Latest / We Are For Good Podcast - The Podcast for Nonprofits / 480. How Smart Tech is Changing Fundraising + How to Harness Its Power for Your Mission (Replay) - Nejeed Kassam

Transcript

480. How Smart Tech is Changing Fundraising + How to Harness Its Power for Your Mission (Replay) - Nejeed Kassam · We Are For Good Podcast - The Podcast for Nonprofits

• 0:00
  Speaker 1: Hey, I'm John.
• 0:01
  Speaker 2: And I'm Becky.
• 0:02
  Speaker 1: And this is the we Are For Good podcast.
• 0:05
  Speaker 2: Non-profits are faced with more challenges to accomplish their missions and the growing pressure to do more, raise more and be more for the causes that improve our world.
• 0:14
  Speaker 1: We're here to learn with you from some of the best in the industry, bringing the most innovative ideas, inspirational stories, all to create an impact uprising.
• 0:23
  Speaker 2: So welcome to the Good Community.
• 0:24
  Speaker 2: We're non-profit professionals, philanthropists, world changers and rabid fans who are striving to bring a little more goodness into the world.
• 0:34
  Speaker 1: So let's get started.
• 0:34
  Speaker 1: Yo Becky, what's up?
• 0:38
  Speaker 2: Hey, John, you know it is the greatest days when we get to go to Canada.
• 0:41
  Speaker 2: You all, all of our listeners know how much we love our Canadian friends we are the kindest, most humane, good people and we got somebody from Vancouver in the house today.
• 0:54
  Speaker 2: I'm so excited to introduce the community to Najeed Qassan today.
• 0:59
  Speaker 2: He is the CEO of Kila.
• 1:01
  Speaker 2: He is an attorney, a changemaker, but he's the founder of the fundraising kit and today we're going to be talking about how smart technology is really transforming the fundraising landscape and if you're somebody like us who completely geeks out on AI and how AI power technology can highlight positive impacts in the world, you are going to love this conversation.
• 1:23
  Speaker 2: But I want to get a little bit of background into Najeed.
• 1:26
  Speaker 2: He is a global innovator with experience working for the United Nations, the Senate of Canada.
• 1:32
  Speaker 2: He's just one of these progressive impact leaders who has spent time on a number of corporate education and nonprofit boards and he really just had a heart for serving the nonprofit sector.
• 1:44
  Speaker 2: So he took that incredible JD and he took all of this public policy information and learning that he got and he started pouring it into the fundraising kit and we just really geeked out about this organization because it saw how artificial intelligence was transforming how the world works and they wanted to know how we could create solutions that enabled nonprofits to unlock their potential through data, through better understanding their donors and just making a better impact for their cause.
• 2:16
  Speaker 2: And somebody who dives into something like that is somebody we want to know and we want to get their tools into your hands.
• 2:23
  Speaker 2: And, besides having all of that passion and drive, he's a dad, he is an entrepreneur and he's just a good dude.
• 2:31
  Speaker 2: Najeed, get in this house.
• 2:32
  Speaker 2: We're so excited you're here.
• 2:35
  Speaker 3: Becky, it's a pleasure to be here.
• 2:36
  Speaker 3: Thanks so much for having me, I think the most.
• 2:37
  Speaker 3: Firstly, that bio is incredibly embarrassing and I apologize to all of the listeners.
• 2:42
  Speaker 2: Don't you love when other people write your bios?
• 2:44
  Speaker 3: No, I absolutely hate it, but I think the most thing I'm most proud about and all that is being a father, being a husband and having an opportunity and responsibility to serve what my kids will inherit, I think, as in this world and our beautiful global community, and so real pleasure to be here.
• 3:03
  Speaker 3: Thanks for having me.
• 3:05
  Speaker 2: We really want to know about you.
• 3:06
  Speaker 2: We want to know about where you grew up.
• 3:08
  Speaker 2: We want to know about little Najeed and how he came to do this work.
• 3:12
  Speaker 2: Tell us all about your origin story.
• 3:16
  Speaker 3: Yeah, thanks.
• 3:16
  Speaker 3: That's a good question and my origin story isn't always as happy as I'd like it to be.
• 3:21
  Speaker 3: Mine is happy, I've had a great life and I'll get to that.
• 3:24
  Speaker 3: I want to start by talking about, you know, a couple of generations ago my family's lived in four continents over the last four generations, not always by choice.
• 3:34
  Speaker 3: So I'm a South Asian Muslim.
• 3:38
  Speaker 3: I'm from what is the border now between India and Pakistan.
• 3:43
  Speaker 3: Most of us have run our history not always been a peaceful, wonderful place.
• 3:47
  Speaker 3: Family members, for fear for economic opportunity to get out of potentially dangerous situations, they fled both sides of my family down the coast to East Africa where they built a good life.
• 4:00
  Speaker 3: My mom and parents moved there from India after partition.
• 4:03
  Speaker 3: My dad's family was a couple of generations there and then, of course, the 60s and 70s happened in East Africa with Uganda, obviously with the Idi Amin.
• 4:13
  Speaker 3: My father-in-law was a refugee to Canada.
• 4:15
  Speaker 3: My mom and dad's parents in Tanzania didn't have it so bad that there was nationalization.
• 4:19
  Speaker 3: There was fear of persecution, and so they kind of moved as kids my mom and dad to England.
• 4:25
  Speaker 3: They saw firsthand Generationaly.
• 4:27
  Speaker 3: We saw firsthand a couple times the danger Sometimes our humanities can run into the unfortunate circumstances.
• 4:36
  Speaker 3: But it also opened our eyes to something like so incredible.
• 4:39
  Speaker 3: My parents got to.
• 4:40
  Speaker 3: They didn't know each other they met in England, of course but when they got to London they began at what is an incredible life.
• 4:48
  Speaker 3: The supportive community of religious institutions, of scholarships, civil society as a whole kind of gave them this opportunity to be the wonderful, boring people that they are today.
• 4:59
  Speaker 3: They're both dentists and they gave us as kids a life that we couldn't imagine, especially generationally.
• 5:07
  Speaker 3: And so my parents moved to Canada.
• 5:09
  Speaker 3: It's a funny story because they broke up when they were dating and my dad was so heartbroken he couldn't manage staying in the country and eventually, of course, they got back together.
• 5:18
  Speaker 3: So no problems on the moving from England to Canada.
