Good day. Good morning, wherever you are. Good afternoon. Thank you so much for joining us. We are rooted and today we are bringing you in collaboration with Evergreen collective, the end of your giving campaigns that play to your strengths. Today's Wednesday, August 10 2022. And we are so excited for you to be here. Next slide. All right, so who is rooted? For some of you, this is the first time that you're joining us. And we're so excited to have you for others, you have returned because you've been with us before. And we always appreciate your patronage. So we'd like to say that we're an organization that leads with our values. And what does that mean? Well, what we have here are the values of our organization. And I won't read for you the entirety of the line, but just the bolded parts. And what it means to us is that anti racism is something we espouse equitable access to opportunities and resources, partnership through listening and building trust, community led breakthroughs, hence why we're here today. Fearless curiosity, and most importantly, health and healing. We not only list these, to put it out there to the people that work with us, but also to keep ourselves accountable internally. All right, so while we're getting started and getting acclimated, I'm going to invite you to share your name, your organization and your pronouns into the chat. Where are you coming from, including your land acknowledgement. Now, if you are unaware of the land that you inhabit, we do have a link where you can click on it and find out what is the name so that you can give the proper acknowledgement? Also, let us know what brings you here today. What are you hoping to gain? We are aware that there are so many levels and contexts of organizations that are here today. So we want to make sure that we are hitting the things that are important or answering the questions that are most important to you. Finally, if there are any accessibility needs that you want to share, please drop that in the chat. If the chat is unavailable or inaccessible to you, I'm going to give us a moment of silence so that you can speak up, you can turn on your mic and share with us.
All right, and if at any point, the chat becomes inaccessible or something is not showing up for you, please let us know. So we want to make sure that you're not missing anything. Also know that this session is recorded, and that we will be sending out the recording afterwards so that you if you have to leave at any point that you won't miss the good things that are going to be happening here today. Hello, and welcome. All right. So today, your co facilitators are here on the slide, but we will also do personal introductions. My name is sia Maga. Don. I am Brutus, community director of community engagement and fundraising. I reside here in the Bay Area in Concord on what is also known as we walk Bay land. I am for those who are visually impaired a dark skinned African woman with braids that are shaped into a bun on the top of my head. I'm currently wearing a white V neck T. I also have a co worker who's currently taking in his morning bottle. His name is Arturo and he will be joining us at points throughout our session. I will now turn it over to bow
so many windows open, it's hard for me to find the turn on my mic. Hi, I'm Val. My pronouns are she they I'm the Director of Strategy and education for rooted. I'm also one of the co founders and mostly today I will be in the background doing the sort of run of show. And thank you all for being here. I reside in the San Francisco East Bay on Chanyeol Aloni land. And I'm just excited to see some both new and familiar faces. So hi, everyone.
And over to her well.
Thank you. My name is Joel Valencia. He pronounced I am in Redwood City, on a lonely land. And I'm here on behalf of the organization that I founded evergreen collective, which primarily focuses on helping bipoc lead and serving nonprofits become financially sustainable. And I'm excited to be here today and I'm connected to all of you and thank you for the invitation.
All right, awesome. So going over zoom edit kid which we are all aware of but just wanted to touch on it really quickly. Be aware of your king camera angles. Stay fully clothed, but no dry cleaning is necessary. Remember to use your name or organization and include your pronouns so that we may properly identify you. Keep your mind turned off unless you were speaking. And always, always, always let us know if the chat is not accessible to you. Community agreements we'd like to go over these as we are getting ourselves strapped in ready to take off on this amazing flight. We invite you to approach with curiosity be open to new ways of doing and thinking. Sit with discomfort, expect and accept non closure as much as you can. Because we know so much is happening engage in be present. practice mindful listening, raise your virtual hand to share your thoughts and try not to multitask when you're in a meeting with others. Be aware of the power dynamics and consider the space you consume. Be willing to share space, speak from your experience, assume best intent and acknowledge the impact of your words on others, except the restraints as they are being presented. We invite you to ideate Yes, and for my Type A's embrace being messy, put aside perfectionism, it's going to be a little hard, but I believe in you, I think you can do this. Next one we like to refer to as Vegas Sesame Street rules. What shared here stays here, what's learned here leaves here. Be willing to slow down notice and name what is coming up in the room for you. Show up as your full self and live your truth. So your quirks all of those things are welcome in this space. Most importantly, take care of yourself and have fun,
because
fun is a part of fundraising. Sorry, I had to. If there are any other agreements that you feel like we have missed, definitely drop them into the chat and we will add them to subsequent sessions.
Next slide.
So here's our agenda for today, we want to make it as interactive and exciting as possible. And I believe that Holwell is going to do just that. So fasten your seat belts, as we are getting ready to take off on this awesome journey. We also have a survey that we would love for you to fill out. And we will make sure to put the link to that at the very end and also send it out to you. So in case you have to leave early, we really would love to hear from you as far as your feedback, because it helps us as we continue to build our sessions.
All right. So you're going to hear about the design Justice Network and the liberatory design principles which help us do the work that we do. And with that, we always say it's very important to center the voices of those who are directly impacted by the outcomes of the design practice. And for those of you who did not think of yourself as designers before, then welcome to the design table, because that is exactly who you are. Next slide.
So some of the
principles, we'd like to review a couple of them and there's also a link so that you can see them in their entirety, I believe there are 12 some of the mindsets that we invite invite you to embrace while doing this work with us. There's one take action to learn. But complexity of oppression must be addressed with courageous ongoing action experiment as a way to think and learn without attachment to the outcome. So we'd like to say that in this teaching lab, it's like a low risk experimentation where you can fail in a safe space and figure out what's working and what's not. Remember small changes can have a large effect.
Next slide.
