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Nonprofit Leadership Podcast
How to Make This Your Best Giving Season Yet
00:29:40
In this kickoff to a special four-week fundraising series, host Rob Harter welcomes Seb Boyer, President of Zeffy, a 100% free fundraising platform built ...
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- [00:02]
A
This is Dr. Rob Harder with the nonprofit leadership podcast, Making youg World Better. What does it take to be an effective nonprofit leader today? What are the biggest challenges? What are the biggest obstacles? How should nonprofits fundraise in an economy that is constantly changing? All these reasons combined led me to start this show. And it's my hope that through this series, people can learn not only what it takes to be an effective nonprofit organization, but to hear from effective leaders who are who are successfully making a positive impact in their communities. We hope you enjoy the show as together we hear how they are making their world better. Welcome to the show everyone. My name is Rob Harder. I'm the host of the nonprofit leadership podcast here. Thanks so much for tuning in and being part of this community. And today I'm really excited to launch into this four week series focused on all things fundraising. Now, I realize it's just August when this first episode comes out, but if you're anything like the fundraisers I'm speaking to on a regular basis, you're probably feeling a mixture of anxiety and excitement. I mean, the fact is, we're quickly wrapping up quarter three and we're moving into the last quarter of the calendar year, which for many of you is the most active time of the year when it comes to fundraising. This is when you see a lot of your gifts and the majority of gifts coming in to your organization. So that's why I wanted to have this special four week series to give you some insights to help you launch into the year end giving season with the renewed sense of clarity and and excitement. And my first guest to kick off this is Sebastian or Seb Boyer. He's the president of zefie. Seb was a tech entrepreneur and investor. In fact, he co founded a successful AI and robotics startup called Farmwise. Seb then left that venture in order to become Zefi's president. In fact, I want to say to my listeners, Zefie is generously supporting this four week series because they're so committed to helping you and your organization thrive this giving season. Now, my conversation with Seb is a great and very interesting conversation. Not only does Zefie provide a lot of different resources for you and your organization, but they do a lot of data and research. They provide benchmark reports and he's going to share some of the findings of their benchmark report. He'll start talking about, for example, some of the seasonal giving trends that their research has found, some surprises there that you may not expect. And then as I mentioned, they have a recurring donor Benchmark report that is really interesting when it comes to when donors begin to drop off to give and what's normal in terms of how much donor retention should you expect for your organization. So this and more is discussed. It's a fascinating conversation. You'll learn right away that Zeb has a gift for understanding data and being able to apply that to your organization. Well, as always, thanks for tuning in. Now, onto the show. If you run a nonprofit, here's some good news. With Zefy, you keep every cent of every online donation. No platform fees, no credit card fees ever. My clients have used it. It's quick to set up, super clean to use, and it just works. Check it out@zefy.com register and make sure every dollar goes where it's needed most. Well, welcome to the Nonprofit Leadership Podcast. I have Zeb Boyer here on the show and I'm really excited to give background to this organization called zefie. In fact, I'm guessing if you're one of my listener heard of Zefy because they provide such great resources and it's all at no cost. And so I've got the leader of this organization with me and he's going to tell us all about what Zefi is doing currently, some of the data they're finding with some of the research. But first of all, Zeb, thanks so much for being on the show.
- [03:38]
B
You're welcome, Rob. Thanks for having me.
- [03:40]
A
Absolutely. Well, as I mentioned at the outset, I always run this by my clients and people that talk to me about Zephy and how wonderful it is. But some people their first reaction that this is at no cost. They always wonder what is the catch. So how is it that you have a hundred percent a free model work and what these added tools that you add to them like a CRM and newsletters, how does this work, number one? And what do nonprofits receive when they do become members of Zefie? Again, at no cost.
- [04:10]
B
Obviously that's some of the top questions that we get is really matters to us that all customers understand clearly what's happening there. We can pay for all of that technology that we build in house through optional donors contributions. What that means is that once a donor gets to that page where they can donate money to your organization after they gave you the money, we asked them if they want to contribute to helping Zephy build products, build more products to support organizations such as the one that they just supported themselves. And a lot of donors actually are excited about this. And so this is how we manage to offer all of our services for free to organizations.
- [04:51]
A
Well, as a coaching consultant, as I was talking to you before we hit record, I've recommended Zephy to many of my clients because there's so many great resources. And again, particularly those nonprofits that are just starting from scratch or they have a very limited budget, they don't have a lot to spend on something like what you offer. And so the fact that Zefy offers this at no cost is a real attraction to them. So when I think about what you offer, you know, how do you answer the question of is this too good to be true? In other words, is there once they get involved and once they start maybe subscribing to Zefie, is there down the road a catch? Maybe. I know I'm sound like I'm a skeptical person, but I think people often ask that is that's what I'm going to run into or can I continue to run with Zefi for a long period of time and the longer I'm with Zefi, there's more services and products that I can get.
