Welcome to Tony Martignetti Nonprofit Radio, big nonprofit ideas for the other 95%. I’m your aptly named host and the podfather of your favorite hebdominal podcast. Oh, I’m glad you’re with us. I’d be forced to endure the pain of otitis externa if I had to swim around with the idea that you missed this week’s show. Here’s our associate producer, Kate, to tell us what’s going on. Hey Tony, here’s what’s going on. Tech to amplify youth voices. Our panel from the 2025 nonprofit Technology Conference examines how nonprofits use artificial intelligence, social media, and other technology to uplift young people. They share challenges and successes to increase your awareness and help you give a voice to younger constituencies. They are Sam Cassin Shoptal from Amazon Web Services, Sahil Gupta at dosomething.org, Caitlin Gillam with Crisis Text Line, and B. Lee, CEO of Epilepsy Foundation. Then, Donor diversity, redefining social fundraising. Gen Z, Hispanic and black donors are driving shifts in event fundraising, giving days, peer to peer campaigns, and more. Demetria Lightfoot and Nikki DeFalco, also from our 25 NTC coverage, share the trends to help you tailor your campaigns to resonate with these growing donor bases. Demetria is at Youth in Need, and Nikki is with one cause. On Tony’s take 2. Thank you. Here is tech to amplify youth voices. Thank you for being with our 25 NTC coverage. We’re all live at the Baltimore Convention Center, where we are sponsored by Heller Consulting, technology consulting for nonprofits. Our session topic that we’re talking about now is harnessing technology to amplify youth voices. My guests are Sam Kasin Shapta. Did I say that correctly, Sam? Yes, I should have asked you off mic as I did for everyone else. Sam is enterprise account executive for nonprofits at Amazon Web Services. Sahil Gupta, did I say that? Did I? Yes, thank you. And he is senior data engineer at dosomething.org. Caitlin Gillam, director of community at Crisis Text Line. And be Lee, CEO of Epilepsy Foundation. Welcome all. Thank you. We are 4 people with 3 mics. We are doing the best that we can. Uh, because I do not want to not have the panel just because, you know, the, the hardware is a little short, but we two folks are sharing. All right, we’re talking about technology for amplifying youth voices. Let’s start with you down the end. What, what brought this topic to the panel? Why, why, why is this important for, for, uh, the community here? Well, it’s extremely important, you know, the students that we deal with at the Epilepsy Foundation, many who are living with epilepsy are looking for opportunities to find their voice. And in a tech savvy world, being able to provide that at a nonprofit so that individuals can share their voice and share their advocacy is extremely important. And how does the tech like I mean we have plenty of time together but just like overview how does the how can we leverage technology for this? Well, one, let’s start with social media, right? It is this generation’s platform. And offshoots of that are able to move us into directions of chatbox, LMS, and other technologies that are supporting individuals one finding the training and resources and tools that they need, but also being able to amplify their own voice needs and advocacy utilizing these platforms. OK, uh, if you could pass the mic to, to Caitlin, uh, when we talk about youth voices for what, what, what ages are we talking about? I mean for us it’s it’s all sorts of ages so I’m I’m the director of community at Crisis Text line so for just a little bit of context we’re a crisis intervention service that is entirely text based so if someone is in a crisis or needs support they can text 741-741. They get that support through a volunteer based model and so um when we think about youth and this, you know, younger generation. Um, and we talk about that age range, you know, if someone has access to a cell phone, um, they can utilize our service and so what’s really great about how we’re structured, which is entirely text based, is that it can be discrete, it can be safe for younger populations to, um, reach out and often, you know, we were talking about be social media but text is the main form of communication for a lot of our younger pop. as you know, they are digital natives and so uh it can be a really safe and discreet and easy way for them to reach out and get support when they need it. I grew up doing handwritten notes that, uh, so here, let’s turn to you, uh, overview, but you know, give us, give us, uh, your, your sense of the importance of the topic. Well, I, I think technology for do something is sort of part of our, our lifeblood. Uh, do something does not exist without our platform which is entirely custom, uh, technology is something we developed over our 31 year history. Um, in terms of youth voices, I would say one thing that we’ve used, uh, recently was actually using GPT’s, uh, technology to content moderate. Um, some of our youth, uh, intentions we call them. So when, when a member in our demographic is usually 13 to 25 signs up for the platform, we ask them to state an intention that’ll start, start with I aspire to. So it could be I aspire to change the world, I aspire to better my community, and we wanted to show those intentions, uh, on the website publicly, um, because we’ve heard from our members that they wanna have more interactivity, they wanna see what other, other members are up to. Um, but we, we don’t have the resources to moderate by hand each one of those intentions to make sure that they’re safe to display on the website. So we’ve been using, uh, GPT’s API along with human moderation. Um, for particular cases, and that’s just one instance in which we’ve been able to use technology to make do something actually amplify not only the intentions of the users but also have them share those intentions with others and be inspired by one another. Isn’t there a relationship a founder relationship between and Crisis Text line weren’t they both founded by Nancy Lublin? They were. Is she still at Crisis or or no? No longer at Crisis Text line, but certainly a through line in our origin story as an organization was leading to something and then saw someone reaching out for support and was like we’ve got to find a way to meet these younger populations where they are