Exercise creative courage, oppression creates fear of change. So coming to fear Well, it's creativity act courageously to imagine possibilities beyond the confines of dominant culture. So this may exact may cause you to think a little bit outside of the box if you will, and that is perfectly okay. Recognize oppression builds capacity to recognize oppression and how it plays out on the various levels be an individual, interpersonal, institutional, systemic and structural and across various forms of identity, which is why we encourage you to basically just hear and listen because there are different lived experiences in the room and different understandings. And in this space, we invite you to basically be open and free but also recognize where there may be hesitation because oppression has been happening for a good amount of time. And it has taken on so many forms. So in this we hope to try to dismantle that as best we can in our work through design. And with that, I will turn it over to Holwell who will lead us through the remainder of the session.
Thank you, as also looking for my unmute button. Same as Val. I've got like 20 Different windows open. So thank you everyone for being here today. I think I saw some familiar names when I was looking at the attendance sheets. I was I was telling my my colleague, you know, it's that commitment of being here at 9am on a Wednesday morning. So thank you all. I see Akuto is committed he is also joined our call. But yeah, so I've spoken a little bit about who I am. I'm excited to to lead this session. I think one of the common challenges and scenarios is we're already starting to talk about it. We're in August, urine campaigns, how do you run these? How do you run them in a way that works for your organization? You know, a lot of folks who are in leadership spaces are doing the fundraising work. We don't necessarily have a lot of time and think about fundraising, and how do we get? How do we get it done in a way that's effective, that is gonna move our mission forward, without having to spend too much of our time on it is how we feel about it, right. So many of us are focused on programs. So I wanted to talk a little bit about a couple scenarios that
let's see.
That kind of really allow us to focus on maybe a few things that allow us to move our mission forward in ways that aren't too taxing on our organization as it is. So thank you for watching that slide forward. So we're gonna talk a little bit about what you should and should not be doing to give you the best results, we want to talk about what what some of your Fundraising Planning might look like for you some internal components maybe, and then review some common scenarios, provide some solutions and best practices to help you maximize your urine campaign. So we want to put a little poll up for you. So we can find out more about what's most challenging as far as fundraising for you. If it's any of these things, or if it's something else, if you want to just put it in the chat afterwards.
Okay, looks like a looks like a pretty even spread actually.
Okay, I like that. I think it's indicative of the space of the sector, you know, we don't all struggle with the same part of fundraising. Part of what's so challenging about fundraising is that there are so many variables. And you know, we spoke about a few of these. I went, when we were coming up with this poll, we added the neurodiversity accessibility challenges on there, I myself have ADHD. And I think I was explaining that, for me. ADHD can make certain types of fundraising really difficult. Like sitting down and doing a complex proposal, right, I have to sit there and focus for hours at a time. And so I have to create the accommodations for myself to make it happen. And, you know, break down the project and manage my own HDS ADHD in ways that allow me to successfully complete that task, which is something that's very difficult for me. So thank you all for for sharing. It looks like the top three tie or four tied are major giving, attracting major donors making space for thinking and planning and reflection, breaking through the noise and standing out and grant writing. You can go to the next slide. So when we think about fundraising, I think if you've been doing this for a while, you've definitely been exposed to so amount of advice or input are well attention comments from folks that you should be doing this March doing that more, you should be building more of an individual donor base, and you should be doing more foundation grads, because there's like millions of dollars there. And you should be doing XYZ, right? So we're all kind of in that space, and always being pushed and pulled in all sorts of directions when it comes to fundraising. All of us have limited time, limited resources, limited staff, bandwidth. And our own time. If you don't have staff members, sometimes I primarily work with grassroots orgs most of the time organizations I work with, don't even have their first development staff person. So they're doing the fundraising themselves, spreading across the team, or sometimes just the executive director is doing all the fundraising. So which fundraising activities you pursue, as an organization depend again, on many variables, that's what is so challenging about fundraising? How do you maximize the ROI Turn on the investment that you make into activities that you choose, right. And so I always recommend kind of just taking a step back and really reflecting. We have to maximize our financial returns with what we have at the moment. At the same time, how do we build up our capacity to generate resources in new ways going forward to create sustaining revenue and to create growth revenue. And so on the left, I listed kind of the classic fundraising areas that are out there, generally speaking, and then on the right amount of people questions and might help to start clarifying for you, what's going to work best for you which areas you want to jump into, or do more of, when you seek, for example, to raise money from many small to mid dollar donors, or major donors and the left there, the two individual donor areas. The key is engagement, or connection to your cause area and your organization. There are non funders who engage with your programs, and organization. And then there's funders who give consistently, both are the base for raising money this way. If you don't have the space yet, or it's very small, then of course, the question is, how do we bring that number up? And you take a step back, right? What are all the things that you need to do to do that? It starts with the groundswell during engagement. And does your organization have the capacity to engage more people to run events? To do webinars? How do you create connection? How do you collect that information to continue to stay in touch with people? And how do you continue to stay in touch, right that you have the team capacity to keep that going, because that's what's going to create your individual donor base at every level. And that in a traditional model, what you do is you have a broad base of engaged folks, not necessarily donors, and then you run a campaign every so often and get a few new donors. And usually they're small to mid level. And then those folks get over a number of years. And after a few years, you ask them to give a little bit more. And then after they give a little bit more chemo years later, many of those folks will eventually be your major donors. That's kind of the the pyramid that
