Win Friends and Influence Donors With Crowdfunding

Make sure you send them progress updates, not just of the fundraising progress but of the impact. For example, this is one of the exceptions that I talked about, I use crowdfunding and other methods to raise some money to build a preschool in Jamaica, and we just started construction last week. So I sent pictures to every donor to that campaign to show them that the bulldozers had leveled the building and were off to the races. You can believe that I’m going to be sending them updates every week just so that they can see. It doesn’t take long. It’s just the picture.

Make sure you tell them lots of stories, because stories are what show the impact of their gift, and it’s not stories about you, but rather stories about what they have done with their generosity.

Finally, get to know them. Our donors are not used to us trying to get to know them. Usually non-profits only call them when they want something, so when you invite them for a tour or invite them for coffee, or just make a phone call to say hello and thank you that gets their attention.

A second strategy is, make them feel like insiders. What do I mean by that? You want to make donors feel like they’re part of your team, and that they have information before other people do. You want to remind them of their connection to your organization. Another way to make them feel connected to you or like insiders is to communicate on their channel.

If a donor likes to communicate by phone, pick up the phone. If they tend to email you more, email them. If they tend to tweet you on Twitter, then tweet them back on Twitter. Whatever you do, listen for the queues that they’re giving you and follow their lead. Invite them in for a tour and just make them feel really loved.

This one here, don’t bait and switch. What I mean by that is donors tend to give their second gift in the same channel that they gave the first. That means that if they’re coming to you supporting St. Luke’s Center, for example, which is just one of our programs that we had at Catholic Charities, then you’re not going to have a lot of success if you suddenly start talking to them about the shelter for women’s’ families. If they came to you through St. Luke’s then keep appealing to them through St. Luke’s, because that’s where you’ll get the best return.

If you’re not a multi-program agency, what I mean by don’t bait and switch is if they came to you through a special event, reach out to them again through a special event, because you’ll have more success reaching out to them that way than you will if you try and change the topic.

These are a couple of campaigns that I have done. One of them is for Sole Brothers Helping Others, and this was a recovery walk campaign for Catholic Charities. I have to tell you that raising money for drug treatment or to benefit people who are dealing with addiction issues is probably one of the hardest missions to raise money for, because a lot of people have very strong feelings one way or another. So Sole Brothers was born because I came up with the recovery walk idea to raise money for St. Luke’s Shelter.

And my son who is severely disabled heard me organizing the walk and said, “Mom, I want to walk,” and I, without thinking said, “How are you going to walk? You’re in a wheelchair?” I have to say it was one of my worst moments as a parent, and thank God he’s a forgiving kid because he quickly answered and said, “I’ll ask my cousin to be my legs.”

So they came up with this idea of being soul brothers. They’re very punny, as you can tell, and I’ll let you click on the links to these campaigns when you get the slides so that I have enough time for questions here, but they raised almost $25,000 over three years. They were covered on the news, and I just wanted to show you a campaign that was possible just because we dared to try new things.

In the second one you can look at, this is St. Patrick’s Preschool Dream. This is another project that I have done for that preschool in Jamaica. I’d love you to look at it because this is one of those exceptions to the rules. We used it to raise our money through a capital campaign, but we also had a back-end appeal where we encouraged people to donate by check because we were looking for such large sums of money, and we didn’t want to pay all of the platform fees.

So if you go and look at that you’ll see that the online fundraising portion of the money was pretty small, but it’s because we had that information out there that people gave offline. So that’s one of the exceptions that I wanted to show you.

When you’re looking at resources there’s some great resources coming up. One of them is the basics on more fundraising, which I’ll talk to you about in a second. They also have great videos. Deposit A Gift is one of the platforms that we looked at or mentioned. They have a terrific crowdfunding resource video series.

Volunteer Match is another good one. If you’re not familiar with this site, believe me, you want to get familiar with it. It’s a site where you can post volunteer opportunities in your area or for your organization, and people go there when they’re searching for volunteer opportunities. I got hundreds of kids who are looking for service hour opportunities to participate in our walks simply because they found us on Volunteer Match. And it’s free. It doesn’t cost you a dime. Then finally, if you go to Slideshare, they have some great crowdfunding presentations there, too. Just search for crowdfunding and you’ll find some.

Then I want to mention another resource. Pamela Grow is a great friend of mine, and she’s also one of America’s Top 50 fund-raisers. A few months ago we hosted a course on non-profit crowdfunding. It’s a four-week course. It’s an e-course which means every week you get one module delivered to you. So this is an outline of what we have here in that course. The best part about it is that you have a Facebook group to ask questions. You’ve got templates. We give you step-by-step guides, so literally the blueprint for what you need is in this course.

