2:18  
I am thrilled that Mackenzie is here to talk to us about matching gifts. So I just wanted to go over a couple little housekeeping items before we actually go ahead and get started. So if you are not familiar with us or with me, my name is Abby Jarvis, and I'm part of the team at NEON one. We are a platform that is built to help you raise money, connect with your donors, and manage the day to day activities at your nonprofit. One of the reasons I'm extra excited about today's session is because one I know matching gifts is a huge deal for a lot of nonprofits. And two, I know that McKenzie is one of the best equipped people in the industry to talk about it. So we do as I kind of mentioned earlier, have an integration with double the donation. If you are curious about using the integration or using your urine CRM account to track your matching gifts. Let me know I can point you in the right direction. And if you're not in here on one client, welcome. Everything you learned here today is going to be applicable to you as well. A couple little things.

You'll notice in zoom, there's a chat box and a q&a box. The chat can move kind of quickly. So if you have a question that you want us to go over at the end, please try to drop it in that q&a box that will help me ensure that I catch it, especially as people chat in the comments area. So do drop your questions in there. And Do feel free to talk to us. I won't be on screen when Mackenzie starts talking. But I am going to be at my computer, looking at what you have to say trying to answer questions as they arise. And just generally keeping up with what y'all are talking about. And then just to reassure you, we are recording this webinar, you'll get a link to the recording. And that recording will also include the slides and it will include a transcript of what we talked about today and some other resources. So don't worry if you miss a slide or if there's something really cool you like fixated on and then you miss the next couple of sentences. You'll get everything you need to revisit this presentation later on.

With that, I'm going to turn it over to Mackenzie Mackenzie. I'm so excited that you're here. I've had a blast working with you in over the last year and I'm really excited to see what you have to say today.

4:55  
Yeah, thank you for letting us come I'll go ahead and take over screen

In here, one second as we do that, really excited to kind of be here with me on one today, hopefully address all those questions that I saw coming into the chat before and kind of what you guys want to learn. So hopefully we'll get to that. But like Abby said, please feel free to be active in the chat, I might even ask a few questions throughout. So let me know kind of what you want to hear more of. And I'll be sure to tailor the kind of the presentation to meet up with that. I'm really excited about this presentation specifically because I think we often hear matching gifts or this really important and impactful fundraising source. And so I think that creating or crafting a matching gift strategy and overcoming some of these common matching gift roadblocks can help your organization really fully leverage that and benefit from it. I know Abby gave a few introductions, but for a formal introduction to myself, my name is Mackenzie Burke, buckler. I'm on the partnerships team here at double the donation. If you are unfamiliar with double donation, we offer the leading matching gift automation software. And so really all that means is that our 360 Match Pro software automates the matching gift process to help you identify more match eligible donors, and then also drive their matches to completion, which is really important too. We're here today with me on one as Abby mentioned, because we do have that existing technical partnership. But we also kind of often partner up to do these educational resources really want to help you guys propel and fine tune your fundraising strategy, your matching gifts, strategy and experience overall success. And so hopefully today, we can provide you a lot of insight and really get you started with matching gifts.

6:27  
In terms of that specific agenda for today's presentation, I'm really going to divide the content into these three sections. And so essentially, first, I want to go over a matching gift industry review. Although this might seem kind of basic, or you might already have a good understanding of a lot of this already. I think that understanding the matching gift industry kind of in its entirety, is an important prerequisite to being able to talk through strategies and those best practices for navigating that industry. Then once I kind of overview the matching gift industry in that general sense, we want to clearly outline those roadblocks so that our strategies again, can directly respond to or overcome those roadblocks to set you up for success. Of course, I want to leave time for a lot of questions at the end as well. So without further ado, I'm going to really jump into the content here. As I just mentioned, really beginning with this overview of matching gifts, I think zooming out and making sure that we all have the same understanding and are talking about the same thing is important before we kind of move forward anymore. I know that matching gifts also can come in a variety of forms, and can have these different meanings. So that's kind of why I want to start here.