so does your does your organization currently have the capacity to do that to create that sustained engagement? Starting now? Or starting? However, many years ago, you've been doing this already? To keep that growth going and engagement going? And if it does, great, you know, go for it, if it's, if it's already producing results for you, especially. But if it doesn't, how do you develop that capacity? And does it make sense for you to develop that capacity? Do you work in a cause area in a region, you know, all these variables that indicate to you as the leader of the organization, that it makes sense to jump into that particular type of fundraising? If it's difficult, if it's an area that is unlikely to ever produce a lot of revenue for you? It's probably not worth it, at least in the short term, right? Where are the short, what's the low hanging fruit and the short term wins that you can get to create that financial space for yourself so that you can start investing more in the long term? And so the last question, there is, ability, belief and connection. It's a, it's the ABCs. It's a classic fundraising kind of methodology, to the prospects in the space that you're exploring, have the ability, which in this case means financial capacity, the belief in the cause area that you're working on? And then, most importantly, the connection to your organization? You know, are they is, are they in somebody's portfolio? Right? If you have fundraising staff, is there a staff person that consistently makes sure that the person is invited to events that the person receives those letters that they get information about major victories of your organization along the way, invitations to all sorts of stuff, right? That connection is what's going to eventually allow you to create the space and a trust, to make solicitations and to create additional revenue for your organization in a way that doesn't. That isn't a transaction, right, but it's a partnership. So I will slow down a little bit. And I'm curious if folks have kind of any thoughts, questions out of folks feel about urine, fundraising and fundraising in general kind of thinking about these things? I don't want to talk at you the whole time. I would love to folks kind of just engage as well. I'll pause there. If you want to put questions thoughts in the chat. or if you want to just go off, off mute and talk. So I'll keep it going. before engaging any type of fundraising, consider that those questions and determine the fundraising activities and capacity built will lead to short and long term development goals as an organization. As as he was saying, Before run experiments, see what you can learn in the process of running those experiments. What can you learn about the prospects we can learn about your community? Everything we do requires resources. And as a small organization, or a small organizations invest in those resources can feel like a big risk. So how can you feel better about taking certain risks, one of those ways is to run small pilot experiments, right, run various small versions of fundraising campaigns, doing little forays into the different types of fundraising and see what you learn. Ultimately, whether or not you're going to succeed in certain types of fundraising, you just have to do it yourself. First to see if your organization and you have the capacity, the ability, the skills, the kind of inclinations to do that type of fundraising. Not everybody is going to be good at every type of fundraising. And so you have to find out for yourselves, what types of fundraising are gonna work best for you. And as you run these experiments, institutionalize that knowledge so that you can refine your experiments and get better at whatever you decide to do. And don't forget that investing in fundraising operations can be really, and can certainly feel really expensive. And so depending on the activities you do, within the first year, sometimes it actually cost as much or more to raise money than than the amount you actually ended up raising. And so, especially when you're trying something new, like if you've just hired a new staff person to do your development, it takes time for them to ramp up and learn the skills and develop the relationships, even new major donors that at established organizations sometimes only break even on the revenue that they collect compared to the big cost organization. And this is actually considered acceptable, since it takes time to build close relationships. And this is, despite the fact that major giving is considered one of the highest return on investment activities that you can do as an organization. I think the highest is planned giving.
Those usually take years to realize, so ultimately, where your return on investment is, as demonstrated is in the long term, it costs much less to retain donors and retaining multi year donors than it does to acquire them in the first place. It also costs less to retain an upgrade your donors who are consistently giving. And ultimately, the growth of your base of sustaining revenue, which is generally you know, unrestricted revenue from from that base of donors is going to make your your efforts worth it. But it does take that kind of initial small snowball to get the going. I wanted to put a little bit of that theory into practice. Let's talk about a common fundraising scenario. So giving Tuesday, you know, let's say given Tuesday is around the corner, sort of is not really yet. But you have given Tuesday, you have you know, somebody on your board or some lower mid level donor, most of all, just, you know, colleagues, friends, just folks are all telling you, Hey, what are you doing for giving Tuesday? Are you doing Giving Tuesday?
Oh, hold on one sec. I see a question.
type of campaign. Okay. So, let me come back to your question was, we, I'm happy to talk about that. So I'll talk about that, um, after talking about the GivingTuesday stuff. So GivingTuesday, you know, every year, all of us have to wrestle with the question of whether or not to do a GivingTuesday campaign. And is it worth doing depending on your organization's resources for something grassroots small if you don't have staff to do all sorts of communications, marketing, and no engagement leading up to the to the day of that was probably not giving Tuesday has lots of hype. There's a lot it seems like there's a lot of money out there that day. But isn't money that's available to you right now, based on where you're at? Again, that is probably not. So when we look at the challenges of Giving Tuesday. First of all, the first challenge actually is retroactive. Have you already invested the time and the resources ahead of the day Giving Tuesday to create your best chance of success that day? Have you spent the month two years connecting with community? Have you run small and midsize campaigns to acquire donors previously? And then have you ensured that communications have continued to get to all these folks that are in your community, so they can connect to your organization and your mission? So when given to the does come around, they feel again, the ABCs are ready to go. Have you? And will you do the prep work required for for the successful single day virtual campaign, not every organization is set up to be successful when doing kind of online only engagement. And then if you want to do a virtual and in person hybrid campaign, that day, do you have the resources to pull that off event planning is is very labor intensive. So even with all of that, even if you've done all of those things, GivingTuesday itself is still usually one of the worst days to do a single day campaign for your organization. Matching Gifts like this for meta have run out very quickly in previous years. But even when you're run out within the first hour, and in that same year, they started that getting matching campaign at 8am. East Coast time. So are you and your donors going to be awake at 5am? To make contributions to run these campaigns, right? Just to hopefully get some amount of matching dollars from meadow or other matching corporations. So unlikely? And do you really want to subject yourselves and your and your base and your community to that? I would advise against that. And then lastly, because there's so much hype, because there's so much going on that day, there's so much noise, right? There's so many emails or so much social media, there's so much going on, it can be incredibly difficult to stand out amongst the 1000s of other call to actions, calls to action from other organizations that are all competing for the same dollars, especially if it's in the same cause area as you. And it's also again, primarily a social media campaign, would does your organization already have the capacity to stand out in a big way in the social media space? So I almost always advise against giving Tuesday campaign if your organization does not have just much more robust capacity to do communications engagement marketing, in the points in the months leading up to Giving Tuesday, and then on the day of game Tuesday, just kind of getting ready to have everybody on this. As far as what it would cost? You mean, it means that the day of you and your staff are giving up a whole day to manage a live campaign? Is this really worth the effort that with our results that it might produce? And then are you investing in the practices in the capacity to build long term engaged relationships with the people who truly believe in your mission? How do you use the urine campaign in general, instead to begin doing that?
