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hey everybody here today with brady josephson and he is a huge online fundraiser working for next after brady how are you doing today i'm doing good how are you i'm doing great uh it seems we're in a nice little little cubbies ready to just have this casual conversation about fundraising and i gotta know what the heck is next after it's a good question so uh you know the name comes uh out of this idea of well what's next after that you know we spend a lot of time in the nonprofit space what's now you know what's now at some point we got to figure out what's next after that so that's where the name comes from and uh what we do is our mission is to decode what works in fundraising and make it as accessible to as many non-profits as possible so we do that through experimentation testing and research so our main business is actually consulting and we'll run a number of experiments we'll analyze data look at trends and patterns to figure out how do we fundraise better and we do that by trying to understand donors they're the only ones who can really tell us what works in fundraising we can all have our opinions all day long but it's really what do donors actually respond to that's the bulk of our business but me and my team we work more on the research and training side so we try to figure out across all these experiments across all these clients across all this data that we're seeing what is it uh that really moves the needle when it comes to online fundraising we codify that translated into things like courses and workshops and ebooks and webinars so that kind of all non-profits can benefit from some of this knowledge and understanding of donors so that's really what next staffer is about daughter came home the dogs are going berserk uh i couldn't hear him at all so it's no big deal so you actually run experiments and collect data and see what nonprofits are actually doing what actually works and the things that donors say actually mean anything to them i thought that was pretty interesting as i understand it you're under the opinion that donors lie and you came to that conclusion through a little bit of research um and it's definitely an attention grabbing headline might be the title of the show is donors lie but what does that mean and how do you how do you determine that uh they're big fat liars yeah well two things one uh trying to tell the truth what they think what they believe there's always kernels of truth what i mean by donors are liars is when you do surveys or if you ask donors certain questions like why do you give uh or how did you hear about us or even more so i lost i lost all of that brother okay we're gonna try about the start of the question let's care let's kill the the video i'll give another shot here all right i'm gonna restate the donor's lie thing okay we got such nice pictures isn't that great so we were talking before we got the show started and you said something that really just caught my ear and that's donors lie and they lie about what they want what they like because you guys do the research behind the scenes and find out if what they say they don't like is really accurate what does what do you mean by donors lie yeah it is kind of attention grabbing isn't it so i mean donors are humans and all humans suffer from the inability to really understand our own behavior particularly when it comes to online transactions or online giving as well as philanthropy giving so when you ask a donor things like well why did you give it's actually very very difficult for you or me or any of us to clearly articulate why we give it's something that's so deep-rooted so values-based it's something so ingrained in us it's hard for us to kind of bring it to the surface but the more the type of research that we do which is really around online giving so landing pages donation pages emails facebook posts facebook ads when we look at user behavior when people are making such quick decisions like you are when you open your email inbox uh it's impossible for us to actually understand how we flag certain emails as that's important that's not important i'll read this i won't read this so then when we stop and try to reflect on uh what we think that we want in terms of emails frequency who they come from what we want to see on a donation page we're lying to ourselves and then we're lying when we give those responses to surveys and things like that so what we'll often see is people say you know email's got to be really short quick to the point nobody reads and i can't tell you how many times we've seen that a long email outperforms a shorter email generally speaking one of the most famous experiments we had a 2200 word email outperform 550 word email which is already above average so this idea that short always beats long isn't true or it has to have a video we've seen video decrease giving or you should include images we must always have images we've seen images decrease giving we see when you lower email volume not only does giving go down but engagement goes down so all these things that donors think they want they want videos they want less email a lot of these things are actually antithetical to fundraising or they actually depress giving and we only learn that by actually testing and monitoring user and donor behavior yeah see i would have had that all backwards i definitely would have said more videos more pictures gotta do it this way i've even talked to a few different companies that focus on video not testimonial so to speak but video thank yous or video this is what we did with your money emails so donors can get that feel good on is their money making an impact but you're saying that video isn't necessarily the way when you're asking for donations