7:35  
And so to understand matching gifts, I think actually means that we have to understand corporate philanthropy as a whole. And so if you're looking for kind of a formal definition, corporate philanthropy is the act of a corporation or like a business promoting the welfare of others. And generally, that's through these charitable donations or kind of time. And so corporate philanthropy is a really great way for businesses to support their communities. And oftentimes, because of that, it can lead to free money for nonprofits, which, of course, we know is kind of this win win win situation. Everyone involved kind of benefits. The corporation benefits because they get to support their community, they get to showcase their responsibility to employees, job seekers, consumers, right, the employee wins because their company is helping them support causes that they care about, and they get to maximize their generosity. And then nonprofits obviously win because they can reach new audiences, garner more financial support, and kind of earn more with less effort. And so in other words, it's this really effective way to fundraise smarter. Corporate Philanthropy, though, is kind of an umbrella term that encompasses a lot of different programs and initiatives that a company might implement. And so just to give you a complete understanding or picture, I'll highlight a few of those programs. The first of which that we have our corporate sponsorships, which might be what a lot of you think of when you hear this term corporate philanthropy. I think that's the first thing that comes to mind. For me. Nonprofits can often receive corporate sponsorships for events and projects. For the nonprofit, the benefit is obviously that they get more money to support their mission. And then for the corporation, the benefit is that they receive tax deductions or get to promote their brands at the event, in terms of what corporate sponsorships actually look like. Those can be financial in kind or media. Obviously, with the financial sponsorship, the corporation will donate money with that, in kind sponsorship, they'll donate goods or services. And then within media sponsorship, they pay for the cost of promoting an event, whether that be through like TV ads, or radio advertisements, and things of that nature. And so again, this presentation isn't explicitly about corporate sponsorships, but I would feel a little bit remiss not to highlight the opportunity as we talk about this corporate philanthropy landscape. Similarly, I'll briefly outline the opportunity available through volunteer grants for you. And essentially volunteer grants match employees volunteer hours with donations to those nonprofits. And so we like to say that these programs turn support our time and effort

10:00  
it into really tangible funds for your nonprofit. It's essentially free money that can sometimes be overlooked if you don't know where your volunteers work, and whether or not their company offers a volunteer grant program. So to kind of solve for that, by knowing where your donors work, asking them where they work and promoting these opportunities, you can better engage your supporters with volunteer grants. So again, that's just a brief overview of the volunteer grant opportunity. Another form of corporate philanthropy we have here are employee grant stipends. And employee grant stipends occur when employers will award grants to their employees. And essentially, it's just the money that the employee can then use to donate to a nonprofit of their choice. This isn't the most common form of corporate philanthropy, but it's still a really important and kind of impactful program that some of your donors or those interested in supporting your mission might qualify for. And then of course, the rest of our discussion will be focused on matching gifts, which is that first fourth form we have here. And matching gifts are this form of corporate philanthropy, where companies will financially match charitable contributions of their employees. And the good news is that matching gifts are actually the most common form of corporate philanthropy. If we think about this, in its really most basic or simplest form, matching gift programs mean that when an employee donates $100, to your nonprofit, if their employer has this program in place, that employer will also donate $100 to your nonprofit. And so you end up with $200. Right. Of course, the impact of that is really profound, we like to say that for the cost of soliciting one gift you really get to, and so that can improve your fundraising metrics, such as campaign ROIs, it can help improve your donor lifetime values, it can help you raise more money with less effort right there all of these benefits that come associated with matching gifts. We'll get to a lot of those benefits later. But I wanted to give you that kind of basic overview first. And while I kind of summarize here, before we move on, I'd love if you could tell me in the chat which of these opportunities you might not have heard of before, or which maybe you're at least familiar with. I think that when we talk about the corporate philanthropy landscape, it's always kind of cool to see what people have heard of. The bottom line really, with this slide. And why I kind of included it here is that all forms of corporate philanthropy can clearly benefit your organization, right? These programs can propel your fundraising efforts forward. However, kind of, as I mentioned, matching gifts are actually the most common form of corporate philanthropy. And often what we see as the most fruitful as well. And so these opportunities are really important to capture. And so that's why for the rest of the presentation, we're going to focus on matching gifts. Specifically, I just wanted to kind of showcase that value of corporate philanthropy, and spark some ideas of funding sources you can pursue beyond just matches.