like we talked about earlier and that sort of sparked the idea for for Crisis Text line for being able to provide crisis support. Through text, so yeah, definitely some synergy between the two. I’m I’m that’s what we’re going with the self-proclaimed. I didn’t see anybody else with you the uh the point on all of these stories is technology amplifying the missions for folks that are utilizing the technology. Um, I, I work for AWS, Amazon Web Services. When we come to nonprofit conferences, the most that people know about us or we’ll talk about is, hey, we’ve seen your smiley face on boxes, right? Or we know that maybe you can help out with fundraising and what what we’re trying to do and and show with this panel is not only are these different organizations that are helping their mission using technology, these are different people and different personas within nonprofits that are interacting with technology, right? We’ve got people that are directly in. Field advocating and talking with people in need to serve their mission. We have builders here as well as CEOs, right? So my job is to kind of help amplify their voices and how they’ve utilized and and and had that firsthand experience because from us really hearing from the customer directly is gonna be the most valuable thing for other nonprofits to go, ah, aha, that’s what they were able to do to leverage, uh, any of the AWS services or just technology writ large to make a bigger impact against their mission. Have you had your session yet? No, this is, this is a very nice warm up. This is before we walk up. Well, I like to think of this as the pinnacle. It’s all downhill. I’m, I’m, I feel bad about the session being later on that folks will just, you know, they’ll get the best thing they could from it. Um, all right, so sorry, since you are the panel moderator though, I will ask, what’s the best way for us to Uh, uh, acquaint our listeners in small and mid-size nonprofits with this topic, you leveraging technology for youth voices. What, what’s the best way to, to introduce our listeners? You know, I think, I think what every nonprofit wants to do is to be able to actually touch their users in a way, make those touches and inroads, and I think that’s the, that’s gonna be the thing that’s gonna work across all of these organizations is how do you use technology to actually engage with. Folks, is it social media? Is it direct, uh, campaigns that are going out for fundraisers that are helping keep your platform running, or is it even just changing the technology that you’re using to be smarter and be more targeted in how you actually go out and and advocate with folks? OK. All right. That may be the last we hear from you. I’m not sure, but uh I’m not sure. I it’s not a guaranteeing your mic off, but OK, so let’s start with our CEO then. So, uh, I guess you’re you’re sharing, yeah, yeah, of course, you’re sharing how epilepsy Foundation, like what, what tools you’re using, what platforms, um, again, our listeners are in small and mid-size nonprofits, so probably similarly situated so you’re bigger than some, maybe smaller than some, share your experience. Sure, so the Epilepsy Foundation of America, which I am CEO, has 26 affiliates across the country. Um, with our affiliates we are using technology one to connect us all, right? We, you know, we have a shared mission, shared vision, but technology really helps propel that and one of the projects that we’ve been working on with AWS is our empathetic chatbot which is uh built on the bedrock platform at AWS. And why we call it an empathetic chatbot is because the chatbot is trained to respond to an individual 24/7 in their most difficult moments. And so I, I, I, I give you this picture. 1 out of 3 individuals living with epilepsy experiences depression and anxiety. If they are to reach out to our chatbot and say, you know what, I’m titrating on and off medication. I’m starting to have feelings of depression, what should I do? Our chatbot will only scrape the information off of epilepsy.com, which is the foremost website for epilepsy information in the world. It will not pull in information from Chat GPT will not pull in information from Google. So one, it’s physician led verified information that the patient will receive, but also the reason that we’re really emphasizing that empathetic is that it starts the conversation with words such as I’m so sorry that you’re going through this. Let’s see how we can help you, and it continues to engage that individual in a conversation. Therefore, making sure that as we talked about, particularly with our youth, they’re very comfortable with interacting with chatbots with texts, but necessarily don’t want to interact with the individual. Oh really? There there might be a preference for the. They know they know it’s an automated tool that they they know it’s not a human that’s not a human they know but they know that they know that up front. It is not a human that might make them more comfortable, right? And they can ask questions that they may be embarrassed or afraid to ask otherwise, you know, um, I live with epilepsy myself. And so there’s many times when you’re in the physician office, you have 12 minutes with your physician. Right, they throw terms at you that you may not understand. The chatbot allows our patients to go to the chatbot and get that information, get clarification and knowledge that they probably would not be able to get otherwise in an empathetic way. And again, we feel like for our youth this is a safe space like my colleagues have said, it allows them to get this information and tools that they need to better manage their epilepsy in a very safe space. OK, um. You did mention social media too. You were the one person who mentioned social media, so what, what, how are you leveraging that? Yeah, so we have a campaign, um, that’s called, uh, Share your story. And what we’ve seen is an uptick of young people submitting their story to be shared. You know, epilepsy affects 1 in 26 individuals in the country. 