Kayla Meyers: Bring Fun To Evaluation & Impact Data
Kayla Meyers reveals the fun in what may sound dull, through braids, data galleries and data escape rooms. She distinguishes between outputs, outcomes and impact, and explains the disconnect between traditional evaluation and the impact measurement we need in today’s environment. She helps you recognize common evaluation challenges and sets you up to overcome them. Kayla is the founder of Bridgepoint Evaluation.
We’re the #1 Podcast for Nonprofits, With 13,000+ Weekly Listeners
Board relations. Fundraising. Volunteer management. Prospect research. Legal compliance. Accounting. Finance. Investments. Donor relations. Public relations. Marketing. Technology. Social media.
Every nonprofit struggles with these issues. Big nonprofits hire experts. The other 95% listen to Tony Martignetti Nonprofit Radio. Trusted experts and leading thinkers join me each week to tackle the tough issues. If you have big dreams but a small budget, you have a home at Tony Martignetti Nonprofit Radio.
First, Dana Snyder shares info on the Global Monthly Giving Summit later this month. Then, she shares what she knows about how to launch or grow your monthly sustainer fundraising. How to convert one-time donors to recurring donors. What to name your program. When to ask your sustainers to upgrade. What to give your sustainers. Storytelling. The importance of consistency. And more. Dana is the founder of Positive Equation.
We’re the #1 Podcast for Nonprofits, With 13,000+ Weekly Listeners
Board relations. Fundraising. Volunteer management. Prospect research. Legal compliance. Accounting. Finance. Investments. Donor relations. Public relations. Marketing. Technology. Social media.
Every nonprofit struggles with these issues. Big nonprofits hire experts. The other 95% listen to Tony Martignetti Nonprofit Radio. Trusted experts and leading thinkers join me each week to tackle the tough issues. If you have big dreams but a small budget, you have a home at Tony Martignetti Nonprofit Radio. View Full Transcript
And welcome to Tony Martignetti Nonprofit Radio. Big nonprofit ideas for the other 95%. I’m your aptly named host and the pod father of your favorite hebdomadal podcast. Happy Groundhog Day. This show is going out on February 2nd. Groundhog Day Let’s hope the groundhog, I don’t know, is the groundhog male or female? Does it matter? I don’t know. Well, it doesn’t matter whether they see their private parts. It’s just the whole shadow overall. Let’s hope, uh, He, she, or, uh, he or she, uh, yeah, just he or she, uh, does not, does not see, uh, does not see his or her shadow because, uh, that means, that means a shorter winter. Shorter winter for those celebrating Groundhog Day, uh, just in the US and Canada. It’s an auspicious date. My thanks to my brother for bringing this to my attention, that it was Groundhog Day for this show. Oh, I’m glad you’re with us. I’d be forced to endure the pain of ascarisis if you infected me with the idea that you missed this week’s show. Here’s our associate producer, Kate, with what’s going on. Hey Tony, we’ve got Monthly Giving Matters. First, Dana Snyder shares info on the Global Monthly Giving Summit later this month. Then she shares what she knows about how to launch or grow your monthly sustainer fundraising, how to convert one-time donors to recurring donors. What to name your program, when to ask your sustainers to upgrade, what to give your sustainers. Storytelling, the importance of consistency, and more. Dana is the founder of Positive Equation. On Tony’s take too. Creativity robbing AI. Here is Monthly Giving Matters. It’s a pleasure to welcome, I call her the maven of monthly giving. She can, she can tell me if she objects to that. Dana Snyder, she speaks and trains on the subject, and she hosts the Global Monthly Giving Summit. She’s the founder of Positive Equation and author of the book, The Monthly Giving Mastermind. The company is at positive equation.com. And Dana Snyder is active on LinkedIn. Welcome, Dana Snyder. I love your energy and enthusiasm. Well, thank you. Are you OK with Maven of Monthly G? I, I, I love the alliteration. MMM. Let’s go. Uh, I, I’m a big fan of alliteration. Yes, listeners know, I’m a huge fan of alliteration, so. Uh, it’s not good. OK, uh, we don’t, we don’t have to carry that through the conversation, but you don’t, you don’t mind being the maven of monthly giving. You got monthly giving all over. I mean, you’re, it’s clear what you, you know, let’s, let’s open, let’s open with talking about the monthly giving summit before we talk about how we can all be doing monthly giving better. Of course, you’ll learn more about that at the summit because you’ll be attending, but let’s, let’s open with the, what do you got coming up, uh, February 25th and 26th for us. So excited. It’s the 3rd annual monthly giving summit, and I’m sure Tony, we met in person at a conference and I’m sure over the years you have attended a plethora of nonprofit conferences. I’ve been to a few, a few, a few, and so have I. And there has never been An event purely dedicated to helping orgs grow recurring revenue. Monthly giving is normally like a workshop, maybe a session, but never in its entirety does it bring together a community to do that. And so, I, in 2024, in the fall when I released my book, I was like, maybe this would be something a few people would be interested in, and I just, for anybody who’s just kind of put something out there. Wondered if if, I mean, like our podcast, right, we probably just put them out there hoping that we would get a couple of listeners way and it blew my mind. Um, the first year had 2700 registrants from about 40 countries. Last year. In February, it was 4700 registrants from 58 countries and right now we’re almost about to surpass 3000 and our goal is 7000. So about a month out when you and I are recording this right now. So, quite the appetite, um, for it, and I think why it’s very much peer-led. I didn’t want it to be a bunch of consultants. Like myself, like just out like me, like you and me, yeah, like us, although our, our insights are great. I, I, I, I, I hope we’re adding some value. I mean, we got, we got, I, there are people listening to this show. I, I hope they’re getting something from it. They’re not just squandering time totally. And I, but I think, but that was not your vision for the, for the global it wasn’t, yeah, it was, I want to amplify the voices of the. Hundreds of thousands of orgs that are doing this all the time and, and especially within recurring giving and monthly giving, a lot of the glorified examples we see are very large organizations and that’s not a true representation of our sector. And so the summit. We’re, we’re, we’re here for the other 95%. That’s right. And so those stories are told, like how they’re growing from 0 to 50 monthly donors, right? Like that might not be appealing to the large organs, but that’s a majority of people who are just trying to get started. And so we tell those stories, we bring together like panelists from The practitioner side, from a tech tool side of like how it actually happens into sports. So it’s very hands-on. My favorite sessions are the peer-led case study rooms. So there’s like pre-launch, if you’re 0 to I think 500, 500 to 5000 and 5,000+, and you can pick. Where you fit in there. What are those numbers? Those are number of donors or number of monthly donors, monthly donors. And so you’ll get to hear two case studies in each room and get to ask your peers questions. So it’s, it’s really fun. The community just again blows me away. Everybody who’s participated. And Tony, just for Virtual events standpoint it’s like the show up rate is like 60% live. The event is 2 half days, so it’s only 1 to 4 p.m. Eastern time, so it’s very manageable in the day, and people stay for of the 6 hours, 4.5 hours. So when they’re there, they’re there, it’s, it’s just, it’s very different. I, I can’t, it’s hard to express with the energy and the chat is on fire, just like supporting each other, giving examples, and it’s just, it’s truly like why. The book I coined like the mastermind is because I believe there’s so much learning amongst each other that just needs to be elevated. So where do we go for info on the monthly Giving summit? Monthlygiving summit.com. Easy peasy. It’s aptly named. It’s free. The URL is aptly named. Oh, it’s free. It’s free. All right, that’s the best part. Just monthlygiving summit.com, not global, or global monthly summit, which is it? Nope, just monthlygiving summit.com. Monthlygiving summit.com, but the event is global. You said it is scores of scores of countries coming. All right. I ended up, which was nuts, that event and in the book, I ended up speaking in Italy last summer. How cool is that? Outstanding. Things that you would never, ever, ever consider or that I never considered. Was that with Valerio Melandri by any chance, the Festival del fundraising? It was. I did. I, I’m not, yeah, I did that many years ago. He’s great. Valerio and, and Julia. Yes, yes. This was more, more than 10 years ago because I’ve lived here at the beach 10 years and it was before that I was living in New York City at the time, so. Do they still do it at the, at the like a little, at a conference center on near the lake? This was near the beach. OK, OK, they moved. All right. It used to be, when I did it, it was near the, in the lake, the Lake District, Northern, uh, near, uh, Lago de Garda, I think. But anyway, beaches, no, but beaches, no, forget, come on. I live on a beach. I’d rather have a beach than a lake. I mean, beach, ocean type beach. To me, a lake doesn’t have beaches, it has sand, but oceans have beaches. So no, fantastic. Congratulations. Valario’s terrific. Hilario Melandri. Yeah, outstanding. Congratulations. You got the, you got an international gig. All right. Help us out with monthly giving. What, just like, you know, big view, we got plenty of time together, but what are we not realizing? What could we be doing better? Start, start us out and then of course, we’re gonna dive in because I like tactics, things people can do, start thinking about, but we’ll get there. We’ll, we’ll get to the, we’ll get to the details. Big picture, what why is it valuable? What could we be doing better about it? Oh my goodness, so many things. So, I have just been reading the independent sector report that came out last year alongside doing research from Giving Tuesday in 2025. Also reading the recurly. Data report, which is a subscription, like in the for-profit world subscription report that comes out that does an analysis of, I think it’s 35 million subscribers, and so I’m always looking at the subscription economy as consumers, how does that influence what’s happening in our sector. And a couple of things that really stood out from like the independent nonprofit sector report was around the 32%. Of nonprofits have less than 3 months of cash on hand. OK, so like that’s, that’s one thing. We talked about the majority of orgs. The 95% right underneath a million dollars budget, and the, the problem that we’re seeing is there’s risk. And what’s one of the top ways to mitigate risk. And if you’re dealing with that low cash on hand, then that’s any type of friction in a donor’s journey is difficult and recurring giving. Has Notoriously had a wonderfully healthy retention rate. Right, of 80, 85, 90%, in some cases, 98% of orgs I’ve spoken with. And if you can have a higher percentage of your overall donations be a recurring monthly, monthly is the most common, which is why I talk about monthly, but obviously there’s quarterly or annually, but monthly is the most popular. Then imagine what that does to your forecasting. Look at what that does for your budget. If you could say that 40% of our budget is recurring supporters. What Runway does that give you that maybe would have never existed before, and that changes the whole dynamic of planning of programming. It changes the dynamic of the staff and the team that you can have. It changes your board discussions, like, it, there’s a lot of implications that are on the positive for it. And in years prior, I think it’s definitely been a tactic, like monthly giving has been like, A piece, maybe like a PS message, it’s great if it happens, but it hasn’t been core infrastructure. Two organizations. And that is a big change when you consider infrastructure of a of it being monthly giving. So, uh, we can dive more into that, but I think largely for predominantly smaller mid-size, I mean, all size nonprofits, but really the small ones having that sustainable base of funding is so crucial. You’re right about planning and, and forecasting. If we just know we’re getting. $10,000 a month or, or $4000 a month. What, what does that mean, uh, when we can reach those kinds of retention rates that you were talking about, you know, how does that, how does that help us plan? Um, all right, so, How do we get started? Suppose we’re, suppose we’re like 0 to 5, you know, we, we, we, no, 0. Like we have no infrastructure. We don’t have technology set up, um, for, for monthly giving, for processing. I mean, we process gifts online, but the, uh, there, there’s additional technology may be needed or support, gift processing support. Where, where, where do we need to, like, where do we need to start if we say, OK. I, I hear Dana Snyder, the Maven, Monthly Giving. Uh, I worked it in one more time. That’ll be the last time. I, I heard the Maven, I did, I’m sorry. I heard Dana and I, I, I, I see the value, but what do I do first, second. So first off, I would again. Have the mindset that it is now core infrastructure and you are going to treat it seriously. Cause if you don’t do that from the beginning, then you’re never gonna bring it up, it’s not gonna be talked about, it’s not gonna be at the forefront, it’s not gonna have a budget line item. I will give an example. So for the past 4 years, I have run a monthly giving mastermind program. So that is working with organizations who are at 0, usually at 0, and building monthly giving programs from scratch. So one organization, this was last summer, last spring. That I worked with the Picnic Project. They’re a local food-based organization in Sanford, Florida. There’s a nice alliteration, Picnic Project, the Picnic Project, um, and they had never focused on monthly giving. They had, they had a handful, I think maybe 8 or so, and I was like, look, if you’re, if we’re doing this, we’re gonna go all in, right? So we changed their home page of their website to have the button on the main homepage is to join the plenty. So we named their monthly giving program. That is the call to action. When they click that button, we built a monthly giving landing page. That all of the value propositions, the copy on that page is why you should give monthly to this organization, why you should join the plenty, why it matters, what you’re going to receive when you become a member, what, what difference it provides instead of giving one time. they’re using Give butter in this case. The form is monthly only donations, so that’s very clear. You know where you are. You cannot give one time on that page. The dollar amounts are impact-based, so $44 equals this. I’m making this up, $24 equals this, right? You know what you’re, you, you know what you’re buying, what you’re, what you’re supporting each month, yeah, correct. And Very within 2 weeks. So, homepage change. Landing page up, branded name of program. We worked with them on an initial acquisition like email series, which was 4 emails that went out to his existing audience. Doubled his monthly donors in 2 weeks. Fast forward, I think they’re up to like, what you said like 10,000. Well, they started with 8, so they went with 8 1st month they got to 16. That’s right. And then it was like it’s compounded, yeah, yeah, tremendously compounded. All right, all right, so that is, that is from like a very, it, there was a desire to focus. On this being the key call to action for donors. Like you want to support us, this is the main way we are asking for you to do it. OK, there’s a bunch of stuff there. Naming it. Now, naming, he had the Plenty, the Picnic Project Plenty. Oh, OK, that’s enough with that. All right. Enough with the Maven, enough with the illiterate. No, but I gotta call these things out because I love, uh, you know, you, you’re stuck with a lackluster host. That’s the, that’s the problem. That’s the problem with this podcast. Um. So that’s very different than, do you wanna give, is this a one-time gift or is this a monthly gift? Monthly, this is a monthly gift. That doesn’t name anything. You just, you became a monthly donor, but you, there’s no name. How important is the naming? I believe it’s very important because we are called into Be a part of something bigger than ourselves, and it, what it allows you to do is it creates branding, it creates identity, it makes it not sound transactional, which is everything we’re trying to get away from. You are a part of community by doing that. Um, it makes a, I have launched through the program 29 and all 29 of them have a name. It is core to the new monthly Giving Builder that is coming out in February, which is very exciting, um. I I love names that speak to the mission of in the transformation that this group is really trying to make happen. So the plenty is such a perfect example, right? You want to have plenty of food. Um, there’s countless wonderful examples, um, of different naming, but I love that as just a an intro because it calls people in. You mentioned what you receive. Is that, is that important? Do you, what, what, what kinds of things should our monthly givers receive? So this can really depend on, it goes back to what’s meaningful to the end user, but at a minimum, it can be, you’re gonna receive monthly communication from us. They get a separate email, even if it’s your traditional newsletter, but it’s got a spin on it and maybe it goes out a couple of days before. And it’s specifically curated to this group of people. What are they making possible? This email could also celebrate, we’re welcoming 5 new members of the Plenty this week or this month, right? So it’s something that’s a little bit curated for this group. Um, I give monthly to 6 or 7 nonprofits right now, and, uh, another example is Swag. So if you join, I just became a member of Surfrider Foundation because I really believe in ocean conservation. Yeah, thank you. Thank you for, yes, I, I live on one. Thank you, very important. The ocean is very crucial to our survival and the animals in it, and So they had an opt-in where it was like, because you became a member. We would like to send you a t-shirt. What’s theirs called? I just got it yesterday. What’s theirs called? Do you remember? I don’t think Surfrider actually they didn’t, they haven’t been listening to you. All right, well, we’ve talked about it. I think it’s just literally becoming a Surfrider member, which, which this is a great example to bring up though, is confusing because they technically call any donation. You’re a member. Membership, yeah, all right, they’re not, all right, they’re not adhering to the Maven’s best practices. All right, I’m not quitting with I’m not quitting. What I love about a shirt or like a swag item is that now I am representing, and especially if it’s cool gear, but they allowed me to opt in. It wasn’t like a you will receive a shirt, it’s like you, you can if you’d like. And then there was an email series on that, which then I gave my address after the donation. So you, I mean, there’s t-shirts, there’s emails, there could be webinars you host, maybe they get exclusive access to events that you have. These can all be largely tweaked based upon if you’re hyperlocal, or if you are national, right? I know one organization in my book, which is so cool, they’re an arts organization, and they would invite their monthly donors to go to the theater with them. So they would have an outing, right? You can do that if you’re very hyperlocal. It’s a little bit different if you’re national, but like the Trevor Project, for example, they have a curated webinar series with their leadership team for their monthly community that they get to ask them questions, they get to hear the impact that’s going on. It’s like a sneak behind the scenes, so you can get really creative. OK, OK. Uh, technology, uh, so now we don’t, we’re not even at, uh, picnic, was it picnic party? No, picnic, picnic project. We’re not even at the picnic project level with 8. We’ve got, we’ve got 8 fewer than 8. So we’ve got 0 technology. I know you mentioned Give butter. We need some kind of, we need a platform to, Do this for us. Yes, yes. OK, what are we looking for? So something that is definitely mobile friendly. Some, if you’re doing monthly, I would say monthly is either pre-selected or if you have a monthly giving landing page, it is. Solidified to be on monthly. And I think the donation form is so important, like so important. If it’s a long, daunting form, and it has like 8 different fields, and it’s really tiny to check the box on if I want to cover the fee, or if the dollar amounts can’t be tweaked, like there’s so many different elements that can make A It’s the best way to say this, to honestly, to make the that form feel like the most exciting thing they’re doing that day. Like, if you were to audit, if you were to audit your form right now. Does it feel good? Or does it just look transactional? Or is it actually generating the excitement that should be happening in that moment of the gift? Like when somebody’s signing up to be a monthly donor, that’s a commitment. Like they’re saying, I believe in not just what you’re doing today, but I believe in the vision that you have. Does your form replicate that feeling? And then, Tony, this is so important. So in the recurly data, this is two things that are so important, 2 things that are so important. All right, go ahead. The front end, the front end, feel good, look, how do people integrate, interact with it. The user interface, user interface, yeah, yeah. The second is after the gift. The donor portal is crucial, and this is something that is slowly being Improved on platforms, but not enough. So if you hear this conversation and you’re like, What is she talking about? donor portal, go ask your provider if they have it, because that’s where you go in afterwards to manage your gift. Normally, in our space, the only option is either you can’t access it easily, it’s like so confusing to figure out like what’s my email? Do I have a password? And then you log in and it looks transactional, and then the only option is to cancel a gift. In the recurly subscription report. Over 50%, this is massive, 50% of people, when provided with the option to pause a subscription instead of cancel, decided to do that, half. Can you imagine? Imagine what our retention rates would be if we uh in our tech platforms, and trust me, I have been talking to all of them about improving this because it takes all of us to proactively ask for new features and functionality from our tech platforms. I think Fundraise up is one of the best at doing this with their donor portals, but it, all of them can still be improved, um. is to make sure that we don’t. Make people feel guilty or bad if they have to pause and or downgrade. A gift. And I think that’s not talked about a lot, um, but is that you truly, if this is a relationship that’s happening, you want to make it. Easy to do what they need to do, um, along their journey with you. I love, um, there’s an organization that’s actually They have recurring first is their whole mentality. It’s actually very difficult to find how to give once on their website, which is amazing. And they call people who pause or cancel surfers. And they’re like, Oh, that’s cool. Oh yeah, they’re surfing in. They’re surfinging in. They’re surfing out, take a break. They’re laying in the sun for an hour, then they go back in and surf. Yeah, they’re surf. Yeah, yeah, yeah, celebrate the fact they sent emails saying thank you so much for being with us. We’d love to welcome you back when you’re ready. Yeah. It’s wonderful. It’s time for Tony’s take 2. Thank you, Kate. I got an email notice. That the. Artificial intelligence tool, uh, decipher at decipher.AI. Had captured. One of our episodes, it was the one from uh. It was in October, the one with Russell James, where he was talking about tax law changes. So I, I clicked the link and there before my eyes. is everything that a host or a producer could want about the show. Uh, it, this decipher had, I don’t know where, I don’t know how it had gotten the audio, but it had scraped the audio from somewhere and Uh, where it resides or, or some other link, or some link to it. And, uh, on this page, There were show notes, episode summary, 15 sample tweets, 10 sample title suggestions, 6 quotes from the show, a full article, a couple 100 word article with takeaways, uh, Facebook, LinkedIn, Instagram posts, and more. Everything that a host could possibly want about the show. And I reject it. I reject it all. I don’t need it. I don’t need it. I don’t want it. I don’t, I, I don’t want it. I don’t want to use it. Now, it came after the show. I mean, the show was already, uh, has already been promoted, etc. So, it’s not that I needed it. But even if I had gotten it the instant after we had recorded it somehow, Russell James and I, I would not have used it. Because this is, this is exactly my concern that if you’ve been listening for more than Probably 3 weeks, and you’ve heard me say, my concern about artificial intelligence is that it robs us of our creativity, that the act of staring at a blank screen and creating, whether you’re creating text or art or music. That is the most Creative act. That we can, that we can perform is, is from nothing, working from nothing, and it’s just our brain that creates. So I don’t wanna be reduced to the role of a copy editor of the decipher, uh, show notes and episode summary and everything else. I, I don’t wanna be a mere copy editor of my show. I wanna be the host. So, I’ll produce. The show notes and the episode summary and our excellent social media social media manager Susan Chavez will do the 15 sample tweets and the Facebook posts and Instagram posts, and I will manage the LinkedIn post as we’ve been doing for years. I don’t, I don’t need AI to synthesize for me or to create for me. I don’t need AI to listen for me to our guests. I have good listening comprehension skills. I don’t need to have the episode synthesized for me artificially and broken down. The, I think, I think one of the main things a host can do is to be a good host, is active listening. Listening. And if you, if you just see that and say, oh, I don’t really need to listen, uh, decipher will create the show notes for me. I’ll just ask a bunch of questions. You’re removing yourself from the conversation. You’re removing the humanity. From Tony Martignetti nonprofit Radio or whatever content form you work in, whatever art you work in. You’re stripping the humanity and the creativity away, and you’re ceding it to a, A tool, a bot. We’re not doing that here at nonprofit radio. And that is Tony’s take 2. Kate. I don’t know where I heard this, and I maybe this is not true, but I’m hearing that there might be a downfall of AI because how they’re training these bots is by using human-made work. So they’re giving