• 5:21
  Speaker 3: But I was born in Vancouver and in the kind of mid-80s and I had a great life.
• 5:27
  Speaker 3: I have a great life.
• 5:28
  Speaker 3: I've never had to worry about persecution or fear or school or anything like that.
• 5:33
  Speaker 3: I just got to be a kid.
• 5:34
  Speaker 3: But my parents taught us a couple of things.
• 5:37
  Speaker 3: They taught us one get as much education as you can, because nobody can take that from you.
• 5:41
  Speaker 3: And number two, don't forget about serving the community that you live in or the communities that we live in, and so I have been working, volunteering, engaging in the nonprofit sector since I was three years old, so 30-something years I have this like really early.
• 5:57
  Speaker 3: My parents live kind of out of Calda Sack and up the uphill block and I had this memory of this.
• 6:03
  Speaker 3: You know, there's some of the older houses like those bungalows styles, walking up and knocking on the door asking for donations at three, like my mom's standing at, you know, like at the edge of the lawn, and it was, and I think it was a love affair, it was a responsibility, and 34 years later I'm, 33 years later, I'm still at it.
• 6:23
  Speaker 1: Oh my gosh, I just love your story.
• 6:25
  Speaker 1: Thank you for taking us back.
• 6:26
  Speaker 1: I mean, your parents are heroes, they're fighters, and what beautiful values they've instilled in you and I can see, just in a little bit of time we've gotten to spend with you today, just how like you just are living your values like deeply in your work, and it's really guided you to this next step.
• 6:40
  Speaker 1: I mean, catch us up.
• 6:41
  Speaker 1: I mean, what happened when you went to school and started to figure out your passion purpose?
• 6:45
  Speaker 1: Take us to that part of your story.
• 6:46
  Speaker 3: Yeah, great question.
• 6:48
  Speaker 3: So obviously, like, I started my first business when I was 13.
• 6:53
  Speaker 3: So I've been an entrepreneur for a long time and it was kind of I think it skipped a generation with my parents.
• 7:00
  Speaker 3: My grandfather was an entrepreneur.
• 7:02
  Speaker 3: He built, he was, he worked on a farm.
• 7:04
  Speaker 3: He was born in a farm town.
• 7:06
  Speaker 3: He didn't work on a farm, he was, like you know, kind of a family with, like laborers or something, and he, at 16, he moved to Dar es Salaam, which is the capital of Tanzania, and he like started by being a shop boy, like the sweepers and all that, and he convinced his the owner to let him sleep in the shop for security reasons no, rent is really the reality of that but he ended up buying the shop, buying the building, growing it, and then when all the nationalization happened, it was taken from him.
• 7:33
  Speaker 3: So he had to start as an entrepreneur all over again in London and so he did it a couple of times.
• 7:39
  Speaker 3: He got pretty good at it ultimately and I think some a little bit of that was passed in my DNA.
• 7:43
  Speaker 3: So I started as 13, built my first business.
• 7:46
  Speaker 3: It's like we did we built menus and business cards for people like graphics.
• 7:51
  Speaker 3: I guess it would be called marketing.
• 7:52
  Speaker 2: I'll be back then.
• 7:53
  Speaker 2: It was just this is speaking to you.
• 7:54
  Speaker 1: This is me at 13.
• 7:56
  Speaker 1: I love this.
• 7:56
  Speaker 3: This is like early Photoshop, like the whole deal.
• 7:59
  Speaker 3: We did it and then I kind of was entrepreneurial and we built our first nonprofit project when I was 17.
• 8:06
  Speaker 3: And then I built my first national nonprofit when I was 20.
• 8:09
  Speaker 3: And so that was the beginning.
• 8:12
  Speaker 3: I've always had a passion for law since I was a kid the incredible societal transformational power of public policy and law, and so I kind of always knew I wanted to be a lawyer and it's a big part of my identity, but kind of went to school, lived all around the world, was posted with the UN, started my legal practice in refugee law.
• 8:34
  Speaker 3: Couldn't handle it emotionally, so moved to corporate law and it was at that time that I'd been started being.
• 8:40
  Speaker 3: I'd been a national executive director.
• 8:41
  Speaker 3: I was sitting on some boards, I'd kind of gotten a flavor of the sector.
• 8:45
  Speaker 3: I saw an opportunity to like build a different kind of technology organization.
• 8:49
  Speaker 3: And that's where Kila started, and that was about five, six years ago and our thesis at Kila was like let's build technology that nonprofits actually want to use and as opposed to like have to use.
• 9:01
  Speaker 3: And then from that it was our customer bases and the incredible organizations that we have using our tech that I was like there's opportunity here.
• 9:10
  Speaker 3: We should give nonprofits the same opportunity and give them technology that's gonna be transformative instead of it coming in 15 years.
• 9:18
  Speaker 3: And so that's kind of how KIT was born, and it's really this passion and deep belief that nonprofits should have the best tech in the world, because our work is maybe the most important.
• 9:31
  Speaker 2: Oh man, I agree.
• 9:32
  Speaker 1: Yeah, you're among similar minds here that I think that passion, that you just really want to give the best back to the sector, we feel that and just the way that we want to show up because it's, you know, the cultural norms maybe it's like sloppy seconds almost where it's like, no, let's make the best possible thing for the sector that we love, that's really perpetuating.
• 9:50
  Speaker 3: Let's make salespeople jealous of our fundraising technology not the other way around.
• 9:54
  Speaker 2: You can't just get there and just sheet, please?
• 9:56
  Speaker 2: I'm working on it.
• 9:57
  Speaker 3: Madeira.
• 9:57
  Speaker 3: I'm working on it and that was the beginning of a journey.
• 10:00
  Speaker 3: It took a few years.
• 10:01
  Speaker 3: Like we did a ton of research.
• 10:02
  Speaker 3: I, like you know, was able to convince some people to let me use some money to do it.
• 10:06
  Speaker 3: Now we lead the world in predictive analytics for giving and you know my mission is to like we have a hoodie that says it's a kid, hoodie that says like talk data to me on the back, Like the idea that there's power, there's opportunity in our data and that, with the right tools, it can like phenomenally transform how fundraisers work and give them a chance to be healthier, to raise more money, to feel less stressed there's so many positive upsides and ultimately unlock the most amount of generosity from our communities.