Ultimately, fundraising results from single day events, especially given Tuesday, can can be very low, because of the lack of an engaged audience. And then the donors that you acquire, don't necessarily stick around. They get connected to the excitement of the single day of giving of the hype. Maybe somebody pointed them to see you. But are they emotionally connected to your organization? And, and its mission and your team? Right? Those are the folks that stick around ultimately.
So
types of campaign that work best for each for the different types of donor type? Okay. I think it's a bit of a complex answer, Liz, I think it's definitely to the extent that you're able to and this is true for individual donor giving every type of funder, you want to segment, you want to think about what is the tailored approach that is going to work for the specific demographic that you're targeting. And so if you're targeting, for example, so here's a classic kind of fundraising methodology thing. If you're doing individual donors, you have low level donors, which is small dollar gifts, let's call it like 10 $20. The mid level folks who give you know closer to maybe you're giving dollars but not quite there. It's up to you You can define those categories for your organization. At one of my jobs, we did 500 to 999 was mid level below 500 was small dollar above 1000 was major dollar. What that allows you to do is create an approach that better uses the resources of your organization, and is considered effective as well on the side of the of the donor engagement. So for your small dollar donors, you do, you're going to call your one to many, one to many approach. So you have one staff person on your team, who's in charge of sending email blasts to many, many donors. And these are not specifically personalized, tailored to each of the donors, they're more general donors. Now this, you know, this, they're giving you at a level that when they want to sustain your work, they're not necessarily seeking to, you know, give it a higher level at that point in time. So you do fundraising strategies that allow them to connect with your organization in a general way, and to continue to give that 10 to $500 amount, then you have your mid level donors, these are folks that are giving you at a level that they clearly engaged, they want to move up at some point, they're kind of testing the waters still, right, they haven't quite become that major level of giving donor. But because they're in that middle space, it can be really valuable for your organization to do campaigns that engage them, and a bit more of a personalized way. So you do what's called one, one to few types of fundraising. A good example of that is hosting webinars that talk about your organization, you bring in a few folks, maybe 30, right? It's no longer this feeling of I'm getting the same email that 1000 People are getting, or 10,000 people are getting, now they're being invited into a more intimate space with the organization. But it still doesn't require that one to one individual personalized approach, it does require a little bit more effort, right. But you're going to continue to build loyalty. And eventually, the hope is to get them to become major donors. And once you become a major donor, and once you're running a major donor program as an organization, and you can do this from the beginning, by the way, you can just have a few major donors in your portfolio and just make sure you manage them this way. Now, we were talking one to one personalized. And at this point, you do what major giving programs and major giving officers to at all established organizations, you make sure that that they're in someone's portfolio. So that means that somebody at your organization is responsible for making sure that each of these people is individually managed, each of these people gets invitations to events that are coming up. And that once or twice a year, you're inviting them to have a personal, you know, coffee or lunch or go for a walk or whatever it is that makes the most sense. Basically, somebody's making sure that that person is continuing to be personally connected to you and your organization. And so those are all individual donor base, fundraising strategies and campaigns. I'll pause there, because that cover kind of questions that you have there, Liz?
I'm sort of curious to hear what people like. I don't know, even if it's just sort of like a moaning fast. Like, like, what are people struggled with? With Giving Tuesday? You know, did you just need someone to tell you, you don't have to do it? Or are there you know, things that have been successful, even on a small scale that anyone you know, would like to share? Talk about? I'm always curious about giving Tuesday, and like what's actually happening in the field, because from our perspective, you know, creating different communications materials for different words, like we see such a range of,
you know, from
large orgs that, you know, do all the things that Hillel was talking about, in terms of like really engaging in social media for long periods of time versus those that, you know, have done small things with not necessarily great returns, because they just don't have the bandwidth. Oh, thanks, Maya. Let's see, never done a GivingTuesday campaign and have heard that I need to do it. I just got a fiscal sponsor and applied for my first grant. So I'm very new to fundraising. Congratulations. Me too. This is why we bring in other people But we've had success. So we have a match and do a whole week starting with giving Tuesday. So we're sending multiple emails over the week and a couple on the Tuesday itself. So is that sort of building? Is it Mary or Mari? I know that we've met before, and I'm sorry that I don't it's Mari Mari. Okay, that's what I thought. Yeah, so what were some of the things that you like you did building up to that in order to have the week work well, for you.
Um, well, the match is pretty key. We found and then, while usually warn people like a day or two in advance, the day itself, there's just some people who like to give on Tuesday, which is why we will often start the week of giving on that day. Usually, like the bulk of the money comes in three quarters of the way through the week. So the day itself is not like the biggest catalyst, but it just people are primed. But it's mostly like email, you haven't listed four or 5000 people, social media, you don't get any traction, really. So.