no the the scenario that you just talked about is a very different one the goal of that email is to get a donation the goal of that email is to more strongly build a relationship to report back that's a great usage of video so this is what i think is difficult is people often say some short emails work great some video works great but in the context of when you were trying to get someone to move from engagement to giving no i've seen very very little to no evidence to say that video is actually useful in that final step in other parts of that journey 100 after they become a donor absolutely but just because video works in one context doesn't mean that we should use video in all contexts and that's part of the sophistication and journey that we and everyone are on as we still figure out how do people actually engage with brands and organizations online see i think i kind of can connect with the donors on this aspect i don't know what it is about video but i'm not interested when i'm throwing scrolling through facebook linkedin or whatever i am not interested in the dang video i want to read i don't know why i know i'm not like everybody else everyone says oh video is the way to go but i i rarely have you know earphones or headphones with me i'm almost always in a crowded place or i'm in a place where the signal is just horrendous so video's not going to load for me and i would much rather read for instance the news than to watch the news i feel like if i'm reading it in my own tone of voice in my own head i can make a more informed decision on whatever the thing is that's in front of me and if i have video i feel like they're making me feel a certain way and i don't like that you know feeling stuff yeah if that's a really good point actually and i mean images fall into the same bucket as videos where you don't leave as much space for you the reader to use your own brain to fill in the gaps right one of the beauties of of text and no images is you can evoke certain emotions or you can call on certain like schemas or metaphors or things that you know and your brain is working and that means it's engaged which means you're probably more likely to actually retain the information and maybe even make a decision whereas when we use visuals we have to be very very careful that it a communicates what we think you know case in point we always there's this debate you know sad kid versus happy kid and one person may see a photo of a happy child and go this kid's happy there's nothing for me as the donor to do here there's no need where someone else may see a happy kid and go like oh wow i can make that kid happy same image two totally different experiences one not good for fundraising and one good for fundraising so often what we find in our testing at least is there is some times where an image helps and there can be odd situations where video helps but generally speaking it's too risky so just rely on the things that allow you to better connect with the donor and let them use their own brain to come to the conclusion which is that giving is good or they should make a donation so if we're getting rid of pictures and we're getting rid of videos and we're talking about just the text and then you know business terms and professional world that's called writing copy so do you have like on your website or your team has available like really cool copywriting techniques or how-to yeah we do um it's an area of of growth i mean we spend so much time focused on copy we're always trying to figure out how do we do it better but um we hired someone by the name of amy harrison who's professional copywriter in the uk who focuses on persuasion or conversion copywriting so that's another kind of key distinction right is there's great storytellers and copywriters but there's a different form of copy that's focused on conversion or action taking so that's here of expertise and we kind of built a copywriting for nonprofits course with her and it's about five hours and it kind of goes through these different tips and techniques and tactics that people can use to write persuasive copy uh particularly online so that's kind of one thing we talk a lot in our other courses or other training that we try to simplify it a bit and copy really needs to answer this question in the mind of the donor why should i give to you as opposed to another organization or not at all that's fundamentally what we call the value proposition question so any donor really large donor small donor online donor offline donor that's fundamentally the question that every non-profit is trying to answer in the mind of their donor and that's partly what your copy is trying to answer in some way now there's different ways that you can attack it at different times but we categorize the answer into four buckets one is appeal will someone actually like like it or identify with it is there credibility behind it just because you say so doesn't mean that they should necessarily trust you is it clear this is the most important one is just clarity we often say clarity trump's persuasion the amount of kind of vague you know non-profit he speak that we all do and we're all guilty of is is rampant it's uh it's all over the place um so we got likability credibility um clarity and i'm blanking on the fourth one right now i'm sorry um sorry was it appeal appeal was a person so appeal likeability uh credibility and trustworthiness um oh it's exclusivity what what's unique to you right there's a lot of non-profits that there's a lot of nonprofits that help veterans what what makes your particular non-profit different or unique or unique to me and sometimes that's as simple as just saying we're based in oklahoma city that's a unique differentiator for an organization can be right is this