Fundraising Voices from RNL

This Fundraising Voices podcast features RNL's Josh Robertson who covers the importance of using personalization to communicate with your donors. Josh and Brian discuss:

• Why personalization is important for engaging the 21st century donor.
• How artificial intelligence (AI) and new, easy to use platforms can transform your communications.
• How to get started with turnkey solutions like RNL QuadWrangle and harness the power of this technology immediately.

Find out more about RNL QuadWrangle here

Our guest: Josh Robertson, Senior Vice President

Joshua Robertson joined Ruffalo Noel Levitz in 1997 as a student fundraiser at The University of Georgia and has since risen to become the chief architect of our donor and student engagement solutions. Josh works daily with hundreds of institutions to transform their donor engagement with new and emerging technology and data-driven strategy. He has worked with more than 60 institutions in managing their multichannel, on-site phonathon programs, including Stanford, New York University, UT Austin, UGA, Pepperdine University and the University of Sydney.

This Fundraising Voices podcast features provocative fundraising expert Jason Lewiss, CFRE, author of The War for Fundraising Talent. Jason and host Brian Gawor discuss:

• Challenging the assumptions we have about what it takes to be a successful fundraiser.
• What's happening in small and large shops to recruit and retain top fundraising talent.
• What you can do as a fundraiser to become better, and advance your career.
• What's next for 21st fundraisers looking to engage new and diverse donor populations.

Get the War for Fundraising Talent book here.

And check out Jason at Responsive Fundraising.

Our guest: Jason Lewis, CFRE, Founder of Responsive Fundraising

Jason Lewis is willing to question deeply engrained beliefs and assumptions about how effective fundraising really works. Whether writing or speaking, Jason challenges the prevailing wisdom about effective fundraising practices, hiring decisions, and donor behavior. In the last two decades, Jason has raised millions of dollars for a variety of non-profit organizations throughout the United States. He has been certified and re-certified as a Certified Fundraising Executive and recognized as a member of the Association of Fundraising Professionals' Master Trainers. Jason earned his MS in Nonprofit Management at Eastern University in 2010 and in 2014 graduated from the College of Executive Coaching. Jason also hosts the Fundraising Talent podcast where he features the voices of top fundraising professionals.

We've just released our annual report on annual giving trends, from a survey fundraisers this year. I got on the line with Shad Hanselman, RNL's annual giving guru, to talk about the results, including what fundraisers say about:

- Usage of channels, like direct mail, phone, email, crowdfunding, giving days and online giving.

- Where fundraisers wish they were spending more time.

- What fundraisers think is best for donor acquisition, retention, and upgrade of donors.

- What's being done for young alumni engagement.

- What's next for the future of annual giving.

Download the full report here

The basic job description of a fundraiser is to reah out to donors, listen to them, and provide opportunities. To see if there might be a chance that the donors want to make a difference for your organization, institution, school or charity. Well, increasingly, those conversations will happen with numerous members of the donor's family or even 's financial planners. Arlene Cogen used to be a financial planner, someone who was really focused on amassing money for her clients.

Then, she left financial planning and became a fundraiser. She began to really talk to fundraisers about how to engage financial planners and found that fundraisers don't need to be afraid, and financial planners can engage with their clients about how to increase philanthropy and find joy in giving. I got on the line with Arlene to talk a little bit about her book and the way she suggests people should engage donors, their families and their financial planners in the 21st century.

Read Arlene's book, Give to Live

And find out how she helps organizations truly inspires donors:

https://www.arlenecogen.com/

Philanthropy is more than money. It's more than values. It's all the other ideas and time of the things that they bring, and this is becoming more and more critical as we look at the younger generations. We spend a lot of our time in the fundraising world thinking about how we can better connect to donors, how we can make the ask better, how we can engage donors, how we can increase their passion for giving. But we're probably not spending enough time thinking about how we work, how we can work more effectively, and how we behave as leaders.

Well, Larry Johnson knows this and he's written a book called The Eight Principles, and has a really great training program and opportunities for fundraisers to really think about how they're developing as leaders. He's actually somebody who knew Stephen Covey himself and I got on the line with them to talk about The Eight Principles and how we can be better leaders in the nonprofit world.

Here's link to Larry's great book on Amazon.

And here's the 8 Principles web site.

Keeping the data on our donors, our supporters and the people that we serve secure is absolutely crucial for the success of any organization. There's really nothing that strikes fear in the heart of fundraisers or leaders at nonprofits worse than the idea of a data breach. Paul Ruffalo, who has decades of experience working in this area knows this, and I got on the line to talk with him about what's changing in the world of data security, and what he thinks organizations should be doing best to protect their data, which is one of the key pieces of treasure that donors and other supporters leave us.

How do you provide service to your donors or alumni at 3:00 AM in the morning? Or get them answers to their questions about giving, reunions, projects or even planned giving in real time? An AI chatbot may your answer. On this episode, our "designated millennials" Peter Christian and Quinn McGourty-Holland teach Brian Gawor how to make a chatbot work, including followup campaigns through Facebook Messenger integration.

If you want a demo of the chatbot, get in touch with us today at [email protected]

Engaging students in philanthropy is a key part of your fundraising development plan -- learning about the impact of donors, engaging students to give before they graduate, and asking students to help in the stewardship effort all can make a difference.

Chris McBride from Cal Poly San Luis Obispo and Howard Heevner from UC Santa Cruz, faculty members at the CASE 2019 Engaging Students in Philanthropy Symposium talk about the power of student philanthropy programs.

Find out more about the Symposium here:

https://www.case.org/engaging-students-philanthropy-symposium

Running your giving program strategically definitely means thinking out to start of the year, how you're going to approach donors, ask them for gifts and thank them, but it also means putting in place the infrastructure to deal with the unexpected. Missy Kennedy at UNC Wilmington is an expert at this. She's had a lot of success over the past few years engaging the entire campus community and dealing with unexpected needs and challenges that philanthropy could definitely have an impact on. I got Missy on the line to talk about her annual giving program and what she thinks is next for the agile, strategic annual giving program.

Check out UNCW at https://giving.uncw.edu/

Katrina VanHuss at Turnkey is transforming peer to peer philanthropic engagement. In this conversation, we talk about the psychology of peer to peer donors, technology and strategy that can maximize peer engagement, and what we think is next for peer to peer fundraising.

Check out TurnKey at: https://www.turnkeyp2p.com/