The ENGAGE Podcast

End-of-year fundraising is always important, and this year it has added importance with organizations needing to make up potential COVID-19 related shortfalls.

In today’s episode, Michael Johnston, founder of hjc, discusses some of the things that you should be thinking about when it comes to end-of-year giving and busts some common end-of-year fundraising myths.

Topics Discussed in This Episode:

• Why this year is the most important year for end-of-year fundraising
• What’s great about December donors
• What you can find in the End-of-Year Fundraising Toolkit
• How to make a holiday persona
• Mapping out the holiday journey
• The myth that holiday giving is only from October to December
• How end-of-year fundraising spans the wide spectrum of society
• Bringing different fundraising channels together
• Last-minute giving

Resources:

Michael Johnston

End-of-Year Fundraising Toolkit

Last Minute Tips for Year-End Giving

Quotes: 

“You might want to make a holiday persona or two.”

“Don’t be afraid to make direct references, but still respect all religions and secular celebrations.”

“People hold off on their giving until the last minute.”

Can you think of a business process in your organization that is inefficient or time consuming, yet no one has been able to change the process for the better? When you know the steps to follow, eliminating waste is easier than you think!

In today’s episode, which features a session from bbcon 2020 Virtual, Jackie Huffman, Operational Excellence Engineer at Blackbaud, shares how to analyze your business processes by identifying and removing waste. Learn how to identify value-add and non-value add steps and ultimately improve your constituent experience.

Topics Discussed in This Episode:

• Jackie’s role with Blackbaud
• How to analyze business processes
• Value-add activities
• Non-value-add activities
• The 8 categories of waste
• Preventing and removing waste from processes
• What a waste walk is and how it can help

Resources:

Jackie Huffman

Guidebook to Becoming a Lean Organization

7 Steps for a Successful Lean Implementation at your Nonprofit

Quiz: How Lean is Your Business Office?

Quotes: 

“Anything that does not meet the value-add definition is what we consider waste.”

“The problem with waste is that it consumes our valuable resources of our people’s time.”

“Because transportation is not something we’re willing to pay for, it is clearly a waste.”

With only a little more than a month left for the the 116th U.S. Congress, there is still federal data privacy legislation pending that could affect social good organizations. So, what’s included in those bills and how exactly might your organization be affected if they are passed?

Today’s episode features experts Sally Ehrenfried, who leads government relations at Blackbaud, and Cameron Stoll, Blackbaud’s Director of Privacy. In this session originally hosted at bbcon 2020, Sally and Cameron discuss the current landscape of data privacy legislation in the U.S., the key committees and lawmakers involved in federal data privacy legislation, and where current legislation stands.

Topics Discussed in This Episode:

• The federal data privacy legislation landscape
• Key committees and lawmakers involved in federal data privacy legislation
• Whether legislation will contain limitations on changing your privacy policy
• The principle of consent
• Examples of data use that don’t require consent
• The Brookings Institution compromise
• The impact the election might have on federal data privacy legislation

Resources:

Cameron Stoll

Sally Ehrenfried

bbcon

The sgENGAGE Podcast Episode 112: Tips for a Successful Hill Day

The sgENGAGE Podcast Episode 110: Understanding Data Privacy Regulations

Quotes: 

“When we’re looking at what happens to a federal bill, and with California having such a large delegation their delegation can actually have an impact on whether a bill passes or not, especially in light of how it treats CCPA.” –Sally Ehrenfried

“The information has to be presented in a way that’s concise, transparent, intelligent, and easily accessible to the data subjects, using clear and plain language.” –Cameron Stoll

“The GDPR was really the first law to give individuals choice about processing their data on the basis of consent.” –Cameron Stoll

GivingTuesday is less than two weeks away – but there’s no need to panic. We brought in Blackbaud fundraising expert Tanya Fitzgerald to talk about those last-minute things you can do to be successful, whether you’ve been planning for some time or are just pulling something together now.

Listen in to learn about the most important thing to focus on, how you can leverage your #GivingTuesdayNow campaign and how to steward those first-time GivingTuesday donors.

