0:04  
Hello, Hello, Pat. How you doing today? 

0:09  
Good. 

0:10  
Excellent.

0:13  
How's your day going?

0:15  
It's going good. We're all very, very excited. So far nothing has gone wrong. I'm the kind of person who always assumes something's gonna go terribly wrong. So

0:25  
That's the right kind of person Yeah, 
 

0:27  
very smoothly. 

0:28  
Good.

0:29  
Alright. Um, alright, looks like we already have eight people watching the watching the session. So I'm just going to get us started if that's alright with you. 

0:43  
Yes, please. 

0:44  
All right, great. All right, so hello, everyone. My name is Alex Huntsberger. And I am going to be the host for the session today. My role is to introduce Pat Duffy co founder of the giving block, and to outline how this room works. The platform that we're using allows attendees to share their video and audio during this presentation. In a moment, I will hand things over to our coach, but this is how things work for these. Our coach is an expert in cryptocurrency and major donor fundraising, and they'll be ready to answer any questions that you may ask them. There is no formal presentation. But instead this is an open forum that will focus on anything relating to their expertise. And our attendees may share both as someone speaking or you may rely on the chat to ask your questions. You do not need to join the room's video in order to participate. People can just watch, if that's what they prefer. This room is being recorded. And we ask that you be respectful of our presenter and other participants by muting your microphone if not talking. Thank you. I'm excited to introduce you to your coach Pat Duffy, co-founder of The Giving Block now the giving block is a Shift4 company. It's the leading crypto philanthropy platform that makes accepting and fundraising cryptocurrencies, easy for nonprofits. And it empowers donors to give crypto to their favorite causes. To date, the giving block has raised over $100 million in crypto for nonprofits, and is helping thousands of the leading charities, schools, health care systems and faith-based nonprofits fundraise crypto. And with that, you can take it away.

2:32  
Sorry, fantastic. Yeah, I guess we'll let people post in the chat pop in questions that you all want to talk about. But for Alex's commentary, I'm one of the cofounders of The Giving Block. Myself and Alex Wilson started it in 2019. We spent the last four years trying to get really good at fundraising crypto, and then developing technologies that nonprofits use to accept it. The the core differentiator, and I guess what makes us ultimately effective and successful today, the reason we got a little over 2000 nonprofits, and we now annual subscribers, is because we focus on the active fundraising of crypto, we look at it more as kind of a donor demographic than a donation method. So for this conversation, we want to talk about a lot of the areas we can jump into and cover can be around actively fundraising it. There's a lot of questions we get, we've grown our donation volume a little over 60% year to date versus last year, despite the market more than cutting in half. So sort of why we're so market proven recession proof because our nonprofit actually fundraise it versus kind of like adding a donate crypto button into a checkout function and hoping someone like picks crypto as an option, which doesn't really happen, which I know is kind of counterintuitive to nonprofits to take credit cards and other traditional payment methods. So we can talk about actively fundraising, donor communications, but actually sets a hook and gets people to give crypto, why people give crypto to begin with, how crypto donors get stewarded differently than the way they you rig up your your CRM to make sure you're not sending the wrong kind of follow up messages not asking a crypto user for 10 bucks a month when it could be a major gift prospect stuff like that. And then plugging crypto in your into your campaign is obviously top of mind right now. As well as all the stuff we usually talk about basic questions around how you can actually accept crypto what does it look like to accept cryptocurrency? What is it? How does it convert? How do we account for it? What's the donor experience look like etc. But I guess we'll we'll go right into questions. I can see them coming in already. This is all for you guys. 
 
