0:04  
Low everyone. Just let's make sure I see people coming in. Yes we do. We had a lot of interest for today it's a fun day to talk about cryptocurrency will touch on. We're gonna give folks maybe another minute or so before we dive in. My name is Tim Sarrantonio, director of corporate brand here at NEON one who is the host for today. And we are excited to bring back our friends the giving block. You know, one of our longtime partners at this point in in specially our cryptocurrency experts, so no one better to talk about it than Pat Duffy. You want an expert? We got an expert. So we're excited to bring you this. Yeah, yeah. In about a minute. We'll get started. Again, we'll go over some base housekeeping. But you know, your folks typically ask Is this being recorded? Yes, this is being recorded. We will have this up later today on the neon, one website and the email will go out tomorrow for the recording. We are watching the chat. I have a compadres here on the line here too, who will be making sure that we're staying on top of things. So the neon one team is following questions. Let's get into it, make sure you have as much time with Pat as possible. So again, I'm excited to kick off crypto philanthropy how to incorporate cryptocurrency into your fundraising strategy from our partners at the giving block. Also proud sponsors of our recent generosity exchange, and had a great presentation also from a new staff member, Josh Hirsch, at nonprofits Social Media Summit. So we are fascinated by what's happening with cryptocurrency. We're excited to have Pat here, basic housekeeping, we are going to record this, we're going to get you a link for the recording. And also Pat, you've given us a cool resources resource that we're going to be sending in the email. And that's gonna be in that email with the recording too. So, Pat, once you introduce yourself, I think you have a slide on that. And then I got to ask you a kind of economics question before we get into it.

2:35  
Hell yeah. Okay, so yeah, I'm Pat Duffy. I'm one of our two co founders at the giving block our claim to fame is like the kind of Advent and growth of crypto Why have to be so we developed the main tools that nonprofits use to accepts crypto donations, the main tools donors use across like their platforms, their integrations or on our platform to make donations to nonprofits. And then we built a lot of the connective tissue between the nonprofits and then the people in the crypto community, everything from campaigns where people go to give the crypto Giving Pledge crypto, Giving Tuesday, Giving Tuesday Foundation, all that good stuff. And then the primary crypto fundraising strategy team. So how nonprofits kind of uncover crypto donations, their existing CRM, and then get out there and meet people in the crypto universe to convert them into donors before they you know, establish getting relationships elsewhere. So we have a really active approach when it comes to crypto. And that's kind of been our differentiator as

3:37  
well. And one of the things that I love working with your team on is, is the actual data behind this. You know, we love that. And that's why you folks were our experts on cryptocurrency for our donor report. And and I know we'll get into some of the data there. But I do want to ask, because before we get into it, folks might be seeing some news about cryptocurrency. Can you give a little bit of context for what might be happening in the market right now and how people can think about that in a long term strategy for this?

4:12  
Yeah, definitely. So at a super high level, there's less money in crypto than there is in more traditional financial ecosystems. It's more than a decade old as an asset class, but it's still relatively nascent. And what that means is when there is kind of like a staple player in the ecosystem or a big move that happens with one company or multiple, it can shake the market more than other markets. It's the same reason why when it explodes upwards, you'll see the stock market go up 30% But crypto goes up. 300 people are more tentative about when they enter their positions, and then they're more careful. Or I'd say more willing to exit as well, just less kind of entrenched. So in short, bags pay hundreds of billions of dollars every decade for cooking the books and Doing things with money that they shouldn't be doing. But they've been around for a long time. But it's not like people are concerned that banks baby shouldn't be a thing. When a bank, you know, processes $100 billion for a cartel or whatever, when a crypto company. You know, Treasury manages in this case ineffectively, like they tried to place too many bets with the capital, they're tasked managing people will flee at a higher rate, just because it's more nascent, there's less kind of bought in. So the market is shocked from like one major player doing bad treasury management. And it's already at a time, but it was economic uncertainty. And kind of a bubble that's come down a little bit already. So we're taking a ding, but we've, you know, over the last decade, this has happened, I would say, you know, I think we may have a slider opened up like 16 or 17 times, there's been like major market corrections that it's still outperformed every other asset. So for me, it's cryptos at a discount, which I like, but for the company, you know, it's tougher to talk to donors, I'm making a transaction when they feel like they got a hole poked in their pocket.

6:03  
The thing that we have found consistently about donor behavior is in times of economic uncertainty. And I actually just talked to somebody at the Chronicle philanthropy about this, they were asking, what is recession giving look like? What happens is that you actually see a big spike in the beginning people of all types of all sizes, want to give. But then what happens is that that might kind of die down a little bit as people start to tighten their own belts. And then there's a nice bump at the end from the major donor class. And the end and crypto assets tend to be from high net worth individuals in the crypto sphere to. And so you'll get into that, but just to kind of give some context here, folks, the data is actually very friendly for what's happening around this. And that's why I want to ask that question. That's great. You take it away, it's the floor is yours. I'll be here to support folks. You can use the chat. Why don't we test out the chat while pads getting ready, type in who you are and where you're from physically today? Because crypto, that's kind of beautiful. It can be everywhere, right? But want to hear who you are and where you're from. We're paying attention to the chat that will help us see questions. And yeah, Pat, take it away.