regional basis or faith basis or non-faith basis there's some pretty simple ways but when we analyze organizations so much it's you know we provide hope and healing to veterans in the united states you know that's kind of like the mission of the tagline it's very difficult for a donor to understand why they should support that organization as opposed to another one so that that's a long answer to a shorter question but yes we have some things on that and um what you're trying to get at the end of the day for fundraising is an answer to that question you know there's i kind of look at it there's there's really two styles uh maybe even a third but you definitely have like a qualifiable and a quantifiable quantifiable is a thing it's something you can count right if you're feeding 1100 homeless people a week you can count that and i know that if i give money it goes to x amount of meals x amount of dollars equals x amount of meals it's really straightforward i feel good for helping x amount of people i know exactly what's going on it's easier straightforward in my opinion and then you have like well like the veteran cost you brought up right maybe an active duty myself i contact get contacted from many veterans organizations and it's much harder to say what it is that you really do and then on the back end you have to get a veteran who likely suffers from tbi or ptsd to admit that they had a problem that you help them in order to create that that testimony or that before and after that you can show people because it's harder to picture what that looks like unless you're showing them what your program has done for them and it's a very different fundraising aspect would you agree yeah it is i think what's interesting when we when we do the different types of research you know every kind of industry or vertical you know like veterans or animals um oh there's always like a grass is greener you know so the counterpoint to veterans would be it's such an easily identifiable connection to make emotionally where everyone has some affinity or connection to a family member or service member to understand at least to a degree what that looks like whereas there's certain you know causes or diseases or whatever might be that or maybe more tangible or more quantifiable but have no emotional connection i've never heard of it so that's a whole other challenge to solve so i think what i've come to realize is every different organization no matter how big no matter how small no matter what vertical has strengths and weaknesses has opportunities and challenges and they're not always the same but i do agree that generally speaking having something that's more quantifiable or tangible does lead to generosity there's quite a bit of research out there that shows that tangibility leads to generosity now positioning it in terms of 11 000 people maybe isn't actually the smartest thing there's something called proportional impact effect when we use large numbers it's actually demotivating at times what does my ten dollars do in the face of eleven thousand people so even saying you know can help one person or one in ten you know the way that we frame things actually makes a big difference when we're trying to be more tangible more clear or quantifiable i like that tangibility leads to generosity people don't invest in things they don't understand and if they don't have a clear vision of what you do and that you're able to they're not going to invest and say yes with their dollars to help your cause yeah and the the thing that we'll often find is um you know we know ourselves we know organizations and so we talk to kind of insiders and people just like us and people that we know but the person whose arms length from us doesn't actually know that much and so it's for them that we need to be even more clear and even more tangible uh so that's really where where that comes into difference and that's really a challenge for small non-profits honestly is you know how you raise your first fifty thousand dollars hundred thousand dollars it's it's friends it's family it's people you know it's people that you have a direct connection with generally speaking and how you tell the story to them is very different than how you tell it to the friends of the friends or when you're trying to raise your 500 000 or a million dollars or whatever that number is when you start getting in those second third degree connections they don't know you they don't know your story so that's where this messaging this clarity this tangibility becomes extra important and it's a hurdle that we see a lot of smaller organizations struggle with once that first network is kind of tapped out they need to actually change a bit of how they tell their story because it doesn't connect in the same way to people that don't know them like that well that makes a lot of sense and we've kind of been talking about email this whole time is there like for someone getting started maybe they are a a one-person shop or a two-person shop and they've got this endless list of things they can do as a new non-profit where would you put email communications and follow through an electronic method where would you rank that is that something that can wait down the road is that something people should get started with right away should that be a primary focus yeah that's a great question um so i'd say two things one building more of like a scalable fundraising infrastructure of which email is one of those strategies you always need to start on that a little sooner than you think it's often not the most biggest priority if you have you know 100 donors uh 500 donors you know optimizing and growing your email list is not the most important thing but if you wait until you've totally maximized your current