12:48  
And I'm seeing in the chat quickly, before I move on that some of you have heard of all, some of you maybe were least familiar with volunteer grants and employee grant stipends, I think that's pretty typical. But I hope that this kind of sparked some ideas of other ways you can get involved with corporations.

13:03  
Awesome. And so now to tailor specifically to matching gifts, I know that I gave that really basic example of a matching gift before where I said, if an employee who qualifies for this opportunity donates $100 to you, their employer would also donate $100. However, it's often a little bit more complex than that I kind of made that really simple, right? The reason that it is more complex is that there's not one standard matching gift program out there. Not every company that offers a matching gift program maybe runs or structures it the same way. Instead, companies will decide on their own guidelines and definitions. So as you can see on the screen, here, we have some of those guidelines. There are generally these five categories in which matching gift programs can differ kind of according to company. And so just to get us all on the same page, because this will also inform why there are roadblocks, I want to briefly overview each of these just to kind of you know, ensure we have an understanding.

14:02  
And I'll start with that institution eligibility one. All I mean here is that companies can decide which nonprofit types or organization types are eligible to receive matching funds through their program. So for example, sometimes maybe a company might exclude a religious or a political organization from being eligible for a match. That does happen sometimes. However, the good news is that most commonly we do see that companies will make any registered 501 C three organization, or even educational institution eligible companies really want their employees to be able to support the causes they care about. And so that's kind of why we see a variety of these institution types eligible. So you can think Health and Human Services, maybe environmental organizations, higher ed K 12. arts and cultural organizations, healthcare organizations, right, the list goes on and on. A lot of those are generally eligible. I make this call out just to show that even though they're generally free few restrict

15:00  
shins, it's still really important to know a company's guidelines, so you can determine if their donors would qualify.

15:07  
Next we have a match ratio. And all that I mean here is just that companies decide at what rate they want to match. Most companies match at that one to one rate, or in other words, like $1, for $1 structure. Again, that's really most common and goes back to that example that I keep giving of a company donating $100, once their employee donates $100, but we can see that the match ratio can range from point five to one, all the way up to four to one. Of course, the bigger the ratio, the more you can grow the size of each donation, and the greater impact that obviously has on your progress towards your mission. The match ratio will just be something important to keep in mind, which is kind of why we highlighted it here. Moving on, we also have employee eligibility. This one's fairly straightforward. All I'm referring to hear is which employees are eligible, is it full time employees only that qualify? Maybe can part time employees also submit a match request. In some instances, maybe even retirees or spouses of employees are eligible to get their gifts matched. And so it's just important to keep in mind because we always want to ensure that we're not letting any opportunities fall through the cracks.

16:15  
Next, we have Gift Amount, in other words, like the minimum and maximum amount. And so companies indicate the smallest gift they'll match. And then they'll set a maximum for how much they'll match per employee per year. And so most commonly, the minimum will be $25. But it can even be as low as $1. And then, of course, as you probably guessed, the maximum can vary a lot. A lot of companies have really, really generous programs. So maybe they'll match upwards of $15,000 per employee per year, there are a lot of corporate dollars on the table out there for you to leverage. And then quickly before we move on, for the sake of time, we also have those programmed deadlines. And so all that means is that companies decide how long the donation is eligible to be matched, they set that timeline where they need a match request in by sometimes the deadline is a certain number of months after the donation was made. So maybe they say I need your match request in three months after you made your gift or six months after you made your gift. That's one common deadline. Another common deadline is year end, meaning that donors have until the end of the calendar year when they made that initial donation to submit a request. And then the third way that you might see this is companies will have a year end deadline, but they'll tack on like one to two months grace period. And so really what this means and why I bring up this program deadlines is that some of your donors who gave at the end of the year and our match eligible, might still have the opportunity to get their gift matched. Now, that's really important to keep in mind as we kind of seek to reengage donors this year, continue nurturing our relationship with them before it's time to make your direct call to action again. And so matching gifts can allow the donor essentially to give again, all without them having to dig deeper into their pockets. That's why I kind of like to bring that up here. Again, this really covers all the guidelines, and I think provides us a really good segue to begin digging into matching gifts a little bit deeper.

