitely being legal, but they are not as visible to us as many other entities are, especially for prospecting, but they have given themselves $453 million for things related to COVID in just the last few months as well. So lots of money is coming from places where it didn’t before to things where it didn’t go before largely because the goals are bigger, they’re building the relationships of trust, and they’re asking at the highest possible level rather than asking for lots of little things from lots of people and never building relationships. That’s a lot of explanation on one simple slide, but I think it’s important to discuss.
Now, again, I’ll have to give some gloss to some of these slides since you don’t have the newest version, and I’ll make sure that I somehow restore that for you and get you all a slide deck afterwards, so you’ll be able to see some of the illustrations. But this is just a way of showing you that at least, again, a couple years ago, this was a 2015 map, but it’s very similar today, that the distribution of the top wealth holders, ultra-high net worth individuals, is across the country, so whether you are in New York or California, where we tend to talk about that stuff, maybe Illinois or Texas or Florida. In fact, it’s really true everywhere. Maybe it’s a little tougher in Alaska in terms of the distribution of these folks, but also the population density is smaller in Alaska or lower in Alaska. So, quite simply, there’s wealth everywhere if you know where to look for it, but it’s only in the hands of a few people right now. So, again, as we take our journey down one path and then hopefully the other as well, we want to make sure we focus on where the money is as well as who has it.
Now, I’m not going to talk about Hawaii. I pulled up a Hawaii deck for you. But, in fact, just to show you that there’s a lot of ways of getting this information relatively cheaply or for free. HomeSnacks is one way you could do this right online right away. If you want to just check and see what are the top richest neighborhoods, streets, cities in your state, you could do it right now just be using HomeSnacks, which is the goofiest title I know of a website.
And whenever I show this to people and update it usually that day for audiences, it’s usually surprising because we know our towns really well, but it’s sort of like the pictures I showed you at the very beginning. We don’t necessarily know everybody as well as we think we do, and we don’t necessarily know every street as well as we think we do.
So, just for fun, next time you meet with colleagues in the office, go ahead and take a look at something like HomeSnacks or the other resources I’ll show you. Pull those up and just first of all ask them what they think the pockets of wealth are, and then you’ll find that some of them they know, and some, they’re just wrong. In the case of Hawaii, in case there’s anybody from Hawaii here, these were the five that were listed.
This is a place I want to introduce the different ways we can do prospecting. And I’ll start with prospecting 1.0. Quite simply this is something I started to do a long time ago, and it started with the sushi club. And the idea was simple. We wanted to get a group of people together and talk about . . . back then it was Japan. It was a contentious time for U.S.-Japan relations, and there wasn’t a lot of information about Japanese companies, their principles, and what they might be interested in.
I was working as an international fundraiser, and I was with a U.S.-based institution and trying to figure out where the points of opportunity were. And so, at the same time, I was also a lot . . . I had a lot of interest in Japan. My wife was from Osaka. We started meeting with other people over dinner in a local restaurant, and that group blew up. There were 150 people on our mailing list back when people actually mailed things by mail with stamps. And then whenever we had a meeting, which could only be 40 people in the restaurant, it was always overflow. It was a chance for people to talk off the record, which is a Washington way of saying nobody’s supposed to take notes, but everybody does.
What really happened, though, was it allowed us to have a relationship over breaking bread or in this case breaking sushi, and we could really learn about things that were never available in books or online. That continues to be true today, not only with Japanese information, but almost all sorts of information. So there’s a huge amount on Google on everything, but the really good information usually is down to a few sites, some of which are free and some of which are for pay.
The great part about this, if you have whatever is your version of the sushi club, meaning your network of individuals with whom you share information, not in a surreptitious spy-like way, but just like a common interest, what are we interested in, what do people care about, and then they naturally start telling you things about people, that could be anything from board members to staff, faculty, alumni, current students, volunteers, donors, grateful patients, you know, lots of different people, but also the entities where information is exchanged in the course of business, government, business councils, chambers of commerce, but also the people who are researchers professionally, think tanks, scholars, journalists, other researchers. All those people are just a wealth of information. The problem, however, is that limitation of geography or knowledge or technology if having a group like that.