• 10:43
  Speaker 3: There's two data points that I wanna share.
• 10:45
  Speaker 3: The first one is less than one in six people who lands on a donation form makes a donation online.
• 10:51
  Speaker 3: Interesting.
• 10:53
  Speaker 3: I believe that and AI can help you change that, if God, if Amazon and God knows who else is using it to get you to make your purchase, is why the heck can't we use it in the giving world?
• 11:01
  Speaker 3: And the second one is less than 30% of people make a second gift to an organization, so, like our conversion is bad and our retention is bad, tech data can actually fix that.
• 11:12
  Speaker 3: Maybe not fix it, but empower fundraisers to fix that problem.
• 11:16
  Speaker 3: And that's what I spend my life doing.
• 11:53
  Speaker 1: I mean, I love that you're plowing in there because, I mean, smart technology is transforming the fundraising landscape and I feel like we're all old enough to know we're talking about the future of fundraising is coming.
• 12:03
  Speaker 1: The reality is, the future of fundraising is like right this moment.
• 12:06
  Speaker 1: It's happening right now.
• 12:07
  Speaker 1: It's playing out in real time.
• 12:09
  Speaker 1: I mean, talk to us about the landscape in the sector.
• 12:12
  Speaker 1: Where are you seeing the greatest innovation happening right now?
• 12:15
  Speaker 3: Yeah, good question, but I want to go back to like.
• 12:17
  Speaker 3: There's a fear in the sector that I think we need to be like, really honest about Excuse the professorial in me, but like fundraising is the same as it's been for 100 years.
• 12:27
  Speaker 3: It started at our churches and our synagogues and our temples and our mosques, and then moved to our community centers in the United Ways of the World and then it came through corporate giving and then a little bit online, but, like, 80% of gifts are still made offline.
• 12:40
  Speaker 3: Checks and cash still represent a significant portion of giving.
• 12:44
  Speaker 3: It's the same.
• 12:45
  Speaker 3: The way our grandparents gave is essentially the same.
• 12:47
  Speaker 3: That we're giving or we're giving, and that's starting to change.
• 12:50
  Speaker 3: And the problem that I feel is so prevalent and people in the sector are so scared to talk about is our technology reflects the problems of the past and the fundraising of the past, not of the future, right, and so we all have Netflix or Spotify or God knows what accounts, doordash or whatever it might be.
• 13:07
  Speaker 3: Nonprofits should be capitalizing on our willingness to spend recurring revenue or recurring, you know, be consumers.
• 13:17
  Speaker 3: But let's do it instead of for frigging I don't know music, which is great and important.
• 13:22
  Speaker 3: Let's do it for giving too, and let's not focus our entire fundraising efforts only on major donors who are, by the way, dying, and giving their wealth to people who don't give in the same way, at a rate that's unheard of and so like.
• 13:35
  Speaker 3: As a sector, we need to stop being so entrenched in what we thought worked and it did work for so long, because, one, it's changing and, two, there are better ways to do it and technology can unlock that.
• 13:46
  Speaker 3: The second thing I want to say, just off my chest, is like tech isn't coming for your jobs.
• 13:51
  Speaker 3: Tech shouldn't be scary to the sector.
• 13:53
  Speaker 3: It should be an opportunity to do your jobs better.
• 13:58
  Speaker 3: It's not the terminator.
• 13:59
  Speaker 3: It's not going to fire people.
• 14:01
  Speaker 3: It's going to empower fundraisers who are, data shows, exhausted.
• 14:06
  Speaker 3: We're asking for more and more from our fundraisers, without raising their salaries too much and without raising their budgets, so they can hire more people.
• 14:13
  Speaker 3: The answer to that problem is technology, not anger, and so, to me, being smart now, engaging in that, being open and excited and progressive and I don't mean that in the liberal, conservative way, I mean that in the how we operate our workplaces way is going to solve so many of the things that we're so frustrated by in our work and that's why smart tech is so important.
• 14:38
  Speaker 3: The second thing I guess it's third that I'll say is like there's so much opportunity in our data and right now we do two things bad.
• 14:46
  Speaker 3: We silo our data so many orgs and we don't use its aggregated opportunity.
• 14:52
  Speaker 3: So whether it's products like us or like really dorky people on spreadsheets, I don't care Get that data in one place and start to analyze it.
• 15:00
  Speaker 3: Right, you know, bring your email marketing data and your online forms data and your campaign data and your phone log data into one place, your CRM or whatever it is, and then get to work on it.
• 15:12
  Speaker 3: That data is telling you a story and it isn't prescriptive, it's guiding right.
• 15:17
  Speaker 3: So like if John opens the same fundraising email three times and attends an event in the same two month period, data shows that that's a giving signal.
• 15:29
  Speaker 3: But if you don't have the right technology to actually tell you any of that stuff, there's no way you're ever going to know that.
• 15:35
  Speaker 3: That's both a missed opportunity for you as an organization but also a missed opportunity for John to exercise and empower that generosity that he clearly felt by doing those things and his action signal.
• 15:48
  Speaker 3: Using data, being excited by it, is really what smart nonprofits are really all about?
• 15:59
  Speaker 2: Holy crap.
• 16:01
  Speaker 1: Yeah, I mean there's so much there to unpack, but I just want to lift this thread of data.
• 16:07
  Speaker 1: It's always like someone else's job.
• 16:09
  Speaker 1: I think it's the fundraiser.
• 16:11
  Speaker 1: It's like I'm the front man, I'm going to go build these relationships and you're saying this is for everybody.
• 16:17
  Speaker 1: We got them in consumable.
• 16:19
  Speaker 1: We got to get it into a place where you can actually read the story that it's trying to tell us.
• 16:23
  Speaker 1: I mean real, practically.
• 16:25
  Speaker 1: Give us some examples of what are some of the storylines that you can see through data.
• 16:29
  Speaker 3: So I want to do two things.
• 16:30
  Speaker 3: Firstly, I think every fundraiser should be a data driven fundraiser.
• 16:32
  Speaker 3: I think it doesn't matter if you're 77 years old or you're 17 years old.
• 16:36
  Speaker 3: As you get into the space, data has to be something.
• 16:39
  Speaker 3: You learn how to tie your shoes in the sector, whatever.
• 16:42
  Speaker 3: The equivalent of that is how to solicit a donation, how to say thank you.