Topics discussed in this episode:

• How to adjust your approach to GivingTuesday messaging this year
• Leveraging your GivingTuesdayNow campaign for GivingTuesday success
• How organizations can plan out a GivingTuesday strategy now
• Last minute considerations for organizations that have already planned their GivingTuesday campaigns
• What donors want to hear
• Stewarding GivingTuesday donors

Resources

• Blackbaud GivingTuesday Toolkit
• GivingTuesday.org
• Free Blackbaud GivingTuesday Webinars
• Your 3 Week GivingTuesday Checklist
• Stewarding #GivingTuesday: Increase Your Retention Rate

Quotes

“You need to tell your 2020 story - what happened to your organization this year and how did it affect you all sustaining your mission?”

“If your organization hasn't started preparing for GivingTuesday yet, there is plenty of time.”

“You're going to have a lot of traffic on your website on GivingTuesday, and you're going to get a lot of first-time donors. Those are the most costly to acquire so you want to make sure that you keep them.”

“Don't be afraid to reach out to your donors. They want to hear from you. They actually really do want to help you and they want to be part of your team.”

We are more connected than ever, but loneliness continues to increase. The concept of belonging is important not just in our personal lives, but also at work. Belonging in the workplace has real impacts on employee well-being, retention and business results.

Joining the podcast today is Sarah Judd Welch, CEO of Sharehold, an innovation consultancy that recently conducted extensive research into belonging at work. Listen in to hear what Sarah has to say about how organizations should look at belonging, the impact of DEI initiatives, and how times of uncertainty impact belonging at work.

Topics Discussed in This Episode:

• Why Sharehold decided to conduct research on belonging
• The core findings of the research
• Why loneliness is increasing and the impact that has on well-being
• The four different types of belonging
• The business case for belonging
• What employers can do in the workplace to increase feelings of belonging
• Who leads the charge on belonging in an organization
• What someone could do to start advancing the idea of belonging in their organization
• Actionable ideas to increase belonging at work

Resources:

Sarah Judd Welch

Sharehold's Redesigning Belonging Research

Quotes: 

“We saw that the key to community transformation was organizational transformation.”

“We’re in the middle of a loneliness epidemic.”

“What we heard in our research was that there is both an explicit as well as tacit power dynamics that show up in how we belong at work.”

What if everything that we know about fundraising is mostly wrong? Is your organization focusing on the right data-based fundraising strategies?

Joining the podcast to discuss this topic with host Steve MacLaughlin is Joe Waters, founder and CEO of Selfish Giving. Listen in to hear Joe and Steve talk about why individual giving matters so much, what’s changing as a result of the COVID-19 pandemic, and thinking about fundraising as a cycle vs. a funnel.

Topics Discussed in This Episode:

• Where most nonprofit revenue is concentrated
• A breakdown of nonprofit revenue sources
• The importance of individual giving
• Leveraging corporate partnerships
• The increasing role of online giving for social good organizations
• Changes and shifts due to COVID-19
• Fundraising as a cycle vs a funnel
• The importance of the second gift
• Creating a realistic plan

Resources:

Joe Waters

Business for Impact at Georgetown University McDonough School of Business

Blog Post: The End of the Beginning of Online Giving

Quotes: 

“If you had to choose between getting money from the company checkbook or going after the consumer, the employee, and engaging them, you’re much better off with the latter.”

“I actually make a recommendation of sixteen different business that people should engage with during normal times, and right now there’s only two that are extremely viable: supermarkets and convenience stores.”

“In a lot of instances, corporate partnerships don’t so much create success as they do reflect it.”

The social good community has massive opportunity and meaningful challenges before us. Recognizing the power of partnerships to build a better world, Blackbaud launched a unique year-long accelerator  in 2019 designed to support early-stage startups with the potential to impact the Ecosystem of Good®, and formalized it as the Blackbaud Social Good Startup Program in 2020.

Listen in to hear Roz Lemieux, Senior Director of Platform Product Manager and head of Blackbaud Labs, talk about the goals for the program, how the first year went, and why Blackbaud felt it was important to focus on startups with diverse founders for the 2021 cohort.

Resources:

Roz Lemieux

Blackbaud Social Good Startup Program Application

The Blackbaud Social Good Startup Challenge—Hear from the 2020 Cohort Participants

Quotes:

“These are startups that are really enabling organizations to do things in a different way.”

“From the outset, we said part of the lens and philosophy that we wanted to apply to the program was to encourage founders from traditionally underserved backgrounds to be part of the program.”

“There’s a very tight coupling between breakthrough innovation and the presence of diverse teams.”

“There's every reason for us to put our time and money and effort behind those [diverse] companies because they're the ones that are quite likely to make a big difference.”