So, on one level, you can do a lot by just the old-fashioned way of getting together, and I would encourage people to do that. Except now doing it this way, you know, technology permitting where we can have a conversation and then learn what we can from one another. But at the same time we’re doing that and holding dear onto that because it’s so important we have to go beyond. So that’s prospecting 2.0.
And there are six markers for philanthropy. They’re really informing, how we know, who has the money, as well as who has the interest. You can tell I’m doing this pretty quickly now because of the problem we had earlier. And by the way, these six markers, there have been two studies at DonorSearch with whom I do a great deal of work, one a number of years ago. This one based upon, I think it was nearly . . . I’m trying to remember if it was 700 institutions and something like $700 million in giving, really substantial study, and you can get a copy of that either through me or through DonorSearch. But they found that there were five major characteristics, and I’ve added one. I’ve taken that liberty. The first of these for big givers is giving to your own organization, which you can discover quite simply by, of course, looking in your database of record, so whether that’s Excel, I hope not, or whether that’s a really great robust database, which Steven can tell you all about.
An RFM analysis can go one step further than just seeing who gave to you last month or last year. Quite simply it allows you to go and code recency or how . . . of course, recently a person made a gift to you, their frequency of giving over a defined period of time, and the amount of cumulative giving they’ve made to you. Score those indices, total them up, sort that file, and boom, you’ve got a very, very simplistic but fairly efficient and effective tool for narrowing down the group of people who have demonstrated the greatest interest.
Of course, one limitation of this is it depends upon whether or not you’ve been actually asking these people for support with any frequency you’ve done so recently, and you’ve asked them for a sufficient amount of money. So, if you’ve been just, you know, giving them a checkbox for $10, maybe that’s all they checked, and you might have, in fact, seen attrition rates for a variety of reasons. And the people at Bloomberg have done beautiful work on addressing this topic of attrition. Steven talks about it extensively. The people at NextAfter do wonderful work, research work in their library on attrition.
But I would add one thing, which is that if we ask people for too little, they will stop taking us seriously, and it’s simply because if you can’t go . . . nobody can right now go to the movies but pretend you can go to the movies. It’s not going to cost you less than 100 bucks to go out with a significant other and have a babysitter and eat for two people at Chipotle and pay for gas. And so if you can’t do that for $100, then if somebody asks you for $10 from their charity, how can you take it seriously? And if you have a very significant asset base, how do you have the time to write a check or to go online and make a gift for any amount of money if that’s your amount of money? So it’s really important to keep that in mind. But this is a great way to start.
Another thing is giving to other organizations. I won’t go through all the rest of this slide, but just to say this, the more they’ve given in terms of their aggregate giving, especially large individual gifts, the more likely they are to make a charitable donation to more than one cause. In the case of donors of over $100,000 who’ve made a gift of a single gift of over $100,000, they’re 32 times more likely to make a charitable donation to some other organization.
Board of trustee positions. The people who might make up only 2% to 3% of your constituency if you looked at everybody. Let’s say you have 10,000 people who have given and showed an interest and volunteered in your file, and you looked at them, you might have 2% or 3% of your people who have been in a board or a trustee position. Those people might be making as much as . . . giving you as much as a third of the money that’s coming in on an annualized basis. That’s what they’re finding through this study.
Political giving is very significant and also counter-intuitive. The bottom line here is that there’s almost a one-to-one correlation between people making a gift of over $250 to an FEC campaign, Federal Election’s Commission campaign . . . federal campaign and to charity. So you might find that as much as 70% of the money going to your organization is coming from that small percentage of people who are also making political gifts in excess of $250. That sounds crazy until you start looking up these people, which I’ll show you how to do momentarily.
And then you’ve got the value of real estate. Now, real estate is something that seems obvious to us, right? It’s sort of like the fancy houses that I was talking about earlier. If somebody owns really expensive house, it stands to reason that they have money to give, right? Well, yes, no. There are big mortgages out there as I mentioned earlier. But individuals owning more than $2 million worth of real estate are in the top 3.5% of your donor pool, and they’re giving you nearly a third of your donation dollars. Now, that might not just be a single property that looks really nice in a picture on Zillow. This might also be a person who owns two or three properties where the aggregate value is 2 million.