• 16:47
  Speaker 3: These are core things that every fundraiser needs.
• 16:50
  Speaker 3: No data needs to be part of that.
• 16:51
  Speaker 3: So I very stupidly but very thankfully, worked on building a program.
• 16:56
  Speaker 3: It's a CFRE certified 15-hour course called the Data Driven Fundraiser.
• 17:02
  Speaker 3: It's a fundraising program.
• 17:04
  Speaker 3: It's 15 hours, anybody can do it.
• 17:06
  Speaker 3: You get your CFRE credits and what it does is it gives you that baseline of fundamentals.
• 17:11
  Speaker 3: It says how can you use data?
• 17:13
  Speaker 3: What does it mean?
• 17:13
  Speaker 3: What are predictive analytics?
• 17:15
  Speaker 3: What's a KPI?
• 17:16
  Speaker 3: How do I measure stuff?
• 17:17
  Speaker 3: And we partnered with the incredible instructors from the sector and if you go to datadrivenfundraisercom you can sign up and it's launching next month, so that's really exciting.
• 17:28
  Speaker 3: So, john, you asked a question like how?
• 17:30
  Speaker 3: Start by starting to learn, make that part of your work as a fundraiser.
• 17:34
  Speaker 3: It's one weekend worth of work or two days of professional development or whatever you can do.
• 17:39
  Speaker 3: So that's really important.
• 17:41
  Speaker 3: The second thing is let's use some examples.
• 17:43
  Speaker 3: We hear a lot about this term in the consumer world, like buying signals.
• 17:49
  Speaker 3: We've heard about that, everyone talks about that in the sales world.
• 17:52
  Speaker 3: And while fundraising is different and what is a giving signal may be different in what it is, that concept of a giving signal is very much the same.
• 18:02
  Speaker 3: It's like what are the preconditions, the actions, the thoughts, the emotions that are gonna be felt by a potential donor or an existing donor for a repeat donor before they actually make the action of making a gift.
• 18:15
  Speaker 3: So, john, you asked some examples opening the same fundraising appeal email multiple times.
• 18:21
  Speaker 3: The correlation between that and likelihood to give is phenomenal.
• 18:26
  Speaker 3: It's incredible.
• 18:27
  Speaker 3: But unless you're tracking that stuff and you know that stuff you're probably not gonna know that.
• 18:33
  Speaker 3: If you have 25,000 people on your subscriber list or your donor list, how are you probably gonna scroll through John's email and check?
• 18:43
  Speaker 3: No, you gotta have the right tech to do that right.
• 18:46
  Speaker 3: Or things like second gift conversion.
• 18:50
  Speaker 3: There's a lot of people in the fundraising space that you basically have a three month window to capture the heart of somebody for a second time.
• 18:58
  Speaker 3: Now there's ways to do it in longer time.
• 19:00
  Speaker 3: But how do you know that?
• 19:02
  Speaker 3: How do you know who gave?
• 19:03
  Speaker 3: How do you know what engagement they're doing in the interim?
• 19:06
  Speaker 3: Are they reading your stewardship emails?
• 19:07
  Speaker 3: Again, data will tell you that story.
• 19:11
  Speaker 3: There is data on what time of day people are most likely to give, what day of the week, what part of the month, what cycle in the year.
• 19:20
  Speaker 3: There's so much there that we have to think about, thinking about to actually action on.
• 19:27
  Speaker 3: But the problem is, for so many of us it's like spray and pray.
• 19:30
  Speaker 3: I'm gonna email everyone and ask them the same thing and hope to good Lord that they're gonna do it.
• 19:34
  Speaker 3: Probably not the best approach.
• 19:37
  Speaker 3: Like I'm a precision guy.
• 19:38
  Speaker 3: Right, you know you wanna get at the people most likely to give at the time and how do you segment?
• 19:43
  Speaker 3: You use technology to do that, you use machine learning and artificial intelligence to do that and you bring all that data into your database or whatever, so that these kinds of tools can actually get to work.
• 19:54
  Speaker 3: And then, most importantly, you can actually leverage relationships by knowing those things.
• 20:00
  Speaker 3: Like it's not dehumanizing fundraising, it's actually rehumanizing fundraising.
• 20:04
  Speaker 2: It's like empowering fundraising.
• 20:06
  Speaker 3: I would say Exactly, exactly, and I think that's your it's like an art in science.
• 20:10
  Speaker 1: It's like you gotta have the science piece so you can overlay this relation, and that's your interpretation of it.
• 20:16
  Speaker 2: I think something that's striking me and I'm just gonna take the shame out of it for everybody that's listening is I don't think anywhere in my two decade fundraising career did I ever have anybody tell me about why data is so important, and I worked at one point a very large foundation in higher ed where we had 250,000 records of alums, or 350,000 records and I don't think that any of us have thought about having a data mindset to go into our work and how again empowering that would be, freeing it would be Absolutely.
• 20:56
  Speaker 3: It's like well, I don't know what your donor's thinking.
• 20:57
  Speaker 3: Well, actually you do know what your donor's thinking, you just don't know.
• 21:00
  Speaker 3: You know what your donor's thinking, and that's a really important distinction.
• 21:04
  Speaker 3: But it's not just the tech, becky, it's also the human side of it too.
• 21:07
  Speaker 3: You have to believe it, you have to want it, because I can build you the fastest car in the world.
• 21:12
  Speaker 3: It can go so fast that even my two year old son would go Zoom.
• 21:17
  Speaker 3: He'd run around the house, which is, by the way, what he does.
• 21:20
  Speaker 3: But if you don't know how to drive, it doesn't matter, you can put all the horsepower in there.
• 21:23
  Speaker 3: And so to me, humanizing this technology, making it feel less scary, to your point.
• 21:32
  Speaker 3: There's no shame in not knowing how to.
• 21:34
  Speaker 3: Nobody's ever said anything about data before, like it's not been the lexicon, the narrative of our sector.
• 21:41
  Speaker 3: I've spent 30 years in the sector.
• 21:43
  Speaker 3: I know I was the problem.
• 21:46
  Speaker 3: I fundraise by calling all the rich people I know and asking them to make big gifts.
• 21:51
  Speaker 3: That doesn't work.
• 21:52
  Speaker 3: And so to me shedding light, opening the door, insert, claim, you know metaphor.