So for those of you who are wanting to use crowdfunding and need a little more support, you’re welcome to use this. We have a link here, especially for Bloomerang customers. If you type the link in it will take you straight to the registration page. Know we only offer it once a year usually, but because of Bloomerang’s partnership with us, we’re both Bloomerang partners, we opened it up for you guys today.

The final thing I wanted to say about crowdfunding is if your not a Bloomerang customer yet, and you’re thinking about a platform, I encourage you to give Bloomerang a look. Because when you’re thinking of crowdfunding, they have a really neat feature that allows you to integrate your social media. I’m going to ask Steven to talk about that real quick.

Steven: Yeah. Thanks, Rachel. Thanks for teeing that up. We do. We have a pretty cool social media hub feature that we released, I think back in September, maybe November. Basically what you do is if you’re a Bloomerang user you can connect a Twitter account and most people just connect their non-profit organization’s Twitter account.

What it will do is if anyone interacts with your non-profit on Twitter through your user name or any hashtags that you can put in of your choice, it will pull those people into Bloomerang, and you can either match them to an existing constituent in your database, or create a new constituent from that tweet or from that interaction. So it’s kind of a cool way to not only monitor your social media chatter, but also tie those into constituents into your database directly.

Once you’ve added them as a constituent, or linked them as an existing constituent, any time they interact with you on Twitter it will increase their engagement on their constituent profile. Bloomerang users who are listening know that we have a proprietary algorithm that sort of scores the level of engagement that donor has with the organization.

So not only can you monitor all that stuff, it actually impacts that score. It’s a nice way to maybe identify who would be good to reach out to when you’re doing a crowdfunding campaign, or just simply let you know who you want to respond to and interact with as the campaign is going forward.

That’s one that I kind of had a personal hand in designing because I felt passionate about it. It’s definitely a cool feature, and Rachel, I appreciate you bringing it up because it does have a lot to do with all of the things that you recommended and all of the crowdfunding advice you gave.

Rachel: Absolutely, and in fact when you’re looking for support to get active in a campaign, one of the things you can do is search for your supporters who have high engagement levels in social media. Right there you have a list of people you could recruit to start your campaign off because you know that they’re already engaged. It’s a wonderful feature, Steven.

So should we take some questions now?

Steven: Yeah. Let’s take questions. We’ve probably got about 15 minutes or so for questions. I’ve kind of flagged them as they came in. We’ve got about eight or so here right now, but I do want to encourage everyone who hasn’t asked a question. Don’t be shy. We’ve got Rachel here. She’s obviously and expert at your disposal for the next few minutes.

I’m just going to kind of roll through these, Rachel. One of your stats about how 80% of crowdfunding campaigns don’t even hit 20% of their goal, it’s still a very popular way of raising money. Why is it so popular with those kinds of bad numbers? Is it just kind of a symptom of people not following the type of advice that you’ve given and maybe just trying it assuming that money is just going to fall from the sky and they don’t really have to put a whole lot of work into it?

Rachel: You hit the nail on the head, Steven. The reason most of them fail is because we don’t choose the right project. We don’t set them up correctly. We don’t market them. A lot of people do mistakenly think that crowdfunding is something that once you set up the page, you will build it and they will come. But it’s actually more about what you do behind the scenes in terms of marketing. So that course that Pam and I teach together gives you strategies for you can do that and make the marketing work.

So it’s basically not following the advice that is here, because people love to give to crowdfunding projects. It’s not a matter that the donors don’t like it, but rather maybe that we in the non-profit world have not yet mastered the way of presenting the right projects in the right time with the right ask, and giving people the shout out in the right way.

Steven: Yes. It makes a lot of sense. Rachel, here’s a question from Rick. Rick’s wondering “If I’m targeting people who already know my organization, why not just use my own website? Why use a third-party platform?” What would you say to Rick about using a crowdfunding platform versus just his website?

Rachel: Rick, that’s a great question. The real power of crowdfunding or peer-to-peer fundraising is that it allows people to create their own fundraising pages, tell their own stories about why they care about your cause, and because it’s so personal to them when they share their pages with their friends, their friends are eager to contribute. If we were trying to do that in our website, first of all we wouldn’t be able to accommodate the number of fund-raisers.

So if you’re an organization like Food for the Poor, for example, when they do their walks they can have a thousand people fundraising for them at one time. There’s no way that our websites and webmasters would be able to handle that much traffic.