these bots human-made work, but apparently we’re running out of strictly human-made. Whatever to train these bots we’re running out, we’re running out of human content, because they’ve got everything apparently that’s what I don’t know if I saw a video or maybe the teachers said it, but I heard somewhere that we’re gonna start seeing a downfall of AI and it’s just gonna keep getting worse. Because the humans can’t create content quick enough or, or in, in abundance enough in sufficient quantity to, to feed the, feed the monster. Well, uh. That wouldn’t, uh, that wouldn’t hurt my feelings. I, I wouldn’t be upset about that. We’ve got Beu butt loads more time. Here’s the rest of Monthly Giving Matters with Dana Snyder. All right, so the donor portal, I mean, you need to be able to, you don’t, you mean you don’t have to call to, to update your credit card when, when you get a bounce or no. All right, the donor portal, uh, for, for monthly givers. Wow, so they can upgrade. They can downgrade. They can pause. They can upgrade, change their card, I guess you can change it, yeah, upgrade, downgrade, change your card. You wanna shift it to a different card. You don’t have to cancel and then start up again with a different card. You manage it on the donor portal. All right, so now. So you mentioned a couple, let, let’s, we can shout out some folks and, and, they should be sponsoring nonprofit radio this episode at least, but that’s all right. I used to know, I, I know Floyd Jones used to be at, uh, I know he’s not at Give Butter, hasn’t been for a couple of years, but I always loved Floyd Jones. So you mentioned Give Butter, you mentioned Fundraise Up. Other, other platforms worth looking at because we’re gonna go from 0 to 10 in our first month, and then we’re gonna, and then we’re gonna take a picnic party and we’re gonna go from 10 to 20, and then we’re gonna be having $5000 a month soon. So, where else should we go besides those two? Where, what, what other platforms are worth looking at? I mean, there’s so many, there’s plenty, right? If we’re talking about the smaller orgs, I would imagine many listeners are with Bloomerang or DonorPerfect or any of those platforms. And what I would say is, There are enhancements in all of these platforms that just sometimes aren’t turned on. So I would go back and if you haven’t met with the team or looked at their updated things that you can turn on or change, just start to be curious. Like, go to your website after this podcast, look it up on mobile. Do a full audit of your process. Redo a test donation. Like, how difficult is it? I know sometimes it’s like we’re just going through the motions, things are really busy, but a lot of the platforms now in 2026 have been doing improvements. It’s just that we haven’t. Changed What we have live on our sites. So, check that out, and if there’s certain things that I mentioned that aren’t possible, like, is it difficult for someone to choose. To cover your processing fee. Do you not have the ability to write in impact amounts, right? This amount equals this. Um, if there’s not a great donor portal and if, if they’re very clear and like that’s not on our roadmap, that’s not something we’re working on, then maybe you should look elsewhere. OK. Is it, are, are, are there platforms that you can add into your existing platform or it needs to be part of your, your overall gift processing? Oh, well, no, I mean, there’s definitely like. And talking about just give benefit or is that maybe that doesn’t exist. Uh, uh, you can say no, it doesn’t. There’s definitely, I mean, there’s definitely separate front-end platforms that then integrate and connect with the CRM so it doesn’t have to be that your CRM is your front-end tool. Yeah, for sure. What are, what are a couple? Can you shout a couple of those? Yeah, well, I mean, Givebetter is one. You don’t have to. Givebetter can be your front end but not your back-end CRM. Fundraise up is not the CRM, right? Um, you can definitely have different, yeah, for sure. All right. This is, it’s an investment. It’s an investment in the future. I mean, that’s what you, you, you, you know, you opened with, this is. It, it’s, it’s an, it’s an initiative. It’s a serious initiative. It’s not a secondhand thing. Like, you know, we’ll get to about like major, major gift. Major giving has always been, there’s usually a role for that because it’s serious, there’s budget line items, there’s quotas for that. Sustainer roles are now popping up. If you’re serious and your program starts to grow. And whether that’s a part-time person, a contractor, it needs, if it’s infrastructure, it has a budget, it has goals. There’s a person, associate or a team that then grows like that all happens and continues to grow when it’s treated as such. If it’s always, there’s, I was speaking actually at the Sarkey’s event, someone had. Read my book, and they’re like, we’re changing everything to be monthly giving a focus, and then it was end of year was coming up, right? And I mentioned, that’s fabulous. Tell me about your end of year strategy for recurring. And it was deer in the headlights. They’re like, we didn’t think about making recurring part of our end of year ask. And I was like, why not? And it was because it’s always kind of been how it is. And I was like, well, you’re going to start right back over in January asking the same people to give again, why not ask them for that recurring gift at the end of the year? And it, it’s just a shift in Mindset. It’s a shift in how we think about fundraising and If we want, and I, it’s so interesting because I think there’s this fear around a nervousness around it sometimes where I’d really rather get that $100 one-time gift right now because we need it right now versus having that person give me. $10 a month, even though that’s $120 over the course of the year. You know what I mean? Like, the rationale, some, a lot of times hasn’t. It’s a short term, like it’s a short-term mindset, you know, this is something we’re in for a, a longer term. You, you’ve talked about consistency, you know, consistency of marketing this over, over time. And that’s why we’re stuck where we’re at, quite honestly. That’s why like you’re not having cash flow on hand, having smart, like that’s why we are stuck in this place because we are kind of like. Doing it to ourselves. And last year it was a crazy one with all of the grants being canceled. And all of a sudden, it’s like, whoa, we need to have Our owned diversified revenue streams and it’s not the first time that it’s happened. I mean, there was an organization I wrote about in my book that went bankrupt in the 80s. Because they actually went, they were very individual donor-heavy. Then they completely switched to being, they were in Chicago, called the Whole House. They went from being very grant-heavy federally and locally, and they couldn’t pivot fast enough when the funding got cut and they shut down. Yeah, yeah. I would, I just want to let listeners in, uh, the Sarkeys. Event that, uh, Dana mentioned, that was the Sarkey’s Foundation Leadership Summit. We, we met there in October 25. It was in, uh, Oklahoma City. Sarkey’s Foundation only funds Oklahoma nonprofits. And they put in, uh, a biannual every 2 years. I think biannual, if it has a hyphen, it’s every 2 years, but if it doesn’t have a hyphen, it’s twice a year. Since, since I’m talking, I’m not gonna say bi hyphen-annual, you know, so, uh, twice every 2 years, they, they host a summit, and that’s where Dana and I met. Well, we had known each other on LinkedIn, but that’s where we met in, in person. Um, how about converting our one-time donors? Into recurring or monthly donors. How do we, what, what’s some strategies around that? Some will and some will never. And we need to be OK with that. Um, there’s a very different type of person, I think that gives to anyways, in a recurring first fashion, um, with your one-time donors, offer it. Always offer the option. Make it a clear difference again of that value proposition of why monthly matters. If you look at your data and you can see very clearly that there are specific donors that are giving to you multiple times a year, have been doing that consistently for a while, that’s a great warm group of people that you might want to offer that to, to invite them in. Um, and then, and then others might not, and that’s why it’s really important to keep refreshing, refreshing the audience, having audience consistency, consistency of message. That’s right, consistency of message and making it. Really speaking to why it matters and being, I think sometimes we try and be so stoic and professional in everything that we say in the sector, and it’s like, be honest, be transparent, be Why does this actually make a difference? Paint the picture. I, I love my movies, is what I call them, and it’s where you are providing such elaborate. visual sensory words and language in your emails, and social posts where I can depict. What’s actually happening, and I can see it. Are we letting people see it? The ones that are not going to be able to come to the, the office or the locations, or it’s international and they’re never going to be able to travel there. How do you really from a sensory perspective, bring them into the realities that you’re That you’re facing, um, and that’s really, really powerful way of moving people through. What’s in your background that drives you to this? Like, are you, are you a consistent person or like, you were, were you an OCD child or, you know, what brings you to this consistent monthly recurrence, recurring? What, what do you think? What, what, what’s in your background that brings you to this, this type of work? I mean, I grew up going on mission trips ever since I was a kid, so there was that. And then in college, are you familiar with dance marathons? No. I can imagine what they are based on the, based on the phrase. I have a, I have a capacity for learning what dance marathon might entail. You’re welcome to describe it because I want your, I wanna know how you got to this monthly thing, how you became the maven. How’d you get to be the not just how you came to nonprofits, but how’d you get to this focus, this maven. Focus the specific, yeah, well, it was like philanthropy was kind of like always ingrained. Dance marathon was in college. I was on the exec board for UCF. Goodnights, and UCF was it University of Central Florida. Correct? Very good, very good. Um, Children’s Miracle Network is what the dance marathon supported. And then, I, digital marketing is really my background and so I love audience analysis. I’ve loved digital. I grew up in the age of social media entering business. So that was naturally part of what I did, um, in my career. And then I started Positive Equation in 2017, so nine years ago, focused on digital marketing, and I love tech, and I’ve always been very adapt to and curious to what’s happening in those channels. And then really, In 2020, 2021, I was fascinated by the subscription economy. I was buying all the boxes. Yeah, we were right, we were all subscribing. We were all buying all the things, and at the same time, I was consulting with nonprofits. And a local one that I loved had just launched their monthly giving program and I joined. And then it made me look at all the nonprofits I was consulting with, and I started to ask, why don’t, why don’t you guys have a monthly giving program? Why don’t, why haven’t you considered a monthly giving program? And it was all the same answer. It was, don’t know how to do it. Where’s the education on that? We don’t have the resources. like the same things over and over again, and I was like, hm, OK, but there’s something here. Like the subscription economy is blowing up blowing up, yeah, people are getting boxes. People are subscribing on their TVs, streaming, that people are not owning anymore. They’re streaming with services that they’re subscribing to, and they’re paying high prices in some cases. The only like very notorious subscription in nonprofit was child sponsorship. That was like definitely the oldest version or tithing is another version, very right. But nothing definitely as like new age as what we’ve seen now. And so I really just dove in and started researching and talking to the platforms and organizations and took my background in marketing and built out this five-step framework, which is what I teach in my book, and in my mastermind program. And It just skyrocketed from there, and, and the other aspect that I loved was personally. I, and because I was still newer to entrepreneurship, was like, I don’t have $5000 10,000 dollars where I could just like give to an organization, but $25 a month, I felt like a micro philanthropist. I knew that my $25 a month gift compounded by hundreds of others, that’s actually going to move the needle. I felt very Like giving a one-time $50 gift doesn’t Do anything for me. Because I feel like it just kind of falls flat. And I mean, I know it makes a difference, but like, I always want to say to the like, I’m in, like you can count on me. And if I to really do what you’re trying to do, and that I still give to that organization six years later, um, the same. gift and to all the other ones, and it’s very different causes that I’m passionate about, but I always give a recurring. Amount. And so, it’s been two-sided. It’s like, I want to help orgs grow sustainable revenue and know they have people to count on to do their work and plan. And then on the other side, like the consumer side is, God, Tony, imagine if we all felt empowered that we were micro philanthropists making a difference and actually moving the needle in this wild world. Like how different would that just change society? I love micro philanthropy. So that’s a, that’s a, no, it’s a great idea. And, and it is, you know, people are saying, I, I, I want a relationship with you because I’m, I’m committing for, I’m committing indefinitely. I mean, no, no, no monthly giving program asks when do you wanna stop, which month and year would you like to stop? Nobody asks that. So I’m committing indefinitely, and then how do you, how do you average lifetime is 8 years. 8 years average. That’s outstanding. But, so I’m committing. I’m not thinking 8 years. I’m just, I’m, I’m thinking indefinitely. But then how do you, the nonprofit, come back now that I’ve said I want a relationship? I don’t wanna just write a, even, I don’t wanna just write even a $5000 check. I wanna be with you long term because I just made a long-term commitment with no end. There’s, there’s no, it’s not fine. There’s no end. So what are you now gonna do with me, not notice I didn’t say for me. What are you gonna do with me now that I’ve extended my hand in friendship and relationship? I get my hand in the, there it is, frame for the, yeah, what are you gonna do with me. In, in, uh, in exchange, you know, in reaction to my hand being extended indefinitely with you. What are you gonna do? That’s the recurring value. That’s right. I mean, that’s the transformational stories, that’s sharing the improvements of what’s happening. That’s the, the true behind the scenes. That’s the talks with the leadership. That’s you’re, you’re along for the ride. You’re part of the team. Um, and I think what we forget sometimes, I just had a great conversation, um, with a previous ED who said they had a monthly donor who had been giving $150 a month for years and went unnoticed. She finally sat down and was like, oh my gosh, I’ve never talked to this person. And just emailed them and I was like, I’d love to take you to tea or coffee, and they said, no, it’s not necessary, and she goes, no, no, no, like, please, please let me come meet with you. And they met this $150 a month donor that I’ve been giving for years, ended up giving a planned gift. Oh, that’s fantastic. Yeah, well, planned gifts, of course, my work, but yeah, they went, right, they went from something that we perceive or incorrectly as, as transactional, but, but we’re, you and I are agreeing, it’s the beginning of a relationship. I’m saying I want a relationship with you. So they went from something that we’re perceiving misguidedly as, as transactional, and then they put them right alongside husband, wife, partner, children, grandchildren, and maybe dear friends in her will. That’s right. And how interesting is that when we think about any other type of relationship, if you like just in dating, if immediately you went from You are actually dating, you are in a relationship, you’re engaged, which is basically what a monthly donor is telling you, versus somebody who just goes out once and then maybe ghosts you for a while. But yet we put so much emphasis on the people that ghost us. Yeah, right. What did I do? Yeah, it’s. But it’s true. It’s so funny when you think about it. Um, there, I mean, look, there’s a reason that the subscription economy, I mean, I’ve subscribed to my doorbell, right? There’s like a subscription for literally everything. And there’s a reason why companies doorbell in the, I know, I know, of course there are, yeah, yeah. Ring, ring, it’s called ringing or or something else. But yeah, right, I subscribe to my doorbell. It’s very good. So why not subscribe to the world you want. Yeah. Uh, I don’t wanna, I don’t wanna quite end yet. Uh, even though that was a beautiful end. We’re gonna have to come up with another beautiful end, uh, for the, to be the real end. Uh, because I wanna ask about, you know, how often, how often do you ask somebody to upgrade? Hm, so, my usually rule of thumb is if they’ve been giving to you for 9 to 12 months, um, unless in every, like, that’s kind of like you walk them through a campaign to do that and you make it really exciting and you make it an experience and there’s a reason for it. That’s also where tech comes into play. How easy is it to upgrade your gift or is that a really clunky experience? So that’s another great question to go back to your tech partner is to say, hey, this is really important for us. What, what do you have available to make this seamless for the donor? Um, I also give to every town, and they use Fundraise Up in this case. And in their actual body of the email, I can click a button and upgrade instantly. One click. And which email is that? The, the body of the email, which email? They send, it’s, it’s just in like a normal monthly giving thank you, you know, they didn’t do a specific campaign in this instance, um, but it was just like, would you like to I forget the exact wording, but it definitely wasn’t like increase your gift. It was something more compelling than that. Is it appropriate to Uh, send thanks every month after each transaction is processed. So they, you can definitely send the receipts and then the receipts have like impact statements that get changed. I think it’s less about the thanks and it turns into the impact. Like you were just saying, what are we doing together? I think it’s more about sharing that. What are we doing together every month? Anybody can say thank you for your generosity, but like, so says everybody else. But like, Tony, did you know that this past month we were able to work with 25 sea lions because of your, I’m obviously going to the water for you. Um, and they got released and they got treated, and we got, we brought on two special veterinarians like that is sensory language that is bringing you a lot and then, hey, next month, our team’s attending this conference together, we’re going to send you some insights from what we learned. You know what I mean? Like, it’s actually, How I would talk to you, and I think we forget that it’s like so formal, or there’s 12 different things we’re trying to share, and it’s like, make it short. Make it simple, make it scrollable and readable. Um, videos are great. Videos are wonderful, short, simple update videos, even if you put those in once a quarter. Um, Megan Walsh, one of my favorite people from Roots Ethiopia, she sends her monthly donors a Friday photo. So every Friday she sent us a, it’s, it’s an email that has a photo with a brief description of what it is, and it’s just sharing a little piece of what’s happening there. So you don’t have to overcomplicate it, um, in a lot of ways you can automate it. Well, yes, you should have a provider that’s helping you do that. That’s right. Anything else you want? What? But I do think from the retention standpoint. On what’s received is you look at your stats to see like, are people opening these emails. I think there is an importance on using direct mail, getting in the mailbox and saying thank you or showing impact. Um, there’s a way to do that through text messaging is a wonderful way to do that. So often the text messages that we receive are just primarily ask-based, largely only at the end of the year. And it’s such a great platform to share a blog update, right? Or just a quick text about, oh my gosh, I just wanted to let you know, this happened. It’s not asking for anything, it’s just sharing impact. So think about all the different channels that you’re, you’re using, but maybe right now for an ask and more so on how it could be around stewardship. What else would you like to talk about? We can, uh, we can close with, I’ve asked you a bunch of questions, something we haven’t talked about or you want to go into more detail on something? What would you like? I mean, what would you, what would the Maven like to close with? So I would say I, I just, I’m in the process of, uh, publishing every Monday. I have a bonus podcast episode right now. That’s my six monthly giving predictions. They’re very short episodes. My podcast is Missions to Movements, and it was built off of looking at what happened on Giving Tuesday last year. Um, it’s a tremendous day for recurring giving growth. Tremendous, but interestingly enough, a lot of orgs are nervous to ask for a recurring commitment on that day. Um, but, but when you do it, like the reaction is amazing because those people, people that give on Giving Tuesday. One, the fact that they know that they exist is huge alone, because there’s still a ton of people in the United States, and I mean, it’s global, but in the United States specifically, that don’t even know that they exist. Honestly, it’s so concentrated for us, but largely I’ve asked friends and they have no idea that it’s even happening. So the people that do know about it are already dialed in. So consider them already a warm recurring audience, um. So, what came from Giving Tuesday from the Curley report was these 6 predictions. One was around infrastructure. The one that just got released last week was around getting the easiest yes. Instead of the biggest ask. So that’s around the micro donation that we’re starting to talk about. People will grow with you, if you give them the opportunity to make it accessible. Like there’s a lot of things and people vying for our attention right now and our money and our dollars, and Make it An accessible community. I think previously I’ve been asked a lot, what’s the largest monthly gift we can try and ask for? Instead of that mentality, think about like, what’s the easiest, yes, it’s a no-brainer. Easiest yes. So they just start. Um, 2, it’s going to be around or 3, it’s going to be around AI. So not thinking of just like chat GBT. But thinking about how can AI help you with predictions around really curating that relationship. So, I have just built a, the monthly giving Builder tool. It is my way to reach at scale. It’s my framework. It’s an interactive tool, web app, and provides you like customized deliverables for your monthly giving promo like the name you were talking about or what website landing page copy that’s all curated or emails or a growth plan. And I built that on Vibe AI through Replet. Oh my gosh, Tony, like the, I could have never done that. I could have never done that. I’m not a developer, I’m not a coder, or that would have been so expensive, right? And I was able to do that in 6 months. And If we think there’s tools out there that exist like Dataro for organizations, but thinking about how you can utilize AI to help. Help show up at the right time in the relationships for your supporters, not, not just the basic kind of way we’ve been thinking about, which is like writing emails and content like that. So, I would say that’s a little bit of a teaser of the three, and then you can check out the rest of the others, but I think I think it is, it should be the year of focus on monthly giving and of course, like, shout out to the summit to come check out the The real like state of the state as to uh what orgs are doing, what your, what your friends and peers are up to. It’s February 25th and 26th at monthlygiving summit.org.com.com at monthlygiving summit.com. All right. You got it. Dana Snyder. All right, so we got, um, I still like Maven of Monthly Giving, but, but also, uh, as we’re chatting, uh, Monthly Matters, Maven. And, uh, the mind movies, Maven. So you, you, you pick your, yeah, you’ll probably just stick with Dana Snyder. I think you’d probably be better off. Don’t pay no attention to my suggestions. But she is the Maven in monthly giving, Dana Snyder. Come hang out with me on LinkedIn. That’s my jam. LinkedIn. She spends all the time on LinkedIn. I do too, yes. Um, and positive equation.com. She’s wearing her positive occasion swag, I see. Yes, positive. What, what is the positive equation? So I, I used to live in New York City. We both did. And I, what neighborhood? Where do you live? Uh, I first lived in Spaja, Spanish Harlem, on 100th between 1st and 2nd, and then I moved down to like Tudor City on 39th between 1st and 2nd. OK, so I know that. I never heard of Spaha.pa Spaha. That was our, I was even further away from Midtown. I lived in Inwood for 10 years, way up northern tip of Manhattan. OK, but so tell me about what, how’d you get positive equation for a company name? So I knew I wanted it to be centered on working with purpose-driven organizations. So that was the positive emphasis. And then there’s so many different factors that make up. Like an organization’s marketing at the time, cause I was really focused on digital marketing, it still works now, but it was like thinking about, OK, you need a little bit of value proposition, you need to have branding, you need to have, it’s like this plus this, plus this, plus this. It’s like, oh, that’s, that’s an equation. So positive equation. They’re at positive equation.com. Connect with Dana on LinkedIn. Dana Snyder, real pleasure. It was great fun. Thank you for all these ideas too. I mean, it’s great value as well. You rock. Thanks, Tony. Appreciate it. My pleasure. Next week, bring fun to evaluation and impact data. If you missed any part of this week’s show, I beseech you, find it at Tony Martignetti.com. Our creative producer is Claire Meyerhoff. I’m your associate producer, Kate Martinetti. The show’s social media is by Susan Chavez. Mark Silverman is our web guy, and this music is by Scott Stein. Thank you for that affirmation, Scotty. Be with us next week for nonprofit Radio. Big nonprofit ideas for the other 95%. Go out and be great.
Ben Cooley: Put Passion & Fun Into Your Fundraising
Ben Cooley brings his energy and warmth as he shares his thinking on intimate donor events; savvy stewardship (Thanking is banking!); your major donor conversations; the critical role of leadership in fundraising; and, a lot more. He’s founder and CEO of Maxwell & Marie.