18:09  
We understand corporate philanthropy right now, right, we understand that matching gifts are a form of corporate philanthropy. And we have an idea of how matching gift programs might differ from company to company. Next question you might be asking is kind of the size of the matching gift opportunity. Is this like a nice unique opportunity? Or are these opportunities really widespread and available to a lot of individuals. And so as you might have guessed, or you can see on the screen here, the good news is that corporate matching gifts are everywhere. In fact, we know that 65% of fortune 500 companies offer these programs. When I see that number, I think that in and of itself, it's really exciting to think about obviously, that encompasses a lot of companies, a lot of employees. Of course, it's not just fortune 500 companies that have these programs, either smaller and more regional companies will implement them as well. All in all, that means that over 26 million individuals in the US are eligible for corporate matching gifts. We know that that's more than 10% of the entire US workforce. And so of course, I think that demonstrates just how impactful these programs can be. I think about it this way, with that many eligible individuals, there's sure to be some overlap with your donor pool. These opportunities likely exist among your donors, because patch eligible donors are everywhere. And as my last little number to kind of showcase this, that match eligible donors are everywhere. We also know that 11% of total corporate cash contributions to nonprofits are made through matching gift programs. The bottom line really is that matching gift programs are impactful. And as a nonprofit, that's why it's so important to think about this fundraising source and what it can do for you and your fundraising efforts.

19:55  
beyond just those obvious financial benefits, though, they're actually benefits that

20:00  
I argue are equally, if not maybe more important. And my point here really is that matching gifts can function as a key donor engagement tool and help you nurture donor relationships. That's because matching gifts motivate donors to action, and I think can even fuel their boost to their satisfaction. First, to kind of unpack that motivation factor, I think it's fairly intuitive to think about, which is why I like to start here. If you put yourself in the donor shoes, if you as a donor know that your gift could go twice as far. And that by submitting a matching gift request, you'd be taking advantage of a benefit provided to you by your employer, while also getting to have a greater impact on a mission that you care about, you'll kind of feel really empowered, and will have this dual motivation to give and get that match. And so that, of course really encourages donors to act now, and increases their excitement with submitting their gift. And plus a matched gift means the donor can really help you reach your goals and vision faster. We know that donors will buy into that they'll have this competitive spirit, where they want to help you achieve goals. And so matching gifts allow them to do that. The other piece of the puzzle, though, that I mentioned is that this in turn can increase their satisfaction. When a donor has dual motivation to give, that kind of gives them a dual reason to be satisfied when a donor knows that their gift will be going twice as far. And when they know that they're playing this really larger or more important role in helping you achieve your mission, they'll feel really rewarded and satisfied by that gift, they feel that it holds a lot of weight. And they can take pride in kind of knowing that their gift is helping your beneficiaries. And so using these opportunities to help donors understand the true meaning and value of their gift is important to making that gift more tangible and clear to them that their contribution is appreciated, it's needed. And it's helpful in creating an outcome. And so clearly, I think what we've done so far is we've seen why matching gifts, engage donors, keep them interested in and maybe invested in your organization for both the short and the long term.