Now, some of you might say, “Well, I’m in New York and everything’s over $2 million.” And I would take issue with that, too. What we often find is that we understand the world as we see it, and even in New York, even in New York City, even in Manhattan, believe it or not, the median incomes and the price of property is not . . . not everybody lives in a $2 million place. They just don’t. So just bear that in mind and try to keep an open mind when you look at your own constituency. But it’s also important to note that when thinking about this as a prospecting tool, that about 65% of your people are going to have the names on property once again. So it has value, but the value is somewhat limited in terms of narrowing your prospect pool.
Corporate leadership is different, and this is where I add a little bit. So DonorSearch has definitely identified the presence of business ownership as being key, and it is. But one thing I would point out is that if you look at the composition of estates by assets, you can see what happens. The richer people are, the more important stock becomes. And I wish I could show you the slide I prepared to just show you some of the data on the most recent . . . what’s happened to the stock market.
But the stock market, if you didn’t know it, has completely blown up, that people sold off like crazy right at the start of the pandemic when most of us either were out of work or starting to work from home. And then it grew dramatically, and now it’s almost at the highest point, again, in human history. So you’ve got a huge percentage of people unemployed, the most since the Great Depression, and you’ve got a small percentage of people whose accumulated wealth is greater than it’s ever been in the history of mankind . . . humankind, excuse me.
This is really important. And if we can figure out who has that money, both the companies that are private that have grown a lot and may go public and the companies that are public where the top executive leadership and their insider owners are all visible, that can be very helpful to us to identify people to prospect and to understand them to research them.
So who are these people? They’re not people who own 5% of their company. I want to just put that aside. They’re people who are in policymaking roles, they’re directors of public company regardless of ownership, they own 10% or more of any class of stock, and they own Rule 144 stock. This is stock that was a distribution when the companies went public.
The main reason I’m mentioning all that is because I want you to know what the value of this very small group people who’s definitely under a million individuals living in debt going back to 1985. These people, to use the most crazy example, like the CEO of Amazon, now the richest person in the world, are rich because of their stock. But because they hold the stock in a way that’s so substantial, they have to file with the government to indicate what they’re doing. So you can see salary, bonus, board service fees, other compensation, retirement plans, their holdings, their options position, and information about their career and other affiliations. You can learn a lot of this by looking . . . and again, my apologies for an old slide.
But if you were to go to CNBC, which you could do now, you could go in there and look up a company. When I prepared this slide earlier today, it wasn’t Blackbaud anymore, it was Salesforce, and you’d see that same arc crash and grow. Never truly crashed at Salesforce, but the growth has been dramatic. We’re using Zoom today, Zoom has cooperated where PowerPoint didn’t, and that growth has been tremendous. Microsoft, as much as we all like to beat them up, Microsoft is still in the top three companies.
It’s very interesting to look at the stock trajectory, but underneath that is the insider ownership. So you can see how the company’s doing. But you can also click a little button here that talks about insider activity. That insider activity will tell you about the individual directors and officers, and you can see their shareholdings and their current value.
And if you want to look a level deeper, and I hope you will, this only takes you five minutes to look up on an individual. You could go to the SEC site, at Securities and Exchange Commission or sec.gov. You could go to EDGAR, which actually does stand for something, Electronic Data Gathering and Retrieval, it’s just a nice little trivia note, and you could look in there for any company like Apple. Just type Apple. You don’t even need to know the ticker symbol. Search for them. Look for the one thing that’s going to give you the best snapshot in time.
Now, if you’re a researcher, you know that you go a lot more depth than this. So I’m doing this mainly for our colleagues who aren’t aware that this is possible. If you are not a researcher and you have a researcher in your shop, collaborate with your researcher on this because they’re going to give you a level of detail, which is much greater than what I’m about to show you that you can do in five minutes. If you don’t have a researcher, hire one.