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And welcome to Tony Martignetti Nonprofit Radio. Big nonprofit ideas for the other 95%. I’m your aptly named host and the pod father of your favorite hebdominal podcast. We have a listener of the week. Deborah Elizabeth Finn. Deborah is moderator of Mission Based Massachusetts, and she sent a lovely email to the group that she shared with me. Saying that our 2026 Outlook show overcame her usual skepticism about forecasts. And she deeply respects Amy Sample Ward, our tech contributor, and Gene Takagi, our legal contributor. I, I should have said, quote, deeply respects them. So we, we overcame her skepticism on, on forecasts and outlooks. She loves our two esteemed contributors. And she even told Mission-based Massachusetts that this podcast has, quote, outstanding guests. End quote. She said nothing about the lackluster host, which I’m grateful for. Thank you. Please leave that out. But I do thank you very much, Deborah Elizabeth Finn, for sharing nonprofit radio with Mission Based Massachusetts. Sharing it wherever you can, I’m always grateful. Deborah, thank you and congratulations on being our listener of the week. Oh, I’m glad you’re with us. I’d be hit with aestheicoria if I saw that you missed this week’s show. Here’s our associate producer, Kate, with what’s on the menu. Hey Tony and Deborah. I hope our listeners are hungry for. Put passion and fun into your fundraising. Ben Cooley brings his energy and warmth as he shares his thinking on intimate donor events, savvy stewardship, your major donor conversations, the critical role of leadership in fundraising, and a lot more. He is founder and CEO of Maxwell and Marie. On Tony’s take 2. Active listening. Here is, put passion and fun into your fundraising. It’s my pleasure to welcome Ben Cooley to nonprofit Radio. Ben is the founder and CEO of Maxwell and Marie, a boutique consultancy serving mission-driven organizations worldwide with almost 20 years of experience building, scaling, and leading high impact nonprofits. He coaches charity CEOs, teams, and boards, supporting them to strengthen fundraising, clarify strategy, grow income, and increase influence. The company is at Maxwelland Marie.co. And you’ll find Ben on LinkedIn. Ben Cooley, welcome to Nonprofit Radio. Hey, thanks so much for having me. Really appreciate it, Tony. I’m glad you’re with us in, uh, in Nashville, Tennessee. I know, I know some people say to me when they hear me, when I get in an Uber, they go, where? Oh my gosh, I love your accent. Where are you from? I, I tell them Texas. Just, just, yeah, I don’t know what it is about Americans with the British accent. I don’t know. Is this a holdover from. From our colonial days, we, I don’t know. Americans love the British accent. Why? I, Tony, they do. In fact, I hate to say this, but I’ll say it anyway, I get free Starbucks because of it, because particularly in the South, in, in like Nashville, they’re like, oh my gosh, I love your accent. And I’m like, oh well, what can you give me for free? I don’t know. Yeah, you may as well take advantage. I don’t know what it is about the British. I mean, I think, I think Italian accents. I happen to Martignetti, Tony Martignetti. I, I happen to think Italian accents are beautiful, but I don’t know. Yeah, I don’t know what, I don’t know what the, uh, what the origin story is for why we are just, I think they’re overrated, frankly, British accents. I think it’s overrated. Well, I have to say I agree with you. I would think the problem is. I’m gonna benefit from it, you know what I mean? I’m one of those horrible people that’s like, yeah, it’s overrated, but I’ll still take, you may as well exploit the love, you feel the love 100%. I just don’t understand it. That’s a, uh, uh, it’s, it’s a phenomenon for, uh, for it’s yearning for probably the days old, isn’t it, you know, but there we go. I was once on a podcast and they said that I was in. Nashville, and they said to me, why, why are you here? Why, why are you here in America? What are you doing? I said, well, I’m here to make America Great Britain again. And, uh, they, they made me the hat, and I’ve wore that many times just for a joke on a party occasion. I understand. Make America Great Britain again. All right, Magba. All right. Don’t do it though. Don’t do that. Yeah, no, we, we need to be our own. Well, we are, we are our own. I don’t think we have any, uh, uh, difficulty showing that we are, we are our own country. We are, we are, are independent. We’re celebrating 250 years of independence. Come on, let’s go. All right. Uh, so you have some, uh, you have a lot of good thoughts about, uh, fundraising, leadership’s role in fundraising, but you, you, you have some concerns too about the very recent, uh, press. So share what I, I think a lot of people share your concerns, but for a little motivation. Share what what brings this to the surface for you. Well, I mean, I, uh, founded an organization, a nonprofit. I grew it, scaled it to tens of millions of revenue. I had over 35 offices globally, 12 countries, raised, you know, um, helped. Hundreds of thousands of people every year in the program, right? But, um, so I take that kind of evaluated experience, and now, you know, sitting with lots and lots of chief executives of other charities that might be smaller, that might be more dependent on one income stream. One of the, Recent concerns that I’ve got and I think everyone’s got is um is how governments are reshaping their giving, not only internationally through development funds, um, you know, we’ve seen that obviously with USAID and with other, The DFID and the new name for DFID and NORAD and all of the kind of big institutional giving has shifted, but it’s happening here federally as well. There are lots of nonprofits that are heavily reliant on government funding. That are now going, actually, we were on that receivership and it was great while it lasted, multiple million dollar, you know, kind of contracts over multiple years, but now is the time to diversify your income streams. And they’ve just recently announced. announced how the shift with the Financial Times announced that there’s going to be a shift from giving to nonprofits in developing countries and rather actually using the local governments to administrate those funds, which means several things. Actually, the way that income is happening now with nonprofits has dramatically changed if you are on the receiving end of governmental funding. And so it’s, I, as an expert, one of the things that I did, I, I, I, you know, like I’m not just someone in theory that’s raised millions. I’ve been there, I’ve done fundraising dinners, I’ve done over myself over 10,000 regular givers, um, I’ve, uh, built Christmas campaigns that have generated millions of dollars. Um, you know, as someone that’s been in this space for the last 20 years. I so desperately want people to diversify their income streams because I’ve watched many of my favorite nonprofits that do great work actually suffer and have to lay off, shut down projects because they haven’t invested in a diverse income stream and they’re heavily reliant on one or two of the incomes that they’ve got. Well, for instance, you mentioned, uh, Christmas, like Christmas campaigns that you’ve run, that leads me to think about the, the reliance on events generally, you know, being too strong, too, too, too, too much, uh, dependence on event fundraising. Yeah. I mean, a, a lot of, a lot of organizations, you know, they do fundraising dinners, they try and raise, you know, try and get 200 people in a room, and, uh, uh, uh, you know, they, they spend $500,000 to 60, you know, $1000 if not more, um, on hosting those people. I, I think things have shift shifted. I don’t think those events work as well as they do. I think they can work, um. Uh, I think if you have the ability to narrate the story well, um, and you’re able to demonstrate activity for the organization and ultimately impact, I think they’re the three things, if I’m looking at a nonprofit, you’ve got to have a great story, you’ve got to be able to tell what you’ve done with that, so how many people you’ve helped, um, and then ultimately, what has that helped meant, right? I think at fundraising dinners. You can raise money, but what I’m seeing more and more locally is um through the nonprofits I’m working with just in the last few years, where the real ROI has come is it’s actually through small househeld events where you get like, we, we got the winner of um some of my nonprofits. That work with me at Maxwell and Marie, um, they, uh, we’ve organized, um, the winner of Hell’s Kitchen, the chef, uh, to come and cook, and it’s been able to get the donors into a more intimate setting where you can just present, but you can actually start walking alongside these donors, because ultimately, I’ll say this, the success of any nonprofit, um, and particularly ones that heavily relies on, Um, high net worth individuals, your resources are in your relationships, and if you aren’t building relationships, your greatest, your greatest asset is the relationships that you have. And so these small local dinners are, are great things that you should be looking at. I used to probably do 20 or 30 of them a day, 30 of them a year for, for my nonprofit. I, I love the, the. Your, your summation of that, that, uh, your resources are in your relationships. Um, and, and I, I think that applies to nonprofits of, of any stripe, whether you, whether you’re cultivating high net worth individuals or more like our listeners in small and mid-size nonprofits, you don’t have those kinds of folks. But it, the resources are still in the relationship. So, and I, I, I absolutely agree with you too about small events. I love, I love sort of not hosting them. I don’t host them as a consultant, but I speak at them. And, uh, going into someone’s home where maybe it’s 6 or 8 couples or something like that, you know, or even sometimes it’s even just 10 or 12 people. Well, that 12 people is 6 couples. Um, but small like that, you know, those intimate events. Uh, you really, I mean, the, the CEO can get, can get to know folks. Maybe you, maybe you bring someone from the program staff or, you know, who’s on the ground. I mean, if it’s, if it’s at all animal-related, maybe you can bring a couple of animals, or pets, potential pets, you know, uh, that you really can move people in, in small groups. I’m not surprised to hear you say you have great success with, you know, 30 of those a year. Yeah, and I think, uh, you know, for me, you know, like I, I was working with a, a startup, nonprofit, first year of trading, and they did one of these dinners, they got 10 couples together, and uh they raised $50,000 you know, in one night, because the founder had such a great narrative and story. And then I think the opportunity from there is then how do you steward those relationships, right? I, I say this phrase often, thanking equals banking, right? If you want the ability to bank another check, it’s actually intrinsically linked to your, your donor thanking strategy, and how do you make them feel seen? How do you make them feel like they’re not just on a conveyor belt? You know, I remember one time I phoned up um. Uh, like I say, I, I ran quite a large operation, um, and, uh, I, I phoned up a donor that responded to one of the events that we did, we did this tour, and we were asking people to give $19 a month. And in that 10 day tour, we got 1100 people respond to giving uh $19 a month. And I phoned one of them up. I was like, uh, they’d seen me speak on the platform, I said, I didn’t want to say thank you so much for giving $19 a month. You wouldn’t believe the lives that are gonna get changed because of your partnership, right? And they were like, what, the chief executive’s phoning me up. I was like, yeah, cos we’re just, it’s the heartbeat of our culture, right? Culture determines what you grow. And if you’re not, if you, if you don’t at the top level, demonstrate the gratitude for the raindrops that are coming in, that ultimately collect and make this tsunami of hope, right? If we’re not grateful for the rain. Drops, then actually, what are we, you know, we’re not being the leader that we should be, right, and so I was just doing, demonstrating to my team and to our donors, you know, uh, the fact that gratitude is at the heart of what we do. It’s not an entitlement, it’s gratitude, and so I phoned this donor up, said, thanks so much. The donor was like, oh my gosh, I can’t believe that you phoned us, this is amazing. They said, I feel so bad, I can give way more than 9. Do a month. Let me go and speak to my wife. I wanna just go, we’re gonna get behind this charity because I’ve never been thanked by the chief executive. I was like, oh my gosh, so he, he goes back and he comes back to me, he phones me up and he says, look, you know, we’re not gonna give $19 a month. We’re gonna give $19,000 a month. I was like, gosh, oh, right, and I said to my team at the time, I said, look, you know. Reality is. People don’t need to give to nonprofits. But when they feel the feeling of appreciation, and you link that with a worthy cause, then. They actually, the, the sky is the limit. We can do amazing things cos people want, ultimately, once people get successful and they have finance, they go to the next era of what they’re giving and what their life wants to do, which is success to significance. And so we have to be great orators of the fact that what they’re doing is significant. You know, I like to get into, uh, details and like action steps, so. After this, uh, glorious oration about stewardship and thanking and I like to use the phrase effusive thanks. I like to give effusive thanks, but, What are your, what, so let’s drill down to some tips, uh, stewardship. I mean, how should we be showing this enormous gratitude that we have? What, what, what, what, what, what do we need to make sure we’re doing right? You ready? OK, I’m, I’m ready. Listeners are ready, please. I said to the, to, to the, to the admin team, to the donor, whatever size you are, right, whatever department it is, right? That within 48 hours, they get a signed letter. I don’t mean like just uh an email, I mean print out a a letter that articulates what this is going to achieve, that donation, whether it’s for $5 a month, whether it’s for $50 a month, for $5000 a month. That they get a letter that’s signed by the chief executive, right, within 48 hours. Now, if it, you know, say if I was traveling because I used to travel a lot, um, I say the most senior person in the, in the office that’s available, right, but within 48 hours they get that. Within 1 week they get a phone call. That articulates gratitude, thank you, link them to what the mission is, right? They then get put on a six week campaign drip. I’m sorry, this is too practical, I, I apologize, but basically it goes, I, I forbid your apology. Well, OK, fine, but I’m practical, practicality is what we want. OK, fine, so basically week one, they get a just a thank you email that’s going to outline. A story of a life that’s going to be impacted. Week 2 is then going to be introducing them to the organization, the Drip Feed campaign, right? So it’s going to be like, this is what we do, this is how we do it, this is, you know, this is the locations that we’re in. It gets them because a lot of people will give because of a story, but that story doesn’t always demonstrate what the organization does, and she, over the next two. It’s gonna be an about us. If you have an about us video, put that in. If you have something that narrates the program and the impact, then week 4, so week 2 and week 3 are about us emails, right? Week 4 is going to be financials. So you’re going to demonstrate your financial integrity, you’re gonna go, look at us, we’re on, you know, Charity Navigator, we’ve got a 100% score on Charity Navigator. Why? Because we appreciate good governance, we appreciate this, we appreciate that, you know, we’ve got our right policies in place. It’s a, a relatively boring email, but actually, for the people that are not heart givers, but are mind givers, right? So they’re the people that sit in a room and going, well, if I gave you a million dollars, what would you do with it? You know, not because you made me cry, here I have all my money. Like, it’s the people are like, I want an ROI on this. Yeah, these are more cereal, these are more cerebral, what percentage of your revenue goes to the program, Exactly, the administration, yeah. Alright. They are the people that have got their donor advised fund and they are going, I want an ROI on this, or they are the people that are going to, you know, I don’t know if you’ve heard of this new, I would encourage your listeners to, to look at them, but like the faith driven. Investor movement, I don’t know if you’ve heard of them, they’re out of Dallas, Texas, and one of the things that they’re, they’re really pointing people towards is compassionate investment. So basically they’re saying, use your donation like it’s an investment into your investment portfolio, right? So it means that actually week 4 is really important to those. Right, because they’re gonna look at it and go, you know, like, they wanna know what’s the percentage of um that’s spent on program versus administration. Now, Tony. I just want you to know to the listeners, I don’t agree. I’m one of those people that disagrees with the 80/20 rule, right? I don’t think it’s possible, particularly for smaller organizations, I don’t think it’s possible, right? I think that 80/20 being 80% spent on program, program, yeah, 20% spent on fundraising, media, admin. You know, a lot sort of stuff. I don’t think that’s not, I don’t think that’s a hard rule, but I’ve heard it, yeah, yeah. And so, and then the 6th is then celebration. Wait a minute. What happened to 5? Wait, where did we go? 5, 4. Did we go 5? We did. We did 4 is, wait, 4 is the no, 3 and 4 are about us. Oh, 5 is the cerebral. 55 is for the more cerebral folks, your ROI, OK. I’m sorry, yes, you did and you did it. 6 is celebration, right? And it’s literally just going organizational celebration moments that you can go, we’re like that combines all of those totals, so it’s a 6 week campaign. At the 6th week, then they get a phone call as well, right? And go, we’re so grateful, we are so grateful, this we you. G 6 weeks ago and you give some form of update of what that that donation has done, right? Then they get put into the normal kind of bog standard, and they get a phone call every year and they get put through. Now, in that 6 week period, you will find that it’s number one, you know, when people give to a regular giving campaign. Or they give one off, it’s where their heightened awareness of you is, right? So like the husband, for example, might be checking the bank account and going, what’s this large donation, who’s this for, you know, well don’t worry, they’ve been in touch, they’ve thanked us, they’ve done this, it’s the, it’s the greatest stress for a non for a nonprofit when they get regular giving. It’s the greatest stress point because it’s where the highest amount of canceled, uh, um, regular givers are, is in the 1st 6 weeks, right, because you’ve got the first initial payment being taken, the second initial payment comes out, it’s like, do they really want to be in, and the greatest stress for that factor is when you actually do sponsored. Events. I don’t know if you’ve ever had anyone come on and talk about like when, you know, a Christian artist or an artist goes out and does those mass 3000, 5000 arenas, and they ask for the big boys of, you know, child sponsorship. Well, the, the greatest risk for those apps. Asks or the out the regular giving is actually in the 1st 6 weeks, so this kind of adds a kind of story and narrative, they get a phone call at the end, uh, and then they get put into um thingy, all the while, every single one of those emails you’re saying thank you so much, thank you, thank you, thank you. What’s the leader’s role, leadership role in, uh, fundraising? The C-suite, maybe the CEO certainly has a role, but board members, let’s talk about leadership’s role in fundraising. Well, I say everyone’s a fundraiser, right? And it’s entirely true. I think actually some people in the organization, um, probably aren’t geared towards fundraising, but they can be geared towards friendraising. You know, if you go back to that, that, that principle, your resources are in your relationships, right, there are people that can introduce you to people, that can elevate, that can um that can contribute, but everyone, everyone at least needs to be a fundraiser. But not everyone can be a fundraiser, but I would say everyone’s a fundraiser, because if they can raise funds, like, if they’re in the program team, they’re a social worker, and they’re related to someone who’s, you know, got a business that’s doing really well, that’s giving 10 million away, like hello, we’re here, you know, like, um, but reality is everyone should be looking to grow the database, and I think that’s often overlooked actually. I don’t, you know, cos it’s, um, but fundraising. Is actually a metrics game. And a lot of, a lot of small nonprofits are going, hey, you know, like I just wish I had more people, I wish I, you know, had more money, I could do so much more good with this money, and you’re dead right you can. But if you’re a smaller nonprofit, I’m talking like sub 500,000, maybe 100,000, 200,000, right at that part, you’re doing great. I mean, not many nonprofits get to that stage, right, so good on you. Well done for all of that. Hard work, the labor that you’ve put into place, but what I would say to you now is, is do what you can to get as many people to just interact with your organization as possible. Go out and speak anywhere that will have you and have a mechanism to gather their data, because ultimately, if I’m stood in front of a crowd, right, uh, and I am allowed to ask them to, to support us, so let’s say if I get in front of 100 people. If I’m allowed to do a regular giving ask, my methodology, which I now teach, I can get, I’ve had up to 33% of people give in an auditorium, um, with this methodology, right, so I was in front of 3000 people in Norway when we launched our Norwegian office, and we got 998 people to give regularly. Uh, so it’s a metrics game. So if you’re only getting in front of as a chief executive, if you. diary or founder, if you’re looking at your next 3 months and you’ve got no speaking engagements, you’ve got no um podcast that you’re speaking on, you’ve got no um no activity that you’re getting in front, I can pretty much guess what your outcome is gonna be. So ultimately, you have to get busy in front of people to get that 4 to 13% of people to actually sign up to your mission and get behind your cause. It’s time for Tony’s take 2. Thank you, Kate. I had the opportunity about 2 weeks ago to meet with a lot of, uh, staff, team members at a client. There are 20 people who, uh, I met with a couple of others. Uh, we had 20, 30-minute meetings in 2 days. And that’s a lot. That’s a lot, but The value, what came out of it. I learned so much from these folks. Because I was really listening actively, intently. Carefully. I was taking some notes, but I was mostly just listening to their tone and, you know, we were talking about what their, Goals are within the, within the nonprofit, what they’d like to do, the challenges that they see, ways to overcome those kinds of challenges. It was just reinforcing for me, you know, the value of asking open-ended questions and just letting people talk and then, Me listening carefully. I, I came away with so much. Insightful, uh, informative. Like sort of data That will help me to help that client. So, this, this certainly has implications for your fundraising, you know, when you’re meeting with folks. So really I’m just, I think just reinforcing something you probably already know. How valuable it is just being the listener, the careful listener, the active listener. You come away with learning so much. And that is Tony’s take 2. Kate, Yeah, usually Uncle Tony is the one talking, so he doesn’t get much practice listening. I, I, it’s very good. I listen, I listen, uh, as much as possible. I mean, this is Tony Martignetti nonprofit radio. I mean, I do have a role here, associate producer. Soon to be assistant producer, if you keep up this uh thread. By the way, assistant is below associate. I don’t know if you’re aware of that. You are aware, OK. No, no, that was very good. Nicely, nicely played. Yeah. Oh, by the way, your, uh, your brother was laughing in the background. I, I heard a quick little chuckle from him. Yeah, well, he’s not getting, uh, he’s not getting part of the revenue the way, uh, the way you do. There’s no, no, no fee for him. We’ve got bou butt loads more time. Here’s the rest of put passion and fun into your fundraising with Fen Cooley. Now what’s this methodology you have that you alluded to that you’re teaching, but you tease it. He’s the guy teases it, but then he doesn’t, doesn’t flush it out. Tony, get it out of me. Get it out of me? What, what’s the methodology, right? So most nonprofits, when they speak at a church, right, or they speak at an event. They’ll do the easiest, easiest cos no one likes asking for money, can we just like kind of like put this principle out that no one really likes asking for money and if you do, good on you, you’re not part of the, like, you’re not, you’re not part of the norm, right? Um, so particularly founders, they feel embarrassed of the fact that they are asking for money, because often some of that money’s going towards their salary or, you know, it’s covering some of the expenses and they feel embarrassed by it, and I get that, you know, I had a mentor of mine that um developed a charity called Christians Against Poverty, right, in the UK and they pride themselves of getting over, I think there were over 25,000 regular givers. He sat me down one time and he, he, when I, I, the first thing I ever did, right, was I got 5, I booked an arena in England, I got 5,884 people to my first event. And then I did a regular giving ask and it absolutely sucked. I I got hardly anyone give, right, and he sat me down after this, he went, you suck. I was like, thanks, bro, I really appreciate the encouragement. He said, no, what you need to do is you need to stand on a