networks now you now you're behind the eight ball because it takes some time to actually build up a program figure out how to get emails how to deliver emails so that's why we often encourage of say you should start chipping away now have a way for someone to sign up for emails deliver at least one email a month you know there's some simple things you can do to get an email program off the ground and have it be functional so that as you kind of grow and expand you have some of the infrastructure and pull place why i do think it's important to maybe not um consider emails like a pure fundraising channel but every donor young olds high level high value or not uh you can use email to communicate to them so for example when we look at data we see that offline donors so people that only write checks are worth 90 more if they just get emails that means they never give online all they do is they get emails they're worth 90 more and all they do is write checks that'll never show up in metrics like online giving but we know that there's value in sending people emails so whether it's a major donor and you're providing an update of a report or impact that's an email-based strategy so there's huge value in email even if it's not how do we get 10 000 emails and raise 50 from each of them you know that's a mass strategy but there's still value in email outside of that that's really cool so you guys do you know experiments that style that way but you also do like this mystery shopper angle which i think is very interesting you apply that to non-profits what do you mean by a mystery shopper yeah so you know if the experiments are really how do donors respond um what we're trying to do in these mystery shopper studies or what are non-profits doing right so if we know for example like longer plain form emails generate a better fundraising response are non-profits doing that and so the only way to figure that out really is to get their emails so that's what we do we we make donations and we sign up for emails and we'll uh capture that experience of making the online donation or signing up for email and then we receive emails we receive thousands of emails every single day from non-profits all over the world and we'll do a different analysis of 45 day periods or higher ed only or small non-profits and we'll look at the different trends and patterns to see and what we're trying to do is marry up if we know that this concept again say longer more plain emails works and fundraising are nonprofits doing and the answer is no somewhere between five percent 10 max use that type of strategy or approach in their fundraising emails that's a huge gap or a huge delta between what is kind of proven to work and what nonprofits are doing so that's where we spend a lot of time talking about that because that's where we think there's a big opportunity so that's what we're really trying to do in these mystery shopper studies is like what are nonprofits doing and what's this gap between what we think or know works and what they're actually doing because that's the opportunity i like that and something you said really kind of sparked an idea of me so if you are a new nonprofit and you don't have a budget per se you could become the mystery shopper like brady's talking about you could sign up on an email list on a non-profit in your industry maybe someone that you look up to and you can see what kind of emails you receive from them and you and maybe your small team or you and your board can look at that and decide what emails you might decide to send yeah i think that's a decent starting point the danger though is do they know what they're doing uh are is what they're doing working i think that's part of the reason why we're in the situation we are where because we don't have the data we'll do a lot of copycat you know i like this organization or this is an organization i support this is an organization i admire or a big one we assume that the big ones know what they're doing and that's a dangerous assumption to make and then we see oh here's how they send their emails they're short and full of images so that's what we should do in our emails so it's great to see that experience but again it's so hard for us to distance ourselves from this bias that we have of our own personal opinions our own experience so i'd say that's part of the equation we can also look at more rigorous data or evidence around what's working instead of just here's what they do or here's what i like so it's a decent starting point i agree with you but it's not the end point right it's uh it's just one data point so we have all this talk out there that the standard knowledge you know make sure you thank every donor handwritten letter maybe a thank you email or a follow-up email you're doing the research are non-profits doing that are they thanking their donors not well enough is the short answer no uh we're actually in the analysis stage of a multi-channel study where we gave a 20 donation online and a 20 donation offline to the same organization but two different names two different addresses two different phone numbers and then we tracked all the communication email phone text and mail for four months and what we're trying to see is a what's that onboarding process look like across those channels at all and what's the difference between the online and the offline donor and we see this every single time where there's kind of an initial thank you it's often automated maybe there's one additional thank you very very very few phone calls and once we get beyond kind of like two weeks you know like the honeymoon stage is over there's no more you know thinking or gratitude it's like you know here's our regular newsletter and we think that this first kind of 30-45 day window is actually