Transcript for 448_tony_martignetti_nonprofit_radio_20190712.mp3 Processed on: 2019-07-15T12:28:32.797Z S3 bucket containing transcription results: transcript.results Link to bucket: s3.console.aws.amazon.com/s3/buckets/transcript.results Path to JSON: 2019…07…448_tony_martignetti_nonprofit_radio_20190712.mp3.945783280.json Path to text: transcripts/2019/07/448_tony_martignetti_nonprofit_radio_20190712.txt Hello and welcome to Tony martignetti non-profit Radio. Big non-profit ideas for the other 95%. I’m your aptly named host. Oh, I’m glad you’re with me. I’d turn pseudo referees if you made me sweat with the idea that you missed today’s show Your crowdfunding campaign. Most crowdfunding campaigns don’t make goal. What are the common denominators for failure and success? We she Hecht answers all and shares his organizational readiness checklist to get you prepared for success. He’s chief innovation officer at charity that’s recorded at 19 NTC and C R M plus email plus website. You’ll learn more about the people engaging with you when you’re C R M E mail and Web site are integrated and talking to each other. We’ll leave you with a plan for getting these technologies together. My guest also ferment 19. NTC is Isaac Shalev, president of Sage 70 Attorneys Take two. Show number 450 were sponsored by Wagner. C. P A’s guiding you beyond the numbers regular cps dot com by koegler Mountain Software Denali Fund. Is there complete accounting solution specifically for non-profits tourney dot m a slash Cougar Mountain for a free 60 day trial and by turn to communications. Full service, strategic communications and PR turn hyphen to dot CEO. Here is your crowdfunding campaign. Welcome to Tony martignetti non-profit radio coverage of 19 NTC. That’s the 1920 19 non-profit technology Conference. We’re in Portland, Oregon, at the convention center. All of our 1990 seasoned reviews are brought to you by our partners at ActBlue Free fund-raising Tools for helping non-profits to make an impact. I’m joined down by mushy Hecht. He is the chief innovation officer at charity. That’s with a D. On his topic is why your crowdfunding campaign might fail and how to avoid it. Welcome, mushy. Thank you. Thank you, Tony, for having me on the show. It’s a pleasure. Pleasure. Um, what’s the work at the charity? So we are a crowdfunding platform and consulting service. So we help non-profits run their e-giving days crowdfunding campaigns, and we do the entire back office service for them. So we’ll give them the platform, and then we will give them a a team of marketing specialists and fund-raising consultants to help them succeed in their crowdfunding campaigns. Okay, so your first step in making sure your crowdfunding campaign doesn’t fail might be to engage charity. That’s right. Oh, man. What a free from I just give you 30,000 listeners, and I’m not gonna charge you. You didn’t ask for it, so I’m not going. Um, okay, it should be pretty simple. You got a lot of ideas around. Reasons why these things might I’m over modulating. Why these things might fail. Um, give us some some stats. Most do. Bye fail. You mean not make goal, I presume. Let’s define our terms. So that xero Yeah, that’s a great That’s a great way to start. So yeah. Okay, so the industry would would, you know, measures it by, you know, you set a campaign goal, and then you don’t reach your campaign goal. And that has about a 2/3 of campaigns. Don’t succeed across crowdster have very broad metric. If you go a little deeper into it’s a personal cause. Crowdfunding campaigns success rate is actually much lower than that. We go into non-profits or a little bit hyre. You’re going to creative creative campaigns for businesses and products. They’ll be somewhere depending What platform? Some Some state, 44% success rate, somewhere lower. Um, it’s not great. The success rate is not great and mostly judged by reaching the goal. Now, in our talk, I spoke about a different metric, which is probably more accurate and more helpful metric to of what failure means. Okay, so if you think about and you try to zone in and what did the essential difference between let’s go modern crowdfunding and, you know, just a classic fund-raising. Okay, so before modern crowdfund e-giving at some really great ways to fund-raising direct direct No, you know, you know, face-to-face solicitations, events, andan, even email marketing as of late and social Media Marketing has a laser all great tools to fund-raising to get in front of people into engage and solicit donations. I would, um, I in my view and in my experience, essential core difference of why you would okay, do a crowdfunding. I mean, if you got all those other options, is that when you when you set out to do a crowdfunding campaign, Essentially, what you’re trying to accomplish is to hit a tipping point that the campaign the crowd from the campaign will be so effective that it reaches a threshold. And over that threshold, it reaches a certain Momenta Mme that you don’t need a push it anymore. And it has a life of its own, right? So think about some of the most popular crowdfunding campaigns that we don’t know about what we call us when we, uh, you reach a you reach, um, you have your pioneers, you’re early adopters, and then you reach early majority. That’s right. Tipping point. I’m glad. Yes, Malcolm. So it’s it’s funny mentioned that my entire talk was actually is based on sort of the narrative that we’ve created through for the presentation to make it a little bit, you know, easier to understand is I based it on the Mountain Gladwell book. Oh, on the on the fundamentals. And that book came out in 2000 19 years later. The fundamentals of that book are still very true and can be used as an analogy for what it takes to reach a tipping point. And that’s really what you’re setting out to do, because otherwise just go to classic other ways. Just why put in the work in the effort to try to do a craft in-kind every single Exactly. You gotta start using direct mail to get people to donate to your crowdfunding campaign. Just write a letter, a solicitation letter, eggs. Every single dollar is a struggle, right? So the possibilities is really what you know of this, you know, uber connected world, this World wide web of goodness and kindness that we live in the possibilities of hitting, attempting a tipping point of having the campaign go well beyond your own abilities to take on a life of its own is really what we’re trying to accomplish. So I would say that there’s actually if you use that metric as as as failure, it’s actually a lot more than 2/3. It’s just that that’s hard to measure. Weight have to be really do granular analysis of what can I get? Lots of campaigns and how they trended and over over what beer time. Okay, but yeah, if you apply that measure, I’m sure it’s. But it’s not much worse, less less than 1/3 succeeding Okay. Ah, so what are what’s the best way to? We just dive in and say, What’s the number one? Well, I I thought of something. After all, what’s the number one reason campaigns failed, So there isn’t one reason. And number one number one, what’s the top reason? It’s gotta be a top reason. So mote many of you. Well, what I would say. Probably a top if I had to choose. The top reason is a lack preparation. I’m asking you, like a lack of preparation and the infrastructure set up right in for up front. Okay. What we do, What do you need to do up front? Very good. So you’re getting me through the top? Didn’t you see the questions I gave you before? So, Tony, tell me, um, it’s