platform and tell people, I’m gonna ask you for money, but I really am really bad at this. So can we just all agree I’m bad, but the mission that we’re doing is worth this ass. Right, so, most non-profits take the easiest out, right, and they go and they say, OK guys, so please could you give, and if you just wanna head back at the back table, I’ve got some flyers, you know, maybe you could give 4%, the maximum. I’ve got, by the way, I’ve done hundreds and hundreds and hundreds of these events. You know, I was, I’m not joking, right, I had, at any point in time, I. 70 trained speakers going out in churches and speaking in churches every Sunday, 70 trained speakers, right? So, like I’ve I’ve aggregated all that data, 4%. If you send people to a table, this is what’s gonna happen, there’s gonna be a massive queue at that table, right, and they’re gonna go, then probably about 7 people are gonna be able to speak to you because one person wants to tell you. That they are really moved by your charity and oh my God, you know, like, and 7 days later you’re still talking to that same person, right? And if you’ve got a British accent, it’s longer, but I don’t know why. Anyway, so you’ll get 4%. So if you’ve got 100 people, that means 4 people are gonna give to you. If you’ve got 200 people, that’s 8, right? Then the next thing is this, if you’re brave enough. You go and speak to the event host or the church pastor or whoever it is, right, and you say, can we put the, the giving envelopes on the chairs, right? Well, you’ve just increased it to 9% by doing that, right? Yeah, you go, hey, give, give now and everyone get the flyer. Oh my gosh, now as I’m telling this story, fill it out, right? That’s 9%. Now if you want to get over 13%. It’s gonna be hard, and I’m not gonna lie, this is not made for the, like, for the faint of heart. I, I just want you to know this, right? QR codes, I’m not a big fan of. Every organization I’ve dealt with in the last 3 or 4 years that does QR codes, what happens is people get out the phone, they scan the QR code and then they get a text from their daughter or from thingy and they get distracted into work, right? I don’t like that methodology, it might work for some, but I’ve not seen it with any of our clients, right? Um, so, and, um, even at high net worth individual, uh dinners, I don’t rate it, right? Still in America, you guys have got something called checks. Like, and we got rid of those in the 1980s, guys. It was unbelievable, you know what I mean, that’s, I think we live in Nashville, Tennessee, you, you live in Nashville, Tennessee, what we, I know, I still use checks and I, I still, every time I have to Google how to fill it out. Anyway, so Google, yeah, yeah, right, so 13%, if you wanna get above 13%, this is what you do. Tony, this is what you do, and it’s awful. You need volunteers for this, you need to be so organized, right, you basically, you pass the buckets down, you go, I’m gonna give you, I’m gonna do a regular giving ask right now. I’m gonna ask you to partner with us on a monthly basis. We’re going to have the team pass the buckets down the rows. This is not to put anything in. But this is actually to take the form out. Now, I used to run an anti-slavery organization, right? It, and it’s almost like you are taking someone’s life out of slavery, right now. And now, it adds a component to this, because you get the decision, psychology of giving, right, is you get the decision when the book is passing, are you going to pass by on this opportunity, or are you going to be the person that’s going to be the person that helps? And so suddenly, psychologically, you’ve just triggered them into not only themselves thinking that, but now they’re also thinking everyone else knows that I’m not taking it out. And so you get a higher percentage, and then what happens is you fill out the form normally and then you pass the buckets back, so it’s like super or what are they taking out of the bucket, a, a monthly, a regular form, monthly sustainer, a sustainer giving commitment. And then they, and then they pass it back somehow. And then, and then once you, you finish, you often play a video of a life being transformed and then you get back up and you say, right, we’re gonna pass back the buckets and you’re gonna put the envelopes in like you are putting your name, your family’s name in there saying I’m in it to end it. Come on, are you’re with me? Say amen. OK, and then you get, you’ll get a lot higher, and that that’s what it’s interesting, it’s why I’m so passionate about fundraising, cos a lot of people put the energy into curating these events or these Christmas campaigns, but if they just had a little bit higher thinking or a little bit of a different. Unique, then actually they could go from 11 organization I work with was doing a Christmas campaign, they, they literally raised 20,000 in their Christmas campaigns. They’re now hitting 20 300,000, because they’re just tweaking it and doing different things, but those different things have different results. What’s with uh Maxwell and Marie, your, your company, who, who are, who are, do they exist? Who are Maxwell and Marie, or they exist, or they, what, you’re, yeah, it’s me and my wife, she start my uh wife started a nonprofit and uh and I started one and so we decided that we would do uh all of our uh experiences that we’ve done. Uh, we would put them together into a boutique consultancy. We don’t work with a lot of organizations. We just work with a few that we think we can, um, more than double in a, in a, in a, you know, 2 or 3 year period. But who, who are, well, where’s your wife? She’s not, uh, why, why didn’t you pitch the, you and your wife talking as guests. My wife, you should have her next time, but she is way better looking than me, and we have 10 children, so she’s currently holding the 10 children back from invading this podcast right now, so yeah. So you have 10 children in, in one house, in, in one house? Yes sir, yes sir. Damn. Yeah, it’s a, it’s a lot, it’s, I’m, I, I’d say, yeah. It’s 2020 years old all the way down to 7 months old. All right, congratulations on the, on the most recent birth of. All right, I can understand why. All right, I can understand why your wife’s not with us. You need, you need actually professional help, not, not. So who are, but who are Maxwell and Marie? So it’s Maxwell’s my third name, Marie is her second name. And so we kind of had that, uh, and, you know, I’ve kind of, through that, you know, we’ve been able to help, not only with fundraising, you know, we help with coaching, with fundraising, but I’ve launched other brands that kind of like, I’ve launched a company called Good Bookkeeping.com. Um, which, uh, helps nonprofits with their bookkeeping, um, uh, because one of the things people ask me, how did you do it? You grew to tens of millions of revenue, and I was like, I understood my numbers. I mean, my, my number 2 was a former CFO of, um, the 13th largest company in the UK. And so our numbers were, not only was I good at telling stories, but what most nonprofits don’t realize is, is their finances are telling a story too, and they have to narrate those through their 990s, through how they get their, their, I, I mean I literally we had a um a nonprofit just recently come to us. They lost a million dollar donor because of their charity commission. Uh, the charity navigator score. Yeah, yeah, no, I’ve, yes, I’ve heard things like that. Also, just disclosing finances to donors who, you know, they, we’re doing donor conversations, just sharing what the, what the numbers are like, but even if it’s a hard reality. I mean, even, maybe even more so if it’s a hard reality that you want your, you want your investors to be aware of that you’re, this is a down year. You’re, or you’ve had a couple of down years, you know, and, but the mission is still important. The, the team is still outstanding. So that the, the giving has not been there, and, and here’s what we’re doing to turn things around and part of that is having this conversation with you. That’s absolutely true, you know, one of my favorite conversations with a donor, Tony, was, um, a guy that founded a very, very large, um, uh, car rental company, right? It’s, um, and, uh, he said to me, Ben, I’m just wondering why this year’s finances don’t look as strong as last year’s, he said. I said, oh, that’s because every time I meet with you, you only give me 10,000. If you gave me 100,000, it would change it. He went quiet. You did, all right, did he up his giving? Oh yeah, of course he did. I was able to, yeah. And, uh, how about, uh, Nashville, Tennessee? How, how did you land there from, I don’t know, where, where are you from in, in the UK? I’m I’m from a little town called Yarm. I moved to Manchester, which was where my headquarters was, but um, uh, I, um, I actually took over a, a nonprofit in, um, so part of, I’ve built this thing called the seven pillars of a sustainable nonprofit, right? And it goes through the seven income streams that you need, right? Once you get to 10 million, you can do something called merger and acquisitions, right? And so I, I did, I started doing merger and acquisitions. One of the ones was in Nashville, Tennessee, and so I knew Nashville when COVID happened, I thought, let’s move here and. Uh, I love, I, I am a massive fan of America, so, like, I know, uh, like British people are gonna hate me right now, but I’m telling you right now, America is where it’s at, and I love it, and, uh, love the, not only, I love the, the, the, the business environment, I love the people, and I love the culture. I just think it’s amazing, it’s not small thinking. Outstanding. So you’ve been here just what, 56 years? Yeah, yeah, but I’ve worked here since 2013. What about the hat collection behind you? Uh, listeners, you can’t, you don’t have the, uh, benefit of the video, but, um, Ben has, uh, I don’t know, 68, 10 hats hanging on the wall behind him. This is his, his Zoom background. My, my Zoom background is this sign that says professional zoom background, which is put on with painter’s tape, and I’ve written in the word professional and I didn’t leave enough space. So I get, that’s my background there. But why, why, what’s the hat collection? Well, it’s just because I’ve got a really pretty wife. That just wears beautiful hats, so um it’s a very sudden, she’s American, so it’s a very sudden thing to have lots of hats on, like cowboy, no, I don’t think they’re quite the cowgirl hats are one is maybe one is like a cowgirl hat, yeah, yeah, no, yeah, the wider brims and flatter brims. All right, so these are your wife, does she wear them, or they yeah, she wears them, yeah, oh yeah, definitely. She wears, she, you know, she’s got the kind of uh the southern charm. Um, it’s, it’s mildly annoying to her really, because, you know, um, they’ll often say if we’re in a drive-through, they’ll say, oh my gosh, I love your accent, and then they’ll go, are you from there too, and she’s like. No, I’m not. And she, and they’re like almost disappointed, they’re like, oh, you’re just one of us. She’s just got a flat southern, where’s she from? What state is she from? Well, she’s a navy brat, so she’s from everywhere, everywhere, all right, so she does not have a, she doesn’t even have a southern accent. Yeah, no, she doesn’t, she just has an what I would call a standard American accent, but she, she started a nonprofit in Uganda, um, and she, uh she uh runs an organization that, that actually it’s brilliant because it’s the only organization. In the world that faces this one issue, a neglected tropical disease called jiggers, and so she, she, her team, she has about 80 staff out in, in Uganda that remove jiggers from people’s feet, and then, and then put, put, make shoes for them. So she’s made 360,000 pairs of shoes in the last, uh. The bad years for um for children in outstanding. What’s the name of the organization? Shout it out. It’s called Soul Hope, S O L E H O P E. Soul like a sole of a shoe, Soul Hope. Yeah, she’s way better at marketing than me, she’s the genius at it. Let’s talk about your, your coaching. You, you do a lot of coaching of, uh, CEOs, maybe other C-suite as well. But, uh, uh, about major donor conversations. The, the, I, I, I was kind of alluding to it when I was talking about individual conversations, you know, investment types of conversations. Not necessarily high net worth. Let’s not, let’s not focus on high net worth individuals, but major donors, you know, maybe they give it to $5000 10,000, $15,000 level, 20,000, maybe, you know, but they’re not necessarily high net worth, they’re just enormously generous. What what’s your, what’s your advice around those, those one on one conversations? Well, number one is have them. Don’t avoid it, don’t be afraid of them, don’t be afraid, because look, I, I mean. Um, I, I, I think this is really important to tell is that. Um, it’s that they are wanting something from the relationship too. Right And if you can figure that out, you know, I talked about success to significance. Often the people that are in that point, you know, they’re, I, I, I’m part of this organization called Halftime, which was started by a guy called Bob Buford. Sorry, Scott, say it again. Halftime. Halftime. Yeah, and it’s, it’s basically to help leaders that have done something with their life, figure out why, why it all happened and how to make sense of it and, you know, what to do with it and how to steward that success to significance, and. I, I think where for me is number one, make sure you make available the time, and by the way, you probably have more capacity for those relationships that you think. I mean, I, I had 14 direct reports, I had 12 countries, I had. 100s of staff, 100s and 100s of staff in my organization. Um, but I still managed 80 relationships that were my significant relationships. Some of them, it all depends on where they were in the, this, I didn’t just categorize them as like, this person’s a billionaire, so he’s my friend. And now, you know, I’ve grown the charity and the nonprofit larger, these people drop off and I’m gonna palm them off. It was, it was actually born out of a relationship and um but number one, you can probably manage more than you think you can, right? And 2 is, uh, they don’t mind you kind of scheduling things like, so for example, they know if if you’re gonna run this well, hey, they’re gonna touch base with me once a month just to give me an update personally or a text, but where it gets really, where you get really good results is that you go beyond the organization into actually being. A former friend for them and that you check in with them. Look, I, I said this to, I say this to my team often, right, that a lot of people that have the ability to drop 5000, 10,000, they’re in leadership somewhere on the spectrum or ownership of a business. And often that means that they’re isolated, right? And they don’t have people to talk to, and so these sorts of connections that you can do are mega. I’ll give you one example. So I used to, you know, I used to try and meet up with coffee, I used to text people, I used to write to them, I used to do, you know, meet, you know, meet for lunch. I always used to pay, by the way, I never used to let them pay. Because a lot of the high net worth individuals that I would, or, you know, major donors or whatever the terminology of that, when I was a small charity and I did it out of my basement, someone who gave me $500 was a high net worth individual to me, do you know what I mean? So the definitions change, but, um, but, um, uh, I used to, uh, I used to write to this one guy, right, he was someone I was trying to approach. I met him once and I said, I wanna, I, I actually wanna help this, I want, I wanna be friends with this guy as well as I’d love him to support. He came from wealth, but he started his own company from scratch. And I used to, I set up a Google alert to watch whenever his business got mentioned or had any success, and I used to write him a handwritten card. Uh, very smart, yeah. And I said, well done. I’m really proud of you for this achievement. He never res respond. I did it for 7 years and he never responded to a text, a phone call, or, or anything. And I admire your commitment. I, I, doing it for 7 years and not getting a reply, you kept it up. OK. 7 years. Well, he was on the, it wasn’t just because he was on the up and up. I knew at one point in time, this guy would need me. Cos I just, I knew, I know these people are, are, I don’t mean this in a self-inflated way, I don’t hear that, don’t, don’t hear that I’m being, I just knew me and him could, when our first interaction, I knew we had something that we could be friends with. And 7 years later, he phoned me up and we’re best of friends, and Uh, he’s, what, his business is over a billion revenue, but like, he is just such a good human being, and he’s given tremendous amounts to charity. But it took 7 years of persistence that he knew I wasn’t just a. I had integrity in it, and I, I, I firmly believed in him. I thought he was gonna, gonna do great things with his life, and he did. Let’s, let’s talk more about these, uh, these relationships. The, uh, stewarding them, managing them. So you’re, you’re being, you’re committed to them. They’re, I, I would call them professional friends. I mean, you’re, you’re treating them as friends, but there is a professional relationship to it. You can be helpful to them in their, in their giving. They can be helpful to you through their giving, maybe through their companies, um. So, uh, uh, that’s how, that’s how I would characterize it. But let, let’s talk more about that. You know, what, what, what advice you give your, your CEOs for, for managing these relationships. So, I mean, it’s, it’s, this is one of the major things that I do with my life right now is I sit with chief executives and I tactically go through it with them, right? And I, I have a team that does this because number one, they’re all unique. You know, and you’ve got to do some research on, on the individuals, find out what, what their giving factors are, what motivates them, but my number one thing is this, is I would not. Ask them All the time. In fact, I probably got to a point where I would ask them every couple of years, maybe, potentially to give, because what I didn’t want to do was to make it transactional. I would make it, I would make it an authentic friendship. And then where I would get them involved is that I would invite them to do a challenge with me. So, um, uh, a challenge that I raised, I think, I think over a million dollars in the early stages of when, like, that was probably double my revenue, right, was I built these relationships and I invited them to do a challenge with me because I was like, we’re friends, let’s do something together that it gets you excited, me excited, and also gets more people engaged, right, in the mission. And so, um, we rescued a girl that was trafficked from Latvia, uh, to Southampton, England. And, um, and so I, I got them involved in the conversation, include them in the conversation, so there was a group of 5 of us, one of them was a major celebrity in the UK, one of them was a high net worth individual, and we, we’re going, right, right, this girl was trafficked from Latvia to Southampton, what could we do? To raise money so that we could name one of our new locations after her, cos one of the things that I did was, every location was named after one of the people that we rescued or we helped, right? So the first um one that came out into Bradford, England. Was called Emma’s hub after the first goal that we rescued, called Emma. The second one that we were gonna launch was Zoey’s hub, after Zoey, who was trafficking from life, so we were discussing, how are we gonna do this, so, number 1, be inclusive, right, don’t just tell them what you need. Actually, don’t just do push down leadership, actually invite them in to, uh, problem solve with you, right, so I was like, we need to raise a million dollars, how are we gonna do it? And so one of them round the table said, I know what we should do, we should do a marathon, and I was like. No, marathons are from the devil, bro. Right? And so like one of them was like, hey, we should do a, we should do a cake sale. And I was like, we’re not gonna raise a million dollars from a cake sale, bro. And then one of us had an idea. We should cycle from Latvia. To Southampton, and I was like, yes, right? So at that point in time, I’ve got to say to your listeners, right, I thought Latvia was next to France. Right, now if you want to get out on that, it’s not next to France, no, it’s next to Russia. It’s 2,715 kilometers, 2000 miles away, right? By that time, back, this is back in 200 and 2015 I think it is, right? I think it is, anyway. And, so one of the celebrity that had hundreds and hundreds of thousands of followers, like literally just tweeted out, we’re doing this, right, we’re gonna cycle from Latvia to Southampton, right? The next week, before we’d even arranged how we were gonna do it, we were, and we were on national news, national, in the UK, right? So this momentum was building, and there’s nothing like, I wanna say this, this is a side note, if you take. Taking notes, remember, note takers are history makers, right? Momentum is what you need to demonstrate, right? In in America particularly, people give to what is successful and is moving forward. If it feels stagnant and it feels like you’re losing all the time, please sir, can I have some more, that’s Oliver Twist, right? But they, they end up going, oh man, I don’t want to be given to these people. I wanna begin to think that are successful. I wanna give something that has momentum. So you need to be a great narrator of momentum. We’re gonna be doing this, we’re gonna, so this challenge was our momentum builder. We had over 115 people join us on this cycle, right? We cycled from Latvia all the way through Latvia, all the way through Lithuania. I didn’t even like cycling. I hated cycling. Right, but we had major companies sponsor us, we were on like radio shows, TV shows. By the time that we got to England, we were doing two conferences in a day, cycling, and then getting off doing sometimes 130 miles, getting off, speaking at a conference, cycling again, speaking at another conference. We, and the momentum was insane, right? But that’s what got High Networth is individuals involved, where they were writing big checks, because they weren’t just feeling, oh my gosh, they want money from me, they wanted to be included, they wanted to be part of the story and they wanted to fulfill, feel the feel the momentum of doing something with their life. So yes, meet them for coffee, yes, give them updates, yes, tell them about your need, but include them in the problem of your nonprofit. And get them to do something with their life, their skill, their passion for it, and guess what happened because of that. Then lots of people heard about us, our database grew, and that people were like this is a fun charity, so then a few years later we cycled from um, From Cambodia to Vietnam, and I had, I think it was 40 people fly out and do it with us, it was amazing. Make it fun, right? There’s a reason why there’s fun at the beginning of fundraising. And, and this is really important, if you’re a leader of a nonprofit, right, I just want you to know this, right? I don’t know if you’ve ever seen Winnie Pooh, Winnie the Pooh, right? But no one in the history of ever wanted to follow Eeyore, right? Oh, we’ll never change. Oh my gosh, it sucks to be good, it’s so hard, nonprofits, the governments are changing that, we’re never gonna be, all I wanted to do was change your life, but it’s just poor me. Now they don’t wanna follow that guy, they’re following Scott Harris that’s done charity water, that’s told them that they can do extraordinary things with their life, they’re following Gary Haugen from IJM that’s actually talking about how do we mend fractured, broken justice systems, and we can do something extraordinary. People want passion in their life and they want to be told they’re doing a good job, they’re having a significant part to play, and they’re celebrated all the way through it. I, I wish we could get guests who were more enthusiastic, you know, more, more passionate, more interesting. Uh, I, I’m sorry. I’m sorry, we, I’m sorry we, we, we struck the bottom here with Ben Cooley. No, I mean, it’s amazing. Uh, all right. The, the, there are, there’s brilliance buried in all that passion. Uh, I wish you could see his arms are flailing. He has to keep fixing his hair because it’s, it’s falling on his face because he’s moving around so much. Ben Cooley, outstanding. Uh, I, I, I admire, of course, I admire your, your enthusiasm, your passion, and, and the valuable advice you, you bring to, to listeners. So thank you. My pleasure. Thank you for having me. CEO of Maxwell and Marie, you’ll find Maxwell and Marie at Maxwellanmarie.co. Connect with Ben on LinkedIn, but I already sent you a connection request. I hope you’re not gonna refuse it. Will not. No thank you. And it was a, it was a real pleasure. Uh, what a great way to kick off the week too. We’re recording on a Monday. Thank you so much, Ben. God bless you. Thank you. Next week, Monthly Giving with Dana Snyder. Indeed, uh, Dana Snyder was supposed to be this week. Yep, that’s, uh, that’s a host, host, uh, I wouldn’t say quite a host mistake. It just so happened that Ben came in quicker than Dana. Dana will indeed be next week. If you missed any part of this week’s show, I beseech you, find it at Tony Martignetti.com. Our creative producer is Claire Meyerhoff. I’m your associate producer, Kate Martinetti. The show’s social media is by Susan Chavez. Mark Silverman is our web guy, and this music is by Scott Stein. Thank you for that affirmation, Scotty. Be with us next week for nonprofit radio. Big nonprofit ideas for the other 95%. Go out and be great.
Lou Kotsinis: Thrive Amid The Digital Transformation
The digital marketing we grew up with is no more, mostly due to Google AI Overview and all the other Artificial Intelligence surrounding us. We’ve talked about this and Lou Kotsinis brings his perspective. What is zero-click marketing and how can your nonprofit exploit it? What new role does your website play and what are best practices now? Plus much more. Lou is CEO and co-founder of BCS Interactive.
