← Successful Nonprofits Podcast
Successful Nonprofits Podcast
Leverage AI and Behavioral Psychology to Engage Major Donors with Griff Bohm
00:32:33
Loading summary
Transcript43 lines
- [00:00]
A
Welcome to the Successful Nonprofits Podcast. I'm your host, Dolph Goldenberg and friend. In today's episode, we are going to be having a conversation with Grif Baum. And it's going to be a wide ranging conversation where we're going to talk about everything from major donor traits to the behavioral psychology that really underpins getting major gifts. And of course, using AI for fundraising. Now, if you have been ignoring the psychological triggers that drive donors to give, or if you have been ignoring ways that you could be using AI in your fundraising efforts, then you are leaving lots of money on the table. And that's why Grif Bohm is joining us today. Grif is transforming the world of nonprofit fundraising with AI technology. As the co founder of Give Momentum, an AI powered donor engagement platform, Griff and team are spearheading the AI revolution in the nonprofit sector. And they're doing this in order to empower fundraisers to save time and reduce manual tasks so they can be spending more of that really precious, valuable work time on building relationships with major donors and getting those gifts. Griff has a background in behavioral psychology and actually, by the way, studied financial decision making and philanthropy at the University of Colorado Boulder. And he has put his behavioral science skills to good use in creating Give Momentum, but he's also put it to good use in other ways. So four years ago, during the 2020 election cycle, he led a capital campaign for defeat by Tweet. And that campaign raised over $15 million from 60,000 new donors. The campaign encouraged minority voters not just to give, but but to turn out in key swing states. And it garnered enough votes to actually swing Wisconsin. So Griff clearly understands what it takes to get people to give and also to act. Hey, Griff, welcome to the podcast.
- [02:16]
B
Hey, Dolph, thanks so much for having me. Really, really psyched to be here.
- [02:18]
A
I am so thrilled you were here. And I thought a good place for us to start might be. Let's talk about that 2020 election cycle and the ways in which you were really mining things like donor traits and also those behavioral psychological factors that you've built so much of your career on.
- [02:37]
B
Yeah, that was a really, really fun campaign for us. You know, a lot of what we basically did was take the basic premise that everybody in the nonprofit world knows, which is that it's a lot easier to hold onto a retained donor than to acquire a new one. And one of the biggest things that we know is that there's a pretty big barrier to getting people to give the first time. And so we were really locked in on just like, how can we. We were just having discussions about it, how can we reduce that? And we basically figured out, you know, through a mix of testing and research and all sorts of stuff that if you can get people to give like a penny or a nickel. Right. Obviously people are much, much more willing to give that amount than if you ask them for even a dollar or $5, to say nothing of $1,000 or $5,000. Right. And so we sort of flipped the whole thing on its head and we came up with what we describe as being action based giving, where, you know, you would give some very, very small amounts of, around some activity that you do on a regular basis. So in that cycle, it was you would give a penny every time Trump tweeted or something like that. Right. But you can also do stuff where, you know, every time you fill your cart, you donate a penny or a nickel to climate change, or every time that you buy coffee, you donate to clean water or anything like that. Where we're trying to basically attach the action of giving, the actual reflex of giving to something that people are doing in their daily life. You know, I mean, I think that there's a lot that gets made about, like the generosity crisis and the decline and, and the fact that there are fewer donors in, in America today than there were than there have been in the past. And I think one of the things is that the reflex to give, like the sort of muscle memory has decayed a little bit. And so a lot of what we've been trying to do is sort of rebuild the muscle, right. Muscles can, can grow and atrophy, and I think we're in a little bit of an atrophy. But that's, of course, doesn't mean that it can't grow back.
- [04:18]
A
So I find that fascinating that you were tying the gift to something very specific, in some cases external to, to the prospective donor, but in other cases, something the donor's doing.