Let me jump in here. I want to go back to Maya, who has never done a GivingTuesday campaign and heard that we need to do it, because this is the sentiment of a lot. And I believe Holwell spoke to this a little bit earlier. With it being your first Giving Tuesday, I definitely encourage you to come up with a strategy that fits your context. I also encourage you not to set your sights so high, that you're expecting a million dollars to run into the door, because it may not happen. Right? Like when you're setting your goal. Look at how much also, I'm also wondering like how much support you have as far as like board and development team. And then with this being the first one, it's also a great opportunity to see what we can do on a small scale that will work for us. But also recognizing, like, what supports do we have are is the board one that actually is able to connect us to networks or even if if it's a fiscally sponsored project, you may not even have access to your own board, you may have like an advisory committee, or something of that nature. But who else can help you give legs to this work? And recognize that, you know, you may not have a return at all, or you may have a small return and use it as a learning experience. But just encouraging you to set out figure out what context would work for you what strategy. And then for Liz, who I believe is said, you know we've done it. It's worked? Well. What? That's a good question. And I know who was going to touch on this. It's like what have we done in the past? That's worked well? How can we build on it? All right, and then I won't take your own the rest of your question. Go ahead and
hold on. Thank you. Thank you both. Yeah. I'm a big proponent on on strengths based approaches to whatever we're doing as leaders. So this is where experimentation comes in. But it's also a lot of reflection. Individually, right in our teams. What can What do we feel empowered to do? Well, based on on who we are on our backgrounds and organizations position at the moment? How do we lean into our strengths, ultimately, I think that that's the winning the winning proposition, that's the way to do things. It there's a getting the name of the book, but there's a great book that talks about kind of just leaning into your strengths, and then getting your the areas where you're, you know, quote, unquote, weak, just up to a kind of adequate level, but then just not investing much more resources in that area. Because at that point, you know, you want to be able to do it to the extent that is necessary. But there are certain areas that you know, all of us are never going to be excellent at. It's just not in our natural ability space. So what's best there is partnering with people for whom it is a strength, strong area, right? And kind of hedging your team that way. But digressing a little bit. So when it comes to fundraising, what are your strengths as organizations and what are your strengths isn't the visuals and a little bit of reflection can really help with that. A part of my coaching practice is thinking about how our personal identity factors help us be successful or prevents us from being successful in the fundraising space. And that includes, you know, identity, identity, you know, thinking about what identities we have that might be privileged ones and what identities we have that might be oppressed or marginalized in this society and thinking about that, not just as individuals but as organizations operating in certain spaces because In my experience, that understanding kind of almost directly correlates with your ability to fundraise effectively or not, because the money is often in the more privileged spaces. And then a lot of the trauma and personal difficulties around getting that money is in these less privileged spaces and these oppressed spaces, right. And so often, folks haven't done that thinking yet, or are very well aware of, but have no idea how to overcome it, which is I think most of us. But thinking about that, and thinking about to what degree that is affecting your fundraising results as a first step, and then starting to think about what you can do to start to overcome some of those challenges that your organization may be having. I, as a last note on that, I run a leadership program, where each of the fellows has to do a small fundraising campaign, and every year, I see that difference there, you know, privileged folks being able to raise the money like nothing. And then folks who come from financially underprivileged backgrounds, just having the hardest time having so many difficult feelings around it. And so just wanted to point out that that that is a part of fundraising as well, right? It's not just here's skills, and if you're not getting the results, and you don't have the skills, like no, there's quite a bit more systemically going on as well, that can make things really challenging. And it's important to just remember and think about those things as well, while at the same time building up the capacity for your organization to, to kind of cut through some of that and get to the results anyway. So with regard to Giving Tuesday in the noise, that's a part of it, right? Are you answering those spaces where your message is arriving, in front of and in the ears of the folks who have the resources that can support your organization, and you have the capacity to make sure that that happens? And then going back to your point about just kind of do you even do it the first year? And if you even do it at all? I think if you've run it already, and you haven't had good results, it's just worth thinking about why why you didn't have those good results? Is it that you didn't have a lot of time to prepare, and weren't actually able to invest quite a bit to try to get the best result? Or is it that you did everything that you could? And ultimately, it's just probably not going to be a winning proposition for your organization in particular to continue doing it? Or can you try doing it in different ways, like Mario was saying just now, can you use it as a catalyst? It's a lot of pressure to try to get all of your money from a campaign that lasts one day. And especially if you're doing it as a first, as a first thing, just, I would say run it more as an experiment as a first time, right? It's like, let's see, let's see if our donors happen to be the kinds of donors who want to give to us on that day.
But ultimately, I think for me, it's most valuable for any organization to figure out how to create that engagement connection. And if whether you do it on GivingTuesday or not, at some point, you make a solicitation throughout December your own campaign, and the results will manifest from that investment and relationship building. Address everybody's questions and thoughts here.
Care about and there's anything?
No, as we continue on, I feel like things will continue to come up. So
thank you. Okay, last scenario. And then we have a bit of exercise for all of you to kind of think about some of the things that we've been talking about. And I want to talk a little bit about how we can raise money more effectively for our organizations by just starting to cultivate a deeper understanding of the true costs of draining our organizations and doing the work that we do, and the true impact. Right. And I would say true error. And true or, again, it's very difficult to have a full complete exhaustive understanding of how much everything that you do costs and how much everything that you do impacts the world. But even little gains, and a little bit of more of a broad understanding of each of those allows us to advocate for greater funding, right? Because it's, it's costing me more you can you can say so and then be at the corresponding impact is there you can make a stronger case for those costs. So, the example that I wanted to talk about as a case study here is just let's say your organization as well. that focuses on helping low income families and communities. You're constantly connecting with talented community members who would like to work for your organization who, you know, would move your mission forward in ways that only members of that community could. Yet because of systemic disinvestment, and socio economic disadvantages, many of these folks don't have a formal education, college degree that many organizations require even for entry level positions. So you decide, you know, what, I'm done with that, I'm going to remove that requirement. The person that I hired for this role, let's call it a community engagement role, doesn't need to have a college degree. And in fact, somebody from this community without a cause degree would actually be even better because of their connection to that community, right? So you decide to go for it. What are the challenges, though, and the challenge is here is you know, this person has a skill set that is going to serve your mission in incredible ways, right, that connection and understanding that community. But it's possible that that person is also going to require additional training to do things in certain ways that your organization needs them to do them. They're gonna need additional professional developments, that maybe somebody who has a certain number of years of experience and a college degree might not need when they arrived, the organization. And all that means more resources, right? You need to have the money and, and the bandwidth and the resources for your organization, to invest in this employee who you're going to hire, to get to the place that you need them to professionally. So when you think about those costs, what are the actual costs, right that the organization needs to plan for, for bringing this employee on board, or to meet the money a to compensate them at whatever the market rate is? And this is where we talk about my opinion here. I think there's a temptation always to pay folks without the college degrees or less. I would highly advocate for thinking about what is equitable compensation. And instead, based on the impact, you expect this person to bring your organization instead of using these other measures that that compound, inequitable practices society? So let's say you choose to compensate this person equitably for your region. is equitable compensation for your region, the market rate? Or is it above market rate? These are things that you'll have to think about as an organization, whatever you decide, that's the first cost, right? I think so my experience with many organizations, sometimes the costs of hiring somebody are actually too grounded in current events. Inflation is really high right now. Right? So what market rate might be should be, is higher than what we've been paying folks across the sector, up until that