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Every nonprofit struggles with these issues. Big nonprofits hire experts. The other 95% listen to Tony Martignetti Nonprofit Radio. Trusted experts and leading thinkers join me each week to tackle the tough issues. If you have big dreams but a small budget, you have a home at Tony Martignetti Nonprofit Radio. View Full Transcript
Welcome to Tony Martignetti Nonprofit Radio. Big nonprofit ideas for the other 95%. I’m your aptly named host, and I’m the pod father of your favorite hebdominal podcast. Happy New Year Can we still say that? We’re publishing on the 19th of January. I, I, we can still say it. I, I believe. I hope we can. So happy New Year. I’m glad you’re with us. I’d be thrown into Bartonella Henssela if you infected me with the idea that you missed this week’s show. Here’s our associate producer Kate, to introduce it. Hey, Tony. I love the enthusiasm with the new year, but we’re 2 weeks in. It’s a big deal. All right, go ahead, go ahead. Here’s what’s going on. Thrive amid the digital marketing transformation. The digital marketing we grew up with is no more, mostly due to Google AI overview and all the other artificial intelligence surrounding us. We’ve talked about this, and Lou Kotsinis brings his perspective. What is zero-click marketing, and how can your nonprofit exploit it? What new role does your website play and what are best practices now? Plus, much more. Liu is CEO and co-founder of BCS Interactive. On Tony’s take 2. How to be a nonprofit radio guest. Here is thrive amid the digital marketing transformation. It’s a pleasure to welcome Lou Katsinis to nonprofit Radio. Lou is CEO and co-founder of BCS Interactive, a digital marketing agency for the nonprofit and educational communities. Since 2011, they’ve helped organizations like the World Childhood Foundation, the Seeing Eye, and the New Jersey Conservation Foundation. He’s a fellow Jersey boy. You’ll find the company at BCSinteractive.com and Lou is on LinkedIn. Lou, welcome to Nonprofit Radio. It’s great to be here, Tony. Thanks for having me. Oh, it’s an absolute pleasure. Thank you. I, I, you’ve been following for a long time and glad to have your, uh, your, your wisdom now shared with, uh, with our listeners. Thanks so much. Thank you. Uh, digital marketing. But, we’re, we’re talking about, uh, a transformation in the, in the field. Why don’t you, uh, give us an overview of your, your thinking, and then we’ll dive in. Sure. So it’s not, I don’t think it’s a transformation. I think it’s a seismic transformation, you know, what, what I like to tell people is that the digital marketing. That you and I grew up with is really fast becoming a thing of the past, right? It’s really no more. And what I mean by that is, you know, the model for the last 15 years or so was that the website was the end all be all of your digital marketing efforts, right? You were, you were drawing all of your attention to the site and it was all about. Links, it was all about, you know, sharing links with other people, putting links into social media, putting them into email just to get a lot of traffic and what was called authority to that website, and then Google would reward us if you had an authoritative site and put you at the top of the search engine rankings. You remember the 10 blue links, right? Well, A funny thing happened, you know, uh, uh, starting a few years ago, we started to notice cracks in that particular model, and you could notice that because Google was starting to take over answers for themselves. I don’t know if you recall this, but wherever it could basically scrape data, and let’s, you know, think whether. Restaurants, e-commerce, it would start to create these panels where you really didn’t have to leave Google anymore. You just get everything done right there. I, I, I think of it, uh, like USPS tracking or FedEx tracking. They would just open a window in the, in the Google search results. If you searched USPS tracking, they would just open a tracking window for you. That’s it. That’s it. And then that was obviously a, a business play. It was a smart. Strategy on their part to try to monetize all of these eyeballs coming to them and then that would start to gradually turn into what we call featured snippets or in the industry we call it position zero, which is they would capture what they felt was the best answer based on the web the websites that they have seen and just put the answer up there and so it didn’t really make a person want to click out you just found what you wanted as soon as you went to Google so. That to me began the shift because then that was the precursor to AI search and I know you had George Weiner on a few weeks back so I won’t get too much into that, but if you think about what AI search is, it basically not only gives you the answer, but then you’re gonna have a conversation based on that answer. So there’s really no incentive to click out of there, and that’s, you know, by design, you know, some of those products allow you to click out and will give attribution, but you can start to see where things are going, right? People are, are going to websites less and less. But what is the icing on the cake there is this trend that we’re seeing, and I don’t think it’s a trend, it’s here to stay, which is called zero click marketing, and we can get into that in detail, but you know, these three forces together are making the website as the central component. Again, a thing of the past. Now it doesn’t mean the website’s going away, right? In my opinion, what is happening is it’s, it’s elevating, it’s becoming more important, but to a segment of the people that are coming to the site, and we can talk about that as well too, but I, you know, I think it’s important for your listeners who haven’t thought about this, and I know we’re talking to small and medium, um, medium sized nonprofits that, you know. During your busy day where you’re worried about a million different things, you know, programs, funding, what the government is doing, what have you, you also have to start to think about, don’t think just that your website is where you want to get people to go. I, I, I don’t think many are thinking that way, but, but the trend is happening so fast and it’s so severe is not the right word, deep, that it’s something that you really have to pay attention to so you don’t fall behind. OK. Yeah. And, and just to reinforce, yeah, for many years, you wanted to drive people to the website as the central, the central focus for, for information about your work, uh, certainly where to give, right? You know, uh, social would Social would direct folks there. I mean, that was kind of, you know, there was a hub and spoke model. You would, you would send all, all your, all your owned media and even earned media that you got, uh, you know, would send people to the, to the site. OK. Um. Where, you know, is there, is there now a central focus or it’s, it’s really just us now managing what AI. Thinks of us or am I or am I oversimplifying it, it’s so it’s, it’s fragmented, right? There is no real central focus. I’ve heard another, um, really good agency talk about it is instead of the funnel model, it’s kind of like the pinball model, right? You, you, you, there’s a, a, you can be working in social, you can be working in AI search, you can be doing blogs, you can be doing video, you can be doing offline marketing. So the idea of attribute attributing it to one. Component is becoming more and more difficult. AI search right now is the thing I’m gonna call it the trendy thing, but you know, again, it’s a trend that’s here to stay. But you know when we can get into this a little bit deeper, but, but it’s really a matter of understanding who your audience is and where they reside and starting to put emphasis on those platforms in the meantime. You do need to have a strong website and we’ll talk. I wanna talk a little bit more about what that entails. That’s a whole separate conversation. You do need to be optimized to be found in AI search. You do need to be optimized to be found in traditional search because it’s still a thing. Um, and you need to have your email marketing in place, so it is a tall order, but if you look at it as multiple different components and you’re addressing them on a daily basis or a weekly basis, and then over time you start to see what the winners are if you’re paying attention and, and, um, you know, looking at your data over time you can start to see where the, the main channels are and direct more attention there. OK, OK, um. In terms of the data, I Google Analytics still valuable, right? 100%, still essential, 100%. But you know, we, we, you know, you also wanna combine that with the other data that you’re getting, you know, Facebook Insights is a very simple, um, and, and, and effective component, um, you know, the other channels, YouTube, of course, provides analytics. All of them really do, and again it’s, I’m, I’m kind of self-conscious talking that way because I know most nonprofits don’t have the capacity to be able to spend time doing that, um. You know, in, in a perfect world what you’re doing is you’re taking data from all these channels and building a picture and you’re combining that with your qualitative, right? Qualitative is a fancy word for any surveys that you’re doing, any trends that you’re seeing on social media, any conversations you’re having with your best donors, and that really puts together the picture of your ideal audience member, you know, any donor data that you have, but, you know, to simplify things, Google Analytics is, you know, a, a very valuable tool, and if you know how to use it. Um, you know, that should be adequate to give you kind of a, a path forward. Is there a, a, a, an analytics add-on or app that you, you recommend beyond, or a couple of apps that you recommend beyond what Google Analytics will give us? There are, there are, see, as an agency, I’m a bit, we’re a bit biased because we use one of the Google tools called Looker Studio, and it, they provide, it captures that information. You can bring in other information as well too, and it gives you a very nice picture of things, um, so we don’t really use any apps outside of that. Again, I mean the. If, if you’re, if you’re taking 2 or 3 of your social channels and you can easily access the data there, and if you’re going into Google Analytics, and if you’re going into your email, um, Programming getting data from there and starting to to collect that that’s where the picture comes from um you know there’s a tool called Data Box which I, I would, I could recommend that um basically collects all of this data and puts it into one picture you know Looker is another one. These tend to be a little bit more advanced if a nonprofit doesn’t have the wherewithal to spend a lot of time doing it so unfortunately I don’t have a simple answer for that, but I can certainly. You know, get back to you on it. OK. Well, those two, those two, and, and again, you know, your, your caveat that, uh, believe me, I’m, I’m very conscious of our small and mid-size nonprofit, uh, listeners, uh, may not be able to go deeper, but, but if you have a, uh, if you have an analytics, uh, consultant perhaps or a digital marketing consultant, or if you do have an IT person, you know, uh, a little, a little advanced. Uh, info, uh, is, is, is valuable for those, for those folks who can, who can take advantage of. That, that’s actually the perfect solution, you know, having an individual that is at least willing to learn on that front. It could even be a very smart intern or a volunteer that works for you just on that front, but those are the channels that you want to look at. If you’re doing that, you’re doing more than 90% of the nonprofits out there. If you’re looking at Google Analytics and you’re looking at your social, you’re looking at email and you’re looking at donor information and starting to draw pictures and correlations from that. And you know, slow and steady wins the race here. It’s not something that you do once a quarter. It’s something that you’re trying to look at once a week and painting a picture in that way. And it’s, it’s more about driving the habit of doing it, right, right. And you never really achieve an end state. You just, you’re just constantly iterating, changing, testing, right? That, that’s exactly right. But also let’s think about it, you know, if we start at the beginning of the year just doing that in a very simple methodical way. Imagine where you’ll be at the end of the year in terms of understanding who you’re speaking to and who your best donors are and who your best constituents are. Now, as a longtime nonprofit radio listener, you’re probably aware that we have, um, jargon jail on nonprofit radio. You raised a zero-click marketing, which is a serious, uh, jargon jail transgression. But I knew we were gonna, I, I didn’t call you on it in the instant because I knew we were gonna dive in and, uh, you’d be eligible for, for a quick, uh, Um, parole, parole from, you know, coming on to this, I, I made sure I wanted to avoid jargon jail so that if you remember, I gave a, um, I gave a disclaimer in the beginning when I said zero click marking, I said, but we’ll talk about that later. Yes, you did. Yeah, all right, yeah, so, all right, so it’s safe enough. I mean you’re, you’re safe from, uh, jargon jail, especially in New Jersey prisons. Uh, I don’t know, I don’t know what the state of, uh, especially local, local prisons in New Jersey. We’re gonna talk a little about our New Jersey, uh, shared background, but we’ll, we’ll get there. Um, all right, so, so. Define your, your zero click marketing and, and what, you know, obviously what, what it means for our listeners. Sure. So I wish I could say I, I came up with this term because it’s, it’s brilliant, but this was actually coined by a woman named Amanda Natividad at a, at a company called Spark Toro, uh, which basically created that, that’s an analytics product as well too, but that’s, it’s, it’s more for audience understanding anyway. So if you follow Amanda’s work, what this really means is that people are now spending their time on apps and on social media channels rather than going directly to, uh, websites and, and when they’re there, they’re not necessarily clicking out. They’re basically staying there all day. And you can think about this, Tony, anecdotally, like, I don’t know how you operate online, but for example, I, I like Instagram, and when I go to Instagram, I’m scrolling, I’m looking, I’m learning. I’m not really thinking of going to. Some website, right? And again, that’s, that’s all by design because these social channels have created kind of walled gardens and they want you to stay there to the point where they really disincentivize you from, from clicking out. They will penalize you. So for example, if I’m, I spend a lot of time on LinkedIn as you do too. If you put a link into your post that goes to a third party site, that’s going to deprecate the reach. That post is not going to go as far because they want you to stay within LinkedIn. Instagram is another example. You can’t even put links into Instagram. You have to put them into your bio at the top. So this is, this is the concept of zero click marketing and it’s where, it’s where we are. And you know, as someone who builds websites for a living and loves websites, I still don’t see this as a huge negative. I wanna talk to you at some point about what the new website means, but as far as Zero Click is concerned, I think this is a huge opportunity for nonprofits because I don’t know if you agree with me that the, the strongest asset that a nonprofit has is their story. It’s why I got into this industry to begin with, because there’s always a beautiful human story there that by definition you can move individuals, you’re, you’re changing the world and zero-click marketing allows you to flex that muscle. You can go into a channel, say Facebook, and there’s all sorts of things that you can. be doing that you can interact with the community, you can put out great content, you can put video, you can experiment. So I think framed in that way, it becomes a big um opportunity for nonprofits and not something to kind of shy away from. I mean they, they, you know, you’re gonna have to roll with this because this is where things are going. I think it’s a longer definition than you wanted, but no, no, sorry, you, you, you, you know, you kept yourself out of jargon jail. Um, it’s so, all right, so can we drill down to some tactics? I mean, what, what, what should we be doing on our, on the different sites? Uh, what should we be saying? So, well, let me just pull back a bit and say, first of all, it depends, right? It depends what niche you’re in. It depends who your audience is. So, So the, you know, how we advise clients is the first thing you have to do, and this is with any marketing initiative, whether it’s branding or websites or zero click marketing is you have to understand who your key audience members are, who your community is, and we just touched base on that a little bit. You wanna do a combination of qualitative, which is, you know, kind of like psychologically understanding, speaking to individuals, doing surveys. Uh, doing focus groups if possible, you know, if you have a team, having them interact with donors and constituents and understanding and starting to paint a persona really of who that audience is, and then you back that up with data that you’re getting from analytics, you know, what pages are people going to, what are they interested in, where are they coming from? Facebook can do that even more, right? What gender are we looking at or for the most part, what’s the age group, and that will really start to paint a picture once you have that, you should combine it. With another critical thing that a nonprofit needs, which is a really strong understanding of your messaging and your position. In other words, what, what is your brand? What makes you different from everybody else? Once you have those two elements, that’s how you start to craft the story that’s going into these channels, so. Again, it depends on what your organization is. Like for New Jersey Conservation Foundation, they’re all about preserving open space here in New Jersey. So they are attracting outdoors people. Uh, there is still, there is still open space in New Jersey. I know. Right, it’s tragic. I know because we’re gonna, we gotta defeat the stereotype that, you know, New Jersey all looks like what you see when you land at Newark Airport. It does not. We are, we, uh, it’s, it’s oil refineries and tanks and, and a major airport and there’s, uh, There’s these, these giant claws on the, on the port of Newark. They’re picking up cargo, uh, you know, the, the, whatever, the, the cargo trailers off ships. Can we, can we, uh, can we defeat that stereotype that, uh, all of New Jersey looks like the, the greater New Newark and, and Newark. Airport area, you know, we, we get such a bad rap. I love this state. We have so much going on, you know, not just the commerce that you talked about, but we have a beautiful shore and we have beautiful, we have tons of horses and then, you know, anyway, so the point is that New Jersey is, there is open space and conserved. 100%, and New Jersey Conservation Foundation is helping on that front. But, so, you know, if you understand their audience and you understand what they’re trying to preserve more and more space, so they’re catering to that audience. So. If you think about their, let’s again, I’m just using Facebook, but you know they’ll talk about their latest efforts to preserve open space. They’ll talk about different types of wildlife. They will feature trails that people can go on. They, they create an immersive experience so that people, it’s not just about their events or an award they’ve won or fundraising, it’s about creating a community. Um, of, of that, that people are interested in coming back to. So again, I just, it, it’s a, it’s a simple process, but it’s hard to execute because it requires discipline, right? Understand who you’re going after, understand your story and continually refine that. And then from there the tactics are really, Tony, they become kind of simple. You can experiment, putting out video, you can, you know, it, it. If you run a healthcare organization and you receive external funding, well, maybe then you need to put up white papers or you need to put up data showing impact, you know, it’s, it’s a matter of understanding what it is you do and what drives people and then putting out different pieces of content based on that and then iterating. You have to look to see what’s working. Are people clicking? Are people engaging? Are we growing in terms of followers? And then, you know, when you’re looking at one channel, perhaps start to experiment in another, um. You know, you should begin in the areas where you already have strength, but over time, you want to start to move out and try to explore different channels if capacity allows for it. And then explain how all this is going to help us as folks use uh chat GPT or, or other, uh, you know, uh, other AI tools. To, to do their search. How, how is this, how is the, is it sort of big, sort of big picture? How is all this gonna help us, help AI think well of us as, as authoritative and, and worth giving to in our sector? Sure. Well, you know, I can’t account for where AI is getting their information. I think George had a better grasp of that when, when you spoke to him, but in general, You know, it’s fed its own data set, and it is also crawling the web, and it is also looking at different social media sites. Uh, and remember, when AI search, what they’re concerned about is not links, but brand mentions. That’s what they want. It’s almost a PR play, right? So in that regard, you would think that social media plays a big role there. I know in certain industries, Reddit, the channel Reddit is a huge driver of traffic to AI search, so. You, you, you have to think that more content out there on different channels is better for you, because over time all of these channels are going to be, you know, viewed as something that AI will take in. So that’s, that’s one way to think of it, but the other way to think of it is, as good as AI is, you’re not spending all your time there. You still want to see pictures of kids and puppies and kittens and so you’re going to Facebook or, you know, you’re going to Instagram because it has a visual model that’s kind of unparalleled, or you’re going to YouTube because you wanna watch the. You know, YouTube is now, I think the most popular streaming channel out there, above and beyond anything else. So, so I, I, I understand your question is, you know, how does this contribute to AI? It’s going to, if it isn’t already doing that, so the more the merrier, but also understand that AI is just one component in the entire ecosphere. It’s the really big one now, but I don’t think it’s going to consume everything. I want to pull on one thread that you mentioned, just briefly, uh, surveys as a, as a way of understanding who your audience is, where they are. Share some of your advice. We have, we haven’t had anybody talk recently about, you know, just like overall survey, survey strategy, you know, in terms of length, what, what to ask, how to, how to, how to get the surveys out to folks. What’s your advice? So first of all, the, the technology has moved to a point where it’s so easy to do this, and it doesn’t have to be this very formal thing where you have to pull in, you know, and I mean you can do that, it’s going to help you if you have an expert that does that sort of thing. We don’t do many of them, but you know, if you think of the evolution where you had to mail out a survey, you had to do a formal focus group, none of that really matters anymore. I mean you can just go through a MailChimp type product and put a survey together there and mail that out, or you can actually just do it in public, you know, LinkedIn makes it very easy. To do a survey or, you know, um, you know, it’s, it’s not the, the, the most kind of empirically, um, you know what, what’s the word I’m looking for here, it’s, it’s not, it’s not like a, a, a professional level, uh, most statistically valid. Correct, correct, but it’ll, it’ll give you a good general, um, you know, a good general feedback in terms of what you’re looking for. Uh, and again, you know, what you’re asking depends on what your, your needs are. What, what we’ve learned over the years in terms of just putting forms on websites is the more you put on there, the less response you’re going to get. So I would think carefully about, um, you know, the specific answers you’re trying to get, and then make it as simple as possible and make it something because if you think about your own busy workday. Who has time to do these things? Like every time I call, let’s say my doctor, and it ends with, will you take a few minutes to, uh, fill out this or, or complete this survey, I always say yes and I always hang up on that. So, so it’s like, you know, um, that’s neither here nor there, but just keep it simple and keep it, no, but you’re, uh, like your, your, your tactic is what you, you, you want the person you’re talking to. To think that they, I don’t, I don’t know if the people you’re talking to actually know what your response was, yes or no, I’ll, I’ll take the survey or I won’t. But I always, I always wonder, do they know? And then, so you’re trying to get the best performance out of the customer service person because you say, yes, I’ll take the survey after my call, and then, and then you shut off the call. And then, you know, you know, I realize how cynical that sounds when I say, Well, the best performance has already been given to me, and then I just say, yeah, yeah, I’ll do it. And then I don’t pay any attention to it, but you’ve now guilted me into, into changing that. So the next time I get on, I’ll, uh, yeah, I, I don’t, all right. I, I’d say no, I’m honest. I, I don’t, I don’t take the survey, but I, I am honest about it. I’ll, I’ll say no. And then, and then I, I get whatever customer service I get. But I, but I actually, I don’t, I don’t think people, I don’t think the people you’re talking to, I don’t think they do know whether this is gonna be a survey respondent, uh, or, or not. OK, I’m sorry. No worries. Yeah, um. Let’s talk a little about your background. Uh, you know, you’re a, you’re a percussionist. But do you have a, a degree in music? No, no, I don’t, uh, and percussionist is a nice formal way to say it, but I’ve just been playing drums ever since I was, uh, goodness, when did I start? I was about 8 years old, so I would have made 1980, so it’s, it’s a really long time and it’s just like anything anyone has a passion for, you know, people say, how did you get into it? I don’t know. I just, I, you know, I had, I had, I was growing up in a period where playing drums in a rock band was, you know, the, the end all be all. You have this, this amazing music scene, so that influenced me. I was a big Beatles guy ever since I was a kid because I had relatives that were listening to it. And that got me into it. I had relatives that played, and then what it’s like, you know, it’s like golfers have told me this, like once you hit a really good shot, it’s in your DNA, it’s in your blood, and you just can’t stop thinking about it. And that’s the way I am with, with drums. I cannot explain to you why. But you know, I’ll play and then I’ll walk away and just look at the set for a minute. I just, you know, I just, I’m, you know, I’m, I’m very passionate about it. So, so yeah, I’ve had the good fortune of, um, working with some really good teachers. I have a good one in New York City now and it’s a continual, continual learning process. And then, you know, I went from rock as a young man. Into now jazz, which for me is a real challenge. It’s, you know, I know it bores a lot of people. I know and it’s not a trendy thing by far anymore, but it really makes you work as a musician, that the men that played this and the women that played this type of music were really skilled, and I don’t think they got the credit, um, that they deserved. Now the percussionist component came in because my daughter. is a violinist, she’s about 15 now, and so she started about 10 years ago. And as I got involved in her workshop, they were looking for drummers to sit in on the symphonies there. So, so I picked that up as well too. And now once or twice a year I’ll perform in that, in that symphony, and that’s really cool because you’re doing like Tchaikovsky and, and, and really interesting pieces where you’re, you’re forced to learn to read and, and play different types of instruments. So it’s, it’s really a lot of fun. If you were. Probably 30, maybe 40 years older, you might have, uh, had the good fortune of having, uh, Tony Martignetti Senior as, as a drum instructor because he used to, my dad used to go, this is in the Ridgefield, New Jersey area, um, used to do private lessons. He, he taught in public schools for many years. Uh, not only instrumental, but also vocal music in, in elementary schools in Ridgefield. And then a couple of nights a week for some extra cash, he would do private lessons in people’s homes. And this is when a private, like an hour lesson was like $10 or $15. And he came to your home. You didn’t even have to, you know, um, so, but you didn’t, uh, you’re, you’re, you’re not, you’re not old enough to have had Tony Martignetti Senior as a, as a drum instructor. But you know, there are, there are other good ones. There are, there are others. He, he’s, he wasn’t the soul. Outstanding instructor, uh, for, for drumming in New Jersey. There, there are others, so I’m, I’m not surprised you, you’ve had others. I, I would have loved to have met him, you know, based on, on what you’re telling me and having met, having met you. What was that like for you growing up? Was it something that like you were interested in? Did it make your mother go crazy because of how loud it was? Cause I get that all the time. And what was that experience like? You know what I remember most about my dad’s drumming and, and, uh, aside from the, the, the private lessons he did, he played in some, some bands, mostly like sort of wedding and bar mitzvah type bands. Um, but what I remember is all, I loved, I loved helping him set up the drum set and take it down and pack it for a gig that, you know, a Saturday night wedding or something. I, I loved the chrome, all the shiny chrome and all the, all the knobs that you had to turn to get the, to get the, the bass tom-tom onto the, onto the bass drum. And you had to secure it in there and helping him set up the high hats, you know, for his left foot, the high hat symbals. There’s, there’s the, there’s all the chrome, all the shiny chrome, and it’s heavy and, and he had this big case that he packed all the chrome in and his snare drum went in there and the snare drum stand was all chrome. And I loved like pulling the legs out of the, the snare drum stand. And just setting it on its three legs or, or folding it up to help him get ready for a gig and just, it, it was like the, it was the chrome and the, and the turning of the knobs. And I just loved seeing the set. Now, his set was, um, Ludwig. He had a Ludwig set and he used, uh, Ziljan’s symbols. Does the name Joe Morello sound? familiar to you? Have you heard that name before? No, no. So there was a band in the 50s and 60s called the Dave Rubreck Quartet, and Dave Rubrik, yeah, I know. You would recognize the music, obviously, um, if you, if you heard him, and his drummer was Joe Morello, and Joe Morello, he, he passed away in New Jersey. I don’t think he was born here, but your father would have absolutely known him, and he played Ludwig. He was an amazing, amazing drummer, and, and as you’re painting that picture of all the chrome and, and we haven’t even talked about the wood yet, I don’t know how far you want to get on this marketing, uh, discussion, but, but the wood itself is, is a whole other topic and the science behind it and the sound behind it. So, you know, I completely relate to the fascination that you have with the different components, and I have to tell you, your father was a lucky guy. having you do this because me going to different gigs and having to haul all this equipment and set it up myself, I wish I had someone like you or someone like you. I was a willing, yeah, I couldn’t go to the gigs because they were, you know, they would end at 11 o’clock at night and I was only 8 or 10 years old or something. Uh, but I could help him at the house. And then the next day when he got back, you know, we had to set the, set the set up again so he could, so he could practice, you know. For the next gig. So, so it was tearing down like the day of the gig and then he would go off that night and then the next day we get to set it up again. That, that was the thrill. So do you, what, what, what kind of, what, what, what drums do you play? I play, I play that exact configuration. I play Ludwig drums and Ziljin cymbals. Ludwig and Ziljin. Oh, that’s outstanding. Oh, all right. All right, I’m getting a, uh, synesthesia. I appreciate you going into that topic at some point. No, absolutely, because we’re gonna see how it impacts your, your work. But the, the wood, you’re talking about, so you’re talking about the wood of what the drums are constructed. What, what would they have been? Like, what do you know what kind of wood, you know, it’s, I do, I do. So, so the ones that you and I are talking about typically are 6 or 7 pplies or maybe 5 plies of maple, uh, together, and they, you know, they, they, um, They steam the wood and then it gets pliable and that’s how they turn it into an actual drum. But then you could start to go down the path of mahogany, which is a much more rare and expensive, uh, wood, and what that does is it’s a softer wood, so it absorbs the sound. It’s not going to be as loud, it’s going to be more tonal. And then there’s birch, which is a lighter one, and you can just go on and on and on, and, uh, You know, so as you, and it’s funny, non-drummers don’t care about this. They don’t hear the difference when you hit the, but drummers, absolutely, and there’s a different feel and a tone to it. So, um, yeah, that’s one other interesting aspect. And just, you know, what we’re talking about here, it just, I’m, I’m glad that you have a respect for drummers because I still have to deal with the, you know, um, you know, what kind of a guy hangs out with musicians, and, and the answer is a drummer, right? And that’s, I have to deal with that all the time. If people understood how hard it is to really play drums, you know, and not just bash at them, but understand the. The, the, the role that you’re supposed to play as a drummer, they would have more of an appreciation, but you know, I’ll deal with it. No, no, no, you’re, yeah, they are, they are underappreciated. You’re right. But the, the drummer is responsible for keeping the beat. That’s the first and foremost thing is not just the beat. I mean, you’re, you’re, you’re driving the ship, you know, if, if you’re playing. In a live performance and the guitar player stops, nobody cares, right? If the saxophone player stops, nobody cares, but if the drummer stops, everybody turns around and goes, what the heck’s going on, right? And I, I can’t take credit for that. That’s the, the drummer Art Blakey said that once, and I, you know, I take it to heart, so it’s, it’s a really important role. And then adding that responsibility to a jazz performance, where, where others are riffing and then you’re riffing, but still keeping the beat through the, through the piece. 