3.4 million individuals live with epilepsy, but epilepsy has a stigma, right? Many people don’t know how to. Interact with the seizure. Like how do you take care of someone who’s experiencing a seizure? So sharing the epilepsy story allows our young people to be to empower their voices to talk about their epilepsy, right, in their own voice, how it’s affected their lives and more importantly how they’re empowering their communities and families to live with epilepsy, right? Seizure safe, seizure, uh, seizure safe safety, right? We have a first aid for epilepsy. It’s called seizure safe. I’m, I’m literally like I’m living with epilepsy, um, but you know it, it allows seizure first day to happen in the community, right? Do you know what to do, Tony, if someone had a seizure? Um, I think you’re supposed to help them not choke. Stay safe side. It’s 3 words. You stay with them, you turn them on their side, and you clear everything from around them. Right, but many people don’t know stay safe side and our amplification on our websites and in our social medias help us to teach individuals that, and many of our young people take that and share it within their own, uh, social media they share it within their school website, and it really helps amplify seizure first aid and one because it keeps them safe. Right, and also just raises awareness on a on a on platforms that youth voices are accustomed to being on. And so they’re sharing with their peers a lot of times and let me tell you, um, that has allowed us to start seizure safe schools laws in 23 states. The first one was started in 2018 by one of our Teen Speak Up individuals, a young lady. Her name is Lindsay Crunk, and it’s called the Lindsay Cronk Bill in the state of Kentucky, which now mandates that all school personnel be trained in seizure first aid. OK, and how do you, how do you credit. The the technology for that for that advocacy success. Well, we have a program called Teen Speak Up where we bring and we bring young people to DC to learn how to advocate but again within those sessions we really talk about how they advocate. Right, it’s not like you said, you know, pen and paper, going to the hill, and yes they do those things, but also it’s when they get back being able to tell their story online, being able to amplify their story through social media, right, so the and the and the tools, OK, OK. We’re gonna go to Caitlin. How’s that sound? Thank you, B. Uh, a crisis text line, you know, it’s basically the same. I mean, how are you leveraging again our listeners, small and mid-size nonprofits, what can they learn from what you’re doing? Yeah, it was really interesting listening to you talk about how you leverage certain elements of technology and as you were speaking I was thinking about. You know, we take a slightly different approach but again leveraging technology in the right ways for whatever your organization is to make the biggest impact so when we’re thinking about technologies that are allowing us to scale that human human connection. Um, we’ve recently built out what we call a conversation simulator, so we have volunteers, we’ve trained over 100,000 volunteers in our existence to, to, you know, help us in this work of crisis intervention. Um, I happen to run a lot of our community efforts around that, that group, uh, but they go through a pretty async. Remote training it can be done from anywhere um but before they actually step in and take an actual conversation with someone in crisis we have a conversation simulator tool that allows them to practice to you know go through certain scenarios to get, you know, outcomes based off of what they share in that conversation to better prep them to. Then go into that environment where they’re taking a conversation with someone who is in a crisis or in a moment of need and so that is uh one way that we leverage technology and then I would say on the platform side where conversations are coming in we handle thousands and thousands of conversations um throughout you know, a day, weeks, um, over a million in a year. And so as part of that process we actually leverage AI as a tool in our platform to uh allow us to assess what is the most imminent risk in these conversations that are coming through so you can imagine it sort of like a mental health emergency room right where AI is allowing us to identify what is the most imminent risk conversation or high risk, how does that get moved up to the top of the queue and then. Our volunteers are able to intervene and then we sort of have that cascade um from there and so that’s another way that again we’re using technology to scale to make ourselves more efficient, but we’re still maintaining that volunteer based model, that human to human connection side of it. Do you use a limited language model the way like the way B was describing it, it only draws from epilepsy foundation content. Do you, uh, how, how, so how, how are you, how, how do you constrain what, what the model is basing its its decisions on? Yeah, that’s a great question. Where I think where this comes into play is the conversation simulator tool that we’ve built. And that’s entirely um generative sort of AI that is an anonymized that is not based on real actual data so what we’ve done is we’ve worked with our clinical team to identify trending topics and conversations, things that we see our volunteers struggling with to handle um certain topics or conversations and then we. Sort of build that model off of those scenarios um but not leveraging sort of any real data when building those out and we only have a handful of these scenarios in place today. It’s a relatively new tool, um, but that is how we’re configuring that with you know AII best practices, um, making sure that we’re of the practice. of do no harm and that we’re being, you know, fair and as equitable as we can in those practices um when building out these tools and so I hope that gives a little insight at least into that and say a little about the metrics how are you measuring it to it or learning it. Yeah, so we have a lot of ways that we sort of measure success or quality with our with our volunteers and our community. Uh, but what we do in terms of the conversation simulator and the training itself, we’ve embedded that into the training process. So when we’re thinking about success, it’s, you know, how are we getting as many people going through our training, how are we getting them to utilize that tool not only go through the training but then actually practice with the simulator that then increases quality on the platform and then we have all sorts of measures for how we maintain and enhance. quality