- [04:28]
B
Yeah, it's actually really funny. We haven't exactly gotten to the bottom of the internal or external sort of locus. One of our other favorite campaigns that we ran was we did a homelessness campaign with Steph Curry in San Francisco where every time Steph made a three, you would donate to homelessness in the city of San Francisco. It was for sort of, you know, city residents, people who might be fans of the warriors, anything like that. And that was another really, really successful one. And what we haven't exactly been able to parse, you know, like Steph Curry big, you know, Notable name Donald Trump's Twitter account. Also a fairly big notable thing. Some of our most successful campaigns have just been we've attached them to big stars and some celebrity, and we haven't exactly been able to get to the bottom of, hey, is the thing that's driving this the celebrity, or is it that people are actually more willing to give when it's not their own activities? Because, you know, we have. We have seen some stuff, but we've also run some campaigns that are external, like, hey, give every time your team scores. And those also do really well. I'm a CU buff alum. Every time that the buff score you can give. They don't. That would be a terrible campaign. Cause they don't score that much these days. But that's a different topic.
- [05:34]
A
So I also have to admit, I hear San Francisco and Curry and warriors, and I feel like I should know what sport that is, and I don't.
- [05:42]
B
Basketball. Basketball.
- [05:44]
A
Okay. I also was like, okay, three. What? In what sports can you get three points? I really was trying. I want you to know, Grif, I was trying really, really hard on that. I love it. But it's interesting you say that. I'll share with you. For some reason, this just popped into my head. Gosh, this is 18, maybe longer years ago, back when I was running a community center, an LGBTQ community center in Philadelphia, one of the funnest campaigns we did was a birthday campaign for Rick Santorum and friends. If you don't know who Rick Santorum is, he is one was a right wing, very homophobic United States senator. And we essentially went out to our constituents, to our donors, and we said, hey, if you make a gift in honor of Rick Santorum's birthday, we will send him a personal birthday card that says, hey, you made a gift. And because of your birthday, Rick Santorum, we will have stronger, more vibrant queer communities. And everybody really got behind that in a way we were not expecting. And we even got some press pickup of it.
- [06:49]
B
Yeah, press pickup, of course, makes a huge difference. I love that campaign idea. I mean, how creative and fun. There's definitely, like, this impulse that we've noticed with a lot of donors, which is if you can sort of, like, turn trolling into something good, right? Like, do troll for good. That gets a lot of play. People love that. Right. And that sounds like the A1 example of that that I've heard of recently. Yeah, that's a great one.
- [07:12]
A
So that might become the title of this episode. Troll for Good.
- [07:16]
B
Troll for Good. Yeah.
- [07:18]
A
I really love that. So obvious you talked about some of the behavioral psychology underpinnings, but I know when you and I had our kind of pre recording call, we also talked about things like loss aversion and delayed gratification.
- [07:33]
B
Yeah. So you know, these are more traits that aren't necessarily attached to the act of giving. It's more traits that indicate whether or not someone will give or someone is philanthropic. Right. And there's definitely a lot of this that you can pick up on. This is mostly work that we did around major giving, actually larger donors. One of the things that I think is just a really core concept for anybody who's raising major gifts to understand, of course, is that loss aversion people basically fear losses more than they desire gains. And so if you say to me, hey Griff, you can lose 10 or you can gain 10, I have a stronger impulse to not lose 10 than I do to in fact go and win the 10. And so we need to offer more in exchange for my loss or to compensate for my loss, then I in fact stand to gain major donors. I think one of the biggest things now that you see, especially when you look at the younger generations of giving millennials, Gen Z, down the sort of age range, is impact reporting. The ability to connect your message to impact is one of the strongest indicators. A thing that I don't know about in our work, if it comes up a lot, but there is this effective altruism movement out there and they have some, they have a lot of opinions. But one of the things that I think they get really right is that they're really, really, really laser focused on making sure that every dollar that is given philanthropically is put to good use internationally. I think you could kind of put like Bill Gates into this. He's sort of the, the alpha and omega on this category. Right. He's been so focused on global poverty and making sure that his dollars are spent in really highly effective ways. And it's a missing piece of the puzzle that I think a lot of, a lot of non profit and a lot of nonprofit leaders are having to grapple with, which is that, you know, you need to be able to answer the question as crisply and cogently as possible. If I give you X amount of money, what are you going to do with it? Right. And there's a lot, there's of course long standing history there with unrestricted gifts and things of that nature, but there's all sorts of stuff there that you can play on the psychology of major donors. And you know, you mentioned a Few others. Long termism is another one that we see a lot of. Right. Like humans basically have a terrible long term sense of things. Right. And there's variations of course, but especially with major giving, a lot of times major gifts are attached to a much long term outcome. A much more long term outcome. Hey, give to our capital campaign during the quiet phase. We're going to go and spend a few years in campaign and then we're going to break ground and then it's going to take us three years to build that building. Right. And it might be from the day I give my gift to the ribbon cutting ceremony could be a decade easy, right. And there's not enough work that happens with stewarding those donors through all of that time horizon or setting up yourself with sort of the tools that you need to be able to make sure that there's much shorter term feedback. Right. Like we get so much dopamine so quickly now you open Instagram or really any part of the Internet or the modern sort of work culture, you know, even like Slack or Teams like with the red dot, you know, that lets you know you have a notification for me. That's a stressor, right. I have so many of those that I can't deal with. But those are designed to be tiny little dopamine hits and you should, as best you are able, be thinking about ways that you can structure dopamine hits into your donor's giving pattern where it's not just sort of like hey, you made your gift and you know, we'll, we'll invite you to the ribbon cutting when we finally build this thing. But making sure that they're kept up to date, that they're, that they're aware of it.