100% and you’re kind of making it up as you, you’re making it up as you go along too, which is, you know, there’s that exciting component, nerve-wracking component to it. It’s time for Tony’s take 2. Thank you, Kate. Happy New Year Uh, Kate doesn’t agree, but I think, I think the 19th is OK. I don’t know about next week. Next week, probably not. So if you want to be a nonprofit radio guest, um, It, uh, it should be obvious, but I get a lot of pitches that, uh, seem to overlook the obvious. So I’m gonna state it. It needs to be about nonprofits. Your pitch needs to have value for Our 13,000+ listeners in small and mid-sized nonprofits. That means even if your nonprofit has a compelling story, or you have a compelling, just incredible story of how you arrived. That’s not good. That’s not good. That, that, that, that belongs on other podcasts. I’m sure there are other places where your story can be told about how you evolved and emerged from COVID and overcame funding crises and maybe leadership changes and culture changes and fundraising debacles and negative PR stories, whatever may have beset you. Um, it’s no good. You gotta, it’s gotta have value for all the other listeners, not just be telling. A nonprofit journey story or a personal story. So. Please make it about that. And, uh, once it’s that, if you got that value. Uh, some bullet points are helpful. I mean, I don’t mind narrative, but bullet points, uh, are preferred, they’re easier to follow. And you email them with why you think this is a good topic, why you’re qualified to talk about it. You send that off to Tony at Tony Martignetti.com. That’s me, the host. And there you go. It’s that simple to pitch. Nonprofit radio. I would say, like if somebody asked what percentage of pitches I accept. I would say it’s probably about 70 or so. That’s purely Off the top of my head, purely a subjective determination. I have not added up all the pitches and, uh, Divided that, uh, into the number of guests and then multiplied by 100 to get the percentage. Uh, I would say off the top of my head. About 70% of pitches get accepted. And that is Tony’s take 2. Kate I think you should bring back the Santa that you never had on the radio. Santa. No, I don’t know. Yeah, that’s off topic that we just talked about. What, what, have you been listening? Where were you? I was just thinking about that. I think I think that was one of the topics for um Was it the 6:50th, and you were talking about how you were gonna have this Santa come on and talk about his thing, and then you, you declined it and never had him on. Right, I, I, I think you mean the 750th, 750th. Associate producer, right? Associate producer Kate, Kate Martinetti, that is you, right? That’s me. You are Kate Martignetti, OK. And you are the associate producer of this, this podcast, not, not so much I proudly wear that title. Yes, associate producer. All right. All right, I’m just making sure because, uh, last July was our 750th episode. Yes, there was a Santa and there was also, well, yeah, the Santa, I canceled him after the fermentation show. With Sandor Kraut, whose real name is Sandor, I think it’s Kraus or. Kraut is not his real name. He’s, uh, he’s playing off sauerkraut being a fermented food because he was a fermented food expert. So after the Sandor Kraut episode bombed. I canceled Santa. Uh, Santa was that other 25%. Uh, yeah, not a roughly, uh, the, the, yeah, the, the 7 to 25 to 30%. I’m thinking about it now. It could be as, it could be as low as 60%. It might be, it might be more like 62.5%. Uh, I’m, I’m a little tough. I’m, you know, you, you gotta, you gotta meet the bar. You gotta jump the bar, not just meet it. This is nonprofit radio for Pete’s sake. We’ve got Bu butt loads more time. Here’s the rest of Thrive Amid the digital marketing Transformation with Lou Kotsinnis. So how do you think so? How do you think that contributes to the work that you do now? Uh, you know, it’s some, the music is improvisational, but it’s, it’s also a backbone to it, keeping the beat as we’re talking about. How do, how do you think about how music influences your, uh, your practice at, uh, at, at BCS Interactive. That’s a really wonderful question, one I haven’t really thought about, but we can do that here. So, You know, the way I approach the drums is, is methodical, right? I just, I love the process of it. I love the, um, the musicality aspect of it, you know, I read music for the drums, and there’s a very, there’s a structure to it, there’s a foundation to it, and I have to think that that is translated over into how we approach working with clients, right? There’s a, a foundation to what you do. There’s a rhythm and a steadiness to it. I don’t know if you picked it up in our conversation, but I’m a big believer in, in foundational habits. It’s not the, you know, we want the ice bucket challenge type thing, right? We want the, we, you know, we, you have to put in the work to be able to get the marketing outcomes. And so again, slow and steady wins the race. I don’t know, maybe that does have some tie into, um, focusing on rhythm and keeping things steady and keeping things organized, right? It’s not. You know, different marketing agencies vary in their culture and ours is not the flashy, you know, we did these huge campaigns, it’s one small win after another and I believe frankly that that’s the stronger way to go because you’re building for longevity, right? You’re putting all these principles which may seem boring but they are absolutely important if you do them over time you, you’re gonna have a stronger structure. That philosophy is very consistent with, uh, George Weiner’s at Whole Whale. Do you, do you know George? I do. I, I know him from afar. I think we’ve spoken a couple of times and I’m familiar with, uh, Whole Whale’s work. All right, well, the two of you, uh, both of your, uh, so I’m sure your agencies have very similar philosophies in terms, you know, it’s not splashy. It’s, we look at the data, we, we, Uh, we iterate based on the data, and it’s, you know, he, I’m sure he would completely agree at the risk of putting words in his mouth, uh, uh, with you that, you know, that slow and steady wins the race. It, it’s, it’s not, it’s not a splash. It, it, it takes time, but over time, you can move the needle. And to that point, I keep saying the word habits. I, I would, you know, recommend for any nonprofit leader, executive director, uh, founder, what have you, read the book Atomic Habits. I don’t know if you’ve read that before, Tony, but that, I don’t know it. Yeah, so Atomic Habits, Atomic Habits by James Clear, it might be the greatest nonfiction book I’ve ever read. It’s, it’s, it’s a, it’s kind of a simple premise that it’s the small actions built up over time that can create outsized results. Um, and everything I’m talking about here is basically outlined there. So it’s, um, yeah, it’s a good guidebook if you’re, if you’re willing to go down that path. Let’s move to the website. Uh, our, our, what used to be the focus, but still, you know, very important, you, you believe. Sure, yeah, so, um, You know, if we think about the fact that less traffic is going to websites, and it’s, it’s a fact, it’s happening, right? It’s, it’s not something that you should really panic over, and I’m saying this as an agency owner who builds websites and, um, you know, I’m, I may be biased in saying this, but I don’t think I am. Think about the people who are now still coming to your website, right? The ones that even though they had the AI search answer, even though they went on social media, they still want to come to your website. To me. Those are true believers, those are high intent individuals, right? They’re the ones that, OK, I’m considering donating to this organization. Are they for real? Right? And they’re not, they’re not satisfied with the, the AI summary that they got. 100%, they, and they want, again, let’s go back to that concept of the story being the most powerful tool, in my opinion, right? Where are they going to get that story from in a way that is engaging and impactful. It’s the way you tell it on your website and the images that you’re using and the, and the video that you’re using, so. To me, I, I said this at the beginning of our conversation, the website is more important than it was before, not in the sense that you have to direct all of your traffic there, but the people that are coming there, it’s not about clicking, it’s about converting. So in order to do that, you have to create a really good experience. So I don’t think the website is going away at all. And one other important element to to remember actually too. Is that this is the last place where you really control the narrative, Tony, right? If you, if you spend your entire career building a, a presence on Instagram, and Instagram goes away one day or they change their algorithm, you’re done, man, you know what I mean? Like now, now you have to participate in zero-click marketing, don’t get me wrong, but the website is the one where you’re able to tell the story in your own way. And I’ll add to that too, one other thing I mentioned, I would, I would say is that AI is probably drawing from your website as well too. So don’t, don’t neglect it. I know some nonprofits listening to this might be saying, oh, this is great, I can just do everything on Facebook, I’ll never have to pay for a website again. I’m, I’m afraid that’s not the case. I think you’re doing yourself a disservice if you’re not investing in your site. OK, uh, so let’s again talk about some tactics. Uh, you know, this may be long-standing tactics, but it’s, it’s often valuable to Reinforce fundamentals. So whether, whether this is cutting edge or fundamental, let’s, uh, let’s remind folks what, what, what they ought to be paying attention to on their, on their own. The site that they control, you’re right. You control everything on your website, from what the back end is, whether it’s a Drupal or a WordPress, to every single word, every comma, every, every image, it’s that you own that, you own that. How should we be respecting it? So the first is mindset, right? Remember now that we’re looking at this in terms of engagement, not necessarily just in in terms of drawing pure traffic. So when you think about engagement, then you have to start to look at like 3 specific factors is what we advise. The first is brand and what I mean by that, that’s interchangeable with positioning, with mission, however, whatever term you wanna use. But when an individual comes to your website, they should know immediately what it is you do, who they serve, or who you serve, and then, you know, design it, or at least design the interface, the main interface, in a way that’s gonna bring people in. I did a whole webinar on this if people are ever interested in terms of positioning and, and messaging on your website. So brand is the, is the, is the foundational element that you have to get right, right? Who are you? What audience do you, uh, tend to cater to or, or are you focused on, and how are you different from other organizations out there? So brand is #1. Number 2 then becomes your story. Again, that, that all important element, you know, are you putting up engaging expert content based around your expertise and based around the audience that you are looking to focus on? And, you know, again, it, I, I don’t write per se in AI. What I do is I write and then I have AI vetted for me. I, it’s a great editor, right? But I write from the heart and I write based on, on my own knowledge, and I encourage website owners to do the same thing. It’s very easy to just say, OK, write me up a page of content based on such and such, and it’ll produce something really very good, right? But what individuals want, in my opinion is authenticity. Uh, and there may come a point where, you know, AI gets so good that it replaces humans. I don’t think it’s going in that direction. I just, I’m a tech optimist for the most part. So I’m, I’m kind of seguing here to, to mention, you know, where do you get that content from. I would still write it based on what you know and who you are and, and what, you know, your organization is looking to achieve. So you’re using AI as the editor for the, for content that you create, versus the other way around, which is, uh, what a lot of folks encourage is that have AI do your first draft, and then you be the editor. I, I don’t agree with that at all. Honestly, I have to come out strongly against that. I, I think that. One of the things that makes us human is our authenticity, our our ability to generate ideas, and, and I think writing is a reflection of our soul. I don’t mean to get too, you know, schmaltzy there with you, but I, I think you, and, and the way it helps me is, uh, so if you’re familiar with the product HubSpot, um, the, the, the, uh, CRM, their CEO, is co-CEO, a guy named Dharmesh Shah, give the best definition of AI I’ve ever seen, which is think of AI as having an intern with a PhD in everything. And that’s the way I use it, right? Um, so I will come up, the, the, the way that I write blog posts, and I encourage anyone to write blog posts this way is I listen for what the client’s pain points are. And if you hear enough of them over time around the same topic, that means something that a lot of people are probably gonna want to learn about. So then that’s, I will answer that in the blog. Now I will do that based on my knowledge, but along the way, if I run into a problem. How do I get past this phrase I need some understanding of this technology. I will certainly go to my partner, the intern right there in AI and get that, get over that hump and so I’ll continue to write that way and then when I’m finished I’m like, OK, take a look at this based on the parameters that I wanted. Is it logical? Um, I have questions about this area. Will you please give me an answer on that? Does this make sense to you? If you were, um, the leader of a, of a large nonprofit based in this sector, would this resonate with you? And that’s kind of the way I interact with it. So I’m, I’m sorry, I’m, you’re asking me about the importance of websites and what to do there, and I’m taking you on an AI path. So I, no, I, I asked you to digress, and, uh, we, we’re using AI similarly, you and I, uh, for slightly different reasons. My, my concern about having. Something artificial, create the first draft is that we’re, we’re surrendering our, our, our, our, I believe our humanity in a, in a slightly different way than you described it. We’re surrendering our creativity. I think, I think the most creative task we can do is staring at a blank page and creating from, from, from whole cloth. And that applies to music, uh, art, and, and also writing. Uh, writing is an art, but, you know, composing text, whether it’s a letter or a blog post or something for LinkedIn, you know, whatever it is, I, I, I don’t want to give up. I don’t want to surrender that creativity to the artificial and then relegate myself to copy editor. Exactly, and, and staring at that blank page is painful, right? It hurts, and that’s why, you know, AI can fill that gap if you let it. But again, you are surrendering something very important there, and that, you know, that’s something, and, you know, for the rest of my career, I’m going to stick to. You know, sometimes do I cheat if I’m stuck? Yeah, maybe a sentence or two, but I don’t allow it to write the whole concept for me. I mean, the whole point of our brand at BCS Interactive is that we are authentic and we are giving you our own knowledge and our hard earned experience. So, you know, again, the bottom line for me, AI is an assistant and it always will be, and I will rely on it. As such, but the original ideas come, come from us. So, so we talked about, uh, we talked about brand and story. Story is, is second, and story again is all of the content that’s on your site and are you engaging individuals that are arriving there once they understand what you do? Are you bringing them through a path of understanding to eventually some conversion? And the third and perhaps the most important now, I’m, I’m not gonna say it’s more important than the brand, but it’s equally as important is user experience. That can mean a lot of things, but the bottom line is when a person comes to your site now, they should be able to find what they want when they want it, and they should be able to get their actions done frictionless, right? There’s really no excuse left for poor user experience because again, think of your high intent. Individual that’s close to donating or that wants to join your organization or an external funder, God willing, those will exist in 2026, um, and that is vetting you as an organization, you have to have your act together. So it’s so important to have a strong website in that regard. Yeah, let’s say a little more about the UX, you know, it, it, again, you’re saying, you know, you, you’ve got your high intent, high information, seeking high, uh, uh, uh. Visitors seeking more information, so that they’re, they’re seeking to be high information. Um, we could spend, we could spend days on website organization, user experience, uh, but give us your, give us like, you know, your, your top level thinking. The number one thing is your navigation, right? Your content organization. So you envision coming to a website, whether it’s on a mobile device or on a, on a desktop and You know, I’m seeking certain pages. I’m seeking certain information, and to this day I’m amazed how many high quality organizations put what I call self-serving navigation. They’ll put labels for different pages that make sense to them, but not to the general public, and a person has to search and scratch that. What does that mean? Am I going to this page? where is that? So navigation. And content labeling is kind of step number one. That’s the most important thing aside from the messaging when they come to the site to understand, yes, I’m in the right place. Once they start searching, they should be able to find what they want super intuitively and I. At the, at the risk of going to jargon jail, and I’ll explain this, the tool that you use to get around that is the site map. I don’t know if you’ve heard this before, but sitemap is really just literally a map of all the pages you want on the website with the correct labels. And what’s a correct label? Well, it’s one that you and hopefully your agency or someone that you have spoken to that is not you can agree on that, yes, this is the label we want that’s gonna define this section, and under that section we’re gonna have all of these different pages that continue to feed that experience, so. That’s, that’s a kind of low hanging fruit that you should be able to address. Then you have to think of your critical functions. I mean, number one is if you’re a fundraising organization or that relies on fundraising, you have to have that experience down, you know, when you arrive at that donation page, that’s the moment of truth. So, you know, there’s certain things that you obviously have to do. You, it has to be secure. You shouldn’t be sending them to a third party site for the most part, and there’s plenty of tools now that will allow you to just stay on the website. You want to show impact, right? That’s getting more into the donor, um, you know, fundraising component, but, you know, $100 will give you this, or $2000 will supply that, that kind of thing to, to, um, to, to better engage your donor. And then the form fields, and again, this is a little bit of old school thinking because when we had to build these things manually, that’s when this would be important. Now, every third party product that you use for donations tends to have their user experience down, but. You know, a lot of smaller organizations suffer from this, so you have to make sure if I was a, a, a willing donor and I came here, is this a simple experience for me? Is this an enticing experience? And then uh lastly, I would translate that similar thinking to all of the other conversion aspects on your site. If it’s important to you to get member sign ups, that member process needs to be clean and clear and, and simple to do, um, you know, I, I don’t know, it depends on the organization. If you’re looking to get newsletter signups, are you enticing them in a certain way, so. It’s about thinking of positioning it’s about thinking about that navigation and then the functionality on the site that’s critical for your organization has to be done properly. Lou, how’d you get the BCS Interactive as the company name? Uh, is that your parents? Uh, what, what, what’s, yeah, what’s the BCS? You know, the first podcast I ever went on a couple of years ago, that was the first question he asked me, and I wasn’t ready for it, and I kind of mumbled it. So ever since then I, um, and I should also segue and say that we are about to do a rebrand. So this year you will see a slightly newer name. So BCSM Interactive in part is gonna go away. BCS stands for Business communication Services. So I used to, uh, in my corporate days, way back when, I had always wanted to start my own shop, and in the beginning, I, I truly knew nothing about business and I wanted to have a name that we would grow into, kind of like, um, advanced marketing services or IBM. IBM is an example, International Business Machines, right? So business communication services, and in the beginning we didn’t just do the web, we did all kinds of things. It was copywriting, advertising. So if you think about a business communication service, which in retrospect is really the worst name ever, I mean, it’s, it’s long, it doesn’t, I wouldn’t business communication services interactive.com. It is boring, right? So I need a nap. What, what is that exactly. So, so I truncated it immediately to BCS. initially we were BCS marketing, and then, um, over time when we transitioned strictly into digital became BCS Interactive. So, um, you know, my father was involved. He was a bit of a mentor from, from the beginning. Um, but if, you know, in retrospect, if I could have gone back and started with a different name, I would have, but, uh, yeah, it is what it is. Well, you’re about to, that’s right. That’s right. Was, was your dad a musician at all? No, no, not, not, not at all. Um, my father was, um, he was a businessman, he was a mechanic, he was a Greek immigrant, and, um, you know, he allowed us, he allowed me to explore our passions, and I’m very, very grateful for that. And, and what is it that brought you to drumming? Again, you know, I think we touched on this. It’s hard to answer that. It really is. It’s something about. That beat, you know, something about the, the, the, the, the, the, the bass drum first, followed by the snare, followed by the bass drum, and then being able to make different sounds with different instruments because every drum is a different instrument and seeing older relatives, cousins being able to do that and then seeing these, I’m going to call them guys because all my heroes were guys at the time in that music scene, being able to do incredible things. I don’t know. I, I, you know, I consider myself an ambivert, you know, if you know that term, like both extroverted and introverted. So they say that introverts go towards the drums because you’re, you’re hidden and you don’t have to be in front of anybody, but I don’t think that has anything to do with it. It’s just something about that, that rhythm that attracted me. Was Buddy Rich, uh, an influence on you? Here’s my thought on Buddy. Buddy Rich is by far the greatest technical drummer that ever lived. I mean, it’s almost too much. If you watch him, it’s almost inhuman how good he was. That being said, Some of that was a little off-putting. It was just, you know, the, the drummers that I admired were the ones that had really good technical chops, but Held back a bit and employed that where it was necessary. They had a great feel. I’m thinking about Tony Williams, who played with, uh, Miles Davis. I’m thinking about Max Roach, one of the greatest that ever lived. And then some of the more contemporary guys, Vinny Kaliuta, um, uh, I’m forgetting, Steve Jordan, huge, uh, uh, your listeners are gonna think we’re going way down the rabbit hole, but I, you know, I’m very passionate about this particular topic, so I appreciate you asking. Yeah, I know, who did Steve Jordan play with? Steve Jordan got his start on Saturday Night Live. He was the first drummer on Saturday Night Live when he was a teenager, and then he went off to do a lot of different studio albums, and eventually he got picked up by Keith Richards. So if you ever listen to Keith Richards’ solo albums, that’s Steve Jordan. And then from there, he played with, you know, a bunch of people. Um, he actually filled in for the Stones when, when Charlie Watts died, so you, you might know him there if you’re a Stones fan. And, uh, he’s just got an incredible feel. He looks so cool playing. And um he’s also very passionate about the instrument and I respect that. Luukatzinni. Lou, leave us with uh some parting words. Oh, by the way, I appreciate you being on earlier podcasts so that all, all in preparation for being a, a guest on nonprofit radio. So my, my, my gratitude to those earlier podcasts, you know, all, this is, this is, you’re at the pinnacle here. It’s all, I’m sorry, but it’s, it’s downhill from here. I can, I can see that. Um, well, first of all, thank you so much for having me. And you know, if you don’t mind, uh, Tony, I’m gonna shy away from giving technical parting words. I, I want to share something that I’ve been feeling for the last year, um, because we’re in this industry together and 2025 was so hard. It was so hard on nonprofits because, you know, I don’t want to get political here, but beyond, because of what we were seeing at the federal level, you’re dealing with an industry that was already underfunded, that’s doing great work, um. That, you know, always caught. Crap, forgive my term, for spending in areas that weren’t programmatic, you know, these people that, that, you know, a lot of staff gets burnt out doing what they do in this industry, and I just think it’s unfair. And then came this kind of, I’m gonna call it a cataclysm that really just knocked everybody on their, on their butts. So the parting words that I have for everybody is that, you know, we’re all in this together. Um, I, I’m, I 100% believe that the nonprofit, uh, industry or community will come out of this. Um, better than they were before, unfortunately there’s gonna be a lot of damage along the way, but just, you know, let’s all keep our heads up. Let’s continue to do great work, and if you pull anything from the conversation that you and I had here, again, it’s slow and steady, it’s not trying to win with one huge marketing campaign that knocks it out of the park. It’s putting in these fundamentals that over time will make you a stronger organization. Lou Katsinis, the company is at BCS Interactive.com. Definitely connect with Lou on LinkedIn as he and I have been for years. Lou, thank you so much. It was a real pleasure. Thank, thanks for sharing your, your, your thinking, your, your expertise. Great being with you, Tony. Thank you. Next week, Monthly Giving with Dana Snyder. If you missed any part of this week’s show, I beseech you, find it at Tony Martignetti.com. Our creative producer is Claire Meyerhoff. I’m your associate producer, Kate Martinetti. This show’s social media is by Susan Chavez. Mark Silverman is our web guy, and this music is by Scott Stein. Thank you for that affirmation, Scotty. Be with us next week for nonprofit radio. Big nonprofit ideas for the other 95%. Go out and be great.