• 21:58
  Speaker 3: Here is actually the opportunity.
• 22:01
  Speaker 3: And I don't think fundraisers even if you're four years or you're 40 years in your career need to be scared of this and I think they should be excited.
• 22:08
  Speaker 2: I'm jazzed about it and I want you to kind of throw out some examples to us, like what are some best practices that are entirely outdated, what do we need to get rid of and what are some things that we could take in?
• 22:23
  Speaker 2: That would be really simple modern day best practices.
• 22:27
  Speaker 3: Good question, wow, great question.
• 22:29
  Speaker 3: So I want to start by talking about the importance of saying thank you, Because it's something that our organizations do not do well enough on.
• 22:37
  Speaker 3: We'll do it for a $15 gift.
• 22:41
  Speaker 3: Somebody makes a $15 gift.
• 22:43
  Speaker 3: Firstly, none of us know how that might be huge for somebody, or it might be nothing.
• 22:48
  Speaker 3: We don't know that, it doesn't matter.
• 22:49
  Speaker 3: There's a data point.
• 22:51
  Speaker 3: I gave a lecture.
• 22:51
  Speaker 3: It's a few years old and I don't remember where it's from.
• 22:54
  Speaker 3: I wish I could cite it, but it's like you should thank your donor in some form or another six times over the course of you think it's a year or something like that, and I thought it was seven, so I'm glad Exactly.
• 23:03
  Speaker 3: Great.
• 23:04
  Speaker 3: So like seven, six maybe I'm misremembering, but the point is that's a lot.
• 23:09
  Speaker 3: Before you even broach the subject of another gift, Right?
• 23:12
  Speaker 3: But what happens?
• 23:14
  Speaker 3: I make a donation online, I get an automated IRS compliant receipt that says dear Najeed, our work is so important to X community, we wouldn't be able to do it without you.
• 23:26
  Speaker 3: Thank you, fake signature person.
• 23:29
  Speaker 3: Great, and then I'm going to be added to a mailing list and every month, you're going to ask me for more money, Irregardless that's not a word regardless of whether you, I like a specific campaign or a specific issue area or impact area or whatever it is.
• 23:46
  Speaker 3: Technology can change that.
• 23:48
  Speaker 3: We have like incredible automation technology.
• 23:52
  Speaker 3: Let me, let me paint you what I think you should do instead.
• 23:54
  Speaker 3: Becky makes a donation.
• 23:56
  Speaker 3: It's $25 and it's about mosquito nets in butts one.
• 24:00
  Speaker 3: Okay, Great.
• 24:02
  Speaker 3: So now what do I know by that donation?
• 24:04
  Speaker 3: I know that $25 was the amount they gave.
• 24:07
  Speaker 3: They, Becky, you selected a one time gift, that you picked either a specific country or a specific problem like mosquito nets.
• 24:15
  Speaker 3: I know the time of day, the week, the month.
• 24:18
  Speaker 3: I know that it was an online donation.
• 24:21
  Speaker 3: All of those things came from a six field form.
• 24:24
  Speaker 3: I also know your address so I probably can very easily know the demographics of your neighborhood, likely what your projected income is like, the size of your family.
• 24:34
  Speaker 3: Now think about that.
• 24:35
  Speaker 3: What I just said nobody thinks about.
• 24:38
  Speaker 3: Let me build an automation sequence which has both email marketing, text messaging, a fundraiser phone call that is specific to that Great.
• 24:48
  Speaker 3: Becky gave mosquito nets.
• 24:49
  Speaker 3: For all people who choose mosquito nets, send them this thank you with this story, with this image Great.
• 24:55
  Speaker 3: If Becky opens it, do this.
• 24:57
  Speaker 3: If Becky doesn't open it, do that.
• 24:59
  Speaker 3: Send a thank you text message.
• 25:01
  Speaker 3: Automate that from a piece of technology.
• 25:03
  Speaker 3: Then send three more follow ups about the impact they made and then phone them after six weeks.
• 25:09
  Speaker 3: That's super easy.
• 25:11
  Speaker 3: Like no, that's really impossible for almost everybody, except if you're using the right technology.
• 25:17
  Speaker 3: So let's not say, oh, I don't have time for that $25 donation.
• 25:21
  Speaker 3: You can turn Becky's $25 donation into a $20 monthly gift that could last 10 years.
• 25:27
  Speaker 3: I promise you you both have time and need for that and 98% of this can be pre-done and all automated and it feels inherently personal.
• 25:37
  Speaker 3: Hey Bex, thanks so much for the donation.
• 25:40
  Speaker 3: Little squiggle automated text with like nickname.
• 25:44
  Speaker 3: You know like.
• 25:44
  Speaker 3: There's so much we can do using this kind of tech, this smart tech that's going to make Becky feel heard, that's going to make Becky feel like the center of your attention and offer a $25 gift.
• 25:57
  Speaker 3: It's the right thing to do, it's financially possible and it's going to significantly increase your likelihood to return.
• 26:05
  Speaker 3: That's what I see the future of giving.
• 26:09
  Speaker 2: Bex would totally give another recurring gift for something like that.
• 26:14
  Speaker 1: Because you would give the signals, because Becky's going to eat up that story and you would have the data to know that she read that.
• 26:20
  Speaker 3: She clicked on that link, she watched that video, she exactly.
• 26:23
  Speaker 1: Because she's going to behave in that way, because she truly deeply cares, which is why she made the gift which is going to separate Bex from whoever does it.
• 26:31
  Speaker 3: And that's just one of a million examples we could do or we could know, using technology like ours.
• 26:38
  Speaker 3: Becky made a gift.
• 26:39
  Speaker 3: She's already given at least $500 for the organization in their history.
• 26:44
  Speaker 3: Automate this email as opposed to that Now.
• 26:47
  Speaker 3: Nobody can do that.
• 26:48
  Speaker 3: Our tech can do that.
• 26:49
  Speaker 3: Knowledge does that for you.
• 26:51
  Speaker 3: Or Becky was a liebunt.
• 26:53
  Speaker 3: She gave last year but not this year.
• 26:55
  Speaker 3: She stopped being a liebunt.
• 26:57
  Speaker 3: Do this, thank you.
• 26:58
  Speaker 3: It's two years in a row, 10 points to Gryffindor or whatever jokes you want to make, but again, you know that because you're using data, both the past and the current, new data, to help to begin new ways of thinking and, ultimately, new post-gift stewardship practices.