7:17  
Nice. Yeah, let's dive in. So yeah, it's a perfect handoff. So like the main question we get from media outlets, and now nonprofits this year, is like how donation volume is up, like crypto donations continue to climb, despite the fact that the market has gone down. They climb a lot more when the markets going up, of course, just for a tax advantaged reasons. But the short answer is if you bought one Bitcoin, let's say two years ago, you're probably up something like 70 80% on that investment. So not everyone buys their crypto at the top of markets to buy before that. And anyone who has any crypto that is appreciated same thing as stocks, has a really big tax incentive to give a nonprofit's are actively fundraising and a lot more. So that's kind of the the segue from the market dynamics. It's a lot of this ends up being based on the nonprofits, willingness and interest in actually actively fundraising crypto. And now, stocks we launched this morning, actively soliciting non cash assets to get those higher donation values. But we're going to talk about crypto primarily today, just an introduction to it. We're gonna talk about crypto philanthropy and those incentives, kind of what it looks like for the nonprofit's are building crypto into a revenue channel. And if you're giving in particular in crypto and stocks and non cash assets, it's even more valuable just because people have to get those gifts in under the wire to offset their tax burdens. Same way they would make a donation to get the the write off, there's the additional benefit of not paying taxes. So it's just a larger impetus. And then getting started to kind of how nonprofits actually accept crypto donations and start moving in the direction of developing a revenue channel, especially in times of economic uncertainty and nonprofits are looking for new places to make money. Okay, so intro to crypto, we always just ask this is more of a rhetorical question. But if you want to pop it in the chat, kind of, you can do a one if you're accepting stocks and a two if you don't, we always asked nonprofits to take stock donations. And then as of today, we actually added a stock donation product into the donation widget. But the reason we asked that is because it's the same tax incentives that are available to crypto donors when they give a non cash asset. And it's exceedingly common but easier to give. So for nonprofits, accepting stocks, if you understand why donors give that way, and why it's important to have that as an option, larger average gift size, higher rate of conversion. All that good stuff also applies to crypto and it's the reason it's become a thing. We then point to this so again, like even over the course of this year, as we've seen the crypto market lose market cap compared to last year. It's of course, a lot still over the last several years. Companies like Coinbase, for example, like these larger crypto exchanges are at a point now where they have dramatically more users than the largest brokerages. So, fidelity or Charles Schwab, ETrade, et cetera, Robinhood Coinbase sports, the largest user base across all of those. So first point of contacts that nonprofits needs to understand, despite the fact there's more market volatility, it is a gigantic user base. So there's arguably more people using crypto than PayPal at this point, both as a mode of investment and a mode of transaction. Secondary says people want to donate it like we talked about the tax incentives. What's cool about this slide is it shows Google search volume for donate stocks versus donate Bitcoin alone, which is just you know, the top cryptocurrency this year is the first time that those have reached parity. And by that, I mean, there are as many searches on the internet for donate Bitcoin as there are for donate stocks in 2022. So some of the drivers are just a younger user base, on average, it's a more digitally native and active user base, on average, they're searching more. And then the third reason is because most nonprofits don't take it. There are a lot of people who make donations to charities every year, but they don't see that they can give crypto or the way that they're looking to do so. And they go out onto the air and they go, Where can I donate this, I understand that there's a additional tax incentive to give assets instead of with a credit card or bank transfer. Because crypto makes it so easy for younger people to do that they're actively seeking out that option. Which is why search engine optimization for us it's such a high priority strategy. And then active user base. So in short, there were a $10.4 trillion in total volume going across the visa network last year. And on Aetherium, the second largest crypto, there were $11.6 trillion in total volume moving across those rails. So yes, people buy crypto to speculate, you know, you park money in it. Treasury Management, sent money there for the high upside probability, you know, you're expected to be worth more in the future. But there's also really cool use cases like NF T's people staking at places to verify movement of data. There's a lot of things that blockchain kind of does behind the scenes and on these different protocols, you can either just send them to and fro as a mode of transaction like a currency or you can also use them in these really interesting ways to move them across the rails to verify transactions or to participate in networks. They can even be kind of used as like a digital ID. So the uptick in the not only speculation, people parking money in and investing, but actually using this stuff, as a part of their day to day goings on is increasing, which is great for the long term outlook. Okay, and then a very young user base, which I'm sure comes as no surprise, 94% of users are millennials and Gen z's. However, fun fact, the majority of crypto wealth more than 50% is held by Baby Boomers and Gen X's. So I think a lot of nonprofits, especially, you know, blue chip organizations where they get these really big crypto transactions from a hedge fund manager or from, you know, an institutional DAF on a more mainstream platform that doesn't even score crypto sometimes. These older folks who have learned about, you know, blockchain and crypto and started diversifying into it over time, I think it's 95% of hedge funds either have crypto or diversifying and actively. That very small percentage of their portfolio, they're not really into crypto in the way that young people are like all in on it. But they understand that, to them, at least not investment advice, but they view it as an important part of a balanced portfolio because of the high upside potential. And those folks are making donations as well. So generally speaking, it's targeted to younger donors. But there are a lot of older folks that don't receive those messages, which can be a mistake. Some nonprofits only focus on say Twitter strategies are always actively encouraging them like hey, if you're not getting a note out to your major gifts base, like we accept crypto donations, there's same taxes out of stocks, we should have a conversation if you've got appreciated assets can be a swing and a miss. Because we have examples of things like universities where someone makes a $50 million commitment, they say, or I should say $500,000 commitment. In this one case, I want to get 50 grand a year for the next 10 years. And then crypto hits an all time high last year and they execute the full pledge in the 2021 calendar year because it's a good time to exit that position to offset their their capital gains. So it's important targeted to younger donors primarily, but make sure that your older High Net Worth donors are aware that you have it as an option. And then yeah, wealthy user base when you look at the intersection of your wealthy donors and your young donors, young, you know, millennial millionaires, 83% of them this is I think at this point maybe as 2019 or 2020, the number I'm sure is higher now as a percentage. But the vast, vast majority of millennial millionaires do invest in cryptocurrency, it's one of their primary investment modules, which means it's up more than their stocks at any point in time, depending on which individual crypto they bought one, that is their primary donation method. So it's becoming more and more important from a major gifts lens for this younger demographic they're trying to convert up and it's more major giving relationships as they hit their peak earning years. And we think of the great wealth transfer, more and more important that an active crypto strategy gets implemented for nonprofits who are trying to future proof their major gifts program. And then this is the data point we touched on. So as people look at the market, these numbers look different. Now, of course, like the value of cryptocurrency, where it goes down, but you can see from 2020, all the way back, everyone who's bought into pretty much every major cryptocurrency is up in those positions. And that means, you know, there's 10s of millions of people in the US generally speaking at any given point in time, who are holding some unit of appreciated crypto, which is more tax advice, or credit cards to give to a charity. So as they become more tax literate over time, and these younger donors become a larger percentage base, we're just seeing more people interested in giving crypto, and they tend to not be knocking on a nonprofit store asking for ways to give it to them, they again tend to look for where can I give crypto to a charity. And then they find that establish a given relationship for the tax advantages as such. So what is it, we kind of touched on it, but people again, look at what's happening in the market today, for instance, and they're like, crypto is a bubble. Sometimes folks will say I used to say that in in 2017.