every organization has to figure out how to kind of bridge that gap. And the hardest way to bridge the gap is to do it all at once, especially if you have a bigger team. So this is an opportunity to gradually start paying folks closer to what is equitable. And so you, you bring this person on board, and you pay them at the rate that they should be getting paid at best, and all the market rate stuff that we were just talking about. That's cost number one. But then there's additional costs. There's the cost of the supplementary education, the professional development, how much money do you anticipate needing to help this employee? Do additional professional development courses? Are there programs that you would like for them to participate in so that they can grow as leaders within your organization? What is that number, and then there are harder to measure numbers, but that are very important. There's a quote unquote, overhead. But that includes staff time, since this employee, again comes from a background where they may not have the experience, the specific formal education that other employees of the organization might have. What are they going to need from your senior level team as far as training, how much more time how much of the staff time will be required. All of that needs to be included into your budget, your professional development budget, their time, IT staff time, you know, all of that has $1 value, right? And when you're advocating for costs, that all needs to be included. And so it can be really difficult to arrive at these numbers. don't have to be perfect, right? You just have to explain that these are costings are kind of ballpark figures. Now, it's important to take these steps, because in the end go through this reflection and taking these steps, you realize something that I think a lot of organizations have a hard time realizing, which is that running running organizations in an equitable way, is more expensive, right? You're not running things in extractive inequitable ways, that means that you are having to invest in the areas that ideally every organization should be investing in to run an equitable organization. So it's gonna be more expensive. It's your job to tell me how much more expensive and then to advocate correspondingly. And so how do you advocate effectively, then you talk about the impact, right? The impact of running things that way of thinking about these things. The primary impact, the one that we naturally all think about is, what's the output? Quote, unquote? What is the productivity of the employee we just hired? filling a role for programmer projects? I think it's really important to think about what are the other impacts that hiring, let's call it, you know, let's bring it back to this example, you hire an employee from the community? What did you do by doing so you didn't just fill a role that produces an output, you created a job within the community. Again, if you're talking about low income community, that's a big deal. There's so well paid jobs and benefits and opportunities for progressive professional advancement. Those are relatively scarce in those communities. So you created that for someone, and not just them, but them and their family.
Then,
along with that, you create you help the local economy. There is the there's the equitability component socially, and just generally, of hiring and empowering a community member who might not have been hired elsewhere, because of more traditional deficit based inequitable evaluation practices that are out there. So you're helping to write that wrong and society by making more of an effort to bridge that gap. And then, very importantly, you're creating trust in that community that you're serving, community centric operations, uplift the voice of the community. At the end of the day, community serving organizations that don't have the trust of the community are less effective or completely ineffective. So you've done all of those things, just by going through the work and effort and raising the money and developing somebody from the community to do a role at your organization. So when you're out there, raising the money to hire that person, it's important to advocate for all of that, and much more effective when you advocate for all that to raise the money that you need. Again, all that's on top of the actual job, you know, on top of everything else, this person is still doing a job that is producing an output. So I'll stop there. I'm curious about thoughts, reflections, questions on that. See about your follow up questions.
Yes, there's something that has come up. And I want to make sure we address it while we have the people still here is a lot of folks are interested in understanding how not to reproduce harm in fundraising. And so what I wanted to definitely do is because in hearing the question, and thinking about it equitably, are we saying the PTSD that comes from the workers who have to put on these fundraising campaigns? Or are we talking about in our fundraising campaigns? How do we not reproduce? Well, how do we not reproduce harm? Within like, the different isn't the wording is the graphics? If anyone wants to come off of mute and speak to that?
I was one of those people who put that in my things I wanted to learn today. I mean, I guess the first one probably good one. For me, it was really the second one of like, how do we how can we talk about our work and the people we serve without being exploitative of their journeys and their experiences? And really like honoring those, because I think that's such a fine line of how you do that, especially when you're fundraising based on kind of some of the things of their lives. So
thank you, Liz for speaking to that. Um, well, I'll start and then oh, well, I'll pass it over to you. And then coinigy Want to add Please. One of the things that I always say when working with people, and when I was a young, humble young development manager is one recognizing is everybody on board with the direction we may want to move in as far as the wording, and such that we use, and a lot of times we, in this space will say, Well, you know, the, the higher ups, the board is saying X, Y, and Z, and so on and so forth. But it's like, I used to always say, when I'm running programs, for lower resource communities, you have to bring dignity to this work. You can't use work, because I think sometimes we get entrenched in poverty porn, and I, you know, using the words that are going to just rip the money out of the donors pockets, because, oh, my gosh, you must help these. But then you have to ask yourself, would you be okay, if someone was talking about you, in the same manner, if they were using the same wordings to describe your lived experience, because there's a way to speak the truth without removing the dignity from the populations that you're talking about. And one of them I actually just used in the sentence, I had a back and forth with my development director, over the use of lower resource versus lower income, at risk, you know, all the terms that are supposed to just and I say I have a problem with just saying lower income, because sometimes the problem is not always money. It's also about speaking to access to resources. Sometimes people just need to be connected with a mentor, or someone who can speak to where this young person is trying to go versus throwing money at the issue. And so as an organization, you all have to be okay with being able to change the terms or do the research to see what terms are more dignified, and will still get us to, you know, our expected end. And also making sure that your board is is not participating in Savior ism, where they're like, No, this is what works. We've always done it this way. Let's keep it moving. And it's like, yeah, but no, that's not it, or are we using even are we using data to speak to the communities that we're serving to say, you know, how do you speak about your lived experience and taking from them some of the wording and the opportunities so that we can use that in our campaigning? And while I'll turn it over to you.