22:00  
And so, kind of I know, we just talked about all the benefits of marketing matching gifts. Before I move on, I'd love to have an opportunity to hear from you all if your organization is already marketing matching gifts. So if you would just drop a simple yes or no in the chat, as I can see those continue to trickle in. And while you do that, just to back everything, I set up with a few numbers, we know that 84% of donors are more likely to donate if their gifts are matched 71% more donors respond to fundraising appeals mentioning matching, and a 51% increase in donation amount results from mentioning matching. And so those numbers really paint a picture, outline the benefits, and I think give proof to everything we've been talking about. So I'm seeing a lot of those answers come in a little bit of a mix of both. And so yeah, that's awesome. We're gonna go into kind of how to market matching gifts, how to remove those roadblocks next. And that really leads us to this point, despite all of those benefits, it is true that your organization is still missing out, right. And organizations miss out to the tune of four to $7 billion each year. That's how much money in matching gift revenue is left on the table. And I think that number is really staggering and begs for a point of pause, which is where we're transitioning. Now. There's a lot of untapped potential out there that we certainly want to solve for. We know that the average fundraising institution receives just 1.31% of individual contributions in corporate matching gifts. We want to decrease that revenue gap and increase the percentage of individual contributions in corporate matching gifts that nonprofits receive. And so of course, that leads us to this question, why are we not already earning more from matching gifts? Why are my donors not submitting their request? And what is the root cause of that revenue gap? And the answer to this question requires us to overview and outline those matching gift roadblocks. While we know that matching gift programs can be powerful and transformative for your fundraising efforts, like we just discussed, there are several matching gift roadblocks, that donors and your team both encounter. And so as we go through these, it's likely that we hinted at them in the previous section, or maybe that you inferred them from our discussion before. We see that matching gift. Roadblocks occur because of the way that the matching gift landscape is structured.

24:13  
So let's think about the matching gift process itself. Generally, we can boil that process down to the four steps you see on the screen here. First, the match eligible donor submits a gift to your organization. Of course, that's straightforward, right? Then second, the donor would submit a request to their company to get that gift matched. As we mentioned, every company has a different process by which they accept those requests. And so this is just going to differ according to each donor. Then once the donor is successfully able to complete that step, the company would approve the request and issue the funds to your organization.

24:46  
And so as you likely hatched probably by my graphic on the screen here or you inferred it. The disconnect is occurring and step due to we're seeing that donors are not submitting their matching gift request. But based on everything I've outlined up to the

25:00  
this point, I feel like I'm kind of contradicting myself, it seems a little counterintuitive to what I've said, we've talked about how matching gifts appeals are really compelling. They compel these your donors to be generous. And so what's the reason that this step is not occurring? It's actually not a donor motivation issue, which is the good news. It's not that donors don't want to get their gift matched, of course, we know that they do. So then the problem is, as we'll kind of see, the several roadblocks that your donors encounter, that are preventing them from submitting their match request. Um, so let's kind of briefly unpack these.

25:36  
The first roadblock that we see is that donors actually oftentimes are unaware of their match eligibility. Although we just talked about companies are implementing these programs, over 26 million individuals are eligible, there actually tends to be this lack of understanding of these programs, companies might have told employees that they were eligible, but the employee could have forgotten right, or maybe it's in some material that they haven't accessed yet. There are a number of scenarios and reasons why this lack of awareness may occur. But the bottom line really is just that donors do not oftentimes realize that their gifts could be matched, and their impact could be doubled.

26:14  
Plus, even if a donor knows that their company has this program, they might not know if your institution specifically qualifies for a match. Or if their gift amount falls within their company's threshold, all of those parameters we discussed before. To fully understand their own eligibility, their own matching gift potential, the donor would have to know all of their company's kind of program guidelines that we discussed before. And so without knowing their own eligibility, it then makes sense why we're seeing that not many donors are submitting the request.

