0:00  
I kind of get into it Cherian Koshy Welcome to the mainstage of Generosity Xchange, I am so excited to have you here. And the floor is yours.

0:11  
I'm thrilled to be here. Thanks for having me, my friend. And thanks, everybody for being here. I know that this may seem like a little bit of a downer to end the day on, but you do have a musical performances coming up. So I hope that you'll bear with me, if you need an extra boost of caffeine, now's the time to grab it. Most of all, if you know me at all, you know that I'm going to share something that is in ultimately encouraging, I want you as fundraisers to feel like you can do this that there is a light at the end of the tunnel. And I'm going to feather in as much data and you know, kind of my shtick is behavioral economics. So I'm going to throw in as much of that as possible. I welcome your interaction in the comments. If you have questions about things like how do I do that they'll mostly be at the end. But I really am grateful that you're here. I'm grateful that we get to go on this journey together. Frankly, some of the things I've been doing fundraising for 25 years, some of these things that I learned, I did not know. So for some of you, it may totally be review, you're like, Oh, of course. Yeah, absolutely. But for it, you know, maybe I'm just the dumb one and get it. But there were things that I was even throughout my fundraising career recently, that I did not know were opportunities. And then even more that I hope will sort of blow your mind and as the aha moment, but you pick the aha moment that you want. So I do I put this slide in here, not because I'm going to talk about my bio or anything like that, you figure that out somewhere else on that thing. What I do have to say, however, is because I work in a federally regulated industry, now I work as an investment advisor for nonprofit organizations to help them invest their resources and raise money, I do have to say that this is for educational purposes. And that none of this constitutes any kind of advice. I don't know you, I don't exactly know who's in the audience right now. So I can't give you advice. And that is part of the sort of federal regulation that that is in my new world, which is really weird to me. But hey, we're here, we're going to do this. The first thing that I want to share with you is that there are all there's all kinds of speculation around whether a recession is happening when it's going to happen. But here's the thing that I can say to you with absolute certainty, a recession is coming.