once our volunteers are having conversations on the platform through um our clinical team so they serve sort of as the you know our volunteers are handling the conversation sort of our front line of defense um but then as things escalate we have an entire clinical supervision team that is uh taking over conversations if need be, but we tend to de-escalate, you know, 90% or more of of uh any conversation that comes in, um, just by having that ability to connect with with someone. Uh, right, and to talk through something with somebody in a discreet way like we do it via text, um, also super impactful. So yeah, thank you. What, uh, how about it to do something? What you know, how are you leveraging the technology for, for youth? Well, I think for, you know, if we do something we sort of pride ourselves on being at the forefront of technology change in in the nonprofit space at least and you mentioned in our, in our previous generation we were one of the first nonprofits to leverage SMS in sort of a programmatic way via code, um, and that sort of led to our shared history with Crisis Text line. Um, in this new generation that forefront is, is seems to be AI and so, uh, what I mentioned before is one way in which we’re leveraging AI core to our platform. There are various other methods, um. In terms of accessibility, for example, um, we just use GPT to generate alt text for 2500 images on our platform that didn’t have all text, which is essential for people, uh, navigating the web using screen readers due to vision impairment. Yeah, for folks who may not know what all is on an image. So for people with vision impairment who use screen readers, which basically read out loud. Um, the content of a website as they browse, when they encounters an image, it relies on a metadata field of that image called the alt text or alt label, um, and we use that, that label to read out loud sort of and it should be descriptive, that’s the goal, right? It should. Uh, the person who is vision impaired should not be deprived from understanding the media content through the, uh, because of their impairments, so the all text, which can often be lacking in, you know, across the web, uh, you might just have an alt an alt label that says this is an image or this is an image of a person, but we really want multi-sentence, although not too long, so the screen doesn’t get caught up on that image. Uh, we want descriptive all text and, and that’s something that we just didn’t have the resources to to scale, um. Through uh through uh a human contributor, so we had to, we had to leverage AI and it worked, it worked really well. We were even able to use it, um, and, uh, to, to be sure that we included gender neutral language even to optimize our SEO through the alt label, so, um, and it cost us $10 for 2500 images so it was a really powerful use case and that’s one of, I would say 5 different, um. AI use cases across do something in our, in our uh previous year we built a tool called Chat something which was a chatbot focused on providing election information. So like B and, and Caitlyn mentioned, we hooked into um sort of a grounded data source. So in this case it was a turboVote API and through TurboVote, we were able to find out for a given user through the chatbot what elections are coming up and, and how they can uh get registered. So, um, that was another case in which we’ve been able to use AI to, to really amplify our mission. Um, and, and just to, to wrap up, I, I think there’s an, an upcoming use case that I’m really excited about where young people who historically we’ve had to give them scripts, um, to message their, uh, congress people, the representatives, um, we’re hoping to be able to use AI to have them generate their own letter that is unique to each, uh, member of do something. Uh, through AI, so it doesn’t have to be like, you know, we tell the members sit down and write a full page letter, but through a chatbot conversation they can actually generate a very unique, uh, message to their to their representative that more accurately targets what actually, you know, they, they want to get template that I think you see 90% of the time everybody’s sending the exact same message and obviously the, the officers realize that diminish the impact right yeah exactly. All right, um. I, I didn’t ask you about, uh, I didn’t ask you about metrics, measurements. How, how are you evaluating? I mean, I know you’re the CEO, so you’re, you’re not, uh, you know, defining the metrics, but, but overall, you know, from the CEO from the C-suite, how do you determine the, the effectiveness of these the the the tools that you were describing that that platform you were talking about? Well, it’s all about engagement, right? How are our constituents utilizing the tools that we have available? And so we’re always interested to understand the time that they’re spending on the chatbot, how in depth those conversations are going. Um, and, and you did ask the question earlier like at what point do we provide human connection? We do have a 24 hour, uh, 7 day a week hotline as well that can take over any chat that is happening within our chatbot if the information, um, or if the conversation to what to to your point, Kaitlin becomes um concerning. It will trigger a human connection. So the bot will flag it to a human who’s available 24/7. Exactly, exactly. And so, um, our hotline, our our 24 hour hotline is funded by the CDC and so we have a very demonstrative um metrics for the hotline that also translated into our, our chatbot, uh, again it is all about amplifying awareness and advocacy. And also making sure that the engagement is uh supportive and um that the resources are robust for our constituents so uh our main uh gathering is around survey and feedback through evaluation and so we we with that we try to um monitor what that engagement looks like and how effective that engagement is for that constituency. Are you at all concerned about your CDC funding? We’re very concerned. Um, the Epilepsy Foundation, the epilepsy, uh, program at the CDC was eliminated about 3 weeks ago, um, and so that is our public health arm which allows us to do awareness and advocacy, uh, on behalf of our community but also. Uh, is our surveillance arm of the condition overall meaning that is how we determine the 3.4 million individuals