But even in a smaller context, you want those platforms because they’re already built to fit in with social media channels. They’re already built to have users create pages that are personal to them, and it just gives you a lot of flexibility and ease of use that you don’t have on your websites, unless you’re willing to pay tens of thousands of dollars to build it. But it really doesn’t make sense to do that when there are platforms that you can use very inexpensively to accomplish the same things.

Steven: Yep. Makes sense. Here’s one from Jim, and I know a couple of people asked about direct mail. You already sort of responded to that, but Jim was wondering, do you see crowdfunding replacing maybe telemarketing efforts? Do you think that crowdfunding could replace really any sort of form of fundraising, or maybe if there’s a shift happening, maybe away from something specifically towards crowdfunding, or is crowdfunding is kind of a new animal that kind of stands on its own?

Rachel: I think the answer is it could be all of the above. It depends. A lot of it depends on your organization, too. For example, if you are an organization that has a lot of older donors and supporters, then crowdfunding may not be the right tool for you. They may respond better with a telemarketing campaign. If you’re an organization that tends to have a younger crowd, then crowdfunding would out-perform telemarketing for you because young people are very social media savvy.

I like to think of it more as yet another tool in our fund-raisers’ toolbox, and it’s not replacing anything because it’s all about communicating with people in the channel and method that they prefer. So if we are looking at our organizations, and we look at the segments that we have, usually all of our supporters won’t fit into one neat age group or one channel where they are all gathered there. So I would look at it as a complementary possibility rather than a replacement.

The key is, and the good news is that we fund-raisers are very much an essential part of this equation. This tool can’t replace us because like any good carpenter, you have to know what tool to use for what job.

Steven: Yeah. And shifting to piggy-back on that, I’m a member of that generation. I’m 31. I’m a little old for a millennial, but I’m still a millennial and I gave to a crowdfunding campaign this morning. I gave $100 to an organization not because it was crowdfunding, but because they did a really good job of all of the things Rachel talked about today.

It was a very specific campaign. It was for one thing. They were trying to buy a new piece of equipment. The goal, I think, was $18,000, and they made a case for it. It was very compelling that that crowdfunding campaign was just for that specific cause, and I was compelled to give. I don’t think it was necessarily because it was crowdfunding, but because they were very specific and they followed all of the same advice. Maybe they had already followed you, Rachel, because they did all of the things you talked about today.

Rachel: Or they made the same mistakes I did and learned.

Steven: Which is okay.

Rachel: So Bret shared with us that he loved the emphasis on thank you letters, not just donation or tax letters, and he says he loves sending a targeted thank you response. I mentioned the secret weapon that I have, and I really believe strongly in the thank you process. I like to think of crowdfunding as a first date.

How we treat our donors will determine whether they want to stay engaged with us. So one of the things I will do is send a greeting card afterward. It may seem like a lot of work, but with the tools that I use is literally adding people to the campaign. It takes seconds and is very inexpensive, but it gets their attention.

If any of you find that interesting, the reason that I use it is a letter sometimes gets thrown out because they think you’re asking for money. Emails have open rates of 25% to 30% if you’re lucky. But when you think about a greeting card, how many times do we actually throw out a card in the mail? Never. I open it every single time. So if you want to know more about that I’m happy to share offline. Just send me an email and I’ll share with you.

But Bret, you’re absolutely right. The thank you is the most important part, and Bloomerang is famous for saying this, the thank you is the basis for retention. That’s what we want to do, because it costs a lot to get a first donor, even crowdfunding donors. It costs our time to set up the campaign, to market the campaign, to do the templates, do the how-to documents, and so the way we really make our money is by retaining those donors and using it again.

If you do your crowdfunding campaign well, the first time you do it it will be a lot of work, but guess what? After that it’s a repeatable event. For example, the first year that I did the recovery walk, I don’t want to tell you how many hours I spent, largely because I was learning by teaching myself and it was so new. But the following years it was just something repeatable that I could just literally retool the letters, change the dates and I’m good to go.

Steven: Yep. Makes sense. Rachel, I have a question from Hannah and I thought it was pretty compelling because this is something that I see a variation of this question asked a lot on a variety of topics, not just crowdfunding. Hannah’s wondering, “What’s your advice for defining a project or a campaign when you don’t really have an obvious need or a tangible need?” I mentioned earlier like the example of a piece of equipment, funding a specific piece of equipment.

What about organizations who don’t, and there are a lot of these organizations who don’t have a very specific tangible thing that they’re buying or trying to fund. Is there some way to work in operation costs or overhead, and I know you don’t want to make it just toward your general fund. But what advice would you have for organizations like Hannah’s where it’s a little bit tougher to make the case for a tangible result?