time for a break. Weather, cps, their accountants. You know what they do. For goodness sake. You’ve heard me say this. You know what CPS do? C p a. Certified public accountants. Do you need one? Do you need a firm? You need a couple, whatever you need. You know what they do? Check them out first at wagner cps dot com. And then you know what to do after that. Pick up the phone, talk to you. Eat duitz. Doom the partner. He’ll tell you whether Wagner CPS can help you. Regular cps dot com Now back to bushy Hecht and your crowdfunding campaign. So that’s actually a good question. Once the number one reason, Yeah. Lack of preparation, I think, um, people they see so we see a lot of graph looks easy, right? It looks like a kn accident. Do it. Do a do a 32nd selfie video. I go on to kickstarter or go fund me. What? According to you, what? What? My intentions are what my goal is what I’m raising money for. And, uh, and then and then people just come like we thought about web sites in 1990 to build it, and everybody will come to it. Not gonna happen. Yeah, doesn’t happen. So there are, um, a few core ingredients that need to go. It’s a new set of we’re talking about upfront, prepped on infrastructure. And these are I would say, these are fresh tools that non-profits need to learn. Okay, um and maybe individually, some of them are, you know, classic tools. But combining them together is really where the magic happens. The glue that brings them all together, that creates that, you know, sort of velocity That helps a campaign take off those two and these air. And I say they’re fresh tools, because there, you know, they’re the these are part of this is possible. I believe that. You know, we hear a lot of saying, like, you know, don’t try to do a, you know, ice bucket challenge for your organization, right? It’s just not realistic. And that’s actually, you know, if if consultant would tell you that I would say the streets looking out for you, he’s not trying to set you up for you. No unrealistic expectations. But I have a bit of a different view in the way my experience on what might what? What I do for a living is we actually work to reverse engineer a an ice bucket challenge and say, What were the ingredients that went into the ice bucket challenge even though it happened by accident again? Okay, organically. It’s not like someone came together. All right, we’re gonna raise under $50,000,000. We’re gonna get the entire world plus the president down. Bill Gates, everything. Here’s the plan. Follow blueprint. Do it. But l s had some things in place. Well, they’re so there. So not with not with this intention. I would say it doesn’t like that so I would say we’ll study. It doesn’t matter. Meaning whether the things happened by accident or they happened with intention. Doesn’t matter. Just tell me, what were those that they were in place? No, no, I understand that. Yeah, I agree. Yes. So they’re making it clear that they didn’t set him up with the intention of exactly Because that’s country what you’re talking about. Yeah. So? So what we’ve done is what was already so number one, Let’s go through a mountain labbate. Okay, Number one is the power of the few. Okay, so we know about you know, the power few 80 20 rule When it comes to fund-raising grayce absentee money is coming from 20% to you people. 20% of ah, you know, 20% of your people should be giving 80% your money, right? And we use this says as a methodology for fund-raising. Rarely do we use it as a methodology for involuntary engagement and for soliciting people to become ambassadors and influencers for your organization. Where we say Okay, well, if we’re trying to get to the message, we should just engage with the mass masses. But the reality is is that it works the same way with volunteer engagement. Getting people to advocate for organization is first, find the power of the few. Find the power of those. The column, the the influencers, your power. Your have power on social media. Exactly. So so glad. Will breaks it down into into into three different types of people. Connectors, mavens and sales people. Right. So today we call them influencers, right? And they but influencers have varying degrees of these attributes, you know? So Ah, connectors like you going to a party. And you’re like, you know, how’d you get here, Laura? You know, she, uh, Lauren bradunas. She invited me to You walked through the room. Heroes at Laura basically was, like, had something to do with everyone invited to the party. Right. You’re going to a conference in Portland, you know? Oh, you have to meet Laura. She’s gonna be there. You gotta meet Tony. You gotta get on the show. You know, everyone’s on his show like these air connectors. That’s not a hypothetical. No, no, that’s that’s really you’re connected. And you’re also maybe even be a maven. Maybe even a sale of herself. Disgusting. You’re made in first. Everything I don’t want to say I’m a whore. Everything. Oh, my God. There’s a lot of Yeah, So there’s a lot of obviously that there’s crossover at some people. Could be like a professional something, And they’re also a bit of a connector. But essentially, it’s influencers. Right? But influencers, you know, today we know the Miss Influences, and they’re like, OK, instagram influencers, they sort of They become formalized and formulated into an actual career. Right? But it’s not just the professional way. Gotta move this long. You have a lot of tips were only on the 1st 1 so number. So you know what? No, I do wanna go deeper on this before before we leave it, but I’m directing you that we got, uh I wanted to get specific. What do you do with these influences first? First you gotta identify them. There are companies that I can help you sort through your all your social contact if you give them your email. Maybe charity does that. I don’t know, but you get enough of a free promotion. I’m not gonna let you say whether you do it or not. Maybe you do maybe you don’t go to charity dot com. She could find out beyond that. So you’ve identified your influencers? What do you do it before your campaign? You You Well, you empower them to be a springboard and a messaging board for your organization. So say you’re a school, okay? And you identify, um, an educator in the community, right? That who’s a maven in the community, which happens to be a parent, right? And you, you you engage with that person and say, Listen, we’re doing the campaign, and we’re raising money for this in this new program. And you happen to be a professional in this program and love for you to get onto a video and talk about like, Yes, this program really deserves the funding that is being asked for. And among all the noise that’s happening through all the solicitations and asking this is going to rise to the tide because you’re getting that trust and that gravitas from this professional who’s going to bring your message to the forefront. So you want to identify them? You want to empower them, engage with them and ask them to become advocates for your campaign. Now, if and their first. So they’re really carrying the message forward, right? The connectors are like just by just by posting it on Twitter today or posting on instagram or putting it on a whatsapp group, they’re naturally connecting or they’re going to an event, right? The mavens air giving you no weights and trust to the conversation. Salespeople are creating persuasive reasons why you should give and should give Maura and give even more. You line these people of strategically, you could have a much