- [05:39]
B
Yeah, that's another awesome question. And the answer is absolutely yes. You'll be able to run forever with the services that we offer today for free. And we have absolutely no plans to change that. Again, that goes back to my first point. It really matters to us that our customers understand how that works so that they can understand that there is no catch to be expected down the road. This is a sustainable model for us. We're here for the long run with this model. And so all of the features and tools that our customers get access to will continue to actually improve all the time as we just make improvements to them with no additional cost. And so this is a very kind of long term stable model that we want to pursue.
- [06:23]
A
Thank you for sharing that. And now I want to get into some of the research you're involved with. You really watch a lot of trends. You've got your own research that you're doing in terms of where nonprofits are going, seasonal giving trends, things like that. And so let's start with that because here we are. This will be published, you know, towards the end of the summer, beginning of the fall, and this is the time now where fundraisers and executive directors are starting to think about year end giving. I know it's not too early to think about that, and that's often when you raise a lot of money. So you've done a lot of research on seasonal giving trends where you found that fall is generally the peak with a lot of giving. Rhythms of nonprofit Organizations. So talk to me about the data. You've got some surprises. I know for us. What's the biggest surprise in that data? And how would you summarize the key patterns that you found from the seasonal giving trend research?
- [07:10]
B
This is something that matters a lot to me and to the team. Just an introduction to this is we always try to find new ways to help nonprofit managers and we know they have very little resources. That's the reason we exist. And so in addition to building the best product we can to be helpful to them, we try to think of creative ways to be more helpful. And recently we've realized that, oh, we actually sit on a lot of data that could be very useful. And while obviously we will never share kind of specific data, we anonymize all of that data and aggregate it. We can leverage this aggregation in ways that we believe can be very useful. And so that's kind of how this research came about. So we essentially look at several years of trends of our own customers using our own platforms. And because we're starting to address a large percentage of nonprofits in the US we're starting to have really good vantage points to measure what's going on. And so one of these research reports that we published a few months ago is about, as you just said, the seasonality of donations. And yeah, we were surprised to find interesting bits there that we were excited to share with the community. For instance, like a few of them, the fall is so September to December is obviously the peak season for the donations. And we find that across years and across different organization sectors. So that's the first kind of takeaway. Another takeaway is that not all organization sectors are exactly the same and you can find their patterns that you could expect. Like, for instance, religious and political organizations tend to be a bit more stable throughout the year, whereas student groups, education related organizations tend to have a very, very big fall and the summer tend to be a little bit on the lower end for most organizations. So one of the takeaways, and obviously we try to be very humble about giving specific advice because each individual organization is different. But one of the takeaways for us is that if you want as a nonprofit manager to prioritize your time throughout the year, then you want to understand these patterns so that you could the efforts when it's the most useful, both the efforts in terms of preparing for that peak season. So setting up your donation page, cleaning up your what your website, these type of things, and the kind of operational effort of actually kind of reaching out to your donors. And engaging with them. So these are examples of takeaways we get from that data.
- [09:45]
A
So based on these seasonal giving trends, are there quieter seasons that organizations perhaps could consider leaning into? Especially those off cycle campaigns where there's less competition for donor retention? I feel like this may be if there are, as I think about, you know, the organizations I've led in the past and people that I work with as a consultant and coach. I do think there's so much emphasis on the year end giving that we miss these quieter seasons that actually could be great opportunities because there's less noise, there's less competition for getting donors attentions as I mentioned. So what have you found on your findings and your research that maybe would create some of those quieter zones?
- [10:23]
B
Our position on this is that like obviously each individual nonprofit manager is the best position to kind of understand when and where to focus. We're here to provide them with the data so that they have like more information. They can for instance, compare their own historical pattern to the pattern that we see in the data and decide for themselves whether that's something that they understand or something they want to change. So if you're a little bit stronger in the summer than most of your most like similar organizations probably means that you're doing a really good job in the summer for some reason. But on the other side, if you're a little bit under, then that may show you an opportunity to be more involved that time of the year and put potential upside in your overall donation pattern.