A recession is coming, I can say that with absolute certainty, because a recession is always coming. I don't know when I don't know how long. But the normal part of like cycles is that there's a risk, there is a period of growth and expansion, there's a peak, there's a decline. And then there's some sort of that recessionary tendency. And in general recessions happen every six years, the last major recession was in '08, '09. So we're really overdue in the grand scheme of things for a recession, recessions, on average last about 11 months. On again, on average, the last one that was sort of a mini recession in 2020, was two months long. But here's what I can tell you with confidence, you will, as the longer you're in this profession, the more you will have to deal with recessionary phases of a fundraising. And so no matter when the recession happens, no matter how long it lasts, I want to give you some tools that are going to last you for a career rather than some tools or ideas that would affect you for the next three months and then not be applicable. So back until June of this year, there are all kinds of predictions around when a recession would occur will occur in 2022, will it occur in 2023. Some people say that it's already happened. Some people say that, you know, there's whatever it is, I, I'm absolutely not going to tell you when it's going to occur, I have zero prediction on this matter. And the fun part is like if you go back in time, you can see like people predicting recessions and being wildly incorrect. The the main thing that I want to share with you is that anyone who tells you when it's going to happen, or how long it's going to last really doesn't know what they're talking about. There's a good amount of research that tells us that there are some indicators, but realistically, no one really knows when or if a recession is going to happen. So that being said, I do want to kind of level set with you for some of you again, this is review. This is sort of basic table stakes information. But for some of you this is new information, so bear with me as we get through sort of what I think of as the kind of standard advice and then we'll get into some more exciting nuanced stuff. But first and foremost, if you look back at giving us a data indicates Yes, of course charitable giving goes down during recessions. Those shaded lines that you see on these graphs there, there, it might stay flat, it may rise at a lower rate, or, you know, it may go down. Those are those are all scenarios that are presented here. The takeaway that I want you to have from this slide from this particular slide is not any specific number or you know, budget impacts that you would do in your nonprofit. What I want you to look at in this slide is to realize that charitable giving, never, ever, ever, ever, ever, ever, ever, ever, ever, ever, ever goes to zero, it never goes to zero. There there is someone somewhere that is giving to organizations here in the United States. And if you're joining us at generosity exchange from other places, that is also true, wherever you are. So if we look at the data from Giving USA, and apparently this gift is not going to work for me. But if you look at the data from Giving USA, it indicates that we had a record breaking year. So I'll just switch to this slide in 2021, so $484 billion, with a B of giving happened in 2021. You'll see there those bands that indicate some recessionary periods. And what that looks like in current dollars, so did giving was getting impacted during those times. Absolutely. But what we didn't know is that between 2006 In 2019, we had record beta, record breaking levels of giving record breaking growth. So there has been a significant amount of opportunity during this time for people to to be generous for organizations to invest in what would eventually occur in a downturn. Now, if you need even more encouragement, this is a study that was done looking at 1000 donors, through fidelity, charitable and indicated that six in 10 donors may give more to that nonprofits they care about despite economic fears. That headline was from September, late September, just a few weeks ago. So there is a lot of positive encouragement, there's a lot of things that you could take away, knowing that there are donors who are being mindful, of course, the opposite side of this is true, there are four donors out of every 10. That may or may not give more, that doesn't mean that they'll give zero, it might mean that they give less or they give the same. So just keep that in mind. Now, every time I talk about this, there's someone in the audience's who says, well butcher it, this is different. I saw Jamie diamond talk about how the market is going to collapse and 30% decline. And you know, the worst hasn't even happened yet. And there's all this news out there that says, all these bad things aren't going to happen. And so what and the first thing is, listen, charitable giving is indexed to the to the stock market. So here's a graph that demonstrates that right. Like if if charitable giving goes up when the stock market is doing well. And we don't know what's going to happen with the stock market. But all signs point to this significant decline, well, then, you know, there might be a significant decline in the in charitable giving. This is the Dow Jones Industrial Average from just this year, look at this decline, you know, there was a little bit of a peak. But since the beginning of 2022. That sounded weird. That's the beginning of 2022, the market has declined significantly 20 30% decline, a 20 ish percent decline in the market. Since the beginning of the year, this is a disaster. Look at the personal savings rate, it's been really low, there was a there was a bump during the pandemic, the personal savings rate is is down, which means that people don't have as much in as much cash that they can spend on things like giving to charity, look at the housing market. This is an index of the housing market, and just this month, it has suffered a precipitous decline. And then we have all of this tremendous amount of debt. The news is telling us that people have more on their credit cards and other types of loans, that has increased significantly over this the last year or two years, as the case may be, since 2021, that that amount has increased significantly. So this is very different. So what should we do? What should we do turian. And for a lot of organizations, they think well, what we did in the pandemic was to put our heads in the sand. And I will tell you one thing that's really interesting is that the No Fun fact that you didn't pay for ostriches actually don't stick their head in the sand when there is danger. That's a that is the example of sort of the original fake news that's been going on since ancient Roman times where they sort of saw ostriches stick their heads in the sand. They actually do that because they're turning their eggs in the sand to keep them keep them warm. What ostriches do and what many nonprofits do, unfortunately is actually worse, when ostriches fear something when they think a predator is coming near when they don't know what to do. Ostriches just get down and they lay down, they hide, they get as low to the ground as possible, they hide in the sand. And they hope that between their feathering and the sand that covers them, that they will appear in invisible to the predator that they won't be seen. And so they won't be attacked. And we're having this discussion on Twitter actually, earlier today, because I said the statement in a presentation and and someone said, really like, do organizations really do that. And I can tell you that during the pandemic, this is absolutely what has occurred. And during recessions, what we see a lot of board members, a lot of executive directors, or leadership do is pull back, they don't invest in fundraising, they don't engage in fundraising because they fear that they will offend someone, they'll turn someone off, or because they have the sentiment that people don't have money and can't give to, to charitable causes. And this is, you know, as I said before, this is a very unique circumstance, and it's very, very bad. And so we shouldn't be out there talking to people about giving to nonprofits, because they they don't have enough to eat, and they don't have enough to heat their homes. And and of course, that may be true for some donors Absolutely. Don't get me wrong. It may be true that you have donors who are very hard hit, who are have lost jobs or are going to lose jobs, all kinds of different circumstances, I don't want to minimize that. I don't want to downplay that. What I do want to tell you is, if you were napping for the last 15 minutes, you're going to nap for the next 30. Here's the main takeaway.