Ore, they would say, you know, it's not backed by anything. The fact of the matter why people invest in this is cryptocurrencies and the blockchain technology behind it effectively due to things that other types of money can't. One is you can't change transaction records. So you can't do what banks do, where they pretend money went somewhere, when it's in. When you look at any unit of Bitcoin that's been transferred to you, you can follow it all the way back to its origin. So you don't always have the name of the person who owns any wallet and chain. But you can see every wall that's ever touched, and when it was first released, it's a permanent transaction record, zero of which have ever been changed. So the unchanging record system is really cool and unique. Then the second piece for most cryptocurrencies like a Bitcoin, is that there is an unchangeable supply. So there's a set number of units that will exist. And this is a hedge against inflation, right? So the US government can print as much money as it wants for all of eternity. With something like a Bitcoin, you can't make more of it. So when someone parks their money in crypto, when people ask, why are they doing it, again, not investment advice, it can be overvalued, or undervalued, when you hear about these people who park money in it, and tried to build up a reserve over time, the fact that it operates more transparently and effectively than any other form of money, and that no transaction record can change, no one can ever deny that you own it. And the fact that they know there will never be a giant injection of supply that will devalue what they're holding, like what happens with your dollars. That tends to be the two primary reasons they hold it, it does some other things, we're 24 hour markets and really quick transaction speeds. But those are kind of the two primary variables. It's it's, it's backed by its technology in the same way cell phone is just in some ways, fundamentally better than a landline. That's kind of the basic framework. And then NF T's take all that technology, like we do on a an asset like Bitcoin, and applies it usually, to a piece of art. So again, you can trace it indefinitely, no one can deny that you own it, if you own it, no one can change the transaction records, if you send it somewhere or you take possession of it. It allows you to fundamentally virtually own a piece of digital art in a way that is 100%, verifiable and unchanging. So it's allowed for kind of sticky things like almost baseball cards online, where you can have a set supply of these on a network. And people can kind of, you know, trade them back and forth and flip them. And then there's also masterpieces that get released for the first time as an NFT. So you have kind of these more famous artists like a people who his claim to fame was NFT art, so his original versions of his art would be released as an NFT. And people have paid as much as $66 million for the right to own the actual official original. And because it's undeniable and verifiable it's the equivalent of you know, having the Middle East in your living room. In the same way that you can take a picture of the Mona Lisa and hanging that up to but it's not the original. So that's the idea behind an NF T hopefully helpful fundamentally for a nonprofit though. All that matters is people donate them for usually the tax incentive or because they want to give you kind of a high five I think it's cool that you're doing crypto stuff, they're culturally aligned with it. And they think it's exciting to participate in crypto related fundraisers the same way they want to do a crypto related meetup in their neighbor. So that is crypto. I'm going to pause for one second here, just because it was a lot of kind of data and description. We're going to touch on the the active fundraising component. But I'm just gonna look at the q&a to make sure we didn't miss anything. Okay, perfect. It's still just people posting their names. If you guys have questions throughout, definitely pop them in, and we'll get to them at the end. Let's dig in. So why did they donate it? Why is it you know, a grown donation option. And again, even in a year where cryptos value has gone down from last year? Why is the donation volume going up on our platform in short, people who have appreciated crypto, even if it's not at the all time high, if it's up from where they originally bought it two years ago, three years ago, four years ago, it's their most incentivized way to give to a nonprofit because they not only get the write off, but they pay no capital gains tax on the crypto they give. So in short, I can give you the million dollars I have in my bank account. And I could write that off too. But if I give you the million dollars and have in crypto, you get the million dollars, I get the million dollar write off and I can even take the million dollars I have in my bank and buy cryptocurrency at today's price. Instead, the new crypto that I just bought is worth a million dollars because I don't pay tax on it yet. I've moved my cost basis up and the crypto that I donated to you if I had sold that instead, I would have had to pay, you know 150 200 grand in taxes on it at a state and federal law per state and federal level. So is this cool kind of tax arbitrage move that people use to donate assets, it allows them to exit a position without paying taxes which which maximize the value of the asset they're giving. Who fundraise is crypto. The list has expanded quite a bit over the last year. But on our platform, there's a little over 2000 nonprofits who are actively fundraising we say fundraising very intentionally, just because there are a lot of nonprofits I'm sure that have like a wallet address pasted on a page or you know, a donate crypto button embedded in a giving form. We don't see. And I'm sure if they're nonprofits on here, we're taking crypto just kind of passively, we don't see much donation volume from people who are in a traditional checkout and then picking crypto as an option. It's for the obvious reason you would probably expect someone who wants to give you 20 bucks a month probably isn't thinking about donating non cash assets. So it's not really the way that they are discovered. It requires either active solicitation within your CRM or donor base in ways that are effective, communicate tax incentives, go through their advisors, etc. Or it's through meeting them where they are. So it's the same way you would have kind of like a Wall Street fundraiser on an annual basis. If you're like based out of Manhattan. People do active crypto fundraising. So they'll they'll have dinners, they'll go to conferences in the in person stuff that's more rare. But things like crypto Giving Tuesday. Having people drop NF t's on behalf of their charity, the more active fundraising approaches are really where the donation volume is heading. In addition to the traditional death based advisor based or your direct appeal based gifts that are made for tax reasons, primarily. So these are all active fundraising programs, a lot of the big ones that we cite here, but the vast majority of groups we work with tend to be smaller and midsize. And they're just kind of more focused on kind of recession, proofing and future proofing their fundraising programs through actively soliciting non cash assets, crypto stocks, etc. And then who are crypto donors. This is like a really cool slide when you just think about like, if you could make a donor in a lab that a nonprofit would want to engage with, it's pretty much straight across the board. This is part of the reason we were excited about doing crypto first before getting into stocks. It's an average donor age that's significantly younger, you know, you can think late 20s, early 30s, oftentimes, their average income is higher than any city in America. So even that's a couple years old, free bull market type numbers. And if you put them all in a city, together be the richest city in the country. So more than Silicon Valley, anything else. These are high income super young, and then very generous. So on the right side, you see the average gift size last year was about $10,500. We got to run the numbers for this year, once we got through end of the year, which kind of stabilizes the average. But a big driver there you can see fidelity, charitable, the stat on the left did a report last year, analyzing their donors who gets what amounts on an annual basis. Mike McLean, who was over there who now runs her institutional arm who we scooped up from fidelity. Pretty much they just ask the donors to give through fidelity, charitable, how much do you give annually? What are your odds of giving $1,000 or more and then They gave them the box, like what they invest in the most generous demographic were the people who ticked the crypto box. And they were about 45% more likely to give $1,000 or more to charity. I think it was something like the other one was 33%, I guess for stocks, then maybe for crypto is somewhere in the 40s. But it's pretty cool. So they're exceedingly generous. Some of that is because they're, you know, younger, idealistic part of it is because they're high income investing in cutting edge technologies to probably making more money. And then to all of the volatility and the active engagement with it. A lot of people have stocks, they don't even think about giving because they're not interfacing with the daily, we saw that $11.6 trillion volume number, these people are interfacing with their crypto, that's the thing they actually think about sending to to places and collecting from places they move it around, we're actively so it's a tool that is more top of mind. I think for that reason, the the tax literacy standpoint at the high end is growing pretty rapidly.