26:46  
Beyond just that, though, there are other roadblocks that donors encounter. Even if maybe they are aware that they're eligible. Once they're told they're eligible, a donor might still be unsure of how or where to submit their match request, we said that every company has a different matching gift request process, such as some may be requiring their donors to navigate to a portal, others might just have a form that they need to fill out, right, there's a lot of variance. Because of that there can be confusion and a lack of know how, as we like to call it, employees might have trouble finding their form with us. And therefore that kind of makes the entire matching gift process become more complicated or lengthy. The donor then might feel like they don't have time to track down those forms or get in touch with someone who might know how. And so this roadblock, of course, is kind of the biggest one. And as we progress through kind of the rest of the content, we'll definitely want to figure out how to rectify or solve for this one, we get have to help donors figure out how to submit that request. But moving on a little bit to the third roadblock that donors are likely to encounter is not understanding when they must submit a match request. By the sense, these program deadlines can differ from company to company, donors just might not realize how long they're eligible. A donor who gave at the end of the year might just assume their gift is no longer eligible, even though it might still be because their employer gives those few months grace period. Or alternatively, a donor who gave at the end of the year might have thought they had a bunch of time to submit their request, when really their gift from last year is no longer eligible. And so since donors oftentimes don't know the deadline or kind of timeline, they have to submit that request, if they've realized their eligibility is expired, or they could have gotten the gift matched, but now they've kind of passed that timeline that might cause cause this kind of confusion and frustration. And So taken together, I think that these three roadblocks really demonstrate why donors or employees right, or not taking advantage of their programs in greater numbers. This demonstrates why we're seeing the matching gift revenue gap. Donors simply put, need help navigating corporate matching, they kind of benefit from direction, really clear instructions on if their gift qualifies, how to submit that request, when to submit that request and more on so without that direction and help navigating donors are often left kind of unable to complete the process. However, I know it's not just donors that encounter matching gift roadblocks. Your fundraising team might also encounter similar roadblocks that kind of prevent you from being able to sit in the driver's seat, and effectively help donors navigate corporate matching, like we just talked about. And so in particular, here, I want to highlight four common roadblocks your team might encounter so that we can then figure out how to solve for them.

29:27  
First, your team might encounter or lack some donor employment data. And so what I mean here is just that without knowing where your donors work, it's kind of impossible to determine their matching gift eligibility. If you don't have a really good mechanism in place for capturing employment data. It can be time consuming or maybe even ineffective to try to track that information down.

29:49  
Similarly, are kind of in the same vein, even if maybe your team does have really good employment information on your donors. You might not have sufficient information on matching gift companies.

30:00  
In other words, maybe you know your donor works for Verizon. But your team might not have a good quick way to determine if Verizon has a matching gift program. And if they do, how that program is structured. Without knowing those minimum and maximum outs, the company will match those employee types eligible institutions eligible match ratio, everything we went over before, right? It can be difficult for your team to effectively communicate a donors own match eligibility back to them.

30:26  
Again, we mentioned that donors need that help navigating corporate matching though. And so without that employment data, and the program details to backup that employment data and determine if an individual qualifies, your team might struggle to help donors navigate that corporate matching gift process. That's why opportunities can really easily fall through the cracks through no fault of your own.

30:48  
The other roadblock your team might encounter when it comes to matching gifts is that you might feel that you don't have extra time and resources to devote to capturing the source of funding. We know that matching gifts are kind of one part of your entire or your overarching fundraising strategy. And so without this proactive approach to matching gifts in place, it might seem really difficult to follow up with donors and pursue this funding source in this reactive way. And so that kind of goes to this next roadblock, without an engaging follow up strategy to remind and inform donors of their eligibility and drive those matches to completion, it can be even more difficult for your team to fully harness this form of giving. And so I know I just laid out a bunch of roadblocks, right. And so it might seem a little intimidating. But the reason that I laid them out is that the good news is that all of these roadblocks with a few minor adjustments can be solved and your organization can then be well on the way to doubling each eligible donation. And of course, that's really what we want to devote the rest of this presentation to now that we understand the matching gift landscape, how that landscape can sometimes create these matching gift roadblocks, I think we can now begin to understand how to solve for those roadblocks, and take a more kind of proactive or effective approach to matching gifts that will ultimately save your team and your donors time and confusion. I want to take this time before we move on because I know we just went through a lot of content to offer a little engagement. So let me know in the chat, if you run into any of those roadblocks, whether it's a team one or a donor one that you're running into, or that you see your donors are running into, and which one you find the hardest to overcome. Maybe I just kind of like to know that to keep that in the back of my head as we kind of progressed throughout.