In science fiction, artificial intelligence (AI) is often depicted as threatening to humans. But in reality, the science of AI can be used for any number of helpful purposes. What are the implications of this technology in the social good sector? Beth Kanter and Allison Fine join Steve MacLaughlin on the podcast to discuss their research into the use of AI in social good organizations.

Topics Discussed in This Episode:

• Why Allison and Beth decided to write the AI4Giving report
• Why the Bill and Melinda Gates Foundation was interested in the report
• The definition of artificial intelligence for giving
• The questions they wanted to answer in the report
• Top findings from the research
• What was surprising at the end of the research
• How AI works in philanthropy
• Cautionary tales about AI
• How people without AI skillsets will be able to use AI tools
• Recommendations for how social good organizations can start to think about AI

Resources:

Beth Kanter

Allison Fine

Unlocking Generosity with Artificial Intelligence: The Future of Giving

Quotes: 

“The most advanced technology in the world can be used to rehumanize fundraising.” –Allison Fine

“Algorithmic discrimination is a huge potential problem that is starting to develop.” –Allison Fine

“They don’t need to know how to necessarily make the sausage themselves, but they need to know how the sausage is made.” – Beth Kanter

Capital campaigns. Maybe you’re in one. Maybe you’re thinking about one. Maybe you’re wrapping one up now. Maybe you have one in the past that you’d like to forget about. Either way, they are important. Capital campaigns can be a tremendous asset to an organization as nearly a century of their history shows.

In today’s episode, we’ll explore the subject of capital campaigns in more depth with guest Amy Eisenstein, CEO and co-founder of The Capital Campaign Toolkit. Listen in to hear what Amy has to say about the key questions you need to answer to get a capital campaign started, the elements of a successful capital campaign, and the state of capital campaigns in the COVID-19 world.

Topics Discussed in This Episode:

• What a capital campaign is
• Running a capital campaign without eating your annual fund
• Key questions an organization needs to answer to start a capital campaign
• How long a capital campaign should take
• Your campaign objectives
• Why you should be thinking big
• Elements of success for a capital campaign
• What Amy has found works and doesn’t work through experience
• Which donors are most likely to make or break your campaign
• The state of capital campaigns in the COVID-19 world
• How organizations need to adjust due to the pandemic
• What listeners can learn from the capital campaign toolkit

Resources:

Amy Eisenstein

Capital Campaign Toolkit

Article: Planning a Capital Campaign: The Essential First Steps

Quotes: 

“There’s always a concern at organizations that a capital campaign will cannibalize an annual campaign or annual fundraising, and what we’ve found is that simply isn’t true.”

“If you want that Olympic size pool, put it in those plans. We can cut it out later if we figure out you can’t raise the money for it. But now’s the time to dream big.”

“You need to have donors who have the capacity to give those lead gifts in order to have that element of a possibility, a real possibility, for success.”

Giving Tuesday, the annual global day of giving, will be held on December 1st this year - just under two months away. Although this has been a year of changes and challenges for many, your organization can still incorporate strategies that will help you leverage GivingTuesday in order to kick off your year-end giving season.

Stephanie Thomas, principal peer-to-peer fundraising consultant for Blackbaud, joins the podcast to discuss methods to help your organization successfully engage supporters to raise awareness and revenue. Listen in to hear her talk about peer-to-peer fundraising strategies, educating fundraisers, and tips for stewarding donors after GivingTuesday.

Topics Discussed in This Episode:

• Why peer-to-peer fundraising is a good strategy for this GivingTuesday
• The different ways that organizations can leverage peer-to-peer fundraising tools
• Education that organizations can do with their peer-to-peer fundraisers to increase success
• How to steward supporters and donors after GivingTuesday
• Advice for organizations planning out their GivingTuesday strategy now

Resources:

Stephanie H. Thomas

Webinar: Five Steps to Supporter Engagement

Blackbaud's GivingTuesday Webinar Series

Free GivingTuesday Toolkit and Resources

Blackbaud Peer-to-Peer Fundraising™, powered by JustGiving®

Quotes: 

“I think peer-to-peer fundraising offers new channels.”

“Ultimately, the ways that social good organizations can leverage peer-to-peer fundraising tools, it has to be easy, it has to be mobile-friendly, and most importantly, it has to be fun.”

“You really do have to have a strong marketing effort; you really do have to have a strong coaching program for those individuals who are volunteering their time and their network for you.”