• 27:18
  Speaker 2: There are ways to humanize tech, and I think about what you've just explained there, and if I were to get that so breezily on text, or if I was going to get that video.
• 27:30
  Speaker 2: There is so much humanity that can be put there, and I think that is something that we're so resistant about.
• 27:36
  Speaker 2: We don't want something that's very buttoned up, we don't want a corporate robot talking to us, but this feels human.
• 27:43
  Speaker 2: I would love to transition into the AI component, because is this what you're seeing?
• 27:49
  Speaker 2: What is the future of AI and fundraising, and is this a component of it?
• 27:53
  Speaker 3: So, becky, let's go back 15 years, when there was significant pushback to online donation forums.
• 28:00
  Speaker 3: Remember, it was like you were in the thick of it, becky.
• 28:03
  Speaker 3: This is when you were in the heart of your career in fundraising.
• 28:06
  Speaker 1: I remember that we were seriously talking about can we give up 2.5% to process this card?
• 28:12
  Speaker 3: Well, let's flip that, and this is a big thing.
• 28:15
  Speaker 3: I have a whole rant.
• 28:17
  Speaker 3: I can give on the way administration is tracked in the sector, but it doesn't matter.
• 28:20
  Speaker 3: Let's talk about how much time it takes to process a check at the bank.
• 28:24
  Speaker 3: It's so true, but anyway, let's get past that and go to 15 years ago.
• 28:33
  Speaker 3: Forget about.
• 28:34
  Speaker 3: Will people give online?
• 28:36
  Speaker 3: Do we need that?
• 28:38
  Speaker 3: Is it an yes?
• 28:39
  Speaker 3: Those who said yes scaled Ultimately.
• 28:42
  Speaker 3: That was the reality, and so I think AI is the equivalent.
• 28:46
  Speaker 3: That's the best equivalent I can draw in the space.
• 28:48
  Speaker 3: If you're fundraising without an online donation forum, what you either had to get it late or you fell away into the abyss and the organization struggled significantly.
• 28:58
  Speaker 3: To me, ai we're about five years from that For orgs who are not being powered by things like automation, artificial intelligence, smart nonprofits all the stuff that Beth and Allison wrote in their new book.
• 29:08
  Speaker 3: We're in big trouble as a sector, and so embracing this technology isn't a nice tab.
• 29:14
  Speaker 3: It's a need tab.
• 29:16
  Speaker 3: Whether it's going to be now or in five years depends on how much you want to struggle for five years, and if you say that in a salesy kind of way, doesn't have to be expensive or complicated, it doesn't have enough to be mine.
• 29:25
  Speaker 3: It just has to be a mindset that's open to that, because it's the donation forum of 2009 or whatever the year was right, and I think that's that to me is the really simple answer to your question.
• 29:39
  Speaker 1: Thank you for always taking it back to mindset you consistently like recalibrate, because I do think that's where the conversations need to go and I think that's because any limitations.
• 29:49
  Speaker 1: At the end of the day, it's so much easier once you get over the hurdle of thinking that it's going to be really hard.
• 29:53
  Speaker 1: You realize like, oh, this is going to make my life a lot better and make my team more activated and working on meaningful work.
• 29:59
  Speaker 3: There's so much fear and, like my dad always, my dad has a lot of like aphorisms.
• 30:04
  Speaker 3: One of them is fear stands for false evidence appearing real and I like I never forgot that because it's like there's really nothing scary about artificial intelligence or automation.
• 30:15
  Speaker 3: It's scary if you don't it looks, it's like maybe it looks scary because you don't know what it is, but if you actually learn about it you're like, oh, this doesn't mean anything, like it's just a tool.
• 30:24
  Speaker 3: It's like it's like trying to dig a big hole with your hands, like use the spade, it's pointy, so it's scary, but just it's easier.
• 30:32
  Speaker 2: You know, for anyone that's listening right now and is just nodding your head like a bobble head and saying, yes, I want to do this, yes, I'm ready to dive into it.
• 30:41
  Speaker 2: I mean, what sort of counsel would you give them about where to start, and does the fundraising kit have some tools?
• 30:49
  Speaker 2: You know, and of course we love freebies and we definitely want to know about that, but let us know where a good starting place would be, specifically even for like the tiny nonprofit who's got you know, like one to three people trying to do all the things and part of me says like those are the people who need this the most.
• 31:05
  Speaker 3: It's like man, I can get a whole, nother person.
• 31:08
  Speaker 3: That's a robot.
• 31:09
  Speaker 3: Now, that's not how it works.
• 31:10
  Speaker 3: Relax everyone, don't.
• 31:12
  Speaker 3: It's not an actual robot.
• 31:13
  Speaker 3: It's like the capacity is humongous, right?
• 31:17
  Speaker 3: So first, I always start every good, important decision with a cup of coffee.
• 31:21
  Speaker 3: So let's start there.
• 31:22
  Speaker 3: Make yourself a good cup of coffee, or cold brew or cold brew if you're bougie, like John and then start by asking yourself, like what are the biggest problems I face today?
• 31:33
  Speaker 3: Are my forms converting?
• 31:34
  Speaker 3: Do I even know?
• 31:35
  Speaker 3: If my forms are converting?
• 31:36
  Speaker 3: Am I retaining my donors?
• 31:38
  Speaker 3: What's my second gift?
• 31:39
  Speaker 3: Track your organizational KPIs is what we would call them.
• 31:43
  Speaker 3: Figure out where there are opportunities and where there are areas that you need to be better.
• 31:48
  Speaker 3: And then we, as fundraisers, have to be honest with ourselves and be like my second gift conversion sucks.
• 31:53
  Speaker 3: The benchmark is X and I'm at Y.
• 31:55
  Speaker 3: You know, let's be honest.
• 31:57
  Speaker 3: Okay, great, what do I now need to do?
• 31:59
  Speaker 3: So now let's go to solution finding.
• 32:01
  Speaker 3: So, becky, to me, the first tool or spreadsheet that everyone needs is what's the benchmark and what am I doing To be empowered by data?
• 32:11
  Speaker 3: You have to be data driven.
• 32:12
  Speaker 3: And it goes back to John's mindset comment.
• 32:14
  Speaker 3: I got to be like I'm going to at least look at that and I'm not going to be defensive.