You as an organization, need to keep fundraising, you need to keep engaging your donors in helping them to understand the cause that they already care about, right? This is something that they have swiped a card, they've written a check, they've gone to an event, they volunteered with your organization, they have essentially fused their identity with yours, they have said, this is a thing that I care about. And so in that circumstance, what they want to know is, is the organization still functioning? Is it still doing stuff? Does it still need resources? Is it still serving the community. So it is important, it's essential that you continue to do that work, don't hide in the sand, and pull back. And what I would tell any executive director or board member that's listening to this or listening back to the recording is that during these times of recession, it is essential that we resource these functions, resource the certainly the asking of for gifts, we absolutely need to do that to the right group of people at the right time. But we also need to resource stewardship, we need to resource other activities that keep organizations engaged. What the research indicates from the pandemic is that organizations that did not invest in fundraising that did not do fundraising at all that said, we're going to hide in the sand and did not invest and engage donor or volunteers during the pandemic. So donors and volunteers, those, those two groups of people that has what, that's what accelerated the key shape recovery in our sector, some organizations are doing really well, because they did engage donors. And they did engage volunteers during the pandemic. And it they fuse that identity tighter, they brought people in so when people did have resources, they were able to give, but organizations that didn't, they're struggling to, to reemerge even steal from the pandemic. And if they if we're there's a near term recession, not sure if there is or not, but if there is a near term recession, and they don't invest in those activities, that's what will cause them to fall further and further behind. So here's the thing that I want to to be lovely. If we could split each other split folks into groups, we can't really do that. I want you to take a look at this prompt on the screen and answer this question. I can't really see the comments right now. But I'd love for you to just say would you buy a ticket. So the the scenario on the screen is, you buy a ticket to Wakanda forever coming soon to a theater near you. It's 10 bucks, you walk into the theater, this has actually happened to me just somehow between buying the ticket at the kiosk and then getting my popcorn and whatever, I get up it to the ticket checker person and then I've lost the ticket. I have no idea. If I left it at the popcorn counter or at the restroom or something like that. Answering the comments. Do you go back to the counter and buy another ticket , do you go back to the counter and buy another ticket? Yes, no. So then the Oh yeah, Tim, go ahead.

14:45  
I'm just I'm just checking. I'm making sure because yeah, I'm watching. What's your answer,

14:50  
Tim, would you go back to the counter and buy another ticket now? Or do you beat Yeah, you'd be pissed off, right? So here's the other scenario

14:57  
somebody? Somebody did say yes, though. Oh, yeah. Thanks. several, several nicer people. Like Abby said, I'd retraced my here. Let's put them up on the stage.

15:07  
Yeah, there we go. Nice. Okay. Um, of course, Abby would retrace her steps that does not surprise me at all that's on brand. So there's some yeses. There's some no's, I imagine, right? Like, I'll

15:22  
go back into my hole I'm gonna go lay down now is like,

15:26  
so the other. The other scenario is you decide today, you're gonna go see Wakanda forever, you walk into the theater and you open up your wallet, and you see you've lost a $10. Bill. There was a $10 bill here, at some point earlier, there's no $10 bill here. Now, do you buy a movie ticket? And now in the comments, you know, throw your yes or no in there. While I reveal the results to you. Here's the thing. This is actually a Nobel Prize winning experiment. Yes, thank you. So the Nobel Prize winning experiment by behavioral scientists, Daniel Kahneman and Amos Tversky. And what they found was that when you do this, and actually did this earlier today, and we got to see this, like in a real space, and so you saw about half the people would not go back and buy a ticket will bracket off Abby Jarvis, who went and retrace your steps, and probably found the ticket. But most people did the mental accounting of saying, I've already paid this money, I'm not gonna go buy a ticket, you know, most people just don't go back and buy a ticket. Now, the second scenario, they do buy the ticket. This is where they can't find $10 in their wallet, they could do go and buy the ticket. Now, here's the thing that's interesting. Those two scenarios are exactly the same in terms of what you're spending what you have lost, they're exactly the same. What is different is the financial accounting, the mental accounting that your brain went through, as you thought about those two scenarios. And here's what's fascinating. This is happening to you right now, right this second. And it's happening to every single one of your donors, it's happening to everyone in your workplace. It's happening all across the country, and in fact, all across the world, because we are affected by all of these, these factors that tell us, you know, the market is losing money. And here's what's happening, and blah, blah, blah, we went through all of that just now, let me push back on this a little bit. Because there's, there's never a headline in the newspaper that says, plane landed safely. All passengers accounted for all bags arrived on time. That's not what shows up in the news. What shows up on the news, what shows up in your, you know, your feed on your phone, and what shows up on the front page of the newspaper and on your screens? Is all the bad news? Right? All the things that I just talked about housing market, you know, economic market, but let's look at the Dow Jones Industrial Average over the last five years. This is a this is a snapshot. But let's let's pick this up a little bit in more detail. Right before the pandemic, January one of 2020, we were at 28,256 of the Dow Jones Industrial Average. Today, right before I hopped on I looked at I don't think the market closed by them, but I looked at it was 30,315. Is the market up or is the market down. Now again, I'm not discounting the fact that you have some retirees who are counting on income in the market. And if you're close to retirement this, you were expecting a certain amount of return. But if you were invested in the market on January 1 2020, and you were invested in that same investment in today, you're up so the market is up or the market is down. I'll leave you to think about that. What about 10 years ago, 10 years ago, on this day in history, the market was at 13,545. So am I up? Or am I down? Here's the article. That was that was little, little weird thing. Here's the article on March 29 of 1999, when the Dow Jones hit 10,000. And people were shocked.