greater chance of success. All right, How much? How far in advance? Great question. So it happens in in-kind. Took 14 minutes for questions. Wait. Another 10 maybe 12 5 Feel generous it How far? So we do it, so we do it in stages. So what’s really important with crowdster radcampaign is keeping the momentum going. So you don’t want to, you know, start preparing a campaign several months before, and then you lose interest in you lose momentum, right? Because you want to complain. It’s like a plane taking off, right? So they’re usually the first people that you would reach out to you before you go public before you go public, right? so you’d reach out to a couple weeks before a couple of weeks before you know if I’m dealing with a squid newsome with university. So it would be like, let’s say, two months before the campaign and you want to. You want to give them preparation? Won’t have them prepare their message. You want to have them, you know they’re gonna go out and they’re going to speak on behalf of the school. They have questions. They’re gonna I want to, you know, you know, curate and really define their message. Probably university. That’s a bigger bureaucracy to so some of their messaging may have to be approved, but sizes smaller midsize shop. Well, College University could be a mid size small shop. You don’t need to be two months out in advance. We’ll give you an example. Influencer. Yeah, so I’ll give you an example. We did a campaign we ran a campaign for Why you in New York University and this was three years ago. We’ve done one recently also, but the 1st 1 that we did of slogan was I m y you and Lin Manuel Miranda was actually a honorary graduate of Achieve University. So We engaged with him for a video several weeks before, But then the video only launched the day before. So it’s about lining up that strategy. Decided that would be a nice shot. Exactly. I shot started every every campaign’s not gonna have a Lin Manuel Miranda. But that’s, you know, kind of an example of someone finding people who have that broad appeal and that broad network to be able to, you know, take your message further. All right. Um, what else do we have to have in place? Yeah, in advance. So them the were only on the in advanced stage. We’re not even into the way. Have 10 minutes left. So the second thing is really, really second thing is really taking messaging. Very serious. So we’re still in the preparation we’re so ever. So I’ll tell you, Tony. Oh, everything. Everything happens in preparation. Okay. If you know what I always say that once your campaign starts, it’s already over. There’s nothing you can do about it once it starts. You know, once it starts, you just if you’re waiting to it for to start for to be successful, you’re gonna lose all your friends. Okay? Yeah, because you’re just gonna be harassing people, like throughout that radcampaign beating down the door for wait. We don’t want that. That’s not that’s not the outcome that we’re trying t. Okay, It all happens before I really wanted thio off. Okay? Yeah. So the second thing is just taking your messaging very seriously. Um, and Gladwell talks about it compares it to, like, you know, the stickiness factor. You can have good messaging. Are you gonna have missing that actually sticks, right. So taking, going to the depth of your cause and your appeal and really defining the truth in the essence of what you’re trying to say. But then churning that into a bite size, you know, congest oppcoll message that has that has legs, okay. And a message that is going to be memorable easily. Big headlines will be able to, you know, the think different, open happiness. You know, those type of messaging, it works wonders in crowdfunding. And it’s so important because you know, the distance between your message and your conversion is actually really, really close. You know, you’re going on on social media and you’re saying, you know, getting to the core of an organization, Really? So getting to the heart of organization and making a real beautiful, you know? Well, well, well positioned. Ask right. You can see it conversion instantly. Be just moments instantly. And that’s what’s important, right? So 20 years ago, when you had a great man, you’re doing a billboard. You couldn’t really measure the results in the conversion of the building. Well X amount of eyes walking down next month. Today, messaging is so much more critical. You can’t mess with that because it’s like there’s so much you can gain with a better message. People are going to see some that’s really gonna be compelling. They’re gonna take action. You’re gonna have feedback immediately, instantly. And that’s also good with testing. So you can text messages. You contest the messages, you can tweak messages. Okay. Messaging? Yes. 30. Glad we’ll talk about the power of context. Okay, so context is that the timing is the right environment. The right moves, you know, it’s social. Are people prepared for it? Right. So on a practical level, you know, the do’s and don’ts of timing. And so you know, you know, for for ce que no for typical organization you want to think about. Okay? December’s a great month. You know, you’re on fund-raising. I want time up and lead my fund-raising My my crowd from the campaign to happen You’re in Line it up with your and fundez latto content. It should be leveraged year and fund-raising thing. Right? Um, if you are a religious organization, it should be before the holidays tied into tight to the holidays where people are in the mood of e-giving worth tied around Christmas for people in the, you know, in the in the giving season. So timing is really, really important. And then in the don’ts, you know, timing around Passover? Exactly. Yes. The Passover is coming up soon. It’s a great time. We have a lot of campaigns happening. Be Christmas. Just a Catholic name. Yeah, I was trying pandering. You’re pandering. Necessary called you out here. Listen. Martignetti sounds Catholic. Culwell call at Christmas. Go ahead from New York, Jewish or Christian? Celebrated Christmas. You know, it’s everywhere. You can’t get away from it. You know, I heard that, um my kids are still wondering why they don’t have a Christmas tree. That they’re not getting it um, it’s just everywhere, you know. Um, you know, it’s interesting on it. Before this company I work for my brother started a virtual currency company. This was 2012 Virtual what? Virtual currency. Currency 1012. No. One way ahead, Right. Guys got back. It was where he was just too much of a vision or way ahead. Right? So you’re talking about and there’s actually I’ve been in the last six months I’ve actually seen already three businesses that have almost the exact identical business model. Tow what we what he what he created and what we were trying to create that genius. Brilliant. Nothing bad timing right through these other three of taking off other’s movements. There’s a whole ecosystem today. Virtual currencies go today, so timing is really, really important, you know? Are you coming out with your message? Where than even the environment is ready for it? Look at that. Remember the immigration campaign that you don’t let your brother listen to this? Yeah, sure. Does he know I really wrote that rodeo? How I wrote about this kind of threw him under a bus. You know, zoho thing for him, you know, it’s it’s, it’s he’s a genius, you know? He’s, you know, he’s too smart. It’s got no time, no time, no good. You can’t invent the car now. Exactly. You remember the image of the campaign that