- [10:54]
A
So real quick, so how do we do that? So you've got a major donor, they make that multimillion dollar commitment and they know they're going to be wa 5 or 10 years. What are those dopamine hits you can give them?
- [11:05]
B
Well, of course it's going to vary donor to donor, right? So know your donors is the first thing to say. I mean my take is that the smaller the better in a lot of cases, right. I think a lot of times organizations get hung up on trying to be like this is one of our most important donors. We need to make sure that everything that we give them is high quality and really polished and all of this. And I've done a lot of just like if we have a place, if I go on a site visit where hey, we're going to, we're going to build our new building here. Just to keep picking on that example, I'll take a picture of the empty field and send them that and just text them, hey, this is an empty grass patch that you're going to help us turn into a great, beautiful, glistening building. Right. And it builds like just this little feedback loop where they see that, they get to look at that. They. Hopefully what happens is they see your name on their phone and they think, oh, I like Dolph. Great. I love seeing text messages from Dolph. Let's see what he's got to say. Right. In my estimation, there's been a lot of reluctance to really kind of just treat donors like people. Right. And treat them sort of the way you would treat like a friend, where you can just have it be really low stakes and really casual. And I think when you get to that level of relationship with somebody, it actually increases their aptitude and their willingness to give much more than it might jeopardize it.
- [12:12]
A
Thank you. That's really helpful. And I. I know, Griff, that you have also mentioned advancing the hero story in our work with donors.
- [12:21]
B
Yeah, this is a. This is sometimes a little bit of a controversial one. Right. But this, I think, goes to some of the stuff I was talking about around delayed gratification and loss aversion and all of that. Advancing the hero story is basically just to define the term. It's basically the concept that you make sure that the donor feels that what they're doing is really a core contribution to the organization. And I think that part of the message, when I make the suggestion that you should just be sending text messages really casually to donors, just like, hey, here's a grassy patch that we're going to do something with. What that's signaling, without saying it, is that you're. You are thinking of that donor, whether or not there's like, something really pertinent that they're doing, right? It's just like, hey, I'm on their mind. Right? And it really feels good to have people be thinking about you. One of the best touches you can get in stewardship is like, wake up, read the New York Times. We actually built a tool that does this where it will take an article out of the New York Times or any publication, any URL, and basically you put it in, we'll read it, and then we'll recommend people in your CRM who you should just send the like, hey, Dolph, I read this this morning and it made me think of you. Right. Because it's just such A nice little piece of content to sort of say to somebody, hey, look, you're on my mind. Right? Actually, you are important enough. I am thinking of you. I think we all sort of, like, careen around in the world, and there are times where we, like, are like, man, is anybody but my mom and my wife really thinking about me day to day? And it's really nice to get that message that somebody, in fact, is fascinating
- [13:53]
A
and also a little creepy.