32:27  
While we're moving on there, though, I'll kind of wait for those answers to come in. And just kind of set the stage a bit to go into this next section. And so we're gonna get into those best practices. Now. In this section, I hope to provide some examples of low lift strategies you can implement today to begin experiencing matching gifts success in both the short and the long term, because that's the goal, right? By implementing these strategies, I think that you can really begin to solve for roadblocks. matching gifts can be an even easier, more effective way for your organization to fundraise. I see a lot about employment data. employees don't know that their employer would match. Yeah, all of this stuff. I think it's, it's awesome that we've kind of laid out those roadblocks now. And I'm hoping that now we can kind of solve for them. And it's great to see that a lot of you are running into the same problems because we can kind of help each other along the way. So really great to see you guys engaging in there.

33:20  
And so I'm going to start with our first strategy and something that I hinted at already before, but that I want to provide kind of a lot more detail about now. And so our first strategy is to proactively market matching gifts. What we mean here is that you'll want to incorporate matching gift appeals into your campaigns to educate donors about these opportunities. And so throughout the year, talk about matching gifts. Simply put, let your donors know what corporate matching gifts are, provide examples of some companies that might offer these programs, and explain that this is really an impactful way for donors to give back and maximize their generosity. I know that this seems really basic or simple, but let's kind of relate it back to one of those matching gift roadblocks. We said that donors lack awareness about corporate matching gift programs in general, and are often really unsure if they're eligible. And so I like to think about it this way. If you can increase the share of voice, you give these matching gift appeals a little bit and encourage donors to think about matching gifts as a really logical and intuitive part of the donation process, you can effectively close that Donor Awareness gap. Once that Donor Awareness gap is closed, we talked about how motivating these matching gift appeals are, and getting donors to do things like give, give now or give more. And so the benefits associated with simply talking about matching gifts. And taking a little bit of a proactive approach really can't be overstated. Not to mention that by incorporating these appeals into your larger campaigns, you can save your team time in the long run. Team time is another roadblock we kind of like outlined before right? And you do this kind of you end up saving your team time in the long run because of toners become more aware of these opportunities.

35:00  
and understand the more, there'll be less donor confusion, which of course means less donor questions. And really less effort required from your team to drive those matches to completion, donors will be able to act quicker and with a lot more ease.

35:13  
Plus, by making matching gifts, part of other campaigns and an ongoing appeal, you won't have to divert as many resources to matching gifts during peak fundraising times, which I know is a big concern. Donors will already know about these opportunities, it's already become part of your donation process itself. And so while this might sound really basic, like I said, it can be incredibly impactful in helping you achieve your goals. When it comes to making the matching gift appeal, I always like to emphasize a few things. One, adopt a multi channel approach. And so all I mean by this is talk about matching gifts on your website, in your newsletter, on your social media, in your blog, posts, and more. The reason that I kind of stressed the importance of multi channel is because it gives every supporter no matter where they interact with your organization, this chance to encounter those appeals. The other suggestion that I like to make is to market matching gifts in a donor centric way. And so this might seem obvious too. But as you make the appeal to the donor that they could have double impact, they could help twice as many beneficiaries. And they could help enable like a really big outcome. When the donor hears this, not only will they be excited to get their gift matched, they'll kind of become more invested in your organization. So really maintain that donor centricity. And then my third tip when it comes to making these appeals, is lean into storytelling, use storytelling to help. We know that donors respond to stories. So I think it's really crucial to tell stories of how matching gifts can make a difference. Tell stories of transformation. And make it clear that matching gifts can make that transformation possible. Whether you're an animal shelter that helped a dog recover from injuries, or a food bank that helped a family receive the nourishment they need, or an environmental organization that helped clean up a stretch of beach, right? Use those poignant stories to demonstrate the value of matching gifts and kind of what they can do.