If you can’t hire one right now, do at least this. At least know this about anyone who’s an insider in your file. Look at the name of Apple. Look up a DEF 14a, which is the proxy statement, which you can find, and then click DEF 14a. Boom, you can see then the document, and you can just search for the person. Control F to search for any key characteristic like Tim Cook’s name. So unless they actually have a Cook working at Apple, you’re going to find Tim Cook, and then you’re going to be able to see his face and learn all about what his interest are including his directorships and memberships as well as his compensation package, not just his salary, but how much he’s got in stock and what it’s worth.
Now, private business today is actually 31 million private businesses in the country, and I have to tell you something that really blew my mind, which is that there are a lot of business starts going on right now. Some of you may have even started your own businesses, or you know people who have in your own families because we’re working from home if we’re working at all. And those who aren’t working are finding new ways to make sure that they can. So there are over 4,000 new business filings per week in the state of Michigan is one example, and that’s a 91% increase over the previous year. So what is this about? It’s people trying to find new ways to make things work.
It’s emblematic of what happened right after the crash of 1929. Many of the companies that were the leaders of industry in the 20th century grew out of the ashes of that time. Similarly, the companies that were very successful in the last number of years grew out of the ashes of the crash of ’97, for those who remember back that far, or maybe 2008. DonorSearch is an example of this. It’s a company that grew really in the immediate aftermath of all that. Now is quite large. So a lot of companies have done that, and a lot of them start, of course, in somebody’s garage or living room or kitchen, I think it was over at DonorSearch.
And it’s important to note that most businesses, most private businesses, first of all, half of them fail, but for those that survive, only a small percentage, about 3.3% end up grossing in that sweet spot of over $10 million. And that’s really where you want to be thinking in terms of the top of the pyramid, that one lane in that divergent wood.
You can get that information from lots of sources. One I didn’t mention here is a great corporate source that’s utilized by DonorSearch and integrated in its database, and I’ll be happy to provide that link to you later. But others that you may be familiar with include Dun & Bradstreet, Hoovers, the company website, of course, Inc., which has a great list of the top-performing and fastest-growing companies in the country. And for COVID related stuff, I would be looking at that.
There’s also a great article from the Helen Brown Group, a terrific resource. Helen’s a great friend to our industry. And Helen wrote a or her team did, wrote an article, I think it was back at the very beginning of the shutdown in April, and I want to make sure I have the right name, called “Who’s Doing Well Now?” which cited a number of different kinds of companies that have been successful right at the start of the pandemic. Those would include companies like the cable providers because everyone needs a good cable connection to have a meeting like this. DoorDash, delivering the food to our homes. Makers of medical supplies seems kind intuitive, but what about the sanitation supplies? Johnson & Johnson. So there’s a list of those companies. That list might mature over time. And, in fact, the Inc. list, the Inc. 5000 is going to be a good demonstration about which companies are taking advantage of the situation, not in a negative way, but in a positive way, trying to address the needs and interests of consumers and potential consumers. And all of that would be documented there.
Real estate is something you can get in Zillow or Trulia or LexisNexis if you can afford it. And that’s a great way to, again, look at that 65% of the people. It’s often the only asset data available. So you do get kind of a window on people in the other lane, too, all the people who are just, you know, living in their houses and trying to make things work. But you definitely get a good picture about the people who are in those $2 million above homes. What you can’t do on Zillow is you can’t see multiple properties. For that, you would need a tool like LexisNexis or perhaps some others that you’re going to get through doing a screening, which I’ll mention momentarily.
There are also a number of other resources, and those would include political giving, which you can get from OpenSecrets, charitable giving, which you could get from DonorSearch or NOZA, which is a product of Blackbaud, of course, foundation and board membership, which you can learn about through Candid, which is the consolidation of the Foundation Center and GuideStar, both great resources. In terms of political giving, OpenSecrets is a great way you can look up things for free right now, and that’s a lot of fun to try.