Rachel: While I start to answer, I’d love to know what Hannah’s non-profit is about, which would help give me a little context for the question. The answer that I use is that you will never, I shouldn’t say never because somebody will prove me wrong, but you rarely have success raising money for operations costs. How we think about those costs is important.

For example, my brother is a Catholic priest in Kingston in Jamaica in a very poor church. We used to, we still do actually, a feeding program for the elderly three times a week. So three days a week they come to us, they get a nice meal, they spend a few hours. So we were in the position that Hannah is in where you don’t have money for operating costs and yet it costs money to have these people in here.

So what we did was we figured out what percentage of time were they there for the week. Then we took our overhead costs. Let’s say they were there for a total of five days out of the month if you were to add up all of the hours. Then we would take one-sixth of every month’s electricity bill, every month’s insurance bill, and build those in as costs of providing food to those folks on those days. That’s how we were able to get our overhead covered because you raise money based on the true cost of the service that you’re providing, rather than just the part that the client receives.

Before we did that, we used to calculate it based on the costs of food only and we were never able to make ends meet. But by adding in all those things, which honestly, you can’t provide food unless you buy cooking gas to cook it, or electricity, you know? So that’s one way you can do is look at your mission and see what service are you offering and what is the true cost of that service.

You don’t differentiate between operating costs and the project costs. Basically, we do the same thing with the breakfast feeding program that we have for the kids. We have low income kids that we subsidize or provide free breakfast for because they don’t get it another way. What we do is figure out how much do we pay the cooks? How much does the food cost? All those things, then we divide it by the number of meals, the number of kids, and we basically come up with a cost for that one meal for one child.

I’d be happy to talk with you some more, Hannah, if you shoot me an email after this presentation. Maybe I can help you come up with some ideas for you, but did that help a little bit?

Steven: Yeah, those are great ideas for sure. Rachel, this one’s from Casey. Casey’s wondering about community crowdfunding. So like days of giving, some states have a statewide day of giving, or maybe some other sort of third-party event where lots of organization are crowdfunding at the same time. How do you feel about those? Are they beneficial? Do you get lost in the crowd? Do you think people should try those types of things? What do you think there?

Rachel: Again, the answer depends. It is a little more difficult on the giving days to get attention because you’re competing with so many people. But if what you put out there is of a very high quality, you’ll rise to the top. So I don’t worry so much about how many other people are trying to go after the same people.

I want to be the best, the one that gets their attention because it’s so well-done. Sometimes that means being the one that does the best job in social media, giving shout outs to donors when they give. Maybe it is taking the time to create a really good profile on the giving day host’s website so that people actually find you.

Here in South Florida we have the Miami Foundation’s giving days. The first year that we participated we thought, “Man, nobody’s going to know who we are.” We have brand name recognition but that’s about it. But we actually spent the time to create profiles for each of our programs, and told success stories on each of those profiles, and we got quite a few new donors from that because we took the time to do it well.

So the answer to the question is if you have the time to do it well in every aspect, social media, thank you’s, filling out those profiles, and advanced promotion to your folks, then yes, it’s worth doing.

As far as using crowdfunding to do that, that’s what the hosts of these giving days are doing. Miami Foundation uses a product from Blackbaud and you’re able to get donor information out of it. Its similar but different. So when I’m talking about crowdfunding here, you could use it to start a giving day if you live in a place that doesn’t have one already. You could do a Giving Tuesday giving day, for example, if you want to do that.

Steven: Yeah. You could have your campaign, but also create something to kind of frame it. That’s kind of cool. I don’t see a lot of people trying that, but I bet it would work. Bret has a question, my buddy Bret. I know you read his comment earlier, but Bret’s wondering about incentivizing gifts, maybe giving something like a non-tax-deductible good or item in response to the gift, kind of like a premium, I guess. What do you think of that? Have you seen people do that? Do you think that’s a good idea? Has it been successful?

Rachel: The best example of that is to listen to NPRs fundraising twice a year. You can do it, but I don’t think it necessarily influences the size or type of the gift. Again, it’s something that you have to experiment with because every project supporters are different. What we found worked well for us was offering prizes to the fund-raisers, because they’re the ones who are really raising the money for you, not the person who’s giving it.

So for example, when we had the $25 gift cards and we said you’re going to get a raffle ticket for every $100 you raise, it doubled what we raised. We went from raising $10,000 a year to $25,000. Part of that may have been coincidence and getting better at it, but people love the fact that the front runner didn’t win the prize. Because if you think about it, my son happened to win every year the first prize.