one of the most critical times in the life of a donor or a new donor and so this is where we should be trying to do everything we can you know send thank you letters do phone calls send multiple emails do whatever we can to engage the donor while they're engaged because the reality is if they don't make a second gift by about six months or definitely 13 14 months they're basically dead they're basically gone for most organizations so this this first time period is absolutely critical for this trajectory of this donor and their engagement and relationship with you that was crazy there's a life cycle of a donor i imagine you know with the the digital age that we're in it's so easy to grab our attention or to have a new thing a new shiny object uh pull us away from whatever we're doing you know if you look at the news cycle most things last a day and a half tops we have a little strange time where we've got some covet going on and we've got some protest slash writing across the u.s that maybe have our attention a little bit more but by and large regular news cycle you might have one but no more than really three days tops on a topic so if they are engaged with you and they had a great experience you know as a donor and you followed up with them great you don't talk to them for three months i probably wouldn't be engaged either yeah i know that's exactly it it's it's maybe somewhat counterintuitive there's this you know idea that you know they've just made a donation so let's thank them briefly but then kind of you know leave them alone we don't want to bug them or something like that and what's what's interesting about that mentality is is one i think it's one that doesn't really understand the value of philanthropy or the joy of giving right like if we really think that donations transform the world or our cause or our mission and if we really think that giving is good at its own level to be separated from you know consumerism let alone the fact that you become more happy more healthy you experience joy when you give why are we leaving people alone uh we should be kind of in a obviously you know ethical and uh understanding way we should be encouraging giving as much as we can but also when we start looking at the data so classy uh did a it's a donation to a platform they did a study of i think that 10 million dollar 10 million transactions and looked at when someone was most likely to become make a second gift or become a recurring donor and the most likely time they are to move from a one-time donor recurring donor is in the second week after they give the most likely time they are to make a second donation to your organization outside of their anniversary date is in that first two three weeks you look at email metrics the most open read and engaged emails are the first three you ever sent right this is when people are engaged they remember you to your point they're kind of connected if you wait three months they won't even remember you probably so there's this real opportunity and maybe seems counterintuitive but again if we look at uh human behavior and if we really think that giving is an act that inspires more giving and it's a positive thing then we should be able to kind of front load some communications and some of these strategies and try to move people quicker in this engagement while they're engaged now i know that startup nonprofits often have a lot of barriers some of which is know-how but some of it's really they're not sure if they know what they're doing or if they know they're doing it right so they're tentative right they are hesitant to ask for money in the first place you know what would you say to those individuals that maybe need to help getting started yeah i think that's actually a great point i think that's probably the biggest barrier to growth uh full stop whether you're a small nonprofit or not is this you know tentativeness or if you feel like asking is begging or if you feel like fundraising isn't a part of your mission you know if it's something else that you just get money from to do your mission like all of those philosophical viewpoints make their way in to how we run our organizations and that's where board and board leadership is incredibly critical if boards don't understand the value of fundraising see it as part of the organization how it's something that you know needs to be invested in not just you know reduced or limited that will make its way down to the ed and the staff person or the volunteers and that's that's where um kind of this culture of fundraising is really really important um uh dan pallada who's who's famous for writing a book on charitable he's got a very famous ted talk he's just produced a new course called uh the bold training and it's really geared towards executives and board members but it's really about this this idea of culture or mindset or how do we think about fundraising and marketing because it's really really damaging so i think that's one kind of tip maybe for people i think it's like 99 for their course you know so and there's a group discounts but that would be something that would be a great board training event you know uh we're going to take this course over the next quarter and i think that could be a great way for you know boards and non-profits to kind of get more aligned philosophically which will then allow for more freedom around fundraising because if you're tentative you're not going to raise money or not as much as you could full stop yeah bold is definitely better you can't ah it's a guaranteed no if you don't ask and if you're scared to ask they don't they don't trust or believe in you and it's one of the things that i think we we've learned through the the cobot pandemic there's there's a very clear line between