Like you can see the old graphic from CNN Money, right? People were surprised now there were some people who were overly confident and said that the order that the Dow Jones would get to 36,000 in like, you know, minutes or something like that. And then there were other kinds of people who said like, No, this can't last, you know, this will go forever, or whatever. And the interesting thing is to look back at the news and see like, Okay, who predicted what and most off of the predictions are wrong, because just like the weather, nobody really holds you accountable for these predictions. So people say things all the time when it comes to these predictions. Let's look at the five year housing index price. So you can see it's up into the right right like over the last five years. So is has the housing Price Index declined in the last month since June of a month or two since June or July. In 22, absolutely, if you bought your house five years ago has your house appreciated as your as our house price is much higher than they were before the Shiller Index doesn't do this, like one to one. So it's not like $100,000 house is now a $300,000 house. But this is what the Federal Reserve looks like. Now look at the 10 year housing price index, right? A more significant gain. Now, how would we use this in fundraising, right? Like we're not talking, we might be talking about a primary home, if someone's leaving that to you, but maybe even a secondary home, like a cabin or, or something like that, a vacation home that they might leave to you in their will. These are opportunities that exist, people are really concerned about mortgage rates, mortgage rates are super high. Let's look at the 30 year fixed rate mortgage average in the United States, right? My parents when they moved to the country, and 1975, they live to live in an apartment somewhere around 1982 or so like, right in the middle of where the interest rates were the worst, they bought a house in Minnesota. Like, I don't know what they paid for their interest rate, but it had to be like in the double digits, then they decided we're gonna move we're gonna move to this place. You know, the suburbs in Minnesota, and this is going to be really cool. That was in 1987. I remember, you know, being there and whatnot, still a double digit mortgage rate. Right? So then you put that in context of where we are up until today. And our mortgage rates higher, yes. But we were in a uniquely low period of time. So we have been behaviorally conditioned as a society to look at what literally just happened, and reflect upon what just happened. And now how do we think about our what's in our wallet, what's in our investments, what's available to us for charitable giving. And again, this is true of all of us as it is for all of our donors. Now, with that in mind, it's important to recognize, okay, let's talk about what's actually happening to some of our donors. The Wharton School of Business estimates that households paid more than $500 billion altogether, when they filed in this in 2021. So in in April, that's where that data is coming from. This was a pretty significant high compared to the last couple of decades. So and and this is adjusted for for inflation. So this isn't just like, regular dollars, this is inflation adjusted dollars. So you're paying a lot in taxes. Why is that happening? When it was going to the market did well, but that didn't seem like that much. One of the strategies for individual people not and again, this is not investment advice. I'm not giving you any of this investment advice. One of the strategies that individual investment advisors provide to their clients is in times of market volatility, look for organizations that were accompanied dividend payments. Now dividend payments are payments that are made to you with a stock like at&t is a good example. It doesn't like put in a lot in terms of back into the company for innovation and stuff like that, but it pays you have dividend. Now those dividends are to make the stock valuable to you as a owner, and then you get taxed on that dividend. So that as the article indicates here from CNBC, it's heading, it hit a record year in dividend payments, and those impacted the tax payments of our potential donor. Who knows who this guy is? Again, I can't really see the chat. So I'm gonna assume that many of you are like, Oh, yeah. Dave Ramsey, I'm sure there are some of you in the chat who are like, who are in the audience who know the seven baby steps of Dave Ramsey. What you're shaking your head. Why don't you go? I don't know. Dave Ramsey fan.

23:44  
Now I'm a Dave Ramsey fan.