So if he’s thousands of dollars ahead of you and you don’t have hopes of raising that money, you’re not going to really feel like a prize is even an option for you. Whereas when it’s done by raffle ticket based on every $100 you raise gets a raffle ticket, you have an incentive to keep raising money. And that works. Bribery works.

Steven: That’s cool. Very cool. We probably have time for about one more question. I don’t want to keep you much longer, especially if you haven’t eaten lunch. Here’s one from Alan I thought was pretty interesting. Alan says, “I see declining federal funds for children’s mental health research as an opportunity to ask private donors to support. In your opinion do you see crowdfunding as a platform that could raise that money?”

I guess the broader question is do you think that if an organization sees like maybe one particular channel of giving decrease that maybe they could bring crowdfunding up and replace that rather than tacking it on in addition to what they’re doing?” What advice would you have for Allen there?

Rachel: I’d like to kind of explore that a little bit more. In a case of a matter where federal or state dollars or grant funding has decreased, then definitely you could use crowdfunding as a potential replacement to help increase those revenues. However, if it’s another channel where the revenues have decreased, that’s something that we would need to look at more closely.

For example, is there something wrong with our acknowledgment process, our thank you process, is there more we could be doing in terms of inviting people in for tours, more personal relationships with donors? So it’s important to look at the cause of why the funding has declined before concluding that crowdfunding is a good replacement. If you have deficiencies in your core fundraising practices where you’re not doing donor love well, those are only going to be amplified in a crowdfunding setting.

Steven: Here’s a quick one from Colleen and then I’ll let everyone go. Colleen is wondering if there’s an optimal length of time to run the campaign to do, leave it up for a long time, it seems like if you leave it up and people aren’t giving that unreached goal might look bad. What do you think about how long you should run things?

Rachel: Well this is one of the topics that we explore in the course that I mentioned, is the perfect timing, but you definitely don’t want a long campaign. You need that sense of urgency to inspire people to give right away. The longer the time frame, the more room for error, the less likely you’re going to succeed. In terms of the published time line, you want a shorter time line, but realize that you may need three months behind the scenes to make sure you have all of your templates and everything good to go.

There’s a lot of work that goes in ahead of time, but ideal length again it depends on the project, but I would say six weeks worked really well for us. It may be different for you depending on the project and the constituency.

Steven: Very good. Well, Rachel, I think we’ll leave it at that in terms of questions, but I want to give you the last word. I know you’ve invited people to reach out to you. I definitely want them to do that. Your contact info is on the screen here now, but anything you want to say here now about people getting in touch with you or what they can expect from you going forward?

Rachel: Well, I want to thank you all for giving me an hour of your time, and thank Steven for hosting me here today. I’ve had a wonderful time. It’s just an amazing experience to see all the questions and realize how much interest there is around this topic. I do love to keep in touch with folks, so please reach out to me. I’m the one who teachers the course that we offered you, so you’ll get direct contact with me there.

Tweet to me. Send me a Facebook message. Connect with me on LinkedIn, even if you have a question that’s not about crowdfunding, please, I’ll often try and answer as many questions as I can. So reach out to me. My passion is helping small non-profits grow, and I just love meeting other people who share that same passion, and all of you do. So thank you so much.

Steven: Yeah. This is great to have you, Rachel, and I definitely hope people will reach out to you and take advantage of your class with Pamela. Pamela’s one of our favorites and Rachel, you’re now one of my favorites, too, because this is awesome. This was really fun to have you. We’ll have to have you back again next year or sooner. Yeah. It was fun. And thanks everyone else for hanging out for an hour. I know everyone’s busy, you’re probably doing lots of tax receipts and thank you letters from your annual campaigns. So thanks for hanging out with us.

Definitely want to invite everyone back next Thursday. We do these webinars just about every Thursday. There’s lots of resources on our website. We’ve got our blog, of course. Lots of fun downloadables, my newsletter, my video podcast Bloomerang TV and the Bloomies, which is our award for outstanding donor communications. You can get lots of ideas there.

Next week should be a great one. We’ve got Vanessa Chase. She’s going to talk about storytelling. She’s kind of our storytelling expert. You may recognize her from the Stewardship School. It’s going to be a great presentation. Be here, same time next Thursday.

We’ve got some other great webinars already scheduled out into advance. I think we’ve got maybe the next three or four after Vanessa, so you can check out our webinar page, and you may find a topic there that is interesting to you. But we’d love to see you again next Thursday, if not another Thursday sometime soon.

Stay tuned for an email from me. I’ll be sending out the slides and the recording in probably about an hour or so you’ll have those. So look for that and hopefully we’ll see you again next week. So have a great rest of your Thursday and a great weekend. Bye now.