- [11:09]
A
Okay, that's good to know. Well, and again, as I think about giving trends and these seasonal ups and downs for different fundraisers and development directors, when you think about what you've seen so far at your role there in Zafi and the interaction you've had with the social impact sector, are there things that you've seen of say post Covid in the last couple of years that have really impacted the way social impact organizations are raising funds to begin with? Like are there things you're seeing, hey, this is something you need to lean into, or here's a trend that donors need to be aware of, but also organizations need to be aware of. Is there anything like that you found in your research?
- [11:45]
B
Yeah, so we found a few patterns. It's very hard for us to correlate that exactly with COVID But like we, we, we find overall patterns. The first one is obviously like a shift online. So that's probably accelerated by Covid. It was happening before. So it's kind of a long standing trend that is continuing on that's pretty obvious. I think a less obvious one that we find is that a lot of organizations are diversifying the way they raise money. So it's obviously not anymore only about online donation through the donate button on your website remains like a really key side to it. But more and more organizations diversify the way that they fundraise. So organizing events, organizing raffles, selling branded merchandise on their website as a way to raise money, all of these things we see are kind of increasing as a percentage of the total amount raised. And so I think that that's a trend that's likely to continue. Like it's just more ways to engage with donors, not only about raising more money, and sometimes it can be the same amount of money, but it's more engagement, more ways to connect with your donors. And so we see that in our data and that obviously matches well the kind of the strategy that we had with the products to build more and more products within the same ecosystem and the same platform. So we want to follow that trend, actually promote and accelerate that trend by providing the tools that nonprofit managers need to actually run these different types of campaigns and putting all of that into a single platform that remains very easy to use for them.
- [13:23]
A
Well, let's talk about recurring donors. That's such an important piece too, is focusing your attention on recurring donors. Because many people know that the averages, when it comes to people giving again, it's much easier to get someone who's already given to your organization than to go to somebody who's never given it at all. So your percentage of getting people to give to your organization is much higher with recurring donors. But you always need to be tracking that, monitoring that are they giving again? If they not, why not all those good things? Well, you've had a report you call recurring donor benchmarks. And I'm going to kind of unpack a few things that you found with that, because this report, as I understand it, shines a lot of light on how long donors stay engaged. And I think donor engagement is critical. Right. It's so important. So what does the data say about donor retention on what's normal and what patterns stood out most from the data that you gathered?
- [14:10]
B
Yeah, so you're absolutely right. Like, we are big believers that retaining and engaging with donors in the long run is the key to long term success of the organization. And so we try to, like, with our tools, we try to make it very easy for organizations to promote that in the data. We find that first of all, there is a trend up like across the board More and more donors are engaging on a recurring pattern. This is showing in all data. This is showing in other public sources of data. It's a long term trend. It's only on the order of a few percent, 3 to 6% of donors that are donating on a recurring basis. But it's a trend up. That's the first kind of good news. Overall, their actual patterns and the actual percentage of donors that are donating on a recurring basis varies widely across the different sectors. So if you're again like a religious or political organization, then you're on average much more likely to have recurring donors and donors that actually stay with you for a very long time. Organizations like student groups, education focused organizations, they tend to struggle a little bit more with retention. Some of that is inevitable. Students, for instance, than to leave school. Exactly that. But some of that we think can be remedied with very intentional actions. All ways to engage with your donors is really good. Encouraging them to switch to a recurring mode is very good. And so there are many ways to do that. We try to make it easy again for nonprofit managers to do this with a very easy to use newsletter tool, for instance, and an easy to use CRM that we provide for free for all of our customers. And people successfully use that to engage with donors and particularly focus on incentivizing or making it very straightforward for donors to switch to a recurring mode of donation.
- [16:09]
A
I love hearing that because I think when you keep things very simple and they're all integrated, like having a good CRM that works with their marketing and their emails, but also to be able to just pull the data they need when they need it. Love hearing all of those things. Is there any other surprising benchmarks around recurring donor behavior? Like maybe the average program duration or when do most donors tend to drop off when it comes to retaining their gift or not? Maybe this month? Is it a part of the season? Is it after big campaigns? Is there anything else that would be helpful for my listeners to know when it came to some of the things you noticed in this benchmark study?