Valid, do you have anything that you want to address? No. Yeah,
you know, it's, it's an ongoing and raging debate, right. How do we do this? It's, it's a really tough question in some ways, because it's, it's about what's the right line to hold with, to the degree we participate in systems that that work and generate revenue. And then the degree to which we push the systems to change, to better empower the communities that we're serving ourselves, right. I think that where it gets very difficult is that there are many organizations established ones that do have a lot of these problematic practices baked in, right over many years of operating a certain way. And so how do you get them to get to this space where they're not causing reproducing those harms anymore? While you're still there, and you're still actually doing it? To some extent, right. And I think it's, it's virtually impossible to fully jump out of the system, right? There is some degree that we are all going to be participating in some way, in reducing certain harms, unfortunately, until things change, right, just the idea of philanthropy, for example, like why do some people have billions of dollars, like certain taxation be? Better distributing those resources, so that fewer folks are under resourced? Right? Your communities are under resourced, so that we don't have to be doing fundraising in this way, right at all. But until those things change, it's like, what can we do? And as he was saying, there are definitely things that we can do to make things better messaging, you know, asset based and reality based and dignity. Conversations and messaging that have that preserve the dignity of people. I like to use empowerment as part of the messaging, right? And remembering that when you're talking about people, and talking about people, right, complete, full, thriving humans that may just not have certain resources. They're not deficient. Don't use anything that makes them seem like they're less than a full human being full humanity for dreams, blogs, form abilities, blog, everything that makes us human, right. And if your message makes it doesn't doesn't run with that and what can you do? To change it right? How do we move away from Savior ism in their language?
And for the very, very
practical advice here? How do you advocate for moving away from that? If somebody says, You know what, but it works, right? It's like, Well, does it really, and I don't have the articles offhand. But when you look at, at the numbers, research around, whether fundraising around, you know, heartstring polling kind of saviors and works in the long term, it usually actually doesn't, people burn out on it, and they don't actually want to engage with your organization of our time. So that's a little quick bit of practical, kind of bring that back to your board and presented to them like, look, this isn't the way forward no matter what. But I can look that up and find it, I think it's, they'll do a Google search for it and just kind of see if like Savior ism works, this fundraising methodology, it'll probably pop up, I can look it up and send it out to CN Tower.
Awesome. We can send it out with the resources. Mari thank you for sharing that podcast. Also wanted to use this opportunity to plug the fact that we will be hosting a session on ally ship and fundraising with Michelle Marie at the end of September. And she's going to be speaking to harmful practices in fundraising as well as ways to do things differently. Just to give you a teaser, one of the questions she asks is, are boards even necessary anymore? So please, if you have not already, sign up, join us because it's going to be an insightful section. So I think
just the time you want to move on stuff,
yeah, well, what I was going to say is, let's jump forward to do our five minute break. Since we're about halfway through our session, and I'm realizing now we never did our stretch break. So I apologize, everyone. So I'm going to just go forward for our five minute break. And then we'll come back and do our individual reflection and writing. So please come back at 1015 Stretch, take your, you know, do whatever you need to do to to help yourself and not feeling zoom fatigue, talk to you in a few minutes. All right, so everyone can see our individual writing and reflection appear on the screen. And so what we'd love to do is just spend about 10 minutes. And if you've already started to think about them, then that's wonderful. And if not, then just spend some time thinking about these questions and write yourself some notes, we're going to have a triad share. So we'll just break you up into some smaller groups so that you can talk about some of your reflections from the session some of the questions you're still having. But first, when talking to Puffin to potential donors, funders, how do you ensure that you stand out what currently compels people to donate and thinking about that through the lens of what we're just talking about? What are all the activities that you're doing that are not getting you results? What's the bandwidth stream? What's one thing you've done that's been successful? Is there any small experiment you could do that might make it even better? And I can say with this one, like when Hillel was talking about the mid level donors, and you know, for rooted we have a fiscally sponsored project, we've just started to do ask campaigns and things and, and thinking through that lens of like, Oh, what is something small that we could do? Or that we could invite people to? That would make them feel really included in the work, even if they're not, you know, the ones benefiting from the different, you know, sessions and things that we put on? But what is something so I really appreciated like, what's a small thing that you can that you could do to add to what you're already doing? And then thinking about your constraints, like being really realistic? What are your constraints? What's the bandwidth? What's the experience on your team? What's maybe pressure that's coming from above, as someone mentioned in the chat? And how can you create the time and space to be able to experiment? So just for time, let's shorten this maybe to six or seven minutes, but we'll check in and go ahead and do some writing. Does anyone have any questions?
Well, Mari has volunteered to share for our group. So did I know
I thought I expressly didn't. Okay, I Oh, it's fine. It's fine. Our group had some good we mostly talked through some questions around sort of like, because there were two folks in our group who are just new, new We're starting out kind of so it was a lot of questions around like, the stuff that was in this call, like, how do you prioritize? How do you reach people? You know, how do you build relationships that you tell how this, you know, with there was a little competition around like storytelling and how that can be really key. But I think what it raises for me is like, if you're, how do you how do you storytelling in a way that is like, you know, asset framing and also not exploitative, all of that. So we were, you know, there was a we kind of chatted for like, two hours, probably we had, we raised more questions than we had answers.