So it's a it's a very tax efficient way to get over that. It's also very fun way to give it's I mean, you'll you'll see when when we do press release and campaigns and everything else, but we've only had one client we've ever worked with through a press release that was crypto related, where it wasn't their top performing release of the year. It's just a thing that people find really interesting and compelling and exciting. And it's a good way to just get younger donors. And you know, tech finance folks are interested in giving to a particular cause all of which are really important demographics. And then for nonprofits, the revenue that it generates by unlocking crypto and now stock donations within your existing donor base is super important. If you can convert them to a non cash asset donation, like their retention rates are extraordinarily higher than the average gift size, of course higher because they're offsetting their gains. And then it's also just I think, an important thing for internal morale and excitement to be able to interface with things like cryptocurrency stocks, or innovative donation methods, everything down to, you know, stuff we don't even interface with directly, but like Venmo Cash App, just the ways that people are moving money. It tends to, I think, be important in terms of staying young in your fundraising strategies, I think it's probably a good recruiting and retention tool us in particular, we're able to recruit a lot better talent, because we're a crypto company, and people just find it compelling. But it's not like the main reason to get into it. But I think it's an important thing to note. It's becoming more of a baseline expectation. And then NFC flat fee, there's only one big takeaway here, people find this kind of daunting, you don't have to make your own LFTs. You don't have to start a Dow you don't have to create any smart contracts or innovative technologies. However, one of our biggest growth areas where we see a lot of donation volume is from NFC philanthropy, what we mean when we say that is people are selling their NF T's like they would normally, but then they're donating proceeds either all or a percentage to nonprofits that they partner with. So these people are selling their art, think of it very similar to people doing auctions, there are a gallery. They're just donating 97% of the time, they're not giving the actual asset directly to a charity. People are just kind of fundraising using it. So it's become like this virtual version of a fundraiser that's become a lot more compelling. The biggest one, I'd say we did was with water.org. That was with Gary Vee, if you're familiar with them, Gary Vaynerchuk. And Anheuser Busch, that was like one of the larger ones we did, what we've done with Sotheby's and a lot of other folks, it's becoming a bit more mainstream. So if anyone tells you, you have to update your gift acceptance policy or start like accepting NF T's and try to like audit what they're actually worth entirely unnecessary for that fringe percentage of the time that that happens, we have an institutional arm that takes those and handles that process. You don't need 2000 nonprofits creating or managing NF T's. But it's cool. It's growing quite a bit. So where is this all going? The two biggest growth areas as we again continue to grow year over year. But where like the real explosive growth is, I would say in tax education. Again, there are a lot of nonprofits who are able to accept things like stocks, for instance, and they do not actively solicit effectively. They don't call for younger donors or high net worth donors to give non cash assets or put in an infographic in an email that explains that they can give more that the same impacts on their bottom line. There's a lot of hidden money in everybody's CRM, but they're just not taking out and uncovering that just gets left on the table on an annual basis. And crypto in particular, because they're so young, it's an even higher percentage. So there's so much money in crypto, there should be millions of people giving crypto each year. But a lot of them don't just because they're not aware that they can give away crypto and it's actually better for their portfolio than if they gave away the cash and pay taxes eventually. So tax education from our standpoint for advisors for nonprofits directly to their audiences. really big opportunity, even if it's kept at a super high level. And then the second piece is the great wealth transfer with the vast majority of millennial and Gen Z billionaires investing in cryptocurrency. It's becoming where they put their money, it's where advisors are going to have to be they want to maintain the business, you know, family offices and beyond. As the great wealth transfer transfer continues to happen, and these younger folks hit their peak earning years, you can expect more and more objects in crypto philanthropy, just because you're going to have a lot more crypto investors and your existing audience. Stocks will always be a part of the portfolio. But you want to be open at both revenue channels and actively soliciting across the board. Okay. And to view your giving, and then I will dive into everybody's questions. How are we doing on time perfect, like 30 minutes central bank through this last part, and then we can take a good open discussion there. So features of the successful program. These are like the three big takeaways for folks who if you're not currently accepting crypto, or even if you are things you should really be thinking