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Quick heads up.
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I'm running a free live webinar on turning Giving Tuesday into major gifts Discovery Fest. If you want a 30 day plan, an impact brief template, and our 72 hour sprint scripts to book leadership gifts before year end, grab your seat in the show notes. It's free. Welcome to nonprofit Lowdown. I'm your host, Rhea Wong.
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Thank you for being here. This webinar is going to be a bit different than other Giving Tuesday or end of year webinars that you may have been a part of. So typically, and I've been in this business a minute, I see a lot of Giving Tuesday or end of year giving campaign stuff and it's usually around things like how to write better copy or what your social media strategy is or blah blah, blah, blah. That's not what this is. This webinar is specifically for how to use Giving Tuesday into a Discovery day for major gifts. I focus on major gifts. That's my bread and butter. That's what I love to talk about. And so I want to talk about how to use this specific day that I know we're all thinking about. We're in the midst of it. If you haven't already planned your end of year, you are probably planning it now. It's when 30% of all money comes in. So there is a huge opportunity here. So love it or hate it, and believe me, I, I have hated on Giving Tuesday publicly. But it is a day that simulates generosity. So we can either argue about it or we can use the momentum. So let's do that. Okay, so here's what to expect in this call Today you are going to walk out with a playbook that converts the traffic into major gift conversations and closed gifts by the end of 2025. Throughout this, I'm going to talk about students that I've worked with in the past and I'm super proud of in order to demonstrate that if you do the work, you will get results. So Adam is one of my faves. When he started working with us, he I think his end of year campaign was 2000. After only a couple months, he got that up to 63,000. So we are seeing some incredible results and I could not be prouder of my students. So here's the thing that I want you to believe today that is deep in your bones. Annual gifts. Love them. These are usually your thousand and under gifts that are keeping the lights on. But the major gifts are where you get the transformation and different donors need different strategies. And one of the biggest mistakes that I see Folks executing at the end of year is treating all donors like they're the same. So I'm going to get into that a little bit deeper, but first I'm going to talk about Stephanie. So Stephanie, again, is a major gift officer. And. And so once she started working with us, just three months after starting with us, she got a $25,000 donation, completely unexpected. And I think that illustrates a really important truth here, which is most major donors self cultivate and self solicit. How many of y' all have ever gotten just like a random five or six figure gift in the mail and you're like, whoa, I had no idea. Who were you people? Me, I have, and I love a random check, but it's also a little mystifying, like, who are these people? Where did they come from? What did I do in order to stimulate the gift or not? And so the truth of the matter is major donors, I. E. Wealthy individuals, self cultivate and self solicit. And so it is our job to put in as many signals and tripwires as possible in order for us to be intentional about bringing them into the fold. So just hold that idea in your mind for a second. All right, let's talk about who this is for and who this is not for. So if you are listening to this and you are ready to take action, that is who this is for. So this is going to be a quick sprint from now until December 31st to help you close as many major gifts as possible. This is for people who are acting with authority, and these are action takers. So if you're the kind of person who likes to sweat over minute details and punctuation, this is probably not going to be your jam. I'm going to say that a lot of this strategy depends on all of the work that you've done in the previous 10 or 11 months. So if you are expecting to close major gifts in Q4 and you have not done a good job of stewardship or cultivation the previous 11 months, this is probably not going to be a strategy that works for you. So I wish we could go back in time, but just bear that in mind that if you have not done a good job of stewardship or cultivation in the last 11 months, this may not be a strategy that works for you. And then there are folks on the team who are always going to be naysayers who are going to say, this just isn't going to work. Well, if that is you or if that's folks on your team, you're right. If you don't try something new, you're not going to get a different result. So this approach may be a bit new to some of you. And so if you're willing to give it a whirl, if you're willing to lean in, then you'll probably see results. All right, let's take a breath. Here's the 3% rule that I need you to understand deep in your bones. 3% of your giving Tuesday audience can fund your next program. The reason that they haven't is that you haven't asked them, you haven't identified them, you haven't approached them in the right way. But they do exist. And so the thing that I hear from folks a lot is, oh, I need more donors. I need more donors. And like, while that may be true for the vast majority of nonprofits that I see, and I'd say a lot of them, it's simply that they have not fully maxed out or maximized or optimized their current list. And there are a lot of people, as we mentioned before, who are low key, looking at what you're doing, right, who are watching what you say, they're watching your content and they're just kind of lurking, waiting for the right opportunity. But they are out there. What generally happens to folks and not you all because you all are forward thinking people. But what I see a lot at your end is that we blast out emails, right? So we're doing like a couple email blasts, we get some click throughs, but we're not optimizing for meetings. And the meetings are where we are going to get the most leverage, by the way, just so you know, your chances of landing a gift increased by skills 70% when it is an in person ask, by the way, just in case you didn't know. And so we're going to think through how we triage our list or segment our list