Facebook krauz from campaign that raised like $35,000,000 for, you know, for for the immigration organization in D. C. Was a 35,000,000 crowdster. It was a $35,000,000 crowdster. That organization, before that campaign struggled to reach $1,000,000 a year fund-raising. They didn’t even have a budget of more of $1,000,000. Here they are, the timing with the entire immigration fiasco that’s that’s going on. Someone launches a campaign on their behalf, or they launch shevawn exactly sure who launched it within weeks. $35,000,000 from tens of townspeople. And and you should. You know it’s not about being an ambulance chaser. You don’t want to take advantage of situations but should be looking out for you. That’s that’s grabbing a hook Exactly. If there’s immigration news and you’re in the immigration space, I think if you don’t grab a hook, your risk being irrelevant, and I’ve had guests who have said that, and I believe it myself. I just I just repeat everything. Guess yeah. Bring smart. Don’t have any knowledge of your own. I have a good memory. All right, let’s move on. Really? Have a couple minutes left, like three or four. So more things. More things. Preparation. Mushy, please. So I’ll tell you. Great. So So you have your So let’s say you lined up all these ingredients, right? And you you line up your power of the few. You get your influences lined up to really help you can. You got amazing messaging, right? And then you have the timing’s perfect. You get even a little setup, right? Roger. And for what you’re missing right now is it’s not enough. No, no, not sufficiently. You’re missing. You’re missing. What you’re missing here is velocity. Okay, so think take up. Sorry about that. Take a plane. Take off. Right, Guys, watch one off. Yeah, take a plane. That’s mine. I put mine on airport road airplane mode for you. Uh, if I could get the same courtesy put in his pocket, but he still didn’t put it. Still did not know. You only gave me 30 minutes and going in airplane mode, yet just took in his pockets. It’s still gonna vibrate. All right, So take a plane, right? It has to reach a certain speed within a certain amount of space. Was a certain amount of time actually living velocity velocity on and lift and lift in the upper wings and believe that teacher above pressure below. So all that scientific stuff, But the point is that you need thes things to happen within within a specific amount of time for us to be able to create that combustion for it actually take off right field to hit the tipping point. Yeah. Okay, So, um, I’ll give an example of what things? People we see that people are usually doing wrong they can improve on. Is that, you know, yesterday had to come from at my talk. I asked someone like you who’s been involved in a crowd from the campaign dahna peer-to-peer of campaign, for example. And one person Me. Okay. And I said, Well, tell me how it went in these and she said, Well, they called me out, they sent me an email and then there was an event, anything, and they said you know, would you take on a campaign a page to raise $3600 for the organization. Right? And she said yes. Okay. And then when was the end? When was the organ it? When was the campaign culminating? Four months. So is the worst words four months of her life. Okay, so you need a much less time than you think you do, right? You think more time equals more money? No, no, no, it doesn’t. Less time equals more money because, you know, people are just inundated with so much information. And if you if you have the right ingredients to motivate the person to say yes, I’ll give right with by telling them, you know, whether you let’s say you put a matching component on the campaign right where you said in this and limited amount of time, your money will be matched, right? Right. Or you put it. You have a certain goal that you have to reach within a certain amount of time, that urgency, their impact recognition with everybody’s gonna be recognized. The campaign. You have all those ingredients and you have the right man. You have the right people pushing it and the context is right. You need very, very little time to actually take off. The majority of our campaigns happen in 24 36 hours. Millions are being raised in 24 3rd toe with weeks of preparation. So if you want to hit a tipping point, you can’t have, you know, miles of runway. You’ll never take off. You just drive right off the runway, and that’s it. So shorten the runway and and and prepare the ingredients that you need, as we just mentioned. But that should be all be done in the maintenance hangar. Exactly playing now, in case that wasn’t obvious. Yeah, you’re feeding off, Tony. We feel about each other is done in manufacturing. I mean, you go way back, but it’s done in maintenance, maintenance and cleaning. Yes. Okay. All right. All right. Uh, give me another minute. You got, uh, Can I? Yeah. You got one more thing. I want to wrap it up. Dahna without mentioning charity dot com. Can you Can you summarize or you want to give another tip? You know, listen, I’m here today, and I don’t do a lot of the conferences, but it’s it’s It’s fantastic to be to be here. I think the Auntie unconference is really nice, you know, some of their like way big. And there’s not a lot of you know, too big to have conversations and too small. I think this is a really, really nice sized dent. Unconference. I’ve met a lot of wonderful people here, a lot of people doing a lot of innovative stuff in this space. It’s it’s encouraging to be here to see a lot of people, you know, working towards the same goal. Yeah, all right, we’ll leave it there. Thank you for having actually. Don’t don’t walk away yet. Your your phone is Your watch is buzzing. He’s monisha Hecht. He’s the chief innovation officer at charity. C H a R D y. That’s enough shout outs for that, and you’re with Tony martignetti non-profit Radio coverage of 19 ntcdinosaur 2019 non-profit Technology Conference, Portland, Oregon All of our 19 ntcdinosaur views are brought to you by our Partners Act Blue Free fund-raising tools to help non-profits make an impact. Thanks for being with us. We need to take a break. Cougar Mountain software maintaining separate accounts for each fund-raising daily expenses and reporting to the board are all challenging. That’s why Cougar Mountain created Denali fund-raising osili Fund, a complete accounting solution specifically designed for non-profits. You know, like the Park Denali. They have a free 60 day trial at tony dot m. A slash Cougar Mountain Denali, of course, is also a mountain, but it’s Ah park in a mountain Denali fund that m a slash Cougar Mountain. Now, time for Tony’s take to the 450th non-profit radio is July 26th. Yes, we’ve been at this nine years times 50 shows. There you go. Who’s gonna be with us? Scott Stein, of course. Live music. You gotta have Scott and his 88 singing. Ah, our theme song. Cheap red wine Live in the studio. Um, of course, our creative producer, Claire Meyerhoff, live in the studio. Call ins from all our contributors. Giveaways? Yes, giveaways. I’m sure we’ll have cure a coffee. The coffee owned by the dentist that provides dental care for coffee growers and coffee workers. As you buy their bags of coffee, they’ll be there. A sponsor of the 450th will be giving away some bags of cure coffee. Always great fun. Um, we’ll have some some comedic thing. It’s too early to tell you. Don’t You don’t need to know at this point if I told you you’d forget anyway, So just be tuned in for the 4/50 and you’ll see what we’re