living with epilepsy and more importantly, um, not more importantly, but equally as important, those who are experiencing suit up which is sudden death by epilepsy. Yeah, the surveillance, the monitoring, you know, it’s like people consider this background data, but, but it’s benchmark data, it’s benchmark data and trends are important and and can be reacted to, but only if we know them. Exactly and you know as we think about um our rural communities and our veteran communities and other marginalized communities, we understand that um we were just getting to a place where we were having effective reporting. On the condition, um, and now having that program eliminated will affect that um immensely. All right, thanks, thanks for sharing with me. Um, alright, well, Sam, I, I feel bad. No, no, you don’t have to. I, I did, I actually, I. You prompted something that I think is a valid question for this group when you were talking about most of the people that are listening are from mid to to sort of smaller size nonprofits. We’re talking about huge impact with technology and I think for listeners. That maybe aren’t um as used to or working with the technology. One thing I’m curious from the panel and I and this is part of why we want to talk about this is, you know, in listeners’ minds, they’re probably thinking there’s an army of people doing all this work, right? You must have a technology team of 35, 45, however many people that you have developing. You know, I know you were just talking about some of your metrics, but I’d love to know just as you guys think of your technology teams and take that with what it is because some folks have data teams, some folks have other technical development teams, what loosely is that size of folks that are helping on these initiatives just so folks can understand how much effort goes in for how much is coming out from an output perspective. I have for each of you, yeah, please be brief because we just have, we have a couple of minutes left, but yeah, OK, thank you. OK, Caitlin. I, I might have based on conversations I’ve already, I might have the largest one out of this group, but it’s not huge. Uh, we’ve got around 30, uh, at Crisis Text line, so they, they are one of our larger teams, but we have a big platform that we’re driving 24/7, so yeah, yeah, yeah. I am one of 4 engineers that do something right. Thank you. All right, thanks, Sam. You did contribute something. You’re welcome. You’re welcome. All right, um, that’s great. We’re gonna leave it, leave it there. Thank you very much. They, uh, they are, uh, Sam Cusin Shopta, Enterprise account executive nonprofits for Amazon Web Services. Sahil Gupta, senior data engineer for DoSomething.org, Caitlin Gillam, director of community at Crisis Text Line, and B. Lee, our CEO at the Epilepsy Foundation. All right, thanks to each of you. Thanks very much to you, pleasure and thank you for being with our 25 NTC coverage where we are sponsored by Heller Consulting technology services for nonprofits. It’s time for Tony’s Take too. Thank you, Kate. It’s time for me to say thank you. Thank you for listening to nonprofit radio. You know, just a few weeks ago, we were named a top 10 podcast by uh by a million podcasts. We’ve got our 750th show coming up in a few weeks, 4, I believe it’s 4 weeks now. 15 year anniversary, 750 shows coming up. Thank you. We, we wouldn’t be reaching these milestones if we didn’t have you listening. Week after week, week after week after week, oh my God, when, when is the show gonna be over? Now, hopefully it’s not a slog like that if it were, if it was a slog, you wouldn’t be listening right now. You, you would be exhausted and you would have unsubscribed. So thank you for listening week after week. I’m grateful that you’re with us. Keeps us going. Because we know we’re helping. The nonprofit community throughout the country and especially in the, the current context, when the nonprofit community is under fire. We need To be uplifted and supported. I believe we’re doing that. You’ll let me know if we ever fall short. Please do. In the meantime, hopefully that never happens. Thanks. Thanks for being with nonprofit Radio. I’m grateful. That is Tony’s take too. Kate. I’m so excited for the 750th where we get all the gang back together. Um, I don’t know about you, but I’m so excited and I’m like counting down the days. I got it in my calendar and telling my family. Oh, excellent. Yes, of course, we’ll have the live music with Scott Stein. Yeah. um, our creative producer, uh, Claire Meyerhoff is gonna bring some kind of game or whatever. She, she always got something entertaining, something fun. Yeah, yeah. Definitely. There’s always a celebration, every July. Well, we’ve got Beauco but loads more time. Here is donor diversity, redefining social fundraising. I’m hungry. That too. Hello and welcome to Tony Martignetti nonprofit Radio coverage of 25 NTC, the 2025 nonprofit Technology Conference. Where we are supported by Heller Consulting. Technology for nonprofits. Our topic now is how social fundraising is being redefined by younger, more diverse donors. Our panel is Demetria Lightfoot and Nikki DeFalco. Demetria is senior director of philanthropy at Youth in Need. And Nikki is director of partner success at One Cause. Demetria and Nikki, welcome to nonprofit Radio. Thanks for having us. Yeah, glad to be here. Pleasure. All right, we are talking about social fundraising redefined by younger, more diverse donors. Your your session description says that Gen Z Hispanic and black donors are driving the shift. Who wants to begin with uh like an overview Nikki does yeah I’ll take it yeah OK that’s right the picture says Nikki. So essentially younger, more diver diverse donors um give differently and we can’t continue doing fundraising the same that we have always done and so looking at how they like to participate and meet them where they are. Uh, give an example or two of how they’re differently. Yeah, well, well, for starters and Demetri has a great story here is they don’t carry wallets. They don’t give with their checkbooks they give digitally and we often do not offer. Them that opportunity you have a great story. I don’t know if it’s a great story. However, I have a child who’s 18, about to be 19, and I taught her the traditional methods of how to use cash, how to