about. One is make it easy for your team, something we say here's like you only get one first year with cryptos. So if you're a crypto champion, you're really into it, you find it exciting, you have to understand like I found out the hard way. When I was at the Lupus Foundation before we started all this, not everyone's into it at the same level. There are marginal gains that you can get in terms of producing team activity and focus on crypto that can just make it a lot more seamless and easy to accept receipt. Everything down to an appraisal and a donor needs one of those, there's a lot of stuff that can get taken off the board where if people don't generate donation volume quickly in a crypto program, or if they make it very difficult to do the projects. They're they're tied up. And you can really get what we call blockchain fatigue, where people kind of start stepping away, and then it's really hard to react to it. So starting slow, make it easy, get a really good first year under your belt super key. And then the second piece is donor needs. There are a lot of nonprofits we met in 2018. In particular, were first starting out that had kind of an internal crypto champion who like really understood crypto, and understood their nonprofit but not the intersection so much. So they'd be sending NF T's back and forth. But they would tell a donor Yes, you can send an NF T It's like a dynamic wallet address because they weren't used to the differences with an institutional account. And they would just like set $400,000 on fire, or you could tell your donor we can or we can't take something or you tell them to do it a certain way. And it would trigger a taxable event. donor relationships are super important. So in terms of how you interface with donors, it's a thing that just we take very seriously and make sure that you're if you're working with us, particularly like connected with our team, and if timezoner asks a question that you're at all unsure about, just direct it to us, and we can manage that to make sure that a donor never gets burned, because there are some complexities. And then don't accept crypto fundraising, especially in the first year. There are so many nonprofits where they'll pop up like a donate crypto button, wait for donations for a year. And they'll go there just aren't any out there Save the Children would be a really notable example. They they had their first button in 2013, I believe 2013 or 2015, I'd have to check very early into crypto. And they didn't get donations for like five years because they went all in on this button thing in their first year. And they just didn't tell anyone they even had it. And then the company or the org rather was condensed out there's just not an opportunity for us literally their first year fundraising if they had a six figure program practically overnight. And then like seven figures plus really quickly, just through active solicitation, they obviously have a larger arm. But every nonprofit who's accepting crypto like you can, in a very light touch way with your active solicitations for your major givers and your younger donors, you're sending the emails anyway, adding that crypto component making people aware that you can take it so many nonprofits aren't doing it. And then there's so many opportunities to just get in front of these people very passively by plugging into campaigns, search engine optimization opportunities, running an app when it makes sense showing up to something tons of opportunities to get out there and in the front of the line. And it's for the time being less competitive than a lot of other donor demos just because it's not new, but it's more new than other areas where it's already a lot more crowded. And then end of the year stats, more than half of crypto nations happen in q4. A lot more than that it's probably like 66% Plus October, we see an increased November an increase in in December. Of course a giant percentage making sure nonprofits are equipped to take crypto and then participating in things like crypto Giving Tuesday. And then after crypto Giving Tuesday, primarily in the month of December. It's the nonprofit's who kind of launch off gain a lot of exposure on crypto Giving Tuesday. And then real for the last for the rest of the month. Right because so many people are going to see your page think about giving you credit to go, that's awesome. I like this cause, book market, etc go talk to an advisor. It's not like a credit card where they just check out on the fly every time it's a with a $10,000 average gift size, much more serious consideration nonprofits who are present in front of mind throughout the month of December. I know we're integrating crypto into their already existing appeals they're sending out to their donor base are the ones who rake the most out of the woodwork there. So in q4, in particular, it's incredibly essential. And then, of course, the, the biggest window here, like almost half of all donation volume is still very much on the table in this tax year. And again, like we talked about with crypto down, you know, if there were 7 million donors that you had access to, and now there's no 4.5 million because of the price movement, people who have bought crypto that is actually up still doesn't have to be all of their crypto just has to be something they bought at some point that is up more than where they bought it. There's still millions of people in the US who are giving this way. And it's why our donation volume still continues to climb and nonprofit tactically appeal.