doing. We’re giving away and, uh, what we put together. All right, that’s it. That’s Tony’s. Take two Now here is C. R M plus email plus website. Tough. Welcome to Tony Martin. Non-profit radio coverage of 1990. See, that’s the 2019 non-profit Technology Conference coming to you from the convention center in Portland, Oregon. All of our 19 ntcdinosaur views are brought to you by our partners at ActBlue Free fund-raising Tools to help non-profits make an impact with me now is Isaac Shalev. He is president at Sage 70 and his topic is solving the C r M plus email plus website equation. Isaac. Welcome. Thanks very much for having me, Tony. A real pleasure. You have a real radio voice. Good podcast voice. I should start one you have right now. You have one already, right? I’m cheating. I do. I’ve been podcasting for a few years on a totally different top shot out your podcast. What is it? My podcast is called on board games, and it’s about board games. Eso head overto on board games dot net to check it out. Okay, Wonderful. That that’s obviously a part time passion of yours again. Yeah, I I design board games on the side. You designed them. I was gonna ask you, Do you talk more about classic or contemporary games? We mostly talk about contemporary games. We talk about the games industry, which is exploding these days, and we feature interviews with industry guests and talk about what’s happening at conventions and things like that. That’s what’s fabulous about podcasting. The niche niche, a board games podcast. Yeah, you could go all the way down the rabbit hole in a podcast. And there’s somebody down there listening, doing it. Yes, whatever it is. Yeah, all right, Uh, let’s do our equation. So what? What’s the problem here? Well, I think it’s an opportunity, really. More than a problem of the opportunity is to be able to know more about the people who are engaged in your mission. Whether that’s donors who are coming to your website to learn more about you or who are reading your emails because they want to know more about the work that you’re doing, um, or whether it’s program participants who you want to track as they go through your programs. You want to be able to wherever somebody touches you, no and track and engaged, which means you need a database that can store all that engagement information. But you also need connections between where the engagement happens. Right when you send an email, you need to know who opened the email in order to track that they opened it and cared about it. Same thing with the Web. When somebody visits your website, you want to know that they came and what they clicked on that’s gonna help you communicate with them about the parts of your work that they care most about. So that’s the promise of C. R M. When it’s integrated with email and with the website. The technical challenges enormous, though, because these are different systems by different vendors and different underlying technology, and making them connect is not trivial. So we’ve spent the last 15 years working on this and we’re getting there. We’re getting closer and closer each year. Are the vendors cooperating with each other? I think that over time we’ve seen a few cycles of how this kind of works. So initially we had a lot of unbundled services. You had your website on your website was I mean, even think about the pre WordPress days, right? When when people were spinning up websites on bear code. Um, and you had databases that didn’t even talk to the Web. I mean, if you were working with earlier versions of razors at your donor perfect, they didn’t have any connection to the Web. But all that’s changed a lot. Now they’re all in one systems. You know, Neon is a vendor that’s pretty popular in that space that provide content management systems as well as email marketing platforms as part of the core CR M database offering. But you can still do it. Lots of other ways and enterprise solutions are often more of a Let me pick of the best in breed for each service I want and then integrate through AP eyes, Um, and that can be very powerful, but it’s challenging, not on just the technical level, but on the training you need to train staff to be able to use multiple different systems. And you need governance. You need somebody to oversee how different systems connect and make sure that the right pieces of data move to the right place is a lot to this. All right, well, that’s what we called it. An equation, you know, were straightforward. There’s some math ap eyes. Let’s just make make that clear. We have jargon jail on non-profit radio. You’ve trapped me in. So I didn’t drop you. I was your for your You’re free falling every rolling. I walked right in and slammed the door. Okay, I know that in a p I was like, It’s a call from one to another, but you you don’t know what it stands for. You can define it better than I can. So, uh, a p I is a way in which one system defines how it wants to be spoken to buy another system. So when you use an A p I, what you’re doing is you’re sort of saying I want to move information like your name and your email address from my website, where I captured it in a form to my C R m so that I can see if maybe you’ve been a donor and I can add engagement record, I can add a touchpoint to your record. So my cr m will say, Oh, that’s great. If you want to pass me information, send it to me in a file that looks like this, right? So send it to me within column one Put the name in column to put the email and package that into a you know, an extra accept ostomel far, whatever it is. And send that to me. That’s basically what an A p I is. It’s how to structure data so that you can move from one system to another stand for something. Yeah, it stands for automatic program interface. I believe I’m not sure about the A Okay. Program interface makes sense. Yeah. Okay. Um, is there an advantage? Thio open source versus proprietary in terms of the three working together. If if you’re all open source, are you more likely to have compatibility? Oh, um or not. I don’t think that, uh, you necessarily will have more compatibility. What’s true is that open source products worm or committed to an open standard s o. They were more committed to offering AP eyes that allows data to move in and out of systems. And there were a lot of and there remained a lot of vendors who don’t yet have fully open AP eyes. In some cases, like blackbaud has been spending quite a bit of time developing their sky a p I that promises to allow open access. But the reality is that if you’re sitting in Razor’s Edge seven, it’s hard to move data in and out because there aren’t really open AP eyes. So yes, if you were in an open source system, you probably had access to open a P eyes on at least one side of things. I think generally that modular architecture, that idea that the product that I’m building should allow data to move in and out has become more broadly embraced no matter what, and open source products have faded, I think, in their relevance to the non-profit space over the last few years, So C v. C R M is no longer ah leading C R M product in the market without sails. For Salesforce’s open source business sales forces of proprietary proprietary yes, sales force is owned by the Sales Force company. I know, and I heard somebody say that it was open. Source. Sales Force has open AP eyes So let’s let’s define the difference here. Open source means that the coda that the product was written in is available to anyone like Firefox. Right? Mozilla makes Firefox. Mozilla’s an open