- [13:57]
B
We're just trying to make sure people have the tools, right? I mean, I think that it's really honest. Like, how many times. I mean, be honest. How many times have you read something and then talked to somebody months later and thought, oh, that would have been a great thing to share with you if I thought of it in the moment. Right?
- [14:11]
A
So, Griff, I'm going to be honest with you. I have read stuff. And by the way, this is old school. There's a couple magazines I still get in print. You know, the New Yorker. I only want to read the New Yorker imprint, so I will own up to this. I literally have cut an article out and thought, oh, I need to send that to my friend Eric or my friend Caitlin. And then three months later, it's still sitting there on my table. And eventually I just have so much guilt over it that I throw it away.
- [14:38]
B
So all it is is just you got a little too much friction. Right? Like, it's pain to mail stuff. I mean, let's not kid ourselves, right? In a world where you can type out a text message and blitz it out anywhere, it's like such a breeze. But, yeah, I totally sympathize. I totally identify with that. Like, there's so much. There's so many things where I, you know, there's only so much bandwidth I have in my day. Every night I feel like I lie in bed and I spend the first 10 minutes thinking about 20 things that I need to do or should have done. And that's like, almost a meditative state for me now. Yeah, I think, like, the ability to just make sure that people have the tools that they need in order to be able to stay engaged with their donors is. Is. I hope it's not received as creepy. I think it's something that you be striving to do as a fundraiser.
- [15:16]
A
Right? I think for me, like, it feels different if I read the article and then maybe I feed the article into the AI and I say, you know, who. Who would be interested? But if the AI is feeding me the articles that I've not really read that's where I start to be like, oh, that feels a little weird to me. But I also have to. As long as I'm sharing some true confessions, friends, I also have to tell you, Griff, that you give me a little more credit than is due. And you're like, well, there's some friction there. So I live in a little village. The post office is two and a half blocks from our house. I walk to the post office multiple times a week. I walk into the post office multiple times a week. I have a PO Box in the middle of my day. If I need a break, I just walk into the post office. Everyone there knows me. I'm, like, one of the regulars. So I have no excuse for not dropping something in the mail. Just to be clear. Zero excuse.
- [16:00]
B
There's some real beautiful Americana in that story, Dolph.
- [16:03]
A
Well, admittedly, especially for me, like, I just. I never thought I'd live in a place like that, but you're absolutely right about that. Okay, so clearly, like, better understanding which articles we might send to our donors is one really good use of AI. And, friends, I know earlier in the conversation you were thinking, come on, Dolph. You said you are. We're going to talk about AI. Go ahead and talk about it. So. So what are some other ways that fundraisers and nonprofit leaders could be using AI to. To better cultivate, communicate with their donors?
- [16:33]
B
So I have this sort of take on AI, which is that AI is a little bit like water, in that it's only as useful as the container you put it in, right? If you have a glass of water that's, in fact, incredibly useful, you can drink from it. If you have irrigation systems, that's incredibly useful. You can, you know, grow crops, but if you just spill water on the floor, that's no use to anybody. That's, like a nuisance, right? And I think there's been. With the technology and how it's emerged over the last couple of years, there's been this sort of thing where people have just, like, thrown it out there, and it's sort of the equivalent of spilling AI on the floor, where it's just like, hey, it's cool. It's really amazing. Go use it. You know? And I think there hasn't been enough work that's been done to make sure that it's useful, you know? So what we really try to do is we try to, you know, with everything that we release around AI that we. That we have, we try to make sure that it's achieving and accomplishing Like a really, really core outcome for our customers that they really care about that moves the needle for them. You know, we do some stuff around like real time identification. So if somebody makes a gift on your website, right, we have a model that can go in and basically figure out, hey, this is, you know, Dolph just gave $5. But in fact, he's a really high capacity donor and he's clicked on 10 emails recently and he's done all this, he's exhibited all these activities. You should be getting, you should call him, right? And it's a really easy moment to pick up the phone and just call and say, hey, you know, thank you so much for your gift. What inspired this? You know, like what, what decided to bring you in. And it's a really, really great way to build pipeline, you know, into, to higher levels of giving. We've done stuff around the ability to do sort of mobile contact reporting where if you have a meeting with a donor, just record your voice into your phone where you can just say, hey, we met. They're interested in this gift, they need this follow up, blah, blah, blah, blah, blah, blah, blah. And then we take care of making sure that that gets logged and all of your follow up gets queued up for you and set up and all of that. And we use AI to sort of turn your voice note into something actionable. Right. And so my basic take is that what AI is one of its most core breakthroughs is its ability to like sort of work across formats, right? So you can have AI produce text, you can have it produce a video, you can have it take a voice note and transcribe that or summarize that or do anything like that. And there's a lot of value there to be unlocked around letting the technology just sort of move stuff across sort of formats for you so that you don't have to spend time transcribing something or like designing something or anything like that.