Doesn't feel as good. As for crypto, well, it's kind of down a little bit. But donors are smart, they understand the numbers. And then it's out a message to descriptive donors, which we'll touch on here. One target communities every cryptocurrency is different. So you'll see Solana for example. And then FTX company behind it, the one that's going through turmoil currently. Ultimately, there's consolidation, people move into different cryptos. One thing we tell them about profits all the time, the beauty of being the nonprofit is volatility. And market turbulence is something that is dealt with by the investors, it does not need to be seen it's dealt with by you. And even in an extreme example, let's say Bitcoin disappeared overnight. Eventually, right over a short period of time these other cryptocurrencies made vacation who is going to be number one, right, so you would get one cryptocurrency going down a lot, and then people moving their capital into the others. As long as you're not holding one cryptocurrency, that would mean you'd see a ton of appreciation across these other cryptos as they rise in to fill that gap. And you'd have a lot of tax incentivized donors. So even when there are shakeups, you know, there are depths ebbs and flows and donation volume. But these different communities all operate a little independently. And it's important for nonprofits not put all their eggs in like one crypto basket, not only in terms of like a treasury management thing, if nonprofits hold it, which is exceedingly rare, but mostly in terms of their fundraising strategy. Lots of nonprofits have been really successful, even creating competitions, where it'll be like, we've gotten this much in Bitcoin. But I'd love to see the theory and community step up. And these people do really view the individual cryptos as communities. So when you're ready to when you have these sorts of social campaigns going, it is fun to one, try to engage different communities and then to when you have one that you really connect with, like Dogecoin was really big with TMCs, they just found that connection through a friend they had, targeting one of the sub communities in a more targeted way can elicit stronger results. Because you're speaking to more targeted community, effectively a scale attack taxes, we touched on this, there's a very big difference between being crypto enabled and stop enabled, and actively soliciting a big part of this is explained in taxes set up, do not assume that your donors understand this, and do not assume that the way your donors give is the way they want to give, right, if you educate them a little bit on it, you can't just expect advisors and everyone else to tell them a lot of people just don't get this message, you have an opportunity to tell them, you can give non cash assets to us. And there's these additional tax incentives. And, you know, if nothing happens, they keep giving you the way they're giving. But for the ones that convert, almost always in means of larger average gift size. And in certain calendar years, when there are certain market dynamics, you'll see big surges and donation volume instead of them kind of pushing those out years out, because the market pushes them to make giving decisions more promptly. So make sure that you're educating your your donor base and the fact that you take crypto stocks, etc. And, yeah, don't shy away from it. Yeah, and they create content, that crypto users like I think the same is true for stocks, like we kind of a Wall Street bets Reddit type vibe. But a lot of nonprofits, you know, they go from passive to pretty much tweeting once a month, like, hey, we take Bitcoin now you can send it to us. It's the same thing you would expect with any other type of social, if every time you go on Facebook, you're like, hey, you can send us money, you're gonna get a lot less far than if you're posting. You know, here's where the money's going. Here's the well that we just, you know, put up for the pygmies in the Congo, whoever might be making sure that you're producing crypto related content whenever you can. It's great. A good example being you set a crypto specific goal and say you want to raise a million dollars, just say you want to raise 100 grand of that in crypto, blast that out and as your crypto donations come through, you can say, you know, we're this close to our goal. You can copy paste that same template and go We're this close to our cryptical Those sorts of very light touch experimental things that don't require the reinvention of the wheel. Right We do have a lot of impact. And then when you have that, you know, from a couple 1000 on up donor base that has given you crypto or even younger donors, you can be like, here's your annual report. And here's our crypto version of that, or the section in the back, you just pull that out the one pager, people do respond to it. They like the you're kind of making space for they're so cute in the same way you could be like, here is what our donors did for us this year. And here's what our donors 30 and younger, you know, our young donors did for us, you can send that to a mailing list. They're like, Oh, this is me, this is something I'd like to be a part of. So it's just good for retention, conversion, and like, making sure it's content they want to see and not just asking them for money, pretty intuitive. That's the recap. Yeah, don't wait until end of year. This is, at this point, kind of an old slide, we need to update because we've been saying that, you know, since the summer, you do want to fundraise actively, and you want to get your gears turning in these last three months of the year. A lot of nonprofits Yeah, well, we'll skip one end of the year and try to get in January, they go through a few slow months, and they just kind of sit crypto stocks, etc. On the shelf, get kind of stuck there for a bit. So it's good to engage during end of year and start getting the cobwebs out. To consistently put CTAs in front of your donors. Again, you don't need to create a crypto specific campaign or fundraiser plug into the ones that are out there. And then think about the emails you're sending to younger donors and high net worth donors in general, you can also send it out to everyone just add the fact that you take crypto that you take stock, so there's a reason they could give to you this way, and they should contact you if they're interested, you don't have a whole lot to lose, you don't have to create entirely different strategies. But so many nonprofits just fail to get equipped to do that. And then to actively integrate it into their plan. Take active fundraising opportunities seriously that you can plug into. These are the campaigns that we run throughout the year, they drive a lot of donor attention, they drive a lot of partnerships that build integrations where crypto donations have actually go to charities. And ultimately, this is kind of where the bait goes out. And then of actually, we real over the course of the month, these are the mass collective action opportunities that get everyone looking at our platform at the nonprofit's we support. And then that needs to be converted into energy over the course the entire month of December. Then don't skip fundamentals is bullet number four here, I can't tell you, if you just go online, everyone who's on here and you just search donate that coin kids, you know, donate crypto animals, whatever search you want to put, you will either see our platform come up first, or you'll see some of our client websites with our widget there that are popping up as the first search result before it gets to us because you guys rank really well for search terms related to kids, animals, etc. By adding in some crypto language and your donate page, you can get discovered, it's just again, a very a one off passive thing you can do to earn some really valuable online real estate. And then finally, don't stop in January. Different stocks go up at different times different cryptos go up at different times, when people are looking to give can be different all the time. Yes, a lot of donations happen at the end of the year. But donations happen all the time. And your donors might be a little different. The more you expose your donor audience, the fact they can give this way, the more likely you are to convert them. And then you know, end of the year, it gets loud. And it's really good to get out there meet all these folks. But then depending on the momentum you have, you've got donor relationships to steward. You've got partnerships, you want to engage with a lot of nonprofits kind of turn off the lights and show up in the month of December and go, can I have money, please. And it's like, well, you can have a little bit but other nonprofits that then you know, put in work. So always attempt that we get because a lot of people get through December they feel a burnout, they let some of their relationships slip as a result. So that's it save time, maximize revenue are the two ways that we focus on on crypto and stocks. Make sure you've got crypto with the experience in your corner. Make sure that you're actively fundraising crypto, again, within your comfort zone, don't reinvent the wheel, you don't have to make nfts You'll hear especially if there's some really into crypto at your organization, you might try to tuck into something while just start slow. And never a really solid first year or just trying to do everything. And yeah, make sure you're you're empowered to accept crypto and that your audience is aware of the fact that you can you can drive this stuff and there's very little downside. And then of course, the longer nonprofits stay out of the space, the harder it is to adapt to, to any sort of cutting edge trend. Crypto is just one of many things, but it's obviously we think an important one. Okay. Let's dig into the questions. And then for anyone on the line who isn't working with us actively, we have it on here. But if you just go to the given block.com and click Accept crypto, and you can just grab a session with someone on our team and they run you through how the actual product stack works the dashboard workout data reporting.