use her debit card. I even taught her how to write out checks, all the things, right? Um, however, when I went to visit her recently at school. She just kept pulling out her phone to pay for all her stuff and I’m like what’s this about? but it’s the ease, which is one of the things that we discussed in our session um donors like to have the ease of giving. They don’t wanna have to find their wallet, pull out their card, type in a 16 digit number and the expiration date, the CVV code, all those things, right? They wanna just hit a button and know that they made an impact and. So those traditional methods of consumerism and how consumers have made well companies have made it easy for consumers to pay for things is the same thing that we wanna in part in the philanthropic area as well. OK, so how do we start to break down some of these barriers? I mean, the, well, essentially this is the same thing we’ve been talking about for a long time making giving easy it’s just that. Giving is easier for Gen Z and more diverse younger folks in different ways and it’s easier for the, well, the two of you, I’ll put you two together or me even older than the two of you. So it’s the same topic it’s just the answers are different, right? So how do we, so Demetri, how do we start to break down barriers to giving? For for younger more diverse folks. Yeah, one of the things we talk about is um digital, uh, what do we call frictionless tech, um, so offering the digital options, the Apple Pay, the Google Pay, um, Cash App, Venmo, you know, things that are already connected to your financial institution where you really just have to press the button one and done. Um, but it is like I said, still creating the impact for the individual. Um, younger donors are, they’re already astute of the causes that they want to support, and when they see the opportunity to be able to give, they wanna do it in like a community type setting. They don’t wanna go to the galas and pay a lot of money for a ticket and uh eat steak or chicken and. Wear a dress. I mean all of those things have a bunch of parameters and barriers built into them that are not attainable for many people in itself, right? Buying the ticket is number one, then you gotta get an outfit, maybe some new shoes, hair and makeup if you’re a woman, right? All of these things, um, so the price point continues to increase. however, in these opportunities for younger donors, they just wanna make create the impact so they see the cause that they wanna support. They, you’re it’s on they’re on your website just give them the opportunity to be able to hit the button and then you continue to engage them further down the line. Are they interested in in community in a different way other than the $750 ticket? Absolutely and they’re authentic and they’re guests what is what’s this give us some examples of of the the type of community. Well you have to meet them where they are and they’re very interested in giving to an individual instead of giving to an organization so you have to appeal to that in a way that they feel that you’re being genuine and innovative that some of our our data shows that they aren’t going to trust you unless you are appealing to the ways that they like to give. OK, you said they like to give to an individual instead of an organization. Yeah, the, the story needs to come from an individual so instead of giving necessarily to a nonprofit organization they’re giving to a person that represents that nonprofit so they like to be. Touched by the story by the mission um but they like to see the need to give to that individual they’re very interested in mutual aid they’re very interested in challenges they’re interested in current needs as they arise. Um, do you have an example of, uh, what you’ve done? That uh that uh brings us to life for us. Yeah, Demetria actually has a really great example of how they do with you the need and changing their events to appeal to a younger audience. Oh yeah, yeah, she’s a, she’s a frontline fundraiser together but. Over here cause we are a client of one cause, yes we are, um, alright, so yeah, so we do offer a gala. We have the traditional gala we have a golf tournament as well, right? And that’s gives to a donor who has a specific type of, uh, discretionary income, um, for younger donors and by younger we are classifying them in like, you know, mid to late 20s, 30s, early 40s, maybe even late 40s, early 50s, right? Um, but the discretionary income for that individual looks a little bit different than it does for somebody who might already have an established career, family might be moving on to the next stage of life, like kids are out of college, you know, things like that. So instead of uh marketing the gala in a space which there’s a story about that as well, how we can shift younger donors into that space, we try and highlight and promote another event that is um a trivia night turned bingo night. And bingo is a big thing in Saint Louis at the moment or in our region and we have found a way to engage our younger donors in that space so that way it’s a $25 ticket um you can bring a bunch of your friends to come with you, you bring some snacks just like trivia night you sit down, you’re having a good time, you’re having fun, but you’re participating still in an event. But it’s a community based event so you feel a sense of communal um gathering from others, um, who are also making an impact in your space but you might bring 6 other people with you to come play bingo and now you’re giving them the opportunity to learn about another organization that you feel passionate about they buy in because you have buy in. And then you all have buy in and engagement in the organization, right, so giving them a way that we can show up where they are at a price point that they feel comfortable with and then as their income levels start to increase or their careers start to um project a little bit more and they have the ability to do a little bit more, then maybe they can switch to the gala which is something that I mentioned in the presentation I make all my friends come and. Volunteer, um, many of them may not have the opportunity to participate in the gala or understand what the inner workings of a nonprofit are, so they get to see that they see it from the backside because I’m their friend, so I give them all