Just remember one thing. This presentation is titled about prospecting, but in theory, the statute, at least as I understand it, does not want us to be prospecting from political gifts. In other words, they don’t want us to go in here, find people who’ve given to a political campaign, and put them in our database. That is theoretically in violation of the statute. However, it is a research tool that’s public and made available for all of us. And so if you have a donor in your database, if you’re prospecting from your own database, which is really what I’m arguing for much of this presentation, then doing this both as I understand it’s not only legal, but I think it would be incumbent upon us to know something about what their interests are. Because fundamentally, research is not just knowing about capacity to find out who can gift stuff. It’s knowing what people care about. And while their political donations are not a complete reflection, they do tell us something especially this year.
There’s also a tool you can use, and which looks more robust than this now. Too bad you can’t see the current image. But you can get it just by going to dsgiving.com. It’s a DonorSearch tool, which gives you a free window on their database up to the most recent gifts on all the people in there. And so it’s not everything there, but it’s a great way to get a slice of information especially if you’re going to have a meeting with someone, including a meeting like this one. And so all the things I’m talking about are not to replace those kinds of in-person contexts, they’re to enhance them. And one thing I always want to know is what are people giving to? Because I want to know not just what can they do but what do they care about. That will tell you.
Similarly, foundation information gives you a great window on what people have an interest in doing. I mean, they serve on a certain foundation. It should tell you something. If I dived a little more into Tim Cook’s bio in that SEC filing, the DEF 14A, you would have learned about the foundations where he serves on the board. Similarly, you can use a resource like this, the foundation directory within candid.org, and to learn more about that, or if you’re just prospecting natively, meaning you’re trying to just find anybody with an interest in what you do, you can go in and look up by those kinds of characteristics and pull up those people. Excuse me. And that’s just an image from there where I just looked up human services in the state of Wisconsin, and then I pulled up a list with how much they’ve given.
Now, that brings us to the third level, prospecting 3.0. There are lots of ways to do this, and those can include using tools like Acxiom Personicx, which is the backbone of the worth mailing list, CQ Roll Call, which helps you identify which sites you want your banner ads to appear on that are focused on the right kinds of people, the people who have resources and interests, so they put your ad. Let’s say you’re Save the Children. You want that right in front of people. CQ Roll Call would help. And DonorSearch has a marketing list function, which would allow you to go in there and also look up that information and be able to look up a finite group of people, so you can see all the people who have given over $1,000 in this three-digit zip area to this particular kind of cause. It’s a very, very inexpensive quick way to find a small group of people who are already demonstrated to give at a very high level.
And then you can use other resources like AccuData or Aculist, which are list brokers who will sell you lists from specific individuals, or excuse me, specific charities, although those tend to be lower dollar donors, so more on the other lane, if you will. And then finally, you have people who aren’t just brokers, but they’re consultants in space like Brian Lacy is at Brian Lacy and Associates, where he and others like him will help you to figure out who you’re really looking for and then get a list of those people. So you’re not just trying to rent a big list somewhere for a lot of money. You’re not just trying to buy a list and figure it out on your own. They’re working with you to curate a list of people who are the right kind of prospects for you. And you can tailor all that through the tools.
Finally, there are screenings that you can do all this with. They range from asking people on a board, you know, about what they know about various people to provide names of people and then to screen them together, tell you who they think has the greatest financial capacity, the greatest interest, their data overlays ranging from age to income, their asset screenings of the type that I was talking about with DonorSearch or others, I’ll list all the companies in a moment, modeling, which is a very different sort of approach where you can make some determinations about who might have an interest in supporting you based on a past activity or other kinds of interests, and then finally, social, which is very different animal and relatively new.
You can try with any of the companies, any of the screening companies before you buy, which means if you have a database and you want to find out who the people are with real money, you can provide a list of them. This is a little screen that DonorSearch came up with for me a long time ago, so people could just give them a few names and try out the database for a month. And you can do that. In fact, you can just search, “Special offer for friends of Jay Frost,” and then run some names. It’s well worth doing.
I would suggest if you’re interested in screening, figure out first what you want, the kinds of people you’re looking for now and in the future, and then share that with . . . get a list like that together and have that screened by the companies that can provide that kind of information. And so that way you’re comparing the different companies by virtue of not only what they deliver, but how they treated you, which is so important. Not necessarily how does that data work with your database because almost all of that does work, but rather is the whole process pretty seamless and is the information really enhancing both what you know and what you don’t know? Which is the only real reason to screen anything is to find out what you don’t know, not whether or not you were right.