23:45  
Yeah. So I mean, I love a lot of things that Dave Ramsey says, I think, you know, some of the baby steps make sense. The one that I sort of take umbrage with is the last one, which is grow wealth, and then give, I think people can give all throughout that journey. I don't think they have to wait into the give. But the Dave Ramsey strategy is to have a taxable, low rate, low fee mutual fund. Now, here's the thing, Dave Ramsey has been around for a long time, he has millions and millions of followers and millions of people are employing this strategy. Now here's the thing, maybe I'm the dumb one, feel free to be feel free to call me a dummy in the chat. That's totally fine. I did not realize this next part. So if you're if you're napping, or on a different slide, or checking your email, here's the thing that I did not realize. So hop over here. And, and you know, call me a dummy if you knew this. Lots of people invest in low fee mutual funds as their part of their strategy. And so when stocks increase the percentage of funds that pay capital gains to their shake shareholders, this is in 2021 was 81%. So the average taxable distribution, meaning at the end, you own a mutual fund. Let's say you have 10,000 Some dollars in your mutual fund it you owe $1,200, at the end of the year on that mutual fund because of the taxable distribution. Now, this is on average, individual results are going to vary a lot. So I want to be very clear, but more than 80% of mutual funds, pay a capital gain distribution. Now you're saying, Sure, and wait, Louis, if I sell a stock, then yeah, I got to pay the capital gains on that. And that makes sense, you do not need to sell a mutual fund in order to get the capital gains. Now, here's the rub, you have zero control as the owner of the mutual fund, on whether you pay capital gains or not. If the mutual fund company buys and sells some portion of their assets within 2022, you could pay a short term capital gains, they're releasing that information right now, you'll see all these firms that are releasing their their estimates or forecasts for capital gains, they'll say, here's what the short term capital gain is, here's the long term capital gain is. And we're almost regardless of you know, 80% or so are sending you a a tax bill at the end of the year if you're invested in the strategy. So this is from an individual advisor, they say to their individual clients, recent capital gain distributions, they're not your friend, because as you can see, no matter where the market is, you are paying a capital gain. That's what that red line means. So even in 2008, when the market declined almost 40%, the equity returns were less were down, the people holding mutual funds, were paying 8%. That's a double whammy that that's rough right. Now, from a donor perspective, I crossed out if you saw that, I cross out the knot, because from a fundraiser perspective, it is your friend, because if I have a $10,000 mutual fund, and I'm going to pay $1,200, in tax, a lot of assumptions in there, but go with me $1,200 in tax, what would I rather do pay $1,200 to Uncle Sam, or right? Charity of my choice nonprofit organizations, I love and care about a $1,200 Check. Now, again, this isn't tax advice, I want to be very clear that you wouldn't ship this directly in this way. But the tax deduction that the donor would receive for writing that $1,200 gift to your organization could potentially could potentially offset what they were taxed on for their mutual fund. Here's what it looked like in 2021, a whopping 12%, now the market was up 29%. But the average fund paid a 12% investment amount as a taxable distribution, even if it's reinvested, even if it's reinvested. So be mindful of that, that blew my mind. I was like, I had no idea. And then I started talking to people and we were like, oh, yeah, I get a dividend thing in the mail. And it tells me this is how much I have to pay in taxes. And so again, short term, capital gains is a higher tax rate than long term capital gains. So you could be it could be significant. Now, some of your donors may not have just $10,000, they may have $100,000, or a million dollars in mutual funds. So you can do the math and see where that problem exists for them. So let's get into the tactical pieces. As we sort of land this plane. The key component that I want you to think about is how to ask for non cash gifts, we have for a long time worked in a cash space, and people will continue to give cash they will give, they will they'll hand you cash, they'll write a check, they'll swipe their debit or credit card, they'll go online and give an absolutely we shouldn't eliminate any of those opportunities give, we want to continue to make those an opportunity. The other thing to think about sort of the low hanging opportunity here is our donor advised funds. We know from if the slide had worked correctly, you would have seen like a massive increase in donor advised funds. So regardless of how you feel about donor advised funds, it doesn't really matter. They exist and there's lots of money in them. So we want to make sure that we are presenting opportunities for people to give from their donor advised fund because if the market tanks, it's not really affecting the money that's already been given. That's that mental accounting component, that money is over here. It's my charitable savings account. I can give tongue whatever money I want out of that account. So if you have difficulty finding information about charitable about donor advised funds, one of the resources that's out there by Helen Brown's group is definitive. And I'll put the website here on the slide for you. So you can search for donor advised funds that give to particular areas, like geographic areas or cause areas you could potentially even see like due to I know someone that is in my donor base that has a donor advised fund. Here's the thing that I learned from a colleague at Fidelity when a donor gives you an amount from their charitable from their donor advised fund, they're giving you a very relatively small percentage of the overall value of that the fidelity encourages people to give significantly from their donor advised fund, and they've increased their throughput rate, how much money is going out of that account significantly, but by just sort of coaching donors on what charitable giving looks like, but they're not evacuating that fund, which means that there's still a lot of potential there, especially knowing that donor advised funds have grown significantly. So remember that this is essentially money that's already given to charity, it's already been spent in their heads. So if you're not able, or if you haven't thought about how to talk to donors about donor advised funds, this is a really an important opportunity. And so when we talk about identifying potential donors that may be appropriate for these types of gifts. And there, there's a few key indicators. So one of the things that I noticed, when I was doing fundraising for for that long was that sometimes people would do in their reporting, they would, they would specify the the actual amount that someone gave, which I was thought was weird, but it would be like $4,227. Now, one of the things that you could surmise is that there's probably not a reason to give $4,227 It might be an asset based gift, it might be something like a stock gift, or a mutual fund gift or something like that. One of the things that Tim mentioned earlier was that people were were thinking about how do I find new donors to the organization. And here's where we can marry these two concepts. So you want new donors to your organization want to find new donors, or you're a small midsize nonprofit, you don't have a lot of existing donors to work with. There are probably individuals now for first and foremost, we want to level Sensei, we want people that are vested in the cause, right? They care about animals, they care about human rights, they care about kids, they care about the disease that you work on, whatever it is, they have some affinity to your organization, some reason to care about what your organization does, once you diagnose that, and determine that this is someone who might care about your organization, there are undoubtedly businesses in your locality that give stock options as part of the benefits package that they offer. The longer that person has been there, the more of those stock options are valued at right, the more that they're that stock has probably grown. So you can identify those people and say, Hey, is this something that you thought about maybe using as making that gift through your company stock, rather than writing a check. So here's an opportunity to kind of marry those options, and really solve a problem for those donors. As I mentioned, knowing knowing your donors is sort of the the coin of the realm, it's essential to have personal conversations with people, you could easily find out if someone's a Dave Ramsey fan, those people talk about it a lot. But you can also just see, like on Facebook, do they like Dave Ramsey? You know, those are sort of kind of easy things. And if they do, they're probably inclined in some of these areas or might consider it, there are plenty of people given what's happened over the last several years who have complained about taxes over their mutual funds or other tax complaints. And it's just something to be listening for, and filing away and saying, is there an opportunity to have a conversation with some of these folks, we'll get into some more information there in a bit. Well, screening data can provide you with a lot of information, it can tell you about whether someone has SEC holdings, whether somebody has multiple homes, it can tell you about their income producing assets, and all kinds of different things, depending on what that is, you know, what how clean your data is, and what well screening tools you use. I'm not going to, you know, suggest any particular one. But what I will tell you is this is an example of investing in fundraising that add that, that levels up your fundraising acumen as an organization. So it allows you to spend money in the right places, and at the right times with the right folks. So rather than sending a direct mail piece to everyone, can we identify the folks for whom not only direct mail is a better solution, but have stock or mutual fund holdings, it's publicly available information that we might align that with canting them a stock form in the mail, so that it's easy and frictionless for them to give. Now we're putting some of these strategies together. The other thing to consider and if you want to be gutsy, is to think about previous donors of $1,000 or more, especially $10,000 or more. These are folks for whom, you know, the specific implications of recession or whatever, less likely to affect them, but also more likely to have assets that they could give to your organization. So here's an opportunity. And one of the things that I did at an organization that I worked at was someone called and he said, Hey, turn got your direct mail piece. I love what you all are doing. We'd love to make a gift To $1,500. Now, this is a longtime donor. So you know, there's more more to that conversation. But I said, Sir, thank you so much for that, that affirmation love that. I'm going to, I'm going to suggest to you that you don't write that check for $1,500. I know you talked about the what was happening with your Home Depot stock at this last conversation that we had. And I wonder if you might consider making a gift of that stock or some other stock rather than writing a check. And he said to me on the phone, he said, Sure, and I appreciate that. That's a thoughtful idea. But I really liked the Home Depot stock, I want to, I want to keep the Home Depot stock. So I walked him through, like if what you can do is gift the Home Depot stock, and then use the $1,500 that you were going to write to us and buy that home depot stock at a higher level, sell us the ones that you bought 10 years ago, buy it at the new level, you get to keep Home Depot sock and he said to me, can I do that, and I sent him the slides from Russell James's workshop, if you're, if you haven't followed Russell James, reach out to him on LinkedIn and he'll send you the slide deck, you can do the exact same things and your donor, the slide that talks about this the charitable spot. And he did that he brought it to his financial advisor. Later that week, we got a stock transfer of $10,000, he was gonna give us 1500, he gave us $10,000. And then of course, he told his friends about it and other donors did the exact same thing, which is important to remember, again, we'll circle back to that in a minute. So consider thinking about including a stock transfer form or something like that in a segmented and have your appeal. So not just pray, spray and pray. But is there an appropriate situation where it would help the donor by not having to contact you, or even you know, not having to go to the website, but certainly having it on the website is really helpful. Let people know that you can give that you can accept these different types of gifts, some of them are very easy to do. Some of them are a little bit more complicated. But when you let people know it amplifies your brand. And you can talk about stories of donors who have done this exact same thing. add information to your website, let people know that these are opportunities for them to give even if you don't have the specific tools, you don't need to know the specific tools. All you need to know is that there are plenty of stories out there of people who have given through this method and benefited from them. If you have any questions call in an expert. There are local experts that your Community Foundation, there are national experts that can help you with all of that as well. So when it comes down to it, here's the thing that I want you to remember, these are no longer nice to have opportunities, they are need to have opportunities, because donors may not have the cash to make a gift. And so there's an opportunity for you to talk with them as we just did about securities, but also about Ira rollovers, about gift annuities and bequest. And I know that when we start talking about some of these things, people's eyes glaze over, they set up she's turned, I don't even understand the words that you're saying I don't under we're not ready to do any of this. And here's the thing that I want to reassure you. Any organization of any size, I have an organization that has $50,000 in revenue per year, was just announced that they were able to take stock yes, we're just told people that they were able to take Ira rollovers and started getting guests as a result of this, I promise you that this is something that you can do with very easy steps. So make it as simple as possible. If you need help. There are lots of resources around this area. Now all of these create opportunities to engage donors at a higher level. So what one of the things that I wanted to share with you, and you'll get these slides are quite literally examples of how other organizations are going to do this. So how do we accept gifts of securities, click on this Feeding America link. When you get the slide deck, see what they do. Modify the verbiage for your own website for your own instances, you do need to have some tools there. If you need help with that, let me know or let another organization know what have been an IRA rollover. If you don't know what an IRA rollover is go to the Mayo Clinic, they have great information on how to make a gift from an IRA rollover. Here's the simple thing. Once you get to a certain age, you have to take money out of your IRA, you don't get a choice. Now, what a board member of mine was doing was taking that money out of his IRA, and then writing a check to our organization. And I said Tom, did you know that if you just sent it directly from your IRA, you wouldn't get taxed on that income. And again, he was like Wait I can do that ended up making gifts a lot of organizations because he took the max out of his IRA rollover and which was a lot of money. He dwelled to do whatever but you know, awesome thing and he told his friends, he told his friends he said, Hey, did you know this was thing? I got four calls in the next week that said, Hey, Tom said this was a thing is this a thing? And I sent them like an example of It wasn't the Mayo Clinic at the time. I sent them an example. And they were like, Oh my gosh, this is a thing. This is really awesome. Thank you so much. We've solved a problem for our donors. How awesome gift annuities. People are like. Now we're getting alphabet soup. Humane Society has a really great website that talks about charitable gift annuities, you can borrow their language. Here's another one that this story of pam pam on the left, I don't know the guy's name. It doesn't really matter because it's Pam story. Pam had an I totally ripped this off from the Nature Conservancy website. I gave you the link. So you Pam and