45:02  
A little, I'll do a little poll for people if they want to opt in at all, then I'll help collect some information to learn more. And we have some questions for people to learn more now. That was awesome as an overview, and it's always good to kind of get a reminder pet as well. Even for myself. So one is kind of a basic one that that an attendee asked, which is can one liquidate crypto would not

45:32  
do well, if you couldn't. So I, we skipped by some of this. I think it's the nature of any company like once you're used to doing suddenly raw, you start skipping some of the fundamentals and the description. But the main things we do from a tech stack standpoint is like one, let anyone send you any of the primary cryptos. To make sure any donation that hits the accounts we set up for nonprofits is automatically liquidated. So we have an exchange called Gemini plugged in on the back end where the official nonprofit services partner there. So pretty much there's just accounts set up where it runs all the time, if there's a balance, sell immediately for the US dollar value of that currency at the time. And then see it generates an automated receipt for the donor. So donor gets the receipt that they can take and verify they sent money to a 501 C three, you get the US Dollars pushed to your bank account. Everybody's happy. So yeah, it does automatically liquidate not every solution is set up that way. So make sure depending on if you're already set up to take crypto if you're looking for something that the automatic liquidation is the most essential part. You'd be surprised like when we picked up Mike Mclean from Fidelity, charitable that was like one thing we found out they had done. I don't know at that point, maybe 200 million in donation volume in crypto specifically. And they weren't automatically liquidating. They were like manually selling still. And I was like, I can't believe that you're dealing with that much price volatility, or like such major transaction sizes. He was like, I didn't even know you could do that. So yes, you it does automatically. liquidus.

47:06  
I have an interesting question. relating to that. But I wanted to pop over in the chat. A, somebody brought up something. And we I remember, pat that the last time we did a nice webinar introducing crypto, that this came up too. And you had a really good answer. And I know things have evolved. And I'm going to read it I'm going to read it fully. It's we are an ocean conservation organization, our most critical disaster facing us is the ongoing climate catastrophe. Crypto is known to be to be energy costly, and much of this is coming from fossil fuel to energy resource sources. There's been some discussion in the industry to address this to be more responsible by tapping into non carbon energy. What's the landscape of the energy use question? I have a feeling you'll have a good answer here.

47:57  
Yeah, it's a great, it's a great question in general. So like the main point of confusion here. And a lot of this is just generated by cryptocurrency communities that use something called Proof of stake, which is more energy efficient, as people confuse what's called a block in a blockchain with an individual transaction. So in short, when a block is authorized, you can have a lot of transactions in it or a few transactions that uses the same amount of energy. Now the energy use is not nearly as efficient as it should be. But it's getting better all the time. So the thing they're working on, and analogy I would use is like, think about sending an email from computers when they used to take up like half of your office, when they were like these gigantic, energy intensive machines. They were less energy efficient, and like sending a letter with a mail truck for a little bit. But like the bet on code being more energy efficient than a traditional financial system that requires infinite skyscrapers and cars commuting and little sheets of plastic we pump into landfills, I would say it's a reasonable bet. So that it's just a matter of like right now while it is I would argue it is less energy efficient, though, not as aggressively as people think it is. is whether or not you accepting a donation in crypto is in that negative? The answer is no, the transactions are going to generate the same amount of energy regardless block gets authorized. And then B that money can either go to you as a you know, wildlife and ecological focused organization or it cannot so the same amount of energy is getting used if more of those transactions end up getting to organizations that are working on making the environment better. I think that's objectively a net positive.

49:42  
And there's there's some prominent organizations out there that have started doing work with cryptocurrency in the conservation space. So it's, it's it's getting better than two years ago when when this question I think was asked. You had a good answer then, but it's gotten better overall.

50:02  
Definitely, yeah. And it's most of it comes down to whether or not your audience cares or not. Because ultimately, like on paper, it's not worse for the environment for you to take it. It's not worse for the environment for any nonprofit to take crypto donations, it's better for the environment if you take it because at least it's going to make the environment better. But like you have to decide, depending on the audience and how you overlap. If a giant percentage of your audience completely misunderstands that problem, you don't feel like having that combo. Like I think that's perfectly reasonable. Some nonprofits feel that way. Which is, it doesn't mean it's correct, but it means I don't feel like having an argument. It's exceedingly rare that those arguments actually occur. But I would say that's the more justifiable reason again, even Yeah,

50:47  
I remember talking to people 10 years ago about, well, it's okay to move your data into the cloud. You know, so So things have changed a lot rapidly. So I'm kind of I'm not surprised there. Now, I want to get back to I just want to make sure those big questions. These are big things that we're trying to solve here. But I love this tactical question that Danielle asked, which is, it's a very practical thing. Does a nonprofit have to do anything differently to accept crypto if they already accept stocks? Or is it just the conversation with the portfolio and investment manager? This is a cool question, actually.

51:23  
Yeah. So if you accept crypto and stocks through the given block, you don't really have to do anything different. But if you're accepting stocks that the traditional system is and like, they almost certainly don't have a, an a good solution for crypto,

51:38  
so we actually not know what to do if it comes to them.