• 32:19
  Speaker 3: There's a sticky on my desk.
• 32:21
  Speaker 3: It says work to yes.
• 32:23
  Speaker 3: My second gift conversion rate could and should be better.
• 32:26
  Speaker 3: Don't viscerally respond to that.
• 32:29
  Speaker 3: Nobody's threatening your job or your competence or whatever.
• 32:33
  Speaker 3: It's like.
• 32:33
  Speaker 3: This needs to be better.
• 32:34
  Speaker 3: So I have a disproportionate amount of my donations that are one time versus recurring.
• 32:39
  Speaker 3: Great, let's take a sober coffee inspired.
• 32:43
  Speaker 3: Look at this and be like I can be better, we can be better.
• 32:46
  Speaker 3: So, and to have these conversations, we got to track them.
• 32:50
  Speaker 3: So get your data in, learn about them, use either a tool or a spreadsheet.
• 32:54
  Speaker 3: It really doesn't matter to get there.
• 32:56
  Speaker 3: But the truth is, you know, for not that much money, you've got a tool that plugs right into your CRM, like fundraising kit, which we just call kit, and and like do all the work for you.
• 33:09
  Speaker 3: It'll tell you it'll.
• 33:10
  Speaker 3: You can toggle between like smart benchmarks, m&r benchmarks, fundraising effectiveness, projects benchmarks, and be like ooh, how's that Do, how am I doing?
• 33:18
  Speaker 3: Again, you can do it by your org size or your NTE code Bucket or whatever, and so it doesn't have to be scary and then you can take a next step.
• 33:28
  Speaker 3: You can, like set a goal.
• 33:29
  Speaker 3: You can track your efficacy over time and I know that sounds like I'm actually being 100%, like being crap, holding yourself accountable, and it's like not in the dark with a little flashlight under the bed, like it's being like yo, I can be better and I will, and here's what I'm gonna set it at and this is how it's gonna change.
• 33:46
  Speaker 3: Great, now that I'm tracking All that, what can I do?
• 33:48
  Speaker 3: Well, now let's get into the fun stuff.
• 33:50
  Speaker 3: Using a tool like kid plug in your Salesforce, so your razor's edge, or your neon or your key lot or whatever you want to use.
• 33:56
  Speaker 3: Plug in your mail chimp, your constant con or you know whatever.
• 33:59
  Speaker 3: Plug in your wealth screening tools.
• 34:01
  Speaker 3: Now I'm starting to aggregate.
• 34:03
  Speaker 3: Now I'm starting to build that pile of data without having to stress about it.
• 34:07
  Speaker 3: These are all like plug-in APIs, 10 minute kind of things.
• 34:10
  Speaker 3: Great, now let's put this thing to work.
• 34:13
  Speaker 3: I can track giving journeys.
• 34:15
  Speaker 3: I can track personas.
• 34:16
  Speaker 3: I can get zip code data.
• 34:18
  Speaker 3: I can and that's not now.
• 34:20
  Speaker 3: Now are finally getting the AI.
• 34:22
  Speaker 3: Now I can let the technology say like Becky's likely to give in February, but also possibly in November.
• 34:28
  Speaker 3: That doesn't mean Becky is gonna give in October or whatever I said.
• 34:32
  Speaker 3: It means Her propensity, the model, the AI, the machine learning says this is likely what's gonna happen.
• 34:40
  Speaker 3: So make that a reality.
• 34:42
  Speaker 3: Call her.
• 34:42
  Speaker 3: I can't believe I'm using two Harry Potter references in one podcast, but like it's a sorting hat, right.
• 34:48
  Speaker 3: Becky's likely to give in November.
• 34:50
  Speaker 3: John is likely to become a recurring, so things like likely to come, a recurring donor, likely to make a gift in a certain month.
• 34:57
  Speaker 3: Likely to give in the next two weeks.
• 34:59
  Speaker 3: Smart ask how much we should be, should we be asking for.
• 35:03
  Speaker 3: There's a ton of data that shows that if you ask for too much, they're gonna give nothing.
• 35:07
  Speaker 3: If you ask for too little, they're gonna give what you ask.
• 35:09
  Speaker 3: Neither of those things is optimal.
• 35:11
  Speaker 3: Using something like a smart ask will tell you you know Becky is likely to give X and you don't need a ton of donation history.
• 35:18
  Speaker 3: If you've got it, it'll be built on Becky.
• 35:21
  Speaker 3: If you don't have it, It'll be built on Becky's zip code or her engagement history or people that you know in your organization that look like her in terms of like Demographics or giving history or engagement history.
• 35:32
  Speaker 3: Like this is the true power of artificial intelligence.
• 35:36
  Speaker 1: That it's that lamppost, it's the guy okay, I mean just totally here for all of this, because I know tech can feel overwhelming, the future can kind of feel overwhelming, but this is just so good like.
• 35:46
  Speaker 1: It's so Reoriented to knowing our donors better, understanding more of their motivation, so it freezes up to do the stuff that really matters.
• 35:53
  Speaker 3: You know you can never replace the human side of fundraising.
• 35:56
  Speaker 3: I don't want to.
• 35:58
  Speaker 2: What I want to is the annoying guesswork, the frustrating Administration, the yeah, the grind the grind and I'll just say it reminds me so much of this conversation, if you want to go deeper, that we have with Lynn Wester about Stop looking at your financial data as the indicator of where to jump next.
• 36:17
  Speaker 2: Watch your donor behavior.
• 36:18
  Speaker 2: If you look at your behavior, we're looking at the wrong KPIs and we're spending our time spinning our wheels Looking at gift amounts when actually the behavior of the donor is going to be driving a morse of sink to your point.
• 36:33
  Speaker 2: Smart ask, which is not at all what I thought you said the first time you said it.
• 36:37
  Speaker 1: So so, okay, I mean you've been a funder's or since three.
• 36:42
  Speaker 1: I'm just picturing you on the porch like ringing the doorbell and I just wonder if there's a story you would take us back to, when philanthropy just really took you back and was like man.
• 36:50
  Speaker 1: This is what it's all about.
• 36:51
  Speaker 1: What's what's when you'd share with us?
• 36:54
  Speaker 3: So I'll tell you one.
• 36:55
  Speaker 3: So when I was young, 20 or something, I founded this nonprofit and poverty.