source, right? So you can take that code. You can do whatever you want to it. You don’t have to pay anyone for it on. That’s what open source means. Sales force, on the other hand, has open ap eyes. Which means how could that I could? No. Course not. You have to report sales for separation. Yeah, All right, So So, yes, but you do want to look for that, but you do want a little lackluster. Sorry, I’m the only one. It’s Tony martignetti now, probably. Unfortunately, not somebody else’s not greater. You’re stuck here. Okay, so, yes, maybe was open a p I Maybe that’s what I misunderstood. Well, the trick is also that you have to be really concerned about the word ap I because there are, um a lot of folks out there saying we have a p eyes and they’re not wrong. They do have a P eyes, but they may not be opening all of the different tables in the database to you. So you may wanna track information in your c r M that you can’t pull from another system. Because, for example, um, you might have an email system where you can pull whether a person opened a specific email on whether they clicked on a specific email. But maybe you can’t pull which email they unsubscribes from. That’s just not an available thing to pull from there a p I So you’ve got some functionality. But when you made the decision oh, they have an A p I. Let’s use them. You might not have been aware of the limitations. S o a. P. I doesn’t mean all the data can move easily, and you really need to explore and make sure by examining the AP I documentation to dive down. Yeah, to know that it’s going to share with you the with your other system, the information that you’re expecting to carry over, right? I mean, you can imagine a donor system saying they have open ap eyes. So you could pull everybody’s name and email address, but not how much they donated. That’s not super helpful, But you could still describe it as an open A P. I Okay. Okay, good. Thank you. Straighten me out, Trainable. Stick with me. But I’m training. Um uh, learning about. See, the databases of records, FBI’s integration methods, Um, a plan for getting these technologies to talk to one another. So we have. Have you done your session yet? I’ll be doing my session tomorrow. Okay. But it’s a repeat. I did it last year. You did? No, I didn’t capture you last year. No. No. Yeah, yeah. I was doing a session at the time that you offered to me. Okay. You really gotta schedule. Maybe I invited you and you turned me down. That’s possible, too. Way invite. More than we can refill. It’s possible. It’s possible. I’m glad to be here this year. Yeah, I’m glad you are to thank you for coming this year. Well, I’ve been listening for a long time, so I think I’m excited. Thio have a chance to be on the other end of the mike. Thank you. Glad. Um, Okay. So Well, what only one with just a little bit about the fact that you’re you’re you’ve been listening for so long and gratified to be a gift. A guest. What? Well, I was I was gonna suggest that we talk a little bit about how, um today the need for integration is even greater because our stakeholders expect us to know everything right. When you come to an organization, you expect them to know whether you’ve been to an event or whether you were engaged in a particular cause. There’s just no separation from from the perspective of the donor of, ah, stakeholder between the different departments within an organization, you know, you call it, and a lot of that expectation is driven by what we are experiencing e commerce for sure. Very smart companies like Zappos, Amazon on and maybe even buy some smart charities that have raised the bar. So now we’re expecting I mean, why don’t you have the same? You have access to the same technology they do if you’re willing to invest in it. So the bar is hyre, you know, step up your game absolutely and fairly right in that we came preaching the importance of working with each individual and segmenting our communication so that everyone feels a personal connection. And if you’re gonna talk that game when the donor calls, you better know who they are. And that means that you need someone at that phone in front of a terminal where they can type in a name and see the full view of what this person has done with your organization. So the stakes are rising in terms of being able to do this and the means by which we do it keep multiplying, right. We have Maur and more channels. So it used to be that we were just doing direct mountain. We did email. Then we did text to give. And now we have ah peer-to-peer platforms. We have so many more ways in which we’re engaging. And usually it’s another vendor. It’s another system. It’s another database through which we add this functionality and a couple of years go by and some CR M pulls that functionality in and you get increased functionality within your core system. How are we gonna make this happen though you have? You obviously have to have expertise to do this. Thio, have these cross platform communications. So 11 tip, one big tip. Here’s if you listen to nothing else in this interview. I want everyone to walk away with this one big idea. Have a network map. A network map is a map that shows all the different systems that you have and arrows pointing to which system pushes data into which place. And this doesn’t sound that complicated. And the reality is, it’s not hard to do. You list all your systems and then you draw your arrows. And when you’re drawing your arrows, just indicate whether it’s an automatic move of data or whether it’s manual. Are you downloading the spreadsheet and uploading it to a new system? That’s manual. Is there an A P I. Is there an integration that does it without you having to do anything automatic? Just make that map, and now you have an opportunity, right, because now you can see where your manual processes. Maybe there’s something you can do about that where your automated ones and also you know, you you don’t want to trip over yourself. You can create loops right where one system updates the next one, the next one and the next one, and then they circle back and making a map avoids that trouble. So that’s the first step in thinking through a problem like this is make the map and figure out what’s in the middle. What’s your database of record? Where you gonna collect all that data? And if you don’t have one, that’s your first mission. Oh, if there’s nothing at your core if you don’t have a database of record, if you don’t have the place where you keep all the data, you really don’t have a way to centralize time for our last break. Turn to communications. Full service Strategic communications and PR for non-profits Turn to helps you tell compelling stories. Advocate for your cause and make a difference through media relations, content, marketing, communications and branding strategy. They’re at turn hyphen to dot CEO not dot com that CEO now here’s back to, but loads more time. Of course, for CR M plus email plus website, there’s there’s some new methods for dealing with kind of cross platform stuff. You’ve got all these tools and you’re trying Thio to be able to see he threw it through and across all of them, so you may have heard folks talking about data, warehousing, data, warehousing is it? Sounds kind of, I don’t know, futuristic in some ways, but futuristic in the most boring way, right? We don’t get flying cars. We got data warehouses, but a data warehouse is basically pouring every other database that you have into one big database. But you don’t have that database do anything, right? So in other