 Are there risks to nonprofits accepting crypto? The primary risk is price volatility. Would you accept the donation because the market is volatile that price can change that is what I often call kind of an imaginary concern just in the sense that it's been solved for now there are solutions you can set up adults So for that you can open kind of an Exchange account that you could have stocks, imagine opening a fidelity account for stocks, and then having a donor transfer that to you. Let's say we move that into your account, it doesn't sell itself in that scenario. So you would receive those stocks, and then the price would change as you continue to sit on it. So you, then that's kind of log in and sell. One of the primary things we solve for is just an auto conversion functionality. So when a donation hits any of our nonprofits accounts, we've got more than 2000 widgets that are out there on the internet, taking in crypto donations, any of the accounts that are hooked up to the back end of that they just sweep constantly, it goes, Is there a balance in this account? The answer is yes. And sell it immediately for the going rate connects to the Exchange account. And then nonprofit just gets an ACH transfer sent to them. So that's the primary risk. Outside of that, I would say tier two risk would just be primarily on like the donor relations side and sort of donor experiences and risks. There's not a whole lot that can go wrong for the nonprofit you accepted that convert you have the cash. But cryptocurrencies can be complicated and giving crypto to a charity's exchange account is not the same as the way that crypto users interact with it. So a good example we always get is NFT's are kind of like, generally speaking like a digital piece of artwork that's being moved along the same network that a cryptocurrency might, if a donor sends you an NF T directly to a dynamic wallet address, that's pretty much setting it on fire, it's not compatible for that. So donors might be transferring these back and forth from wallet to wallet. And then you have this account. And that donor was hey, I'd like to send you a $400,000 piece of digital artwork, you go, absolutely send it along. And it just evaporates it. So that's a there's no pole transactions in crypto. So like the risk of a donor taking the wrong step is actually much more impactful. You can't recover a transaction consent to a incompatible wallet address. It's just gone forever. So things like that we say are important. So like the solutions nonprofits use and the team that they're connected with, when a donor comes in, asks a question that you're not prepared to answer. It's not a thing that a nonprofit should be Googling and trying to navigate independently. It's definitely not a thing that like if you're working with a solution provider who is new to crypto or doesn't really understand it that you would want to leave up to them. There's areas of complexities and the technical understanding that the donor interaction requires, I think it's taken us it took us a couple years to get I would say pretty good at it. And then the last two years, we've gotten that pretty airtight. Those are the two main I would say risk areas, a lot of the questions around compliance considerations and everything else are pretty much solved for. There are certain questions for different entities like money transmitters that work with crypto nonprofits don't have to be concerned about, nonprofits are mostly concerned around the tax incentives. The donor gives us cryptocurrency, can we actually accept it and tell the donor you know here's what it's worth, and they can actually write it off. Because if that were to change, that would be a gigantic issue. Of course. That's been locked in since 2014. Any other concerns you hear at conferences? Sometimes there'll be like, you know, what do money transmitters need? Yes or no? It's like exchanges are required to accommodate those regulatory changes. The nonprofit doesn't have to navigate them who do very similar to try to get into what regulations MasterCard or Visa need to navigate to operate or operate legally. Hopefully that's helpful. 
 