organizations that have succeeded in organizations that have struggled and it has everything to do with forging on and not being tentative um asking in uncertain times versus pausing versus waiting um versus stopping some organizations that that's a recipe for disaster in my opinion when it comes to fundraising you know being more on the front foot and being able to adapt and is always where i think organizations should lean which isn't to say you just blast emails and blast mail that's not what i'm saying at all but to be proactive to be more on the front foot to be more communicative yeah i think is always the the better posture well there's definitely a way to continue the ask and do it with a little bit grace but i mean i'm right there with you we don't know how long this this thing is going to continue right it's the first time we've collectively globally taken action against such a small enemy and a virus and we don't know if this is going to be done next week or two years from now are you telling me non-profits out there listening that you're going to stop fighting for your cause whatever your cause is because you can't see people in person yeah no it's a great point and one of the the critical kind of links to generosity is empathy uh at a physiological level when we experience empathy something called oxytocin's release oxytocin's been directly linked to generosity and so when we see these spikes of giving around natural disasters or even economic crisis or something like this there's always an influx of giving giving actually goes up in the short term and i think that's partly because we all have this heightened sense of empathy of my gosh imagine being you know out of a job right now imagine having three kids and working from home like i think in a in a weird way we've had a heightened sense of empathy which actually leads to generosity and so not that you should you know prey on that necessarily but um organizations that are communicating and asking are raising tons of money right now and that's one of the ingredients is this heightened sense of empathy yeah other of the many organizations i've talked to in the past few months since march the ones that continued to ask with empathy have had their banner years they've reached the heights of new heights and the ones that have been tentative or have paused many have all but closed up shop and they've you know shrank back into the ether there's there's something to be said about being bold and doing it with empathy well i think what's interesting we've got all this digital online stuff um i know i talked to preston cohen a couple of months ago about the google ad grant but i understand that you're a big fan as well google ad grant yeah definitely i i think it's not not you know the end i'll bl solution but it's a key component uh to add to the online marketing mix you know when it comes to online fundraising we try to simplify down there's really only three metrics that matter one is traffic how many people visit your website one's your conversion rate or how many people that visit your website actually make a donation and the third is average gift which is just on average how much do they give if you multiply those three things together it equals revenue so when you're looking you know how do i optimize online fundraising you're looking at how do i get more traffic improve my conversion rate or improve generosity or ideally a combination of three and so we do that type of analysis on all of our clients and also a lot of our benchmarking studies and the thing that stands out all the time particularly for small non-profits is a severe lack of traffic you know we'll often look at hey you know when people give they're actually very generous you know the average gift to a small non-profit in a research study we did was over a hundred bucks you know it's it's fairly high uh the conversion rate typically small organizations have a higher conversion rate because the people visiting the site know you better you know friends and family they're more likely to convert so you actually have a higher conversion rate it's the traffic piece where again in this benchmark study the average small non-profit was receiving uh you know less than a thousand visits a month and if you get less than a thousand visits a month it's going to be very very difficult for online fundraising to make a lot of financial sense so where the google ad game comes in is it's a way to kind of tap into a huge traffic source google search for free you get up to ten thousand dollars of free advertising now there's some strings attached it's not as easy as it maybe sounds you got to jump through some hoops and people should go back and listen to your conversation with is a preston uh because he can kind of walk people through so it's a very very useful tool and a way to boost traffic and that's often what um we suggest organizations do if say you've got a great mission you talk about it okay your donation page is okay you just you need to get more people there and that's where a lot of organizations struggle i love it i love everything you're saying pretty where can people get a hold of you uh going to our websites great next after dot com uh me personally i actually just deleted twitter today i'm taking a twitter break but uh normally i'm at brady josephson uh linkedin i i'd love to connect on linkedin i've i've had a really um you know kind of fun time in these copa times posting questions getting the discussion so you can find me there at brady josephson so those are some ways you can find and connect well brady this was a lot of fun and we'll have all those links in the show notes for you thank you for making time today to come speak to my audience thank you so much for having me we appreciate it