Brad Ton: Be Human & Be Yourself, For Best Fundraising
Messy and authentic. That’s how Brad Ton wants you to come to your fundraising relationships, for best outcomes. Be genuinely curious about people, with a dose of strategy, and you’ve got his formula for success. A retired hip-hop recording artist, he has great storytelling advice. He also shares how LinkedIn is vastly underutilized by nonprofits as a relationship builder, and what you can do to excel there. This is an especially fun and spirited conversation. Brad is an account executive in nonprofit technology at Instil.
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Board relations. Fundraising. Volunteer management. Prospect research. Legal compliance. Accounting. Finance. Investments. Donor relations. Public relations. Marketing. Technology. Social media.
Every nonprofit struggles with these issues. Big nonprofits hire experts. The other 95% listen to Tony Martignetti Nonprofit Radio. Trusted experts and leading thinkers join me each week to tackle the tough issues. If you have big dreams but a small budget, you have a home at Tony Martignetti Nonprofit Radio. View Full Transcript
And welcome to Tony Martignetti Nonprofit Radio. Big nonprofit ideas for the other 95%. I’m your aptly named host and the pod father of your favorite hebdominal podcast. I’m traveling this week, so sorry about the echoey sound, low quality laptop mic. I’ll be back in the studio next week. I’m glad you’re with us. I’d come down with bacillary angiomatosis. If you infected me with the idea that you missed this week’s show. Here’s our associate producer, Kate, with what’s coming. Hey Tony, here’s what’s coming. Be human and be yourself for best fundraising. Messy and authentic. That’s how Brad Tun wants you to come to your fundraising relationships for best outcomes. Be genuinely curious about people with a dose of strategy, and you’ve got his formula for success. A retired hip hop recording artist, he has great storytelling advice. He also shares how LinkedIn is vastly underutilized by nonprofits as a relationship builder and what you can do to excel there. This is an especially fun and spirited conversation. Brad is an account executive in nonprofit technology at Instill. On Tony’s take 2. Tales from the gym. Rob, PhD. Here is, be human and be yourself for best fundraising. It’s a genuine pleasure to welcome Brad Tun for his first appearance on nonprofit radio. Brad is an account executive in nonprofit technology at Instill specializing in helping chief development officers and frontline fundraisers bring clarity and simplicity to major gift work. Brad’s approach is rooted in a deep belief that fundraising is fundamentally about human connection. Oh my God, are we, are we simpatico on that? You’ll find the company at Instill.io. And you’ll find Brad very active on LinkedIn. Brad Tunn, welcome to Nonprofit Radio. Uh, that’s the, this is the, the greatest introduction I have ever heard. I, I am like, I’m ready to run through a brick wall right now. So, so thank you for this. All right, I’m glad the enthusiasm is, uh, infectious. Absolutely. We have spent a lot of time getting to know each other on LinkedIn. And we got connected by a mutual friend. Uh, I mean, in terms of your philosophy, that’s what I was not aware of. I see you on LinkedIn a lot. We’re gonna talk about LinkedIn, how you believe it is vastly underutilized. We’re gonna get there and how personal you are on LinkedIn, but we got connected around your belief in. Uh, the humanity of fundraising that, which I said, uh, I had to, I had to digress from your bio. I don’t even give the guy a complete bio without me interjecting my opinion. It says is how, this is how lackluster the host is like the, the, the guy can’t stop but inject his opinion. He doesn’t even give the, uh, a complete bio of the guest before he’s interjecting his own editorial comments. All right, but no, we do connect over that humanity messy. Authentic, present. All right, we’re gonna talk about all that, um. Uh, Share, go deeper. Share your philosophy about, uh, fundraising about major gift work. Yeah, absolutely. I, I think, I think fundraising is about connection, not activity, and Many, most of the fundraisers I talked to in 2025, almost 2026, are buried in reports and systems that don’t reflect the real state of their donor relationships, right? The, those, those in between the lines. Um, those soft skills, those things that really make people tick, and I am a firm believer, I’m a firm believer in a lot of things because I’m stubborn. The red-headed, uh, stereotypes are true. Um, but I’m a firm believer that connection and, and human relationships start with a deep-rooted sense of genuine curiosity, where I can seek to understand, not seek to respond. Um, and, and really be focused on what is the why of this person. And, and as you know, Tony, I, I’ve been listening to the podcast a long time. Fundraising is storytelling, and I know every nonprofit leader knows that at their core, it’s storytelling. But it’s, it, it, people don’t give because they want to support the organization, right? People give because they see themselves in your story. Whatever your story is that you have hopefully shared with them, they see themselves as a part of that. And, and we have to be able to give them that opportunity to join our story. Um, I’m gonna stop there or else I’ll ramble and that’ll be the end of it. Just hand over the mic. I’ll turn mine off. All right. Um, no, there’s so much, there’s so much there that I, you know, at all levels. I mean, that’s a high level, which is exactly what I asked you for. You know, I, I, I’m, I’m nodding, I’m smiling. Yeah, absolutely. Uh, I’m just, I agree. Um, but we, we get this. I don’t idea this. fallacy that major gift officers and, and fundraisers generally need to present a certain way that we need to, there’s a facade. And if we’re not professional, if we’re not, Uh, you know, exact, that we’re gonna disappoint the, the donors or the prospects. We’re gonna disappoint the nonprofit that we, that we love, who, whose work we love, otherwise we wouldn’t be doing the fundraising for them. We’re gonna let them down if we don’t have the, the major gift persona. Cut that off at its knees, please. Yeah, I’m, I’m with you. Um, and, and this gets, uh, fundraising is life. It, it is. Um, and, and there’s a lot of parallels and, and things that I’ve learned the hard way through this experience, but all of those things you said, I, I need to present myself a certain way. I’m gonna let the prospect down. I’m not gonna get this major gift. I, I, I, I, it’s all rooted in Self-centered fear, right? It is, and, and, and I don’t mean that in an egotistical way, like I’m going in thinking I’m better than or anything like that, but I’m focused on myself. I’m worried about how I’m gonna be perceived. I’m worried about, am I gonna get what I want, which is a gift. What if I don’t? What if, what if, what if? Instead of a complete mindset shift where I’m focused on you. On you. And that’s where I get back to this sense of genuine curiosity. If I come into a conversation completely detached from any sort of outcome. I don’t control whether or not you give. I can’t, I can’t open up your wallet for you. I can’t make the wire transfer. I can’t. I have to let go of those outcomes. I, I, and, and, and detach. And I have to focus on you, the human being, and get curious because if I don’t, I’m not gonna actively listen and I’m gonna miss an opportunity for connection. And when we seek connection first, Amazing things happen that otherwise never, never would have. I was talking to somebody the other day and I, I can’t remember, but they’re like, I, my business is better than ever. And it, it got better than ever. When I started openly referring. People that came my way to other people in my industry because I knew they were a better fit for what they wanted to do. Right? I wasn’t, I wasn’t aligned, but I started making those referrals, right? Instead of trying to square peg round hole stuff. And then the universe for whatever reason, my business skyrocketed, right? It’s the same thing in fundraising. I think when we look at the human. And we’re messy, and like we talked about, and we’re imperfect. Yes, I wanna show up professional, right? I, I want to represent myself in the organization the right way. 100%. Yeah, like, yeah, you know, I’m gonna show up on time for the meeting or even early so I know I’m on time. You know, I’m gonna respond to messages, you know, we’re not talking about being messy like being messy, lackluster and a poor performer. We’re talking about being a, you know, a messy human being. Yeah, like, yeah, like. No. Here’s the, the, the secret is that no one, no one has life figured out. Not a single person, right? Like, can we just acknowledge that and just say how hard things are and how, how, how unpredictable things are? Do I want to, do I want to, um, Give a prospect the idea that my organization is unorganized and scrambling, and no, not necessarily, but at the same time, I can be transparent with what we need and why we need it without beating around the bush, without coming up with some You know, uh, my, my, my vocabulary is nowhere near the, uh, the level that yours is, Tony. But, but I, I can’t, I can’t come up with, right? I don’t need to come up with some overarching, incredibly creative way to say that we could use your support, and here’s why. Here’s what it would mean. Yeah. Right? Um, that’s what I mean by messy. It’s like, I’m not, I’m not gonna say this perfectly. And if you hear me ramble a little bit, it’s cause I get excited and I truly believe in what we’re doing. Like just level with people. Yeah, I love the excitement. When the passion comes through, it’s, it’s infectious. You know, I, uh, being Italian, I tend to wave my arms around or not, you know, and we’re doing this, and we, you know, we, we had, you know, our census was 15,000 patients on any given day in New York City or, you know, whatever. Can you imagine 15,000 patients? So, um, all right. So, yeah. Um, Honesty, you know, just honesty. Um, and when you do make a mistake, like I was saying, you know, you, you, you respond to messages. If you don’t, if you don’t respond, if you mess something up, just apologize. I’m sorry. I’m, the email went longer. I’m sorry it took me longer to get back to that email or that voicemail than, than I wanted and certainly than you wanted. I’m sorry about that. But let’s still meet. I, I still would like to meet you. I just, you know, I, I messed up, uh, answering a voicemail, but, but let’s still get together because this cause, you know, merits your, merits your attention. It happens. I, uh, it happens. I was messaging with, uh, a prospect of mine a couple of weeks ago. Um, and her name is Jamie, and I typed Jamie, um, and she called me on it. Which she had every right to do. And I responded immediately and just, you know, I think previously I may have got. Earlier in life, maybe defensive or gosh, she’s taking that a little too seriously. What’s the big deal? What’s the big deal? But immediately I let my guard down and I immediately, I immediately own it and say, Janie, first of all, my apologies. I can’t imagine how many times that happens to you. My last name is Tun, and you wouldn’t believe how many times people glance and they call me Tom because like, I don’t know how it happens, but it does, and I know what that, how frustrating that is. So I did, I apologize and Off to the races. And that’s a tiny, tiny example of just. Just, just show up. Just show up. People are, the bar has never been lower for human connection ever, ever. If we just show up, it, it’s, it’s amazing what happens. Yeah, human connection and, and customer service. That’s a great callout, the way, if you, if you, I think, I think the average customer service is crap. So we’re just asking you to be a little, you just have to be better than crap. You really do. I, I was, I’m, I, I got a, uh, I, I’ve tried out some new technology on my end, and I, uh, there was a bug with it, and I emailed support, and I know it’s an entrepreneur that’s running it. He’s doing everything, and he immediately emailed me back and said, I’m on it. That’s all I needed. Yeah, yeah. It took the rest of the day, but I didn’t care. I wasn’t sitting around wondering like what’s going on. Um, yeah, that responsiveness is, you’re right, that’s a good call out though. You talk about quality over quantity. Yeah. What do you, what, what do you mean by that? I think in the sense as it pertains to fundraising, it’s being intentional and reaching out to people as human. I think, um, I think people are so burned out over automation. Um, that’s not to say we don’t send out an end of year thank you email or something, you know, I’m, I’m not in, I’m not in the comms world. Um, I’m not saying that, but I, I, I think, I, I think there has to be intention around building real genuine relationships, um, and we’re about to be in 2026, and I continue to see, uh, we are gonna be when this, when this, we’re, we’re airing this in, in January, so it’s there you go, my apologies. It is 2026. It’s 2026. We’re there. We’re recording made it congratulations December, mid-December, yeah, um, we’re there and I still see. Donors not being thanked. Like, it’s unbelievable. It, it’s, and, and, and, and they’re, they’re not retained. Um, so by quality over quantity, what I mean is we gotta stop spraying and praying. We gotta stop trying to give our major gift officers portfolios of 34, 500 people. There is no way to manage those relationships effectively, none. And you’re doing yourself as an organization a disservice by thinking they can. Um, they may not tell you they can’t because they don’t want to disappoint you, development leaders, but they can’t. Um, and you’re gonna lose way more than you win. That’s what I mean by, by quality. What do you think is a normal, uh, reasonable, uh, prospect? Uh, prospect pool of responsibility. Yeah, my, uh, I’m gonna paraphrase here, but, uh, our VP of, uh, of, um, of, of partner success, Eric Franz, will, will get on me because I can’t remember the name of the law, but there’s a law out there with number of relationships you can actually as a human being, you, uh, and I can’t remember it. I’m terrible with that. 100 to 150 is the max. Like that’s, that’s it. That’s it. Um, if you’re, if you’re a leader and you’re having to. Uh, split your time, then it needs to be even smaller than that, um, but I’ve talked to, look, uh, I talked to major gift officers and major gift leaders all day every day, and you wouldn’t believe the number that are the numbers of portfolio sizes out there. 40, you see, you, you hear about 250, like 3, 250, 300 in the in the thousands sometimes in, in the thousands. Um, and, and, and managing touch, touch points with automations and, uh, it it lends itself to being reactive instead of proactive, right? Like I need to wait for someone to come to us or ask something or whatever, uh, to bubble up to me rather than being able to manage and, and build effective relationships, right? Yeah, over 150, uh, in a, in a, in a prospect portfolio, uh, prospect and donor. That is antithetical to what you and I are talking about. You can’t have human connection with more than, you know, whatever that law is that we don’t need a law, we don’t need the law. We just, it’s, we just know it’s common sense. I mean, there’s only so many, there are only so many relationships you can manage. And just to make it explicit, you know, people are, are. Falling off the, off the portfolio as time goes by, you know, the, the, the folks who you, uh, get to solicit solicitation for, and they say, no, you know, I’m just, I’m not at that level with this organization. I’m gonna, I’m gonna keep doing my, $50 a year or my $500 a year, but I’m, I’m not gonna get to the level that you asked me. Uh, I’ll, I’ll just continue. OK, well, that person then, however you define major gift in your port in your nonprofit, that person is no longer a major gift prospect. So they come off the, they come off the, that portfolio and another person joins them, join, joins the port. Portfolio doesn’t join them because they, they’re no longer in it. So, so the, the portfolio is, is evolving, but we’re not letting it get above the, the 150, which is what I’ve typically seen 100, 100, 100 to 150 max. Yep, you got it. Um, yeah, you got it. And, and, and I think, I think people that communicate back with you that they’re gonna stay at their level, that’s wonderful. That’s wonderful. Thank you. Yeah, I’m doing my job. That, that’s effective communication, and you never know what might help happen down the line, but I’m never gonna completely forget them. Maybe that goes to a different, a different department or a different, a different process, um, but we gotta, we gotta stick with engagement, and that, that’s any information is good, is helpful information. Absolutely. And, and you’re, you’re thanking them for all the giving that led to this solicitation. I mean, they’ve, they’ve been so loyal that you, you thought they would, well, you considered them a good major gift prospect. Turns out they, they, you were right. Your assessment wasn’t wrong, but that, it’s just not, they’re not at that level with your nonprofit. So then you move on, you know, as, as, as we’re talking about, but, but you’re grateful for the giving that brought them to the solicitation. And for their commitment to continue it. That’s right. Absolutely. And I do that. I do that, I, a lot in planned giving where I, I’ll solicit a gift in a will, most typically, but whatever type of planned gift, and the person said, you know, no, you know, my estate is for my children, or I do love the work, but not at that level, like to, to include you in my long-term, my, my estate plan or my retirement plan. But I’m, you know, I’ll, I’ll certainly keep up what I’m, what I’m doing, what I’ve been doing. You know, we thank you, thank you, because it, because all that giving brought us to this, to this conversation. So thank you for everything that you have done and that you just committed to keep doing it. Thank you. What a blessing transparency is. Yeah, absolutely. Let’s talk a little bit about, uh, Brad Tunn. You have, uh, you have a background. You have a very interesting background that drew me to you. This is what drew me to you on LinkedIn at first. I think I first found you through a comment and I clicked on the guy’s. Retired hip hop artist, yeah, that’s talk, talk, tell us, tell us about that work. Pretty standard life path, right, for so humble, red. I mean, doesn’t, didn’t everybody have a, have a, have a hip hop career? No. So, uh, I guess I, um. Yeah, I, I, I went to, to school. I went to, to Indiana University, uh, for sports marketing and management because, uh, the movie Jerry Maguire had come out and that’s what I wanted to do with my life, right? I wanna be Jerry Maguire. Oh yeah, um, so I had, I had a brief stint in the sports business world and found out very quickly that it was not for me for a variety of, of, of reasons, um. And um I was a, uh a single guy, no kids, living on my own, and didn’t really know what I wanted to do. Um, so I did what any rational human being would do. I had uh a, a, a, a small amount of money in a savings account, not much. I, uh, drained it, went to the local Best Buy, bought a bunch of studio equipment, and set up a, a, a studio in my apartment, my one-bedroom apartment, and embarked on what I had no idea at the time. Uh, would become an 8, 9-year career as a, as a hip hop artist. I released 4 albums. I toured, uh, I did shows. Um, I would work odd jobs on the side that I was overqualified for to help pay the bills because, you know, the, the Indiana hip hop money was not making anyone rich. Um, that’s not a huge hip hop market. It’s not, even with the intern, even with the intern. That, um, and it was phenomenal experience. It, it’s created so many life lessons for me. I, I can’t even begin to tell you, um, when I started, it was bad, Tony, like it was bad. The, the music was not good when I started, yeah, you’re just, I mean, what did you know from, what did you know from hip hop? I, I knew I loved to listen to it like I, and I. I think it was a very, a, a very, um, helpful emotional outlet. I loved the emotion behind it. I loved the underdog mentality. Um, you know, who were some of your influences? I may not know them, but who? Oh, I mean, so, I mean, I grew up in the 90s, so anything, uh, Tupac, Notorious BIG, Nas, Jay-Z, Eminem. I mean, everything that your parents hope and pray you don’t listen to as a teenager, right? I became, yeah, now I couldn’t speak to any of those lifestyles because I did not live them. However, that same type of, uh, I would say, uh, emotional outlet and, and therapeutic way of writing, uh, was great for me. And what I found out very quickly. Is that, man, the sky’s the limit when you really, really work hard. I mean, as simple as a lesson as that sounds, like, I was never the most talented rapper. I did get better, thank, thank God to everybody around, um, but I just outworked everyone and, and made connections and, and did things that people were scared to try to do and, uh, it opened up a lot of doors and I’ve carried that with me, like, and as a parent, I can tell my kids the same thing and really believe it, right? Um, it’s, so. Yeah, absolutely phenomenal, uh, experience, um, and it’s been, we still talk about it, uh, to this day. It, it’s, it’s huge. If, um, I’m sure in a, in a, in a closet somewhere in this house, there’s a case full of Brad Reel CDs still, uh, that went unsold from that era. So if anybody ever wants one, happy to ship it out. Nobody has CD players anymore. Listen, listen to. that that nobody has them. Well, you have the discs. All right, so you were Brad Real Real, R E A L, uh, yeah, that was it. Yep, yep, Brad that was it. All right, yeah, yeah. Is there, is there still some music online? There is, um, there is, uh, Spotify and, and all those streaming platforms. Uh, my last album is still out there. It was called, uh, Letters to the Editor. That was 2012. Uh, it’s still there. It’s still there. So go stream it occasionally, randomly, I’ll get a check in the mail for 17 cents from Apple. It’s great. It’s really great. Letters to the editor. Look at you appealing to the mainstream media in your final album. That’s exactly right. Maybe this media, maybe this medium isn’t the best one for me. I, I’m gonna try, I’m gonna try editorial. I’m gonna try op ed pieces. There you go. You got it. Um, did you do concerts? How big, like how, how big, how big venues? What, um, so, um, at the peak of it, I, uh, I opened for, and I don’t know if anybody know who these people are, but I opened for, uh, I played a show with Cypress Hill. I played a show with Wiz Khalifa and Cypress Hill. Cypress Hill is going insane. Insane in the membrane in the membrane. Insane in the brain. I remember them. And I played, uh, I played our amphitheater here in Indiana, um, in front, well, I played as the doors were opening. So the capacity of the venue is 12 to 15,000, but, you know, nobody was really there yet. But I was on the stage opening for Wiz Khalifa. Um, but for every one of those there were, you know, Tuesday nights at the local hole in the wall performing for the other rappers and their girlfriends, you know, in Bloomington, Indiana. There you go, plenty of shows in Bloomington, Indiana. So what’s the, what’s that feeling? All right, suppose there are, there’s several 1000. Suppose you got 5000 rap fans. Uh, you’re opening. OK, I understand your opening act, but still. You, you got, you’re bringing power. What, what does that feel like? Thousands of people moving to your words. I, I don’t even know where to, where to, how to describe it. There is no feeling in the world, even right now, just thinking about that. I, my juices just get flowing. Um, there is the adrenaline, the, like I just feel at, at home there. Um, it’s such an expression of, of art, and, uh, I took it very seriously. If people were gonna come out, I wanted to act, you know, bring the energy and, and make the The audience be a part of it. Um, but it’s like they say, right? I don’t, um, I’m a big sports guy and, and when like, when, when football players retire, they say it had nothing to do with, Sunday afternoons, right? When you saw me on the field on Sundays, it was Monday through Saturday that I couldn’t do anymore, you know, the, the grind, the practice, the, uh, I mean, I was, I was working 40 to 50 hours a week at a regular job to help pay my bills and I was doing hip hop for 40 to 50, 60 hours a week on top of that. Um, and it’s like, at some point, I started having kids and I was like, ah, Yeah, yeah, but the rush, the rush of the fans, the, the adrenaline, they’re moving to your words, they’re moving to you. They’re moving to you. Um, yeah, there’s something really cool, and I’ve taken that with me. Like I’ve never really had, um, public speaking. I do. Um, every now and then I’ll get in front of a group of people now, um, in different capacities, and, and, and I love it, and it’s all because of that. Like, it’s all because of that. And, uh, yeah, I, I’ve, I’ve really, really, really enjoyed, enjoyed that part of it. It’s time for Tony’s take 2. Thank you, Kate. I’ll say Happy New Year again. It’s uh it’s only the 2nd week of January, so I’ll I’ll throw in a happy New Year there, everybody. I’ve got a tails from the gym. This one’s uh revisiting Rob, the retired Marine, Semper Fi. Very interesting guy, as it turns