I didn't want to put you on the spot. But I will add to what you just said. We also talked about segmentation being a challenge, especially for very small or like one person, team to one person, organization who does everything. How do we think about whether or not we should be segmenting? And how do you donors or potential donors think about themselves in that way, whether it's by things that they care about, or dollar amounts? So that that was a question that
I think, Chair
I think I can report for our group. I think we also had a really nice conversation about a couple of different things. Um, I think one of the things we talked about a lot was how to, like really build, sell your organization as not, like, not sorry, remembering just one like, I'm really thinking of your like presenting your organization and like a positive forward way to really sell yourself. And so instead of feeling like it's like a resource, scarce kind of thing going in to really present yourself in this like forward engagement way, and also looking at what your donor is looking for, and how do you make that connection to them to make sure that there
is value. Thank you.
So I know we are at time. So I'm going to paste into the chat, our the link to our survey. And I'm going to really quickly flip through some slides here. Particularly this one, which has resources and tools, we've put in some links here. There will also be a stock photography link on there shortly, but we'll include it in the email we follow up. And hotel has been gracious enough to do agree to do an office hours to walk through his fundraising campaign engagement tool that's an air table tool that you can take a look at there. But we'll follow up with an office hours for anyone who would like to walk through that tool. And then the last piece is sorry, I'm just zooming through here at the end. As we mentioned earlier, we have an upcoming series in September ally ship in you. Part one will be a radical communications network partnership. We'll we'll talk about what embodiment looks like that'll be CNI, hosting or CO hosting that discussion. Then we'll have a panel and group discussion about how our ally ship and solidarity journey show up in our relationships and inform our inform us at work and inform our relationships at work. We have some different panelists there. And you can check that out on our website to learn more about the different people who are going to share with us. And then as we mentioned, a workshop with Michelle Marie from community centric fundraising will be at the end of September. So thank you all for coming. We appreciate your time and thoughtfulness and being with us today. And that you're spending time thinking about these things. So that collectively we can hopefully change fundraising change our nonprofit sector and well, please, overdue
just because of the just responding to some of that sentiments and questions from the share out the community centric fundraising slack workspace that that Val just shared in the resources and tools section. That's a community of fundraisers as well as a movement itself. So that's a great place to go in and crowdsource answers to questions you may have about some of the fundraising work that you're doing. I think that it can be really tough to do doing this work in small teams and feels like you're really isolated. That's the place that I go to, to connect with folks who are questions I have If Michelle Murray is one of the people that is leading that, that effort, and I could not recommend more, definitely joining that slack group and just participating, I think you will all benefit from that tremendously. I know I have. And then the the blog, the nonprofit AF blog is zulay, who is also leading that. So just wanted to really highlight the value of that.
Okay, thanks so much. Okay, so here's the
QR code for the survey. In case that's easier for you, you can wait one second,
if you need to take a picture.
And then the last thing here, we have all of our contact information if you'd like to reach out to any of us and we'll follow up with lots of good tidbits over email. Thank you all so much, and have a great rest of your day.
Hope to see you again soon. Thanks, everyone. I think that there's one
thing I do like about using the word empowerment and in the context of supporting low, low and under resourced communities and individuals. And that's
it helps many of us have,
re acquire or acquire for the first time, that internal locus of control. Whereas normally a lot of us who are disenfranchised, who come from very difficult backgrounds and have a lot of trauma, we end up in this place where we don't feel like we have autonomy, we feel like everything's kind of set up against us. And we don't have the ability to really influence the direction of our lives, right. We have no power, we have no ability to move our world for ourselves. And I think that when you use the word empowerment and get folks to feel like they have some amount of control and power over their own lives, that word that word emotionally resonates, right, it allows folks to move to that place where, where they feel better, and are more able to influence the outcomes of their lives that way, but there's a whole lot to say about that, too. It's complex, and rigid into psychology. I'm not a psychologist, so I'll stop there. But agency, okay.
Yeah, I really liked that word, because it means so many things. And it's sort of like it. I don't know, I associated as being a snooty word, even though it's like, but it's actual meat, meaning I feel like it's really good.
It just now like I like the word agency, but I get your point. You know, it's like, then you're bringing up another point, right, which is, I think one that is worth having a conversation about Sunday, maybe you can talk about it with Michelle, and it's like, how do you?
How do you?
How do you used messaging, and you know, that that is that is uplifting to our communities and supportive of our communities, that is also accessible to our communities that don't necessarily have certain privileges? Right? I think that some I've definitely been spaces where folks will call me out or other folks will call other folks out. And it's just like, without even considering whether or not the person that they're calling out, has had certain privileges has had has the space and the time and the education, formal education to really have that understanding of what we're talking about, right, have you gotten there yet? Have they been invested in that way? And I feel like that's also harmful.
That's a good point.
I feel like so much of this is about embodiment. And, and like and self awareness, right? Like, no matter like, no matter what your lived experience has been, and and all of these things and related to communications in general is just how are you communicating and to who and I mean, it goes for me it goes, it always goes back to thinking about communicating with my now six and a half year old, where she can conceptually understand so many things and she understands race and she understands dynamics and like all of these things, right that are there but then explaining it to her or talk not even explaining that having conversations about what's going on in our lives in a way that is accessible to her, that we can have just as deep of a conversation about something. And I think to me in communications, that's sort of the piece I keep striving for is like stripping away all of the sort of white supremacy, urgency, you know, domineering or, you know, who's an expert kinds of things, and like how do we actually talk to one another and, and talk about these different issues in a way that everyone is feeling included? And, and feels like they can participate and from and share their lived experience in a space together.
So, I don't know.
That's what I keep kind of going back to with any, with any of this stuff, is how to break down some of those barriers.
I think it's always gonna, I think it's lifelong, right, this process that we're talking about, too, it's, it's an evolving space to write the folks who are at the forefront of this are constantly kind of arriving at new insights and ultimately, sometimes recommending we move away from approaches that were previously the ones that were the ones that everybody was, was following. I think just being willing to kind of step into that less, less certain less stable, kind of just natural evolution and progress of those is, is important too. And then, you know, being showing ourselves grace as as learners and the process to Yeah,