the lady there. Okay, so Pam and Ellen had some investments that were underperforming. Sound familiar? She was gonna give those securities to the Conservancy and her will anyway, the conservancy said, Hey, would you think about creating a charitable gift annuity, you don't know need to know what a charitable gift annuity is. But there are resources there that help you figure that out. If you put those assets into an annuity, we can write you a check every quarter every year, you can get money from making this gift of investments that were underperforming, that you are going to give to our organization anyway, here's the winning thing. If you're like glazed over and whatever, here's the winning thing. You can tell this story of Pam from the Nature Conservancy to any of your organization's here's what Pam did at The Nature Conservancy. Have you ever thought about making a gift like that? Would that help you? That doesn't have to be your story from your organization? Do what I just did and rip it off? Right? Like, here's the story, would this be helpful to you? Would this solve a problem for you. And there's the potential that that addresses that. But quests are really a little bit harder to talk through with your organization leadership, because they see that money is longer term. But this is an opportunity to invest in the relationship with your donor, having them leave your organization, the will is sort of the the gift of last choice for fundraisers. But as you know, it can be quite a bit larger. And it can be a significant relationship with the donor. And this is behavioral economics one on one, if I've already bought the ticket to Wakanda forever, I'm probably going to go if I've put your organization in my will, I am going to make more annual gifts to your organization. It's a sunk cost fallacy, because I want to see you succeed that the data from Russell James ad reaffirms that. So here's the thing is, as we close this out, understand what your donor problems are, listen for their problems, and don't immediately solve it. But go through this, this framework of identifying, first of all, when they say I wish I could do more, if they say I wish I could do more, that indicates they want to do more, but there's some barrier. So you can say, What's stopping you from doing what you say you want to do more? What's stopping you what what's holding you back from doing what you really want to do. But then a lot of us myself included, like solve the problem, I can solve the problem. I can use some alphabet soup, and I got to solve the problem. Don't do that. Don't do that bad idea. Save them. Would it be helpful? Would you be open minded to me going back to some colleagues and figuring out some opportunities that might solve your problem, and help you advance the cause that you care about? Don't try and solve the problem. Get people around you to help you ideate come up with some ideas, and then demonstrate consistently? How do these different opportunities help donors solve the cause related problem? How do they save the forest to help the kids do whatever? And how do we tell those stories that have already been told the stories have already been told? replicate those stories, tell people those stories, you can do this too. For this community center, you can do this too, for our nature preserve, you can do this too. Is this something that would interest you demonstrate how it would benefit? They're the thing that they care about?