And here are the companies, I think it’s a pretty extensive list, that are doing screening work today. They range from the kind of modeling that’s done over at BWF Insight, to DonorSearch, to iWave, DonorScape, which is part of Grenzebach Glier, Target Analytics, which is part of Blackbaud. I think they may have, in fact, rebranded so it’s not just Blackbaud, WealthEngine, Wealth-X, which does just the upper end, [inaudible 01:08:15] still do this, and then finally, Windfall, all companies that will provide screening.
The last part here is about social ambassadors. Now, when I came up with this deck, originally, I included something called Sherlock. Sherlock in this form no longer exists, and it’s a shame. You can get social handle appending to your files from some of the vendors, and sometimes it’s natively within your own databases. If you’re a Salesforce user, you might find that there’s a way to access the social information on a constituent that you are looking at. If you go into a screening with a company like DonorSearch and perhaps others, some of that data can be appended or at least is visible when you’re accessing the product like prospect view online, and then you’re looking at that. But the reason why I think this is so valuable why I hope that it’s possible to screen a file for this is to find people who have great social capacity and to sort by that basis, so when you go out and you start thinking about that second lane when you’re thinking about the future, you can think about the people who have great social capacity to help you.
And the last thought on that is that I’ve worked with a great deal of organizations over the years where I’ll screen files or do research or encourage them in research projects. So think about prospecting. And inevitably, especially in the really big places where they have a lot of staff, they know their files really well, but they only probably know about half the story. And it’s not because they’re not working hard. They’re working really hard just like you are, just like I am, but they just can’t see it all. It’s not possible. So what a screening might do is allow you to prospect among your own file to see what you’ve missed and then to be able to explore it.
And the reason why I provide this image is that one time in delivering this kind of data, years ago, I remember, but this image has always been burned into my mind, I was at an Ivy League university showing their results, in this case just showing securities data. And the faces of everyone in the room, which was filled with major gift officers, all of whom were a lot smarter than me, were blank, and at first I thought, “Am I looking at the wrong file?” Which is the worst possible thing, but that’s not what was happening. They did not recognize the names. They simply didn’t know their own alumni who had great value, and I’ve seen this time and time again.
If you take nothing else from this part of the discussion I would say this, see if you can test some of these tools, so you can find out what you don’t know, not just what you do. And the reason for that is simple. There are people hiding in our midst who have a great deal of ability and a great deal of passion for our causes, but because we haven’t seen them, we haven’t talked to them, and we haven’t listened to them, they haven’t had the ability to invest. This is a woman who was at the Occupy protest a number of years ago. Again, another image that’s burned into my mind because if you can’t judge a book by its cover, you certainly couldn’t judge her, you know, by the way, she’s looking. You know, she’s a nice-looking person, but I don’t think she’s rich or poor. I don’t make any assumption based on her look. There’s no top hat and big house, but she is sitting on $3 million at birth. And after this, if she’s still holding that money, it’s a lot more than that.
What I couldn’t share with you today, unfortunately, because the slide deck issue is that I think we have another opportunity as we think about, not just how do we prospect from our own constituency, the people with a lot of assets today, but also the people who are either growing their assets or their assets are less visible to us because they don’t hit one of those five markers, particularly people of color. And this has been actually a passion point for me personally for a long time because I have an interest in international philanthropy. And when you think about it, the United States as dominant as we are, as much philanthropy as occurs here, all these things, it’s just a piece of the puzzle. We’re probably only a quarter of the world’s market cap. We’re probably only a quarter of the world’s stock market at this point. We’re only a piece of philanthropy.
And just one example is that zakat alone, Islamic philanthropy, the devotion that people must make as observant Muslims is over $500 billion a year, and I never hear anyone talk about it here. We need to find out everybody we’ve been ignoring, not just because it’s the right thing to do, but because it’s essential for our survival as nonprofits.