words, just doesn’t delivery males. It doesn’t do any transaction. You can query from it right on. And so then you can query across all your different systems. And so you say, Find me the person who received these three e mails who donated at least $100 over the last year. And who cares about owls and they live in New Jersey. Perfect. Right. And I can, even though that data lives in multiple data. Very right. But if you can make that query right, then you can send that email that says who gives a hoot. And that person in New Jersey is gonna open that email right now. You’ve sold me on the value of a data warehouse. How do you create such a thing? Well, data warehouses are created mostly with open source tools. Actually s o. A lot of times you take a my sequel database and you use a P I’s to pull in data from all your different systems. Sometimes you have to download stuff and upload stuff. There’s data extraction transformation and loading process is E. T ells that go along with that? But the key is that you need and I say key because it really is about what’s called a primary key in a database. Every line every row in that database is represented by a unique identify. Something has to be unique, right? And the trouble is that everything that has the nation’s my information systems degree from Carnegie Mellon it’s paying off. Also antiquated. But you know, as antiquated as it is, that was true in 8429 week. Identify where each row right and when there is such a unique identifier than you can really make the magic happen. The trouble is, when you push three different databases into one, each database had its own unique identifier. So you Tony martignetti are 1 28 in this database and your 3 96 in that database in your 4 25 donordigital base. I’m in the employee database, right. So we need to create 1/4 unique identify in the warehouse that identifies you across those three systems. So there’s some work to do. And that’s why we recommend that non-profits do work with experts around this because data warehousing can be complex to get off the ground. But it has incredible returns in terms of transparency, invisibility of your most valuable data across multiple systems. So this means that you don’t have to take everyone’s favorite system away from them or the system that you just spent a whole bunch of money implementing. You don’t have to get rid of it because it doesn’t integrate with that system. You can keep everyone working with the tools they love while still creating transparent information and reporting for decision makers. OK, I’m gonna guess that sage 70 will, uh, will help you with this. So what’s age 70 will do is help you assess your digital infrastructure. What are all the tools that you’re using? Are they well integrated? Do you have the right staff and skills to leverage them? A lot of times you know, the trouble that you have is not your tool doesn’t work. The trouble that you have is that strategy. You’re not sure what you’re trying to achieve or how to measure it, or it’s that skills. You know what you’re trying to achieve. You just don’t have the people who can do it or they’re structured poorly. You’ve got them scattered across different departments and they’re not effective and you need to centralize them, whatever it might be, The tool itself is usually relatively far down the list, and that’s because we’re in 2019 and we’re lucky. A lot of the tools have gotten a lot better. There’s been a lot of feature convergence, so any tulani CR m you pick is gonna have a lot of the same features. And it’s less about nailing the tool and much more about understanding what you wanted to achieve, making sure your staffed for it, making sure that the data is traveling through each system the right way. So that’s what saved 70 helps with when you actually want to build the thing. They’re specialists to build that thing. This folks here, um, right here it ntcdinosaur recommend everyone talked to a fracture is a great partner in this O Matic. If you’re on razor’s edge is another great partner for this s o there folks out there who specialize in setting up your data warehouse. And it’s a process I really, really recommend that you get expertise for Ah, but ah, start with strategy, though. Figure out what’s trying to do. Right? Right. What? Why? Yeah. What’s our goal? Yeah, what’s our purpose? And which information do we need to raise the visibility of? Because one of those, one of the worst things that you can do is build a warehouse that lets you see everything and then try and look at everything. No. You gotta look at the five things that matter most. What else you gonna talk about tomorrow? Well, I think we’re gonna talk on the agenda. Well, we’re gonna talk a little bit about the, uh the different ways that vendors offer this kind of integration. So there are all in one vendors that offer you a lot of different tools under one roof. And that’s great because it’s easy to train staff in that you see familiar screens over and over again. The data on the back end is integrated, so they’re really effective. However you trade Cem flexibility, you may prefer a different email tool, but the vendor doesn’t have that. They haven’t all in one, so you have to stick with them. You might go with, you know, totally the opposite. On end of the spectrum, you might go with a platform, whether that sales force or dynamics where you ca NBA build whatever you want on this kind of core foundation, and that gives you tremendous flexibility, you can build whatever you want. It also gives you a lot of costs and challenges your skills because you can build anything if you have the money for it in the know how. Um, should you build anything that’s usually ended? Question. And there’s the maintenance of the of the custom. Build right, and you have to budget not just for the maintenance, but here’s the real l tricky one. When you build a custom system, nobody can train you in it, but you, so you have to now build a training capacity to continue supporting your system. This isn’t you know. I’ll say this over and over again. We spend too much time thinking about what it’s gonna cost us to buy our tech tools to build our tech tools to maintain our tech tools. We should be spending twice that much time thinking about how to acquire the right staff, howto retain them and how to train them to use our tools. That’s the hard part. I mean, so many people non-profits have tremendous passion and tremendous skillsets, but not often great technical skillsets. That’s part of what a successful non-profit needs to learn how to do is in bed strong skillsets in technology in their staff and be willing to invest. You have to be invested in it either either through staff or or outside help, right? I mean, you know the old joke, right? What happens if I You spend all my money training my staff and then they leave? Well, what happens if you don’t spend the money training your staff and they stay? I haven’t heard that joke. I don’t know that one. I haven’t heard that. All right, E. I wish we had a laugh track. Have an awful on trains. I’m not sure it would have been too loud. You have a good, hearty laugh yourself. That’s all right. Um, okay. We still have another couple minutes together. Uh, what else are you gonna? I don’t know. You know, based on your session description, I feel like we’ve covered everything, but we can’t have covered it all because we haven’t spent 75 minutes together. Well, we certainly haven’t. I think that, uh, one of the tricks that you have to really, uh, ask yourself is Do I pursue a C r M driven strategy? And this is something that I want every small non-profit listening to think hard about because, you know, I sat with the client ones and they were talking about how they wanted to put everything in a c r M. And what should we do? And I asked, How many donors do you have that you communicate with? And they said 500. And I said, That’s a wonderful number. You don’t need to C R M. You need a telephone. 