51:41  
Yeah, there's a couple things. So there's accepting crypto and accepting stocks. The one thing is like, the active brochure we talked about and the ability to kind of control flow and accept donations from your donors versus like, can someone who wants to give stocks to your organization through his effort Pfizer, can they make sure their money finds its way to you? I don't know the answer is yes, with socks. And then with crypto depending on the gift, I would hope that that adviser, whoever can like figure out a way to make sure that that transaction happens for the nonprofit, you would either have to accept it directly. Or you could connect with someone like us to accept a one off or like a DAF or a partner that has 501 C three status, so it doesn't break the chain of custody. But what we do, and like what we're much more interested in is the ability to like actually accept it. I don't like nonprofits accepting all their stocks through death. And I don't like nonprofits only getting crypto. When someone like stumbles upon a button, I think it's much more important to like, unlock as many non cash assets in your existing CRM as possible, and then to actively target and solicit new donors on the basis of non cash because, again, there's so many people out there that haven't found the relationship who are just dumping money into death that never really finds its way to a charity. And it's that only changes if nonprofits go and get them first.

53:01  
Yeah, what's, what's fascinating folks, if you actually want to see this in action, you know, a lot of times you see these very large nonprofits, and they talk about crypto, stuff like that, check out the Arizona burn Foundation. And this is a neon CRM client, I just happen to go to their website that we've been working with them for a long time. And right on the homepage, they have they've embedded the giving block widget so you can kind of see it I pad I don't even know if you know about this organization, because you work with a bunch. But like it's right there. So if you want to see like, this is a small community based organization out of Arizona, right, has a very hyper focused mission. And this is the type of thing that they're just trying to say, look, you know, come here if you want to do it, right. So, in the final final moments, somebody did ask, like, what are the fees for this type of thing, and that's why I want to point out Arizona burn, like this is not just for the biggest big, big, big nonprofits, but especially the size of these donations, you know, how do you folks approach things?

54:08  
Yeah, so we, we kind of take the unique approach, I would say, like having a SaaS component. So like, this is not a knock on any aspect of your business model. But like we when it comes to innovative technologies, like like stocks and crypto again, back to buttons sitting somewhere, just like collecting cobwebs, like we have an annual subscription, and it's like as low as $2,500. A year is like the main one that the average nonprofit uses. We have like much larger enterprise stuff going on with big nonprofits, but it has been like 2500 bucks a year. The reason for that is we don't want to be a platform that makes all of their money off of three multibillion dollar nonprofits who just are already getting donations anyway, it's I think a lot of platforms pretend like you can set up all these things, and you'll have all these additional revenue streams, I don't think a button counts as opening revenue stream so we take a much more active approach. So that's why we have to subscription. Pretty much every nonprofit who signs up, we should be incentivized to make sure everyone has a shot to build a revenue channel with like, one on one interaction, rather than, like, set up this button and hope for the best. I think a lot of nonprofits look at new technologies like a scratch off, where it's just like, it doesn't really cost anything. And if it works, great, if not, we'll walk away from it, I would we try to get people to use it more effectively. And then on a per transaction basis, we charged percentages on the different donation methods, we have crypto, we have stocks and then credit cards through shift four. On all of those, it's really dependent on the nonprofits volume. If a nonprofit is like, hey, we get $100 million a year in stocks, we're coming to you, we'd like to pay lower fees, we're like, okay, fine, you would you've twisted our arm, if we are meeting a nonprofit, we're raising most of their donation volume, it can be, you know, 3% plus, because we're obviously expected to play a more active role in in driving the donation volume itself. So it's almost like a processing plus kind of a platform.

56:01  
Well, and the neon CRM integration for the crypto doesn't cost anything. So you can just connect it and away we go. Awesome. So we did have one other question I saw earlier. Is this just for US nonprofits? For instance, where do you folks, where can you serve?

56:23  
No. So we can work with nonprofits pretty much anywhere. Other than like sanctioned countries, there are a handful of jurisdictions that Gemini doesn't support for regulatory reasons depends on what the crypto rules might be. In terms of your strategies, if you're an international organization, you have to understand like the tax policies in your area, and what compels the donor to give. Sometimes they still do like we have Canadian organizations who accepts crypto through us they've got specific relationships that give that way. And donors have to pay tax on the crypto they're giving, but it's still kind of like a convenience thing. It's not nearly as incentivize, but it happens. So you would have to know your jurisdiction and why people would give if it's a crypto hotspot, or just if you have certain relationships where it makes sense to accept it. But yeah, in terms of whether or not you can accept stocks and accept crypto, if you're international, think about those things. And then the second thing I'd say is sponsor organizations, if you are an international org, and you accept gifts through a 501 C three sponsor from us donors, like that's a thing you've done in the past, we strongly recommend setting up your non cash tools through your smartphone or tapping them on the shoulder instead, just because you can still accept gifts from folks in your jurisdiction. But it gives that large US donor base that's really tax incentivize to give things like crypto and stocks, the tax incentive to give to you, which could be like a really big difference maker in the volume regenerate. So some nonprofits are international, it'll take about leveraging their sponsor. Definitely feel free to put one in when necessary.

57:51  
Awesome. Well, Pat, as always, thank you so much for your time today. I hope bag season is is fantastic for you, folks. And there's actually a fun new asset that we just played a little bit a tiny bit of a support role on for crypto donor personas, actually. So there's some cool things that you folks are, you know, putting together they're so happy to happy to be partners with you.

58:21  
Yeah, you guys make the best content. The donor report is still the best. I wish we had hardcopy thanks. And we go out. I mean,

58:28  
we got my I got my hard copy right here. Well, we're working on another one, folks. We got another report coming out next year. Maybe we can we can tap you guys for some stuff there. All right, folks. Thank you. We are going to be back in a few weeks after giving Tuesday with a fantastic webinar on email me and Abby Jarvis are going to be rockin that give you a little bit of a preview of the report that I was just mentioning, which is our email report. So very excited about that. And I know all of you are going to have a fantastic end of the year. Thank you. And yes, we're going to start working on getting this recording out. You're going to see it no later than tomorrow. Thanks, Pat. Thanks, everyone. Have a great day. Thanks. So thanks for having me.

Transcribed by https://otter.ai