 Specificities of crypto donor demographic stewardship strategy. It's a very general question, and I like it. So I'll try to keep this one tighter though. The main big thing that we talked about any crypto transaction that is sent to a nonprofit is a major gift indicator. Now it's not 100% true that they are a major donor. But the reason we say this is because there are a lot of micro transactions or smaller transactions a crypto donor sends, that is not a good indicator of their giving capacity just because it is a non cash asset. So by sending you cryptocurrency, they are triggering a taxable event like they or they would otherwise be sorry, triggering a taxable event in the for profit sector. So if you go to buy a cup of coffee, the reason people don't like spend cryptocurrency, or at a baseball game or something, is because they would owe taxes on that SAP like buying your groceries with stocks. So when a donor is sending cryptocurrency somewhere and they're they're giving an investment to a nonprofit or they're converting out of it. It's a major decision. Anything that is small transaction is usually just kind of a high five. So because it's so easy to send, it's not meaningful to send $5 in crypto versus a credit card. It's ultimately very similar for a user. They don't get that big tax write off. It's not a capital gains offset. So it's usually just like, Okay, you take crypto, I like crypto, I like what you do very cool. And it's kind of like a drive by high five, five bucks. That is not the way they would give their five bucks all throughout the year. It's just not the way they would do it. It's more just kind of an indicator. They saw the tape and that's cool. I can't tell you how many times you know, I save the children for you like you're not Get away some of these big blue chips who work with you get this role, that's crypto users who get the small transactions that in the month of December, you get a note out to those folks and you go, Hey, if you're making major transactions offset your capital gains tax burden, here's a little infographic on how that works. We've got the advisors through The Giving Block you can connect with and then these donors turn into the five, six figure type donations. Because that five bucks earlier was kind of a high five, but ultimately, in the month of December, generally, sometimes in November as well, they're getting that big tax offset donation where the transferring a larger chunk of non cash assets. So the main thing I would say is like any crypto donation you get, when it's very small, you'll probably have a CRM, that's rigged to be like, Okay, if someone sends us $1 via cryptocurrency, we'll ask them to send us like 10 bucks a month with a credit card because it will go into the same kind of automated process based on the size of the gift, I would just make sure that any crypto donation you receive, you take a stab at converting them to a major gift donor because what you know about them is they have crypto, they see that we take crypto, they sent us a little bit. And they may have an actual opportunity to do a cap gains tax offset. That's the primary and then in terms of individual level stewardship is just understand that every crypto user is a little bit different. There's kind of a Me-Me, Twitter, crypto user, a lot of people are familiar with the laser eyes and just everything yeah seems to be a meme. There's a lot of those folks out there, they're very vocal part of it. But like 95% of hedge funds, like are invested in crypto are moving into it. A lot of institutional capital sits in a company sits on their balance sheet. There's a lot of older folks whose financial advisors help them diversify 1% of their portfolio into crypto a few years ago. And now they're sitting on $100 million. It's not one size fits all. So you want to navigate the ecosystem. As you would expect, if you're mostly fundraising off of Twitter, your trip is going to look a lot different than if you're integrating into an email based capital campaign. And you have a few financial advisors who are coming through to connect you with the client. So there's some variability to it. But I would just say any crypto donation that any nonprofit receives, you know, treat it like a major gift prospect until proven otherwise, because the average crypto users higher average income than any city in America average crypto user makes 111 grand a year. And they tend to be you know, late 20s, early 30s with high income and a lot of capital, see if you can tutrn them into something more significant. 
All right. All right. What other questions are we supposed to look in just I guess, the chat, and the q&a?
 

12:36  
Generally, that's where the questions should be coming in the chat and the q&a functions.

12:44  
Let's see. Anyone want to talk about anything crazy? Unlike other income, is it harder to estimate individual crypto wealth? Yeah, that's in the sense that you're saying through like a wealth engine or like a wealth screening? Would you have consistent records that are kind of available and get away pumped into major databases where you can screen that? The answer would be yes, it would be harder to estimate an individual crypto user as well, because like all of that, pretty much like mass surveillance of people in traditional financial sector that gets pumped into those, you know, wealth screening companies in the nonprofit sector, they wouldn't have accurate data, because they wouldn't probably have integrations with all the top crypto exchanges at this point. A lot of it will come down to your individual relationship with the person. It's more just kind of a matter of understand that the average crypto user is going to have more capital than the average person. And then another good indicator also just giving propensity similar to wealth and given capacity. Fidelity did a study last year we actually picked up Mike Mike McLean developed the institutional arm for crypto at Fidelity Charitable and now he runs our institutional team. They did a study last year where they just asked people how do you invest and how do you give and an interesting statistic that came out of that is if you are a crypto investor, you are 45% of crypto investors that they screened gave $1,000 or more to charity each year compared to 33% of investors if they didn't tick the crypto box. So they tend to be not only high net worth, but these are younger folks who are actually making four, five figure donations to nonprofits on an annual basis, which is in alignment with that overall wealth data.
 

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