out, I, uh, I’ve only ever overheard conversations with him. You’ll remember Rob is the guy who got the, uh, sourdough bread. From Kim. And other sordid stories about Rob, the, the retired Marine. December 5. I got chatting with him, you know, he, he had been talking about a Marine Corps reunion. That he was hosting, uh, it was the 250th anniversary. Uh, he was hosting it at a local restaurant that I’ve been to, and I’d been hearing about him. I’d hearing him talk about it for a few weeks, inviting folks. Um, and then I saw him in the men’s room, and it, I, it was a little awkward, you know, it was just the two of us, and so I, I, I don’t know, I felt, I felt awkward not saying anything. So, As we’re walking out of the men’s room, I, I, and, and we were leaving together. Um, we didn’t do anything in the men’s room together, which is just a coincidence that we were leaving together. I asked, how’d the party go, the Marine Corps reunion party. So we got talking. And Rob, uh, actually is doing his PhD in global policy. At the Harvard Kennedy School of Government. And he’s very near finishing his degree. Next month, he defends his PhD dissertation and all the research around it. That’s pretty impressive. Uh, a, a, a Harvard PhD, um, he has a master’s degree in North Africa and Middle Eastern studies. He did marine tours in Afghanistan, multiple tours. So this guy is, is, you know, he’s not only worldly, like well traveled, but a student of the world. His master’s degree in North Africa and Middle East, and he’s doing his PhD in global policy. Um, his PhD dissertation, I think it’s, uh, I think it’s called While We Were Sleeping or As We Were Sleeping. And it’s about. Failures in. American and Israeli. Policy over many years that led to the, um, the Israeli attacks. Um, by the, by the Palestinians, uh, in the Gaza Strip. So he studied that, you know, the, these technology, but also, um, military failures, political, I guess, I mean, I’m saying failures. I mean, it’s an analysis of all these factors that, um, I think essentially his thesis is that that these factors led to, Uh, the attack So, very interesting. And his daughter is a pediatric oncologist in New York City. So Rob, our, uh, our marine friend, um, Semper Fi, very interesting guy. Uh, and I haven’t had a chance to talk to him since. This is all, this is all in one conversation at the gym, and I haven’t seen him since. But I, I know his dissertation defense is coming up, so I’ll, I’m, I’m obviously gonna ask him about it when, uh, when I see him. Very interesting. Rob, PhD Rob. And I don’t think anybody else in the gym knows. I’ve never heard him talk about it. Interesting when you talk to people, right? That is Tony’s take 2. Kate. I’m proud of you for socializing for once in the gym. Oh, thank you. Usually you’re making people angry by stealing their spot or what. Mrs. Blood and Soil, that’s Val. Yes, yes, you’re right, um. Yeah, I, I reached out, uh, like I said, it was, it was a little, it just felt awkward walking out with the guy who I’ve seen dozens of times in the gym. So I chatted him. Yes, I, I opened the conversation. Thank you very much for being proud. We’ve got Beauco butt loads more time. Here’s the rest of Be Human and Be Yourself for Best fundraising with Brad Tun. So tie that into today’s work around this, this is, must be an influence on your, your storytelling ability. What, what, what can you, what can we take from, That experience of yours and, and convey it into our storytelling. Yeah, I think it’s all about, yeah, it’s, it’s about being vulnerable. It’s about, uh, self-discovery. It’s about being OK with what I don’t control, um, and the unknown, uh, and what that allows me to do as a human being is to really just, lean in and engage with life. If it’s fundraising, if it’s personal relationships, if it’s business relationships. I don’t have a sense of fear in what if, what if this doesn’t work out? What if By doing this, I don’t get to do something else. There’s none of these things that truly come up anymore. We all have real life things, right? We all have real adversity, real trauma, real things that happen, and I’m not talking about those. What I’m talking about is the everyday, um, when I’m able to just show up as, as truly myself and understanding that things are gonna work out the way they should. As long as I’m truly me. And whatever is meant for me will happen. That, I think that’s where the real lesson is, is. I can’t force, I can’t force life. Like I have to live life on life’s terms. I can’t force things to happen. Um, I can work hard. I can, I can show up on time, right? I can. I mean, I, I can get myself together. I can, I can do these things, absolutely. Doesn’t mean I don’t grind, doesn’t mean I don’t have goals, right? Um, but there’s something beautiful about Just just letting, letting go and stop trying to fight so hard. I don’t know if that’s a good response or not to what you were asking, but that’s kind of where my mind went with it. Well, it’s personal, it’s, so it is very good. It’s very, it’s very instructive. Um, you know, controlling, one of the things of many you just said, you know, letting go of what you can’t control. You, yeah, you said earlier, you know, you can’t control whether the donor is gonna make their donor-advised fund contribution that you’re soliciting or take out their wallet or, you know, whatever. You can’t control that. What you can control is, How, well, yeah, how you, you know, how you come, how you present, everything we’ve, everything we’ve been talking about. You can, you can control your own. Your own self and, and in being, in being your own self and just presenting as authentic just coming as authentic. I don’t even want to say presenting. It makes it sound like a presentation. Just come as you are. Come as yourself. Just come. And if I, and if I share, and I could, I could level with you if, if I’m an MGO and, and you’re a, you’re a prospect, I can say, Tony, I, I don’t know if, if your why and what you believe in aligns with what we do in our story, but here’s why I thought it might. And like, I may be off base, like you’re, and it’s OK if you tell me that, but here’s why I, I, I thought it might, right? When you were talking earlier, you mentioned This and we’re trying to do that. Does that resonate like I can just. I can be curious. I don’t, I don’t know because I, I, I think, um, I keep reading too, Tony, and this may be a separate tangent, but I keep reading, you probably see some of the same things that I do where there’s a mindset somewhere in the corner of fundraising where that, that, that raising funds, uh, feels like begging. I keep seeing it and I’m like, I don’t, I don’t understand that. Like I. I, I don’t understand that mindset that like we’ve already lost if we feel like raising dollars is begging or asking for, yeah, that’s, that’s, that’s coming with, uh, with humbleness and, and almost a contrition. I’m sorry to have to ask. No, no, we, no, we ask confidently, we ask firmly, uh, we may get no’s, we do get no’s. You will get nos are great, by the way, nos are great. That’s fine. Now you know where you stand, as you said earlier, you know, the information is valuable, but, but we don’t, we don’t ask with, with, uh, sheepishly, sheepishly, awkwardly, so, you know, uh, quietly and, and, and contritely. No, no. All right. You’ve said a couple of times, curiosity, curiosity. I think you’re talking about curiosity about people. Just Yeah, jeez, that why this curiosity about people. How does this help a, a fundraiser? I, I, I, I think then I don’t make any assumptions, right? Um, I was talking to, um, A chief development officer of a, of a larger nonprofit, um, last week, and she was telling me a story about how they have different, uh, I was at a, uh, a school and this person had this potential major donor had an engineering background, right? All their degrees. These were in engineering, um, they were, uh, uh, uh, an alumnus of the engineering school and all that, and the person was on their wealth screening tools, like, this is a prime candidate to give a major gift to our engineering school, right? And they kept hitting this person with engineering. Uh, information and testimonies about the engineering school and they were building a new wing for it and this, that and the other, and they were getting no traction. Fast forward, they got a meeting with the guy. They walked into his house, uh, in person, and he’s got incredible artwork up, right, within his house, and they start asking about the artwork. Long story short, the guy was an engineer because his parents pretty much made him. He always wanted to be an artist. Um, and, uh, we’re able to get a large gift for the art portion of the school, right? Uh, so that, that’s what I mean about curiosity is not coming in with any assumptions. And, and when I take, when I detach, like I was talking about before, then I’m able to come with really no true agenda because I’m not focused on an outcome. I’m not focused on This is how this is gonna go. I can have my roadmap about how I run a meeting and what that looks like and what, what materials to bring and, and all of that. But I need to really unders like what makes you tick. And let the conversation go. The way it goes. And, and, and that’ll lend itself. I have a 2 year old right now, so I’m constantly reminded of what genuine curiosity is. Now I need to have better questions than why, why, why, why, but that’s helpful, you know, never satisfied. Right. I consider it, uh, almost a gift when I can meet somebody in their office or in their home. You’re surrounded by, by, um, artifacts as, uh, that, that, that reveal the person. Where, where did you catch that fish? Whose wedding is that photo from? Uh, you have a boat. Uh, where’s that home? Who are, are those your, are those your parents? Are those your grandchildren? What, what, oh, I see you went to Indiana University at Bloomington. What, what did you study there? You know, you’re surrounded by potential questions and, and that’s where curiosity. You know, it just becomes so, so valuable and it’s way more fun. Don’t we think that’s more fun than like all this structure and process, and I don’t know, maybe it’s just me because I’m not like a, I’m not a detail-oriented guy at my core. I have to really focus on, on, on a step by step process because I usually just figure out the temperature of the water after I jump in. Like that’s, that’s just, um, but I just find it, it’s much more fun way to live. Yeah, because you don’t know what you’re gonna learn. You don’t know. Yeah, yeah. Uh, yeah, it’s curiosity about people. Uh, that, that’s, that, that’s how you’ll learn about them, what motivates them, you know, like the engineer who’s, uh, who wanted to, really wanted to fund the arts. You got something else in your background that you are very open about. You’re very open about it on LinkedIn, uh, your own sobriety and recovery. How does that, how does that help your work? Oh my gosh, um, I’m, I’m, I’m grateful, you know, uh, my journey through sobriety has not been a linear one. I first got sober from alco I’m an alcoholic, uh, back in 2017. And uh my sobriety date now is January 26, 2024. So you can see, it’s not, it’s a, it’s been a journey of self-discovery, um, and we don’t know what we don’t know. Um, but it is the absolute focal point and foundation of my entire life. And when I speak to these things, I’m actually, I’m, I’m throwing some lingo out here without even realizing it when I, when I, when I say, you know, don’t, uh, let go of what we don’t control. Um, showing up vulnerable and, and human, it’s all centered in, um, in, in self-centered fear. It’s all centered in recovery and, and, and sobriety for me, are, are these lessons. I am so grateful. Uh, To be in recovery. I’m so grateful. And, and the reason for it, I, I’m pretty confident that I was the type of person without this disease of alcoholism. I was gonna live a fairly mediocre existence. I just, you know, I, I had some good times, some bad times. I was gonna kind of go through life, uh, like, like that, um, not, never truly engaging with my own life, never trying to reach my full potential or grow. It just, for whatever reason, um, but, but through all of this, What’s been such a, an incredible blessing is, is I know, I, when I wake up every day, I have two choices. One is to be the absolute best version of myself that I can possibly be. The other is to lose everything I have. That there’s no middle ground, uh, for, for a person in, in, in recovery, at least for me. There’s no middle ground. Um, I don’t, I don’t believe in the word maintenance or maintain. I think we’re either growing or dying. And if I’m not getting better or growing or, or learning something new every day, then I gotta be careful. Um, so yeah, that, that has been. I, I, I just see life completely differently now and to live a life without. Uh, fear of, fear of what you’re gonna think of me, fear of if I’m gonna get what I want. Are you gonna take what I have, um, all these things. Uh, and the universe has a beautiful way of, of attracting like-minded people to you. Once you start to live authentically, you just attract authentic people. It’s, it’s crazy, right? Was it the hip hop period in your life that, uh, brought you to the alcohol addiction? You know what, um, it’s a, it’s a great question. Looking back, you know, hindsight’s twenty-twenty. Um, it certainly did not help, um. What really did it for me was somewhere in my late 20s to early 30s, I developed um really debilitating anxiety, like real bad, panic attacks, the thought of like laundry to do would put me in the fetal position. It, it just and it’s hard to explain if you’ve never been there, but like, uh, mental health is very, very big to me, um, big deal. And I found out quickly that alcohol made that go away. It made it go away, took away the anxiousness, like just like that, and it became my best friend, um, until it didn’t. Until it didn’t, that didn’t last very long. Um, it’s a selfish, it’s a very selfish and demanding friend. Oh my gosh, it’s a jealous, jealous more, right? Yeah, um, and what I learned the hard way is that, you know, I was attempting to numb out anxiety or fear and, and, but you don’t get to pick what emotions you numb. So I was also numbing joy and happiness and presence and all of these things, um, and it was killing me fast, um. The gift of desperation. Um, I’m fortunate enough that I get to work with, with other people in recovery a lot. Um, it’s, it’s something that fills my cup. And I tell people all the time like. Uh, even if I could, I wouldn’t give you, I wouldn’t give you the gift of desperation. You gotta, you gotta get it yourself. You got, and, and because you have to experience that, um, I’m as hard-headed as they come. And uh throughout my journey, I thought I had it figured out. And I was doing so well that I created a life that was beyond my wildest dreams. I married the woman of my dreams, had a, we have a beautiful blended family, all of these things, but then I started, I started repeating some of the patterns. That I was doing when I had blamed it on my first marriage, my, uh, an environment that was, uh, tumultuous, like a, a career I didn’t want to be in, like all these things, and I’m like, it, it dawned on me that it was me. Um, and I was on the verge of losing everything that mattered to me, and that was it. That was it. No way out. None. And it was like, you just got to let go. Stop trying so hard. Uh, and ever since, it’s just been, it’s a beautiful thing. Yeah, I don’t know. Well, congratulations on where you are. Thanks. I appreciate it. You said it’s, you said it’s not linear, so I, I recognize that there are, there are struggles, maybe struggles every day, you know, I don’t, but congratulations on where you are and, and also just thank you for sharing that. Thank you. I appreciate the opportunity. Um, yeah, thank you. What amazes me about your, Brad, your, about your philosophy is, I mean, you work for a company, uh, called Instill. They’re Instill.io, Clearly a technology company, but you’re humanity forward. Yeah. Do you have any, any dissonance in the company? I love that question. And here’s the thing, it’s why I lean into it. Um, human is, we’ve been, we’ve been talking this whole time about to be human, right? How to be human, how to show up more human. And that’s in a world of AI, look, I use AI all day, every day, I use it all the time, uh, for work, for my grocery lists, for all kinds of stuff, right? So that I can show up more human to the human parts of my life, right? That’s what technology should do. It should fill some gaps where we need it. Take away admin, manual things that Anybody could be doing so that I have now the bandwidth, the tools, the insights to show up more human. That’s what it should. It should not replace. Any human connections. That’s why if you ever see me posting, if you ever see me commenting, if you ever get an email from me, if you ever get a text message from me, it is me. And I, there are so many tools out there that promise You know, Gold at the end of the rainbow, if you just automate all your workflows, please don’t do that. Please don’t do that. Please show up as yourself, please. Um, there’s plenty of other ways that, that technology can help you, but when you’re communicating with another human being, it should be you. So, is it, is it as simple as, you know, these, the tools that, that you use in the, in the ways that you use them, just give you greater time and, and, and bandwidth to, to be, to take the time to be present. With other, with other humans, is it, is that simple, or is there, is there you got it? No, I, I, I think that’s it. And, and maybe see things that I couldn’t see otherwise, right? Things that maybe would fall through the cracks. So not to like get too, um, into the weeds, but like if I have a, a, a portfolio of donors, um, if I don’t know what to go look for, I won’t find it, right? So if I can have things surface to me that I didn’t even know I needed. Like relationships between donors. Um, or the sentiment of that donor the last 2 or 3 times we’ve talked is going down. I need to nurture that relationship before it’s too late. These are the types of insights that where I can now be proactive. Instead of reactive. Because if, again, if I don’t know what to go look for, I can’t find it. So, you know, I’m staring at a spreadsheet. Who do I want to reach out to today? Well, it’s been 6 months since I gave Tony a phone call. I guess I’ll give it to him even though he gives every December. Why am I calling him? Like what, why? With what message? And, and, and I have to take all that time to think about those things before I do it. This is why we burn out, right? Is, is we’re just kind of, we’re wandering in the dark. Um, I guess that’s what I mean. All right. Let’s switch to LinkedIn Yeah. You would like, you’d like nonprofits to be doing a lot more with LinkedIn. You are very active there. It, it brought us together, uh, so there are downsides to the tool, obviously. That’s sorry for that. Putting those aside, putting that, that, that unfortunate, uh, relationship aside, no. What, what, what, what are we not, what are we not seeing in, in, in nonprofits, uh, capacity that, that we ought to be exploiting? So here’s, here’s the way I view LinkedIn. I view it as, um, a neighborhood or a coffee shop, right? And if I’m a nonprofit leader. Um, my donors or potential donors are sitting in this coffee shop and I can pull up a seat right at their table and it’s not rude or creepy, right? I can do that. So, um, I can get in the comments, I can, I can post about Things that my organization is doing and start to formulate my own neighborhood of who my prospects are, who my donors are, and we’re interacting all day every day. So when I go to make that phone call or that ask or that piece of outreach later in the year, they already know me, we’ve already had a warmed-up conversation, right? I am top of mind and It is blue ocean. No one else is doing this, right? No one is doing it, and, and you’ll see it out there. It’s, it’s. It’s flooded with salespeople. And, um, LinkedIn gurus and all the things that are worthwhile, but in the nonprofit space, I see very little of fundraising leaders out there. sharing their why and, and, and being personable and approachable. It’s one thing for me to have the organization’s page, right? Come to our, come to our gala, come to our event, and I’m, I’m reposting it, right? If, if I’m Brad, if I’m the development director of XYZ nonprofit. I should be speaking to and posting to the universe why I’m there, what, what brings me joy, what fills my cup, um, start to get in the comments of, if I have a donor database of 150 major donors, I need to find them on LinkedIn, follow them, connect with them, be in their comments, right? Find out who else is commenting on their stuff, right? And that’s how I do outreach. That’s how I build connection, and no one else is doing this, and it blows my mind. Um, I’ve been consistently on LinkedIn for, I mean, I’ve had an account for a long, long time, but every day for 8 months. OK. And I can’t tell you the number of relationships, and yes, business, I’ve drummed up, but more importantly than that, community and connection. It, it’s been, it’s been absolutely Incredible and added so much value to my life. You can share behind the scenes moments about the organization, reflect, share donor impact stories, right? Leader leaders posting with their own voice, so I can, I can be human. People will relate to that, right? I wanna know, um, I, I give to a handful of organizations here in Indiana, um, and I love a couple of them because the, um, the Chief Development Officer. Posts about um moving her kids into college, right? Or just, just messy everyday things. It is so awesome. And now I have an emotional connection to that organization. When that same person talks to me about having a difficult moment with their kid after school, and then 2 or 3 days later is reflecting on a donor story about their nonprofit and then going and making an ask for a campaign, I see the human. Um, anyway, I’ll, I’ll get off my soapbox, but I just think it’s untapped territory. Um, I think there’s fear in putting yourself out there, which I can understand, but it, it, it’ll come back to you tenfold. Yeah, you’re being vulnerable. Um, and I, I think a lot of what attracts people to you and, and, A community around you is because you are so, you, you are vulnerable, you are personal, you are intimate in a, a, a, a, a good number of your LinkedIn posts, which I’ve commented on and told you that I admire that. And I’m telling you now, I, I admire your vulnerability and, and it’s more than presence. I mean, it’s, it’s, it’s an intimacy. You, you, you do share, you, you share some intimate stuff. Well, uh, thank you. I appreciate that. Um, I think likewise, um, not just with the podcast, but, um, I appreciate your ability to, um, articulate, I think what a lot of people are thinking and feeling, but put it into words that makes it digestible for a lot of people, um, and you’re not shying away from things which I find so refreshing because We can pretend all day long, not just with fundraising, but I, I, we can act like everything is, is wonderful and, and great, and there’s so much good out there, but I think being constructive, um, and always wanting to improve and get better and pointing out maybe some deficiencies and things like that is so important and it opens up a dialogue. Um, so thank you for, for you doing that, uh, as well. All right. Follow us both on LinkedIn. Follow Brad first. Brad Tun, T O N. No, Tom. His name is Tom. It’s Tom or Brad. It’s Tom, very good. It’s Tom. You will not find me under Tom, but you’re welcome. I don’t know, I’m sure there’s a great Tom out there. Tom Tun. No, you won’t find that. No, uh, he’s Brad. He’s Brad Tun. Uh, Brad, you leave us with um. Uh, you, the, uh, I will typically say, you know, leave us with some inspiration, you know, take home moments. This has been like 50 minutes of inspiration. So, uh, but maybe it’s just something we haven’t, we haven’t talked about or you’d like to say a little more about that, that you didn’t. Leave us with something that We haven’t heard some, some, some, some, uh, some Brad, some Brad Real that we haven’t heard. Here’s what I’ll say, um, if you appreciate someone in your life. Uh, tell them. Tell them, um, thank them. I’m, uh, I’ve grown a cut, and, and you know what, it is, it’s awkward for about 5 seconds to pick up the phone for no reason. Especially if it’s someone when they see your name, they’re gonna think something’s wrong cause they don’t hear from you very often. It’s awkward for about 5 seconds, and then you’ll feel 10 ft tall. Um, so if someone means something to you, tell them. Brad Tunn You’ll find him, as I said, very active on LinkedIn. Follow him there. You’ll find the company Instill at instill.io. Thank you, Brad. I knew I was gonna love this. Uh, genuine pleasure. Thank you very much for sharing all this. The pleasure is mine. Thank you so much for having me, Tony. Next week, zero-click marketing. If you missed any part of this week’s show, I beseech you, find it at Tony Martignetti.com. Our creative producer is Claire Meyerhoff. I’m your associate producer Kate Martinetti. The show’s social media is by Susan Chavez. Mark Silverman is our web guy, and this music is by Scott Stein. Thank you for that affirmation, Scotty. Be with us next week for nonprofit radio. Big nonprofit ideas for the other 95%. Go out and be great.