the details, but then they see it firsthand by in by volunteering. Um, and a couple of my friends have now transitioned to become like my mid-level donors. They’re, they’re sponsoring at the higher level. They’re getting the tables because we now have the ability to do those things, but they’re also still participating in that bingo trivia night type event because that skews more of a fun. quote unquote aspect piece of it that we like to do, but then we wanna feel fancy and still go to the gala. How do you find out what uh what’s gonna be appealing? You said trivia night is is popular in the Saint Louis area. trivia people. We’re huge trivia people in Louis. I’m gonna be in Saint Louis, uh. Uh, for the National Association of YMCA, NATO, it’s a great conference. I’m speaking on fundraising there, just a couple weeks. I’ll come over. OK, um, so how do we find out what our youth are interested in doing? You gotta ask them. Yeah, you have to ask, is it that’s what they like to do like we’re planning an event. What would you like it? Exactly. Or how do you like to participate, right? Just don’t make assumptions. Maybe they do want to go to the gala. Maybe they don’t, right? So we just have to ask them. OK. Demetri, you said you created volunteer opportunities around the at the gala. Oh yeah, there’s always an opportunity to volunteer at any of our events we’re targeting that for folks who are younger, that may be financially out of reach. So you can come and be something as small as a greeter or the person to help with registration, help with the fund and need auction in the middle of the, the Dutch auction and some of those folk folks have transitioned to buying tickets at the to being sponsors, so buying tables, sponsors, yes, I know I’m very happy for my friends we’re trying to do here is unlock the secrets to. so that we can not only engage them where they are now, but we all know that they would like to be in a couple of years from now. All right, so what are the secrets now? I’ll ask a question. I was going to say that unlock the secrets for our listeners. Yeah, 100%, um, Gen Z and millennial donors, they participate differently in the gala space as well. So some things that we’ve learned. From other nonprofits, um, our friends at the Human Rights Campaign is that group tickets and group discounting is very much of interest to Gen Z and millennials, and that’s how they like to come in groups and participate so offering they can choose their own community, yeah, pretty much your community of 10 for a discounted table or less, you know, they might, they might wanna bring 7, right? So giving them an opportunity to participate in the ways that they like to do. OK, excellent, um, Demetri, you had mentioned. Um, Venmo, Google Pay, Apple Pay, anything else? I mean, that’s kind of like low lift that nonprofits should be providing as, as, uh, as payment. Yeah, PayPal, all of it, it’s, uh, and, uh, PayPal do younger folks use PayPal? I mean, I would assume yes because we have it on our website. I think they use all of the above is cutting edge, so yeah, I don’t think so, but I think it’s also has to do with, uh, what does, what integrates well with your system, right? So how you, uh, what. Grades on your website, how do you keep your donor data and glean uh online contributions, right? So if your CRM or your website doesn’t do well with PayPal but it will link to Apple Pay, then yeah you should have that as an option. Um, most people do have an iPhone unless there’s that group of Android users. The green thing you wanna offer G Pay everybody’s got a yes, then you wanna uh offer G Pay for um people who have a Google phone, right, like things like that. So yeah, you really have to figure out what fits your organization, but it would behoove you to be able to offer those um digital options for payment donors. Are consumers, right? They expect that consumer driven experience across donating as well so just considering that. Yeah, so um we’re seeing a little bit of fatigue on Giving Tuesday, right? And there’s so. So Many causes to donate to you and it’s really overwhelming so where we’ve seen success is to really build out your own Giving Day that is not on Giving Tuesday pick a day that’s important to your cause or as Demetrius said in our session, a day where you’re available as an organization and set that up for success. What did you do, Demetri? We don’t have our own individual giving day yet, um but we are working towards it yeah so hopefully later this year we will implement our own day um in Saint Louis we have what’s called Give STL Day which is kind of like Give ST or Giving Tuesday where everybody comes together and they support their Give STL Day, yeah, uh, for Saint Louis, um. But that is a space where majority of the nonprofits, there’s over 2500 nonprofits in Saint Louis, but we all kind of gather in that one space and then you as a donor will go to that space and that’s where you give. However, you kind of can get lost in the shuffle, right? 2500 is a lot. Uh, I’ve found personally myself some organizations that I became supporters of or a supporter of through Give SDL Day, but. It I mean they were like I just kind of like picked a rabbit out of the head just happened upon them, but the Giving day does give you intentionality to highlight to your donors and engage maybe some new people about what you guys are doing specifically so the spotlight is directly on you and not somebody’s trying to find you in the middle of a larger group of people. OK, right, so don’t fear, uh, creating your own giving day. Not at all. Yeah, OK, uh, what about peer to peer work? So Demetri, I think you said people like to give to individuals so that was Nikki, but so is that peer to peer is is that a part of that it’s a wide array of things within peer to peer, but we find that Gen Z and millennials like to give through peer to peer to challenges, right, which are individuals as. Well as um giving days as well uh they just wanna take it back to community and to real people so uh peer to peer gives you that opportunity and it’s also a smaller entry point um to that donation pipeline. Is uh birthdays over is that still a thing, you know, for, you know, doing it on your birthday, having a campaign on your birthday. Yeah, I think that was really common in uh uh the geriatric millennial