- [18:57]
A
Yeah, I found AI to be really good at, prompting me to be more creative when I'm not feeling creative.
- [19:05]
B
It's a really good thought partner and I think not. There's this effect that I've observed in myself where I kind of hit writer's block, right? And instead of going to AI to like have it write something for me, what you'll notice is that in the process of needing to give it to write the prompt to, to ask the AI to write something for you, you actually write the thing yourself that you, you need it to write. You know, I can like sort of pull out it helps me clarify my thinking, where it moves something from. Okay, what I need to do here is articulate this and then I go through it and in the process of writing it all down, I, like, actually come up with all of the various points that I'm trying to make, and I need to give those to the AI in order for it to be able to do anything with it. And sometimes I still let it write the. The paragraph or two of text, you know, but I think it does a lot to help you, to force you to clarify your thinking. And, you know, I think there's not enough that happens. I love that idea that. That it prompts creativity for you, because you can just ask it, hey, I'm on a little bit of a block right now. What are 10 ideas that I can start? And it will come back with 10 ideas, right? And the more you give it, the better they'll be, right?
- [20:12]
A
Or I can give it one of my own ideas and say, hey, you know, what are some of the issues with this? Or, you know, and I'll also say, like, I use it a lot when I'm facing either a difficult conversation or one that I don't have on a regular basis. So, you know, I can say, hey, I'm about to have a conversation with Griff and here's what I'm thinking about. What are your thoughts, AI? About the way I should be approaching the conversation. And it will almost always give me a different perspective. It might not be a perspective that I'm going to take on entirely, but certainly a perspective that helps make that conversation better.
- [20:46]
B
Yeah, it's really interesting. I mean, not to get too technical, right? But the way AI works, it's not actually thinking. All it's doing is predicting the next sort of word in a sentence. Right? And so what that means is that all it's doing is taking things that have existed before it and repackaging them for you. And it's doing this in this sort of magical way where it, like, writes the message for you across the screen. You know, I sometimes think of there's like that old Harry Potter scene where he would, like, write the note in detention and it would, like, etch it into the back of his hand. There's like a scene in one of those movies that. That happened. And that's how I feel about AI where it's just like. It's kind of got this, like, magical presentation, but all it's doing is really just guessing the next thing in a sequence and there's something very earnest or honest Maybe to admit that that's all really humans are doing when we think too. Right. We're just trying to think about the ways and take the constellation of all the different information and put it together. And there's very little that's actually not been thought about or dealt with before. Right. And there's so many resources out there and it's sort of crazy to have it all compiled into this one little chatbot. Right. But it is definitely true that it can be a really great sort of thought partner when it comes to needing to spur creativity and stuff like that.
- [21:54]
A
Yeah. And as I think about ways to use it in fundraising, one of the things during this conversation that I just thought about is, I have to admit, like, I don't think this is an issue that I would have. But for example, if my computer system said, hey, Dolph, GRIF just gave $5, so it has a larger capacity, it's open 10 emails, et cetera, you should call and say thank you. I feel pretty confident I'd be able to call and thank you and have a follow up question for you. But if I was new at this, I could probably say to a chatbot, to GPT or something else, hey, I need to call a donor and say thank you for a $5 gift. They have a much higher capacity. What do I say? Or ask after the thank you? It could actually give you some ideas. But then the other really cool thing. And of course you do all of this by typing, not by talking, but you could even say, hey, could I role play this with you? And it would let you role play it.