500 donors call two a day, right? There’s your not at a point where you need the scale. And therefore you shouldn’t hamper yourself with the You know what a system is gonna tie you to, uh, there’s another small non-profit Smallish. I mean, talk about 30 employees. So not tiny. Um, but, uh, 30 employees couple $1,000,000 in revenue And they you’re using sales force, which is, by the way, fair, very challenging for small organizations to use effectively. But they had really the cleanest salesforce implementation I’ve ever seen. Data was hygienic. It was kept well, they had a sale sports admin on staff. They had another part time sales force person who really did a great job of pushing all of their donordigital and all of their program stuff into sales force. They were running every program out of sales force. And I kind of wanted to actually have a panel tomorrow about managing your managing using a c R M. To manage program. Yeah, yeah, it’s It’s certainly part of the promise of sales forces you can cross from donor to constituent tow program participants, and they made it work. However, however, there there’s a but there’s a big but lurking at the end of this one, which is that even though they were doing such a great job of that whenever they wanted to spin up a new program and they’re young enough that they’re still spinning up new programs and thinking of new ways to solve their problems. Whenever they wanted to spend up a new program, they got stuck. They got stuck in a six month sales force development cycle. We have a new program. How are we gonna administer it through sales force? We need to create new forms we need to create new business logic. We need to test it right. We need to go through the process of implementing this program into sales force. That’s really slow. You can’t sew a small organization. One of its advantages is agility and flexibility. When you take on a bigger than your class system, you may sacrifice some of that agility. Eso, you know, in our advice to them, was not to get rid of Salesforce, right? Our advice to them was, and this is crazy. But our advice to them was spend the first year of every programme in Excel and I know right, I’m a tech consultant telling you Excel is good for things, but iterated rapidly be able to be flexible. Don’t tie your data into hard relationships. Admittedly, you lose some of the benefits of structure data. It’s true. But what you gain is the ability to figure out how it’s gonna work for real. And once you figure that out, once you have some process maturity, right and you figured out what the right way to do it is, then go to Salesforce, right? Then put it into your sales force. So that’s something that I really want folks thinking about lean startup principle. That’s right. Start, start lean. You’ll learn your pivot if you need to. And then when you’ve got something that’s a year old and and proven mean, the program may not even take off right. You could spend more time in sales force development than the life of the program. Conceivably right. So when you’ve got something that you know you’re gonna stick with and you know what data capture, um, then spend your time and money on your sales force. Implementation? Yeah. Don’t overbuild your infrastructure. I mean, it’s the same idea is certainly out of the outside. It’s that same idea that you know, uh, if you’re gonna build a public space and you want to know where to put the walkways, what do you do? You wait. You wait and see where the path. Yes, yes. So it’s the same ideas and favorite. Figure out where you’re going to get a lot of bang from your infrastructure investment. Where is it going to really pay off for you on? And it’s a little bit, I think, counter to how we sometimes think about this, where it’s become so de facto that Oh, you’re gonna need to C R M and you need to see our strategy. It’s not clear to me that you need to C. R M strategy. It’s clear to me that if you want to keep track of your most important stakeholders, you’re gonna need a method for doing so. And if you have enough of them, a C R M is probably the method. Okay, okay. Give us a wrap up than solving the C r M plus email plus website equation. Well, the first thing I should say is, don’t forget, carry the one is there. Is there a solution to this equation? Yeah, I think there is a solution to the equation on, and it starts with understanding what your goals are. If you really do communicate to people. If you’re an advocacy, Oregon. You really do a ton of e mailing in a ton of segmentation. A ton of personalization, then? Yeah, you need your C r m and your email and your website to talk to one another and just not. Not just that. You need your social integrated and you need your pita pema integrated and you need your text messaging. So, yeah, that’s your core business is communicating effective segmented messaging in order to inspire actions. So it makes sense that you use that infrastructure. But that’s not gonna be the case for every non-profit. So understand. Visualize what advantage, what benefit you want out of this, and that’ll help shape your investment. What you want into this? That’s one. The second thing is, you solve this problem with the right people more than you solve it with the right tools. Invest in the right people. Whether that’s advice from consultants or whether that staff and their expertise and skills, that’s where you’re going to get the biggest force multiplier the right people. All right, Isaac shall live. He is president at Sage 70 helped us solve the C R M plus email plus website equation. I thank you very much. Thanks, Isaac. Thank you, Tony. Great to be here. Pleasure. Thank you for being with Tony martignetti non-profit Radio coverage of 19 and T. C. All of our interviews at 19 ntcdinosaur brought to you by our partners at ActBlue Free fund-raising Tools to help non-profits make an impact. Thanks so much Being with us next week, it’s the week before the 450th show. If you missed any part of today’s show, I beseech you find it on tony. Martignetti dot com were sponsored by Wagner. C p A. Is guiding you beyond the numbers weather cps dot com But Cougar Mountain Software Denali Fund is there complete accounting solution specifically for non-profits 20 dot m a slash Cougar Mountain for a free 60 day trial and by turned to communications, full service, strategic communications and PR. Turn hyphen to dot C o ah creative producers Claire Meyerhoff Sam Leibowitz is the line producer producer. The show’s show schnoll Media is buy shoes in Chavez. Mark Silverman is our Web guy and this music is by Scott Stein be with me next week for non-profit radio Big non-profit ideas for the other 95% go out and be Greek. You’re listening to the talking alternate network. You’re listening to the Talking Alternative Network. Are you stuck in a rut? Negative thoughts, feelings and conversations got you down. Hi, I’m nor in Sumpter potentially ater. Tune in every Tuesday at 9 to 10 p.m. Eastern time and listen for new ideas on my show Beyond potential. 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