• 37:00
  Speaker 3: Now, okay, it was a spin-off of the make poverty history campaign that was doing grassroots work and I Remember like, so we partnered.
• 37:10
  Speaker 3: So the whole model of the organization was we find local organizations that are doing capacity building work that generally is like income generating for marginalized folks and we like fund them to expand their work, right.
• 37:22
  Speaker 3: So it was a program in Rwanda.
• 37:24
  Speaker 3: It was like doing beekeeping for widows, okay, and what I didn't know about Rwandan culture or in that villa, not the whole culture, every culture, but like that specific area was there was a lot of marginalization of widows and it really effect Did their ability to generate income and that meant that widows disproportionately lived in poverty in that community relative to non Widowed people.
• 37:45
  Speaker 3: And we funded this project.
• 37:47
  Speaker 3: We got the photos, john, of these, of these amazing women, god too many of whom were young, like in their 30s and 40s, and they were widowed and like the median income grew by some Crazy number you know like, and they were just making honey and I was like I'd buy that honey, but like that's not the point.
• 38:03
  Speaker 3: The point is, for we raised 30 grand or what.
• 38:06
  Speaker 3: I don't know what the number was, but it was so small for us in terms of the way we think and it literally lifted a whole cohort of people out of poverty.
• 38:15
  Speaker 3: And I Remember thinking myself like this is something I can give, like I work 80 hours a week.
• 38:21
  Speaker 3: I I was 20, so I was still school, running a national like you know National organization, playing tennis on the varsity team at Miguel, exhausted all the time, and but I was like this is worth it, like the grind, becky, to use your term that we all have to do to like give our Organizations the juice they need to do great work and to support great work is actually worth it, because the reality is, whether it's my family or my you know my history or those women in Rwanda or people up the street in our own communities, so many folks rely on this important work and I wish they didn't have to, but I don't see a world where it's gonna be the case that they don't.
• 39:01
  Speaker 3: So if we're doing all this, if we wanna unlock generosity, if people want to do that, let's make it easy for them to give.
• 39:09
  Speaker 3: Let's make it easy for people to unlock that kind of generosity, so that they can feel the way that I felt about that program.
• 39:18
  Speaker 2: And I gotta put a book in to that beautiful story and just say how good would it feel if we could leverage what we've talked about here today with smart tech, with data-driven decisions that feel good to the donor and to us, and we could replicate that feeling of what happened with those women in Rwanda without the grind.
• 39:42
  Speaker 2: And so that's what we're here for.
• 39:45
  Speaker 2: Friends is like we want you to work so much smarter and not harder, because we wanna keep that firing your belly of whatever it is that you have for your mission.
• 39:56
  Speaker 3: Becky, did you just say fire in my belly?
• 39:58
  Speaker 2: I did say fire in your belly, so I have to tell you it's like a crazy thing.
• 40:02
  Speaker 3: In the 90s there was the Canadian Prime Minister it was Jean Cretien who was like that's like the president equivalent in Canada, and I wrote my first book on youth social change when I was 22, and he wrote the forward and in that forward, I swear to God, he said the words fire in my belly.
• 40:16
  Speaker 2: I mean, we were just meant to talk.
• 40:18
  Speaker 2: Today.
• 40:19
  Speaker 2: We end all of our conversations with a one good thing.
• 40:23
  Speaker 2: Najeed, this could be a life hack, a piece of advice.
• 40:27
  Speaker 2: What one good thing would you offer up to our community?
• 40:29
  Speaker 2: And, by the way, I can't wait.
• 40:32
  Speaker 3: I think one good thing is, like, human beings have phenomenal capacity, capacity that we as people can't even imagine we have.
• 40:40
  Speaker 3: You know, you hear these crazy stories of people like mothers.
• 40:43
  Speaker 3: Firstly, moms are badass, let's start with that.
• 40:45
  Speaker 3: And secondly, like you know, the incredible capacity of like mothers defending their babies in front of bears, and while that seems like a hyperbole, I like really.
• 40:54
  Speaker 3: Firstly, it does happen, which is nuts, but secondly, I like, I truly and deeply believe in like the incredible potential of humans and that unlocking that possibility and it's like one good thing is like, I really believe that everyone has that sixth, seventh gear, whatever you know, in them, and that we should all spend our lives searching to find it, because when we do, it's pretty special.
• 41:18
  Speaker 1: I mean, what a beautiful way to round this conversation out.
• 41:21
  Speaker 1: How can everyone connect with you?
• 41:24
  Speaker 3: The fundraising kit Kila give us all the things.
• 41:26
  Speaker 3: It's really easy, like fundraisingkitcom, like toolkit KIT.
• 41:31
  Speaker 3: Fundraising kit is really simple and there's like lots of and then I really want to encourage people to do this course Like we.
• 41:39
  Speaker 3: You know data driven fundraisercom.
• 41:41
  Speaker 3: It's awesome, it's super accessible, it's all done online at your own speed, and we'll make sure we put a really great discount code in there, like 50% off or something, and so we can.
• 41:53
  Speaker 3: You know every fundraiser should be a fundraiser that's powered by data.
• 41:58
  Speaker 3: Becky to your point and happy anyway in my journey that to support all of you listening and getting to that.
• 42:05
  Speaker 2: Well, thank you so much for that.
• 42:06
  Speaker 2: I am.
• 42:07
  Speaker 2: We're looking at your course right now online and it just looks really exciting and we're going to drop that code into the show notes.
• 42:13
  Speaker 2: We'll also put it in a raising mail.
• 42:15
  Speaker 2: Thank you for offering that and being so generous with that, with your time.
• 42:19
  Speaker 2: And I just have to say like I want to extend this rose to you, this, you know, fictional rose, to be our friend for ever.
• 42:28
  Speaker 2: Najiv, you have got a mindset and an enthusiasm and charisma.
• 42:34
  Speaker 2: We need more of it.
• 42:36
  Speaker 3: I don't know about any of those things, but I'll happily take that invitation to geek out on this stuff, because not only is it important, but it's also a lot of fun.
• 42:44
  Speaker 2: Amen, preach.
• 42:45
  Speaker 2: Well, we'll be rooting for you, definitely, and so glad that we're connected.
• 42:48
  Speaker 1: Thanks, so much Thanks.
• 42:49
  Speaker 1: Folks Appreciate your time.