Here's the last thing I've mentioned to you. This is the Russell James research, he continually reminds me get the next meeting, get the next meeting with the donor, if you've met with them, and they have indicated a problem, get the next meeting to talk through solutions. If you get the gift, get the next meeting to store to them. When you are talking about stewarding them. Here's the other like aha moment that that I had in this conversation with him. The idea is not just steward thank you and blah, blah, blah. The other thing to think about is shifting that paradigm to say, Do you know one person just like you who may benefit from what we just did for what you just did? Would they do you know one for I don't need the name. But if you're going to see that person the next week or two? Would you mind just talking about what you just did, just sharing with them kind of what happened here and let them know that I'm happy to speak with them too. And now you have turned your donors into an army of advocates that will continue to support your work and here's what I want to say most people are saying Thank you, most people, you know, thank Tim and the team for the team and for the time and I do want to do that I would like everybody in the comments give Tim and the Neon One team, a thank you for this opportunity providing this for free. This is amazing speakers are incredible. Everybody besides me, but I want to thank you for the work that you're doing in our communities. If you're if your leadership has not told you today, thank you for making an impact. And, and here's the thing, there are donors who woke up today, because they are they love the work that you're doing. And they could not think of doing anything else. But give to your organization, their identities are fused with that. So just unleash that generosity with those donors give them the opportunity to live their best lives to, to give to a cause that they care about, continue to fundraise. And I hope that you come away with this encouraged if I can be a resource to you, I'd be happy to do that. Maybe we can take a couple of questions, Tim?