So, if it sounds like I’m hectoring now, it’s because I think it’s important that when we go back to our friends and colleagues, we say, “Well, here are some tools, and here’s some ways to understand our people better. Here’s a few more people with money,” and we should do that. Because if we don’t, we’re going to miss this moment in time where the stock market’s huge.
But if we don’t also simultaneously think about the people whose wealth is growing and will eclipse that of those people within 20 to 30 years, we will have missed building the relationships that will change the nature of our organizations, make them more effective, more inclusive, more diverse because that makes us better as well as more successful. And the only way to start that process is to start listening to them now, to start researching them now, and to make sure that we’re collecting information in an appropriate way on those people so that we can build them into the conversation we’re having about what philanthropy should look like in the days ahead. Steven, is there anybody left?
Steven: Oh, yeah, we got 100 people in here. That was a good one, Jay. I’ve been just bookmarking the last 20 minutes all those sites. That Sherlock one, I never heard of that one. That one looks really cool.
Jay: Yeah. And Sherlock, you know, again, is it in, is it out, hard to tell? This has happened a couple times with these companies, you know. We’ll see.
Steven: Well, that’s all right. We know how it is in the tech world. But, yeah, the free tools or at least the list of tools, not all of them are free, that’s okay, but that was worth the price of omission. But, Jay, this is awesome. Thanks for hanging out with us and sharing all your knowledge. And we got your contact information there. I know we’re a little bit over, so I don’t want to keep people too much longer. But can people reach out to you? Is that cool with you, Jay?
Jay: Absolutely. Yeah. And I’ll be happy to, you know, reconstruct that and send it out to you and share it with anybody who wants it. But I’m also available here just to talk anytime, usually in stronger voice, but I’d love to hear from each of you about what’s going on in your world, the questions that you have and how we can make sure that you’re investing the resources you need to get to know these people and welcome them into your world.
Steven: I love it. Yeah. Definitely reach out to Jay. He’s a wealth of knowledge, a great guy, and got that good webinar series, the “Mastermind Series” over at DonorSearch. If you just search for “Mastermind’s” webinar, you’ll find it right, Jay?
Jay: Yeah. We’re having a great session on Tuesday on Islamic philanthropy, in fact.
Steven: Yeah. That’s right. You made me remember when you were talking about that at the end. That’s going to be a good one. I’ve actually seen him speak before. So definitely check that one out because that’s a lot of money that’s just waiting around to be asked for, right?
Jay: Yeah. I mean, there are some things that people need to know about that. Absolutely. Yeah. As a whole, we haven’t been paying sufficient attention to something that’s a huge source of charity.
Steven: Well, that’s why we like you Jay because you’re always shedding light on cool things that folks need to be thinking about. So thanks for being here. This is fun.
Jay: Thank you. I appreciate it.
Steven: And thanks to all of you for hanging out. Like I said at the top, I’ll send out the slides, the recording. Slides will have all the lists of stuff in there. You won’t miss anything. And hopefully, you can join us again on our next session. I’m going to bounce into my slides here, Jay. I just want to talk about some things we got coming up next week. We got two sessions next week. But a real one I’m really . . . I’m excited about all of them, of course. My buddy Ligia Peña is going to come back and talk about legacy fundraising. She’s kind of my go-to for all things, bequests, planned giving, whatever you want to call it. I know there’s lots of different terms for it. But she’s the legacy mastermind in my mind.
But she’s going to be talking about decision science. What’s decision science? I don’t know. You’ll have to join us on Tuesday to find out, 1:00 p.m. Eastern, also totally free. We’d love to see you again. You’ll get an email invite to it. Don’t worry. But check out our webinar page. We’ve got lots of other cool sessions coming up on into 2021. I booked the 2021 session already, I can’t believe it. But there’s lots of cool things coming up.
So, hopefully, we’ll see you again on another Bloomerang webinar. Like I said, look for an email from me with all the goodies, all the slides, the recording. And hopefully, we’ll see you again next week. So have a good rest of your Thursday. Have a good weekend. Stay safe out there. If you’re out West, we’re thinking about you. Please stay healthy. Please stay safe. We’ll talk to you again soon. Bye now.
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