- [22:45]
B
Yeah. It's kind of unbelievable. And it will. I mean, I think a lot of people don't know this, but you can actually role play it through voice. Like you can speak to it and it will speak back to you. You don't have to go like typing it in. And so, you know, there's a lot that you can do with that. I think the thing that I think about when you raise that example, which I completely agree is a good one, there's something to be said where, when, when I have interacted with like really experienced, high quality, top fundraisers, Right. Of course they don't need ChatGPT to help them come up with the thing to say. They know what to do. The way they got there is by doing it right? The way they did that is by call actually finding, you know, a thousand donors over their career that they've called and thanked and done this with. And the biggest thing, you know, like ChatGPT they basically say it's as good as the 75th percentile. It's, like, as good as a. Basically, like a C student on anything, right? And, like, it's writing quality and stuff like that. And that's basically as far as it will get you, but it will get you from, like, the 25th percentile to the 75th percentile really fast. And then you can focus on doing a lot more to improve and to move yourself up. There's this old concept called the Dunning Kruger effect that I'm sure nobody has ever heard of. It's sort of a bizarro thing, but it's this idea that, like, when you start something new, right? I'm about to have a child. My wife is a month away from our first baby, and I have this sometimes this thought where I'm like, yeah, like, I feel like I'm going to know what to do as a parent. Like, you know, I could be good at that, right? And that's me at the very beginning of the Dunning Kruger curve. Basically, like, it's this, like, imposter sort of confidence, right? You think you might be good at it before you actually are. And then the next part of the curve is the crash back to Earth. You realize you're terrible at this thing, and it brings you all the way back down. And then there's sort of like a long and steady improvement after that, right? You start something, you learn a lot really quickly, you get a lot better really fast. You feel like you're on the moon, and then you realize, oh, actually, we're very bad at this. And then you need to do the long and hard work of actually improving over time. And that's. I think, a lot of what ChatGPT can do is sort of skip you ahead to the long, the longer part of that curve where you don't have to experience the crash back to Earth.
- [24:52]
A
Got it, got it, got it. Okay, I've got one more AI question for you. And by the way, it's not related to fundraising. So, friends, I'm sorry, but I just want to ask it. So for my friends who are listening right now, there's four participants in this zoom chat. So there's Grif, who's a human being. There's myself, who's a human being, and then there's my AI notetaker, Otter, AI. And then I see that there's Griff's AI Notetaker, Fireflies, AI. I'd love to have a little bit of conversation with you about your notetaker. And I'd also love to chat a little bit about my note taker, but I'd love to have a conversation with you about your note taker.
- [25:32]
B
So what are you interested in hearing about my note taker, Dolph? I mean, the thing, the reason that I don't use Otter and I use Fireflies instead is that it lets me. We've basically built this, this is what our product does, but I do this for myself as well. And it's probably not as relevant for recording a podcast, but when I get on phone calls with customers, or would be customers or something like that, it will basically build out a whole set of next steps for me and then it can sync those into our system to make sure that I actually execute on them. Right. And so we, part of what we do is sort of build plans for people where it's like sort of a stewardship engagement plan. And so at the end of almost every call, you know, that's at least a well run meeting that, that I get on. Right. There's a sort of 10 minutes or 5 minutes at the end where we set up next steps. It will take all of those and it will actually cue me up with tasks and sort of items in my to do list to make sure that I actually get to work through all of those. And just when we were developing that write, Fireflies was an easier one for us to work with. And so we went there. So no, real strong. You know, I'm sure my note taker is just as good as your note taker. I built a bunch of stuff on top of it to make sure that I stay on top of all my stuff.
- [26:36]
A
By the way, I love that. I'm sure my note takers, just as good as your note taker, might be better than mine. I'm not trying to have like a competition on our AI note takers here, but admittedly you answered all the questions I was going to ask. I was like, okay, why do you use Fireflies and what do you see as the differentiation? And so now I understand that. Thank you. And I will say Otter AI will give a list of action steps. Probably won't be any action steps from this. It's a podcast recording. Although if there are, they'll be hysterically funny. Like, for example, I'm sure there'll be something about your newborn. There'll be an action step on that. I feel confident, but I don't know about any integration. So thank you. I'm actually going to have to look at that and see if Otter will integrate into the systems I use or if Fireflies would. So that's really, really super helpful. Thank you.