45:57  
Yeah, we got a few minutes before the main stage needs to be cleared because Swamp Water is going to be performing right after this. So I actually think you did a pretty good job because Ashley and Kim, were were threading a little bit in terms of how do you frame this? And Kim asked that that early on in terms of like, how do you talk to donors to make this easy to understand? I actually think you did a good job. And you also covered Ashley's, which is are they even going to know about these things? Yeah. So I feel like that's pretty good. But we can still get into it, Kim and Ashley, if you want to kind of do that. Danielle did ask an interesting one. What about Canada? 

46:39  
So not all of the tools will apply in Canada. Many of them will and we can talk about those as well. But the asset base gifts, Danielle will absolutely apply, like stocks and mutual funds. You know, the circumstances may differ slightly. And the the specific tax implications may differ. But here's the thing we don't want to get into. We're fundraisers, we don't want to get into the conversation with donors about taxes. We don't need to do any of that. Keep it and this sort of answers Kim's question as well frame it from the perspective of Did you know that that you may have a benefit to giving charitably that there might be something that helps solve a problem? One, you could give a gift and actually get paid for it. Give a gift and get paid for like, that's cool. I didn't know that. Or that there were things that if you gave them you could offset a problem that you had. These are these are ways to kind of start those conversations. I would never ever get technical. I don't as as someone who interfaces with my nonprofit clients donors, sometimes we don't try to get technical, we try to expand their thinking around what are other assets that they could be giving and start thinking broader bigger. Love. Thanks, Alex. Thanks, Hilary.

48:01  
Yeah, you can you can see the comments. It's the q&a that

48:04  
yeah, now it comes out of the full screen. So now I'm all about it. Yeah, so let me know if there are other questions as I said that you can always reach out to me and I'll probably point you in the direction of Russell James.

48:16  
And and Russell James. I did place him he is so giving is so giving. I pinged him when I was doing the donor report. And he just dumped an ungodly amount of information on me that I like was like, wow, this is amazing. So he's so so given. This was awesome, man. This was a great way to end things. And I think like, this goes back to what our product team said that that if you can make it easy, it doesn't have to it could still be easy and elegant. Right and this type of charitable vehicle is the elegance of giving. Our job is not to be experts. This part our job is to open up the opportunity. So here we go. Another another good. Added quote here, it feels much more financially literate. I do too. I do too. Awesome.

Transcribed by https://otter.ai