- [16:47]
B
So one data point that we find interesting is that donors, they give between five and ten times on average. And so it's not that many actually. And so there is like, we believe, like a strong untapped opportunity to increase retention. Because if you look at other types of subscriptions, if you look at your Netflix subscription or any other subscription, I would guess that if you had Netflix before, you probably stayed on for more than five months, you probably paid more than five times Netflix, and that's true for a lot of different private subscriptions. And so for nonprofits, it tends to be much lower. And I think while there could be kind of structural reasons for that, I think there is a huge untapped opportunity to increase that. Again, we see differences depending on the sector, and that's what we try to share in the report so that people can kind of a little bit compare themselves to what's common or average within their sector. But across the board, we're big believers that there is a big untapped opportunity to increase retention. So not only on one hand, you want to make it clear for your donors that it's much better for you and it's a much stronger connection and relation to you to switch to a recurring mode. And on the other end, you want to be very proactive. Once they've already signed up for a recurring donation, the work doesn't stop there. Essentially you want to be very active in continuing to build their relationship so that you increase the retention on the back end.
- [18:24]
A
We'll be right back. If you run a nonprofit, you know how fast fees can eat into donations? Well, with Zefy, you keep every penny. No platform fees, no credit card fees. Donors can choose to tip Zefy, but your organization pays zero. You can set up a live form in just a few minutes. It's super easy. If you need donation forms, event ticketing, or donor management all in one place without the costs, go to ze.com register and give it a try. Once I think about looking at my both of these reports, is there anything that kind of explains away some of the common, I would tell myths of fundraising, for example, that summer's always slow or that certain donors don't stick around. Like recurring donors just don't really want to give on a recurring basis. Is there anything that where your report clearly debunks some of these common fundraising myths?
- [19:22]
B
So short answer is no. I think like most of these common wisdoms are very much grounded in reality and we see that in the data. Like we see a lot of the same high level trends. Now what the data is enabling us and our community to do is to kind of double click on that and go one step or two steps deeper. And so while this is true on average, it's true that summaries are slow. The reality is very different whether you're an education focused organization, a charity focused organization. So the devil is in the details a little bit. And so our reports or enabling our community to go into that details and, and understand for themselves what specifically applies to them. And what does.
- [20:06]
A
Okay, that's helpful. And I think about what also the things that SEFI offers when it comes to these benchmarks that you're bringing up. How would organizations not use these benchmarks so much as guardrails? In many ways they should use this as guidelines for them, not so much judgments when they're own. You're comparing their own day to day and year to year performance. How do you envision organizations taking this data and applying it correctly to their organization?
- [20:33]
B
I've worked with data for a long time, many different companies. And so my opinion about data, it's absolutely necessary to look at the data and it's super, super useful. But it's not sufficient in the sense that you need to compare that data to real life, essentially to what you're observing for yourself, and then need to make sense of both of these things in your head. And so it matters a lot that every single person that looks at this data is asking themselves, how does that apply to me? What did I already know, for instance? Oh, like summers are slow. I already knew that. It's great to confirm that, but it's not new. And what did I not know? And a lot of people are looking at this data, they know already 80% of what's in there, and they didn't know 20%. And the 20% is kind of guiding them to finding opportunities. And so maybe you didn't realize that your spring season is way lower than most similar organizations. Oh, I had no idea. So you didn't learn much on everything else, but you had kind of a clue that there was something to go and dig there. And then people do and then they find opportunities to change things for the better. So that's what makes us very proud of this data.
- [21:49]
A
And there's no doubt that I noticed that you personally, and then Zephy as a whole provides a lot of this data for social impact organizations, which I think is wonderful. So speak to the person who maybe is not really good with some of the data details or maybe doesn't believe always that data should be followed. Maybe they're much more driven by relationships and kind of a gut feel of things more than just look at the data alone. What would you say is why the argument, if you will, from your perspective, why data is so important to help inform your decisions and inform how you move your organization forward.
- [22:22]
B
My opinion on this is that what you already know and what you feel in your gut is most often true and it's most often what matters the most. I think the data should not be Seen as something that is going to come and tell you that you're wrong or that you're right in some way. It's an help to try to look at the same thing from a slightly different perspective. And that perspective might be maybe interesting in very different ways. And what your gut feeling already tell.
- [22:50]
A
You, I agree with you. I think, I find that no doubt, nonprofit leaders often are really good if they're very relationally driven, they're relationally intelligent, or emotional, intelligence is very high. That's a good thing for a nonprofit leader, particularly if you're in a CEO role, executive director role. But data is so important to help fill out the gut feel information that you have, if you will. Right. So I like how you said that.
- [23:14]
B
Yeah. And maybe just to add on this, I don't want people to feel that data is this super complex thing. Right. Data can be very complex, of course, but data can also be very simple. And so we know that a lot of nonprofit managers, either they don't have a data background or they don't have the time. And so we try to do as much work as we can on our side to digest that data to very easy to understand bits that they can quickly leverage. We hope that at least the data that we share with them with nonprofit managers, whether it's in our product or in reports, we hope that this data is extremely easy for them to act on.