- [27:22]
B
And this is what I mean. Where AI is only as good as its container. Right. It's only valuable to have next steps be sort of presented to you if they're being given to you in a way where you will execute on them. Right. And so there's a lot of stuff where sort of AI and automation work together and hand in hand, where take the AI, put it together with some automation and make sure that actually whatever next steps, whatever next step that Otter recommends you take care of with my brand new baby, you know, it makes you want to make sure that those actually happen.
- [27:50]
A
Yeah. Hey, exactly, exactly. Feed, diaper, et cetera, all the important stuff. And I'm doing that now just to really mess with my Otter AI. Okay, Griff, I'm glad you joined us. And I know that we're going a little bit longer than usual, but I would love, love, love to play Two Truths and a Lie with you.
- [28:10]
B
Cool. Let's do it.
- [28:12]
A
All right, let's go.
- [28:14]
B
All right. So I tried to come prepared for this. I did write one, though, that I was about to have my first child, so I'm going to have to, you know, that one is. Sorry, skip that. So, but we'll do. I've lived and worked in four countries that aren't the United States. I once rode a bike across the entire state of Colorado, 700 miles. And the Momentum headquarters, like our company headquarters I'll do, is based in a bank in San Francisco.
- [28:45]
A
Hmm. That's tough. I believe that you're a bike rider, so I could see you having ridden across Colorado. I also believe that you've probably lived and worked outside of the United States. I don't know if it's four times, but that seems pretty believable. I'll also say the headquarters in a bank in San Francisco seems so outlandish, that would almost have to be true. But I'm going to say that that's the lie. Your headquarters are not in a bank. Like all the gold in California in someone else's name in San Francisco.
- [29:25]
B
You nailed it, Dolph. Yeah, we were once in a bank building, which is where I came up with that. And that's how it was, sort of upstairs in a bank. We've moved out of that space now. But you teased that up perfectly. Because I did that precisely trying to see if I could do this, like, crazy, outlandish one and trick you into believing it. So you saw right through me. Nice and nicely done.
- [29:47]
A
Well, again, I was like, that's either so outlandish or it's 100% true. I don't know which. But also, I don't know if you're Remember the song all the gold in California is in the bank in the middle of Beverly Hills and somebody else's name that was literally going through my head as I was talking about that. Well, Griff, thank you so much for joining us. And I want to make sure that my friends who are listening know ways in which they can intersect with you and really connect with you. And so the first friends, I want you to go to givemomentum.com GPT they have a dedicated GPT assistant that is trained on all the best major gift fundraising practices. Practices everything from how to follow up with a donor to advice on how to actually make the ask. So you can go to givemomentum.com GPT Additionally, while you are@givemomentum.com, i want you to check out the blog tab. It is one of the most interesting blogs I have seen. There's a lot on there about AI and fundraising. There's also a lot on there about fundraising and nonprofit leadership, so make sure you check that out as well. And finally, at givemomentum.com, grif and his team is going to be having a study released on AI and nonprofits in the coming weeks. So make sure when you go there, you look for that study as well. So friends, if this has been a good conversation for you, if it's helped you really think about both how you could be doing some fundraising differently, but also ways in which you could be using AI in your organization. There's two episodes I'd like for you to consider listening to. The first is episode 351, use email sequencing to unlock donor retention. You know, Griff started the conversation by saying, hey, we all know the cheapest way to get a donor is to keep a donor. So check out that episode. And the second is episode 281, surefire ways to retain your Donors with Samantha Thread Gill. That, my friends, is our show for this week. I hope that you have gained some insight to help you and your nonprofit thrive. And I wouldn't do it except the lawyers make me say it. Okay, here you go. I'm not an accountant. I'm also not an attorney and neither I nor the consulting practice provide tax, legal or accounting advice. And you know why. Of course you do. I've already told you I'm not an accountant or an attorney. This podcast is for informational purposes only. Yeah, we mentioned it. Bylaws. But you should not rely on this podcast for tax, legal or accounting advice. In fact, don't rely on any podcast for tax, legal or accounting advice. If that's what you need, find a licensed qualified professional in your area.