so that we're optimizing for meetings with the right people, right? Because it also does not do you a ton of good because I'm sure y' all are out here with a bajillion things to do. You don't need more meetings on your calendar, am I right? But I'm pretty sure you need more meetings with the right people, people who have capacity, people who have indicated interest, people for whom timing is right. Now if your calendar was booked with those kind of meetings, I'm sure you'd be pretty psyched, right? I'm sure a lot of you have heard the 8020 rule of 20% makes up 80% of the overall, this is just one of these, you know, called the Pareto principle. What we're seeing in major gift work is it's more like 90 10. So 10% of the donors are making up 90% of the overall. Truly. And I, I do this all the time. I talk to people who are like, oh, I want to do a, a grassroots campaign. I'm like, well, via con Dios, like, sure, I think grassroots. There's a time and a place for grassroots campaigns. But typically grassroots campaigns will not move the deno. Grassroots campaigns are typically not even going to keep the lights on because you expend money in order to get a donor. And so if your donors are coming in, say 5 or 10 DOL dollars each, likely you're losing money on the first gift, you're probably making money on successive gifts if they do come back. So when we look at a return on investment ratio, it is about 5 cents on the dollar for a leadership gift versus a smaller gift, which is probably typically more about more like 50 cents on the dollar for the first gift. All right, so why this matters right now, y'? All, this is the final stretch before your end. Major gifts are the game changers and they are in plain sight. So real talk, other people are talking to them right now. You need to be talking to them right now. So we're going to talk about whether your pipeline is ready and when you are ready. When you find the people and the signals at the right time, you get results. Like Rosemary, who. This is a woman who started with a $500 a year gift and now she's giving 100k. She had the capacity, she just wasn't engaged in the right way. So here is the problem that I see in most end of year giving. One, there are no signals. So your VIPs, your major gift potentials are buried in mass email blasts. Two, there's no follow up, so there's no specific invitation that you're making them for a 20 minute briefing. You're not indicating to people that you accept DAFs or stock or qualified charitable distributions on your website. Three, you're not offering any opportunities to meet with you. You have zero calendar blocks for hot leads. All right, no shade, y'. All. Is that true for you? Are you guilty of any of these things? I want you to create two lanes here. So lane A, these are your annual gift people. They are your steady, predictable. They're the ones who are going to get your mass emails if you're going to send them out on giving Tuesday. These are the ones who Are you're going to do your social media outreach, et cetera, et cetera, right? These are consistent revenue streams. These are the people who are keeping the lights on. However, when you're doing lane A, I'm going to talk about a little bit about signal taps embedded. What do I mean by that? Think of these as tripwires. So the minute you click on one of these, you then move over to lane B. Let's talk about lane B. Your lane B is going to be your hot prospect list, your top 30 people. These are people who will be getting custom briefings. These are the people who you will show your leadership level gift proposals to. And you're going to do it quick. It's 72 hour sprint speed wins here. So the focus is different for our lean A people, our annual giving people, we're thinking about volume and reach, right? So anyone out here like click looking at your metrics, like how many opens did we have? How many many click throughs do we have? What's our conversion rate? Yes, if by the way, if you're not, you probably should. Your lane B is different. Your lane B is focused on signals and relationships. So we're tracking different metrics there. Your lane B is literally how many conversations can we get on the books and of those conversations, how many are converting to bigger gifts? Let's talk about your lane B. Who is in your lane B? And this should be 30. And again, the volume might vary depending on the size of your organization, but any thing greater than 30 people I think really risks getting lost in the noise. So really keep it tight. Here's who you should be thinking about for the lane B. Anybody who's used a daf, which is a donor advised fund stock or a qualified charitable distribution. Anybody who sponsored a table or looks like a corporate decision maker. Anybody who has been introduced via a board member or ned. Any lapse people over a thousand dollars plus recent engagement. So it looks like maybe they opened an email or they replied to an email or they clicked through an email. So the quantity itself is not necessarily a condition of joining your top 30 list or someone that you've talked to in the last 18 months that you've gone kind of along the road with who seem like maybe they were ready for an ask and like for whatever reason it didn't happen, they can be on your top 30. Or if any of you out here are doing well, screens. People who seem like they are in the wealth screen and their giving interests are aligned with the organization. Okay, here's who you are going to exclude because we're keeping it tight. Thirty people, cold, unverified names. So I know y' all are out here being like, why don't we ask Oprah for money? Please keep Oprah off your list right now. Unless you're for real, for real friends with Oprah. Oprah is not going to be where you need to spend your time. People who are currently paying their pledges and any other restrictions that don't fit offers. So for example, if someone, if you know someone's moved out of the area or if you know someone has told you like, hey, this isn't going to be our giving priority moving forward or hey, you know, we're actually shifting priorities or whatever it may be.
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If you're liking this training and want the full version, including the complete Giving Tuesday playbook with schedule templates and swipe files, register for the free webinar in the show notes. You'll get the whole training totally free this week.
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