- [23:53]
A
Well, one of the things I think is really critical for organizations that are growing, organizations that are trying to stay on the cutting edge, is often the ability of the board members or the staff or both, to think differently about things. And so I think about the bench reports that you've provided, some of the data you provided. Is there anything else, particularly if this surprised you with this report, when it comes to helping leaders and board members to think differently, was there unexpected peaks or dips or giving steadiness that really could inform planning when it comes to, say, they do a calendar year of giving and trying to map out what that plan could look like? Was there anything else you want to share that was really helpful, you think, or could be helpful for those who read this report?
- [24:37]
B
Yeah. So I think for me, the most important takeaway from this report is that these very aggregated data about different seasons, for instance, or recurring donors versus one time donors, that can very much deeply affect the success of your organization in the long run. And so my main message to nonprofit managers is that most likely going to be very useful for you and your board to start thinking along those lines and to start Thinking about the summer season and the fall season and so on. And a lot of nonprofit managers already do. Right. Don't get me wrong. But for those who may not already do that, I think switching to that mode of being very intentional about what we want to achieve and how we want to measure their success and then kind of learning as you go, not only with your own measurements, but also comparing your outcomes with outcomes from other organizations that can kind of put you and the board in a very productive scenario and productive state of mind.
- [25:42]
A
How can people access these research summaries? I think about like the updates you may have, you'll have future reports, you'll have future data you like to share. How can people get more information about Zefi and maybe even connect with you directly if they'd like to?
- [25:55]
B
All of these reports are free to download on our website, zephy.com z e f f y.com and so people can obviously get all of that for free, like whether they're already on the platform or not yet on the platform to connect with us. We have a great success team that is always super excited to talk and help people get on board with our platform. That's helpful. Obviously the platform is made to be kind of self explanatory and so it's very easy to get started. We have many nonprofit managers who get started in a few minutes so just by going on the website. So we try to make it easy because we know most nonprofit managers don't have time. We're always super eager to connect and we do want to do that. And people can connect with me and Sebastian, so that's my full first name. S E B A S t I e nape.com, happy to chat with you directly but otherwise the product is very easy to get started with. So you can do that on your own if you don't always obviously have time to connect with our team.
- [26:56]
A
Well, maybe I could close with a personal question. You left the for profit world and were very successful and a venture startup. And what drew you first to commit now your career to the social impact sector and what keeps you motivated to stay in it?
- [27:12]
B
The first part of my career in the for profit sectors, building startups, I'm actually very much still have a lot of connections and relationship with the for profit sectors. In my mind like I think that both are very much kind of two, like both the for profit and the nonprofit sectors are very much two leg of the same body if I can say they're very complementary to each other. And I don't think they're kind of two very separate worlds. One of the principles we have at Zipy is that nonprofit organizations should get the same technology and the same level of service that for profit organizations get. And so trying to make these two worlds work together is something that I find very exciting. And I'm excited to take a lot of the learnings that I got building companies in the for profit sectors and apply these principles to helping not only Ziphy, but nonprofits throughout the us, throughout Canada, and we're opening the UK as well right now, like nonprofits throughout the world, be as effective and do as much good as they possibly can.
- [28:10]
A
Well again, appreciate all that Zefy offers. I personally benefited from it because of the clients I'm working with have gotten so many resources from Zephi. So thanks for what you're doing to provide these great resources for the social impact sector for nonprofit leaders. And also not just the resources, but the data. I love that we were able to unpack some of your data because I think fundraising is such a an issue that people are really staying close to the ground on because I do think the fundraising landscape is constantly changing. So anyway, just thanks for being on the show. Thanks for taking time to share your insights with us.
- [28:39]
B
Thank you for having me. I really appreciate it.
- [28:42]
A
Hey friends. Well I wanted you to know that this podcast can be found on itunes, Spotify, Amazon, Google podcasts and wherever you listen to other podcasts. I also want to encourage you to like subscribe and share this podcast with others. This will actually help us get this great content out to more nonprofit leaders just like you. You can also join the non profit podcast community, find other resources and interviews of past guests, all on my website, nonprofit leadershippodcast.org well, thanks again for listening and until next time, keep making your world better. If you run a nonprofit, here's some good news. With Zefie, you keep every cent of every online donation. No platform fees, no credit card fees ever. My clients have used it, it's quick to set up, super clean to use, and it just works. Check it out@zephy.com register and make sure every dollar goes where it's needed most.