community like Demetria and I but uh I’m not seeing it as much with Gen Z. would you say? I don’t even know what that is. Yeah, so it’s where you’re pledge your birthday to announce that I have to revamp it and steal it and make it a thing again. Well, good luck sounds like a bill. I don’t know. Uh, all right, but, so what is, what are some examples of peer to peer if it’s not, it’s not the birthday giving. Yeah, so it can be like on your giving days, right? That is a great way for you to share a link to your peers that says I’m giving to this or I support this cause and you guys should look into it and we love your support as well. And that is the easiest way to do something like that, um, or even just inviting people to come to like an event or come volunteer with somebody like I’m gonna volunteer come volunteer with me learn more about that place and that will give you the opportunity to engage a little bit further with those individuals. Do you have uh support resources for for folks who want to do a peer to peer. Is there, is there like brand, you know, branding stuff that they can use so we see a lot of the nonprofits that we work with do you have a set up where it’s almost peer to peer in a box, right? So a donor can come and say hey I wanna fundraise for your mission and easily set up a campaign to. Um, make that happen. OK, what’s what goes into that toolbox? Essentially it’s you need a story. You need the mission, you need the organization and then you tell your story and you ask your peers for donations and it’s, you know, the simplest way of giving. what is the nonprofit offering in the toolbox that supports the peer to peer. They would just offer samples of how. To get set up they would recommend how you set up your page, um, give it an example of a mission story and how that individual could get involved with the marketing materials all the elements logos, yeah, exactly. Yeah, and then tips on fundraising, right? Like who to ask, when to ask, how to ask. All right, great fundraising advice. What else? uh, we could spend a couple more minutes together. What what have we talked about you did your session on the nonprofit radio listeners. I think one of the things that we didn’t touch on is really remembering that younger, more diverse donors want authenticity. They want to know that they’re helping um individuals that are directly impacted by your mission and they don’t want performative actions they have to be. Believe that you are truly making a difference and that they can help and often they respond to what’s going on in the world at the time and Gen Z donors are more likely to give to a moment in need um whether it is Black Lives Matter or conflict in the Middle East right? so um that is how they like to respond. Yeah, I would say don’t discount the young professional groups, um, a lot of people, uh, so I would say myself as a geriatric millennial. Um, or better than a baby boomer. It’s that I’m on the Gen Z millennial cusp, so I call myself a Genial, um, but there is a certain aspect of our careers that we were on the hustle and the bustle right like. How do we move up to the next level, um, getting degrees and propelling ourselves in our careers and getting better titles, making more money all of those things, right, um, that should not be discounted because another generation looks at it a little bit different because we. Still feel the exact same way we still wanna support those causes um we still wanna be involved intricately in nonprofits, especially ones that we’ve identified as something that we care about in our own hearts um but we just do it a little bit different than maybe Generation Y does, right? um, like my daughter, she is just like, yeah, no we don’t support this store this store this store anymore mom and I’m like, OK, well why? And she’ll tell me her reasoning and I always say, OK, you gotta find your. You gotta find some stand for something or fall for anything right? so that’s cool, but where do we draw the line in some of these spaces um so I don’t discount the way that she looks at things, um, as a younger generation of people coming up and how she wants to support things and then. I know that I’ve worked really hard to get to a certain spot so I have discretionary income and now I’m at a point where I can really make impactful contributions to a nonprofit so don’t, uh, I want the frictionless type of digital giving as well but I still wanna be engaged almost kind of like the. are engaged, you know, like take me to coffee, you know, make me feel kind of special, um, let’s talk about some things. How can I not just give you dollars but how can I also give you my time and my talent in other spaces than just volunteering at an event. Um, serving on boards of directors, all of those things that are older tried and true methods that we kind of feel failed by the wayside, there’s still a group of us that really put a lot of value in those those efforts, right, um, and that kind of breeds the life of nonprofits, so to speak, um, but I think that. Community aspect is something that we all have in common no matter what the generation is we’re looking on how to impact the community it’s just done differently by each generation um boomers are more trust they wanna know that they trust the organization to give what they’re they’re giving their money to do what they need to for the mission. Um, Gen Y wants to be have the E’s and Generation Z and millennials wanna know that you’re mission driven, right? Like you’re actually focusing on things you’re supposed to, but we all still want to impact the community in some way. All right, I think we should do it there. Perfect, perfect closing. Thank you. Thank you, Demetri. That was Demetri Lightfoot, senior director of philanthropy at Youth in Need. With Demetria is Nicky DeFalco, director of Partner success at One Cause. Thank you, Demetria. Nikki, thanks very much. Thanks for having us. My pleasure and thank you for being with Tony Martignetti Nonprofit radio coverage of the 2025 nonprofit Technology Conference where we are sponsored by Heller Consulting Technology services for nonprofits. Next week, our 25 NTC coverage continues with we’ve been hacked and smart data storage. 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 Martignetti. 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.