37:05  
The second part though, have proactively marketing matching gifts is the importance of gathering employment data during the giving process. And so while donors are on your donation form, and are going through this act of filling out their information, and taking action, you want to collect employment data on your donation form, then just include a field that says something to the effect of see if your company will match your donation like I have in that graphic there. And then ask donors to input their employer name. Again, this will solve two roadblocks. One, it will solve that roadblock of donors being unaware. Rather than having to think about matching gifts as a secondary fundraising item or task. Donors can think about matching gifts during the donation process, and can then later discover their eligibility. For your team. This strategy also solves roadblock right? When you had that insufficient donor employment data, it was impossible to determine your matching gift potential, and each individual donors matching gift eligibility. But when you have rich employment data and know where all of your donors work, you can get a more complete and accurate understanding and can use this data to then determine eligibility and communicate that to the donor. And so capturing data employment data is a really important first step to being able to help your donors navigate corporate matching. Doing so during the donation process is best practice. And I think makes the most sense, because different donors are already on your form. They're already providing a lot of information, they're in this giving mindset. And so I think that they'll be really eager to enter their employment name, so that they can learn more later. So your team will save that time not having to chase donors down for that information, you can easily and quickly follow up with your donors while they're in that giving mindset and get them to submit their match request. And so like with all the strategies that we'll discuss an outline today, I think that incorporating this idea into your plans is a win win. You can solve several matching gift roadblocks at once, to better position your organization to kind of earn more from matching gifts. While I make a kind of point of an additional value add, go ahead and let me know in the chat. If your organization does already capture employment data. I know we saw a few people with roadblocks that they don't have it before. But it's just always interesting to see how many organizations are already doing this. While those come in now, I often get questions about capturing employment data. So as kind of another call out of an additional value add and a reason why to do this. When you have donor employment data on hand, this can help you secure other corporate philanthropy forms like we were discussing before. You can see if your donors are eligible for volunteer grants, or employee grant stipends to that we highlighted, you can keep track of employment trends and see if many of your donors maybe work for the same company. If that's the case, maybe then you can reach out for the company and see if they would be interested in the corporate sponsorship. Right. I know it's kind of a tangent that I'm going on here. But um, my point just being that capturing this employment data will help you earn more for matching gifts, but it will also help you develop your corporate strategy overall.

40:01  
I see a lot coming in here about Yes. And that's kind of some mixed answers of yes and no. So really important to keep that in mind, if you aren't already capturing this employment information, I always like to say kind of just ask your donors first, right, that's the first thing to do.

40:18  
Awesome. So let's talk about our next best practice or suggested strategy for matching gifts success. When we talked about roadblocks for your team, we discussed lack of information about where donors work being a really common one. And we discussed that your team might have insufficient information on matching gift companies and program details. And so that leads us to our next solution, research some matching gift companies and stay on top of those program changes. While this might sound like a really big initial investment of time upfront, the reason that I kind of frame it this way is that it can save you a lot of time in the long run. Knowing the top matching gift companies and their program details can help you better understand each donors potential and follow up with them after. And so there are several methods through which you could do this. First, a lot of the time, you can find this information on companies online, plenty of companies take pride in their matching gift program. They see it as their CSR initiative, they talk about these programs, because it can help them recruit top talent, it can improve their employee retention rates, it can help with customer acquisition, right, there are a host of benefits. So oftentimes, they'll talk about it, and they'll be really transparent. So that's one obvious way, kind of looking at their website, looking at their press releases to obtain and familiarize yourself with this information. As another way you could do this, you might reach out to donors directly, and ask them to to contact their employer to learn more, you might reach out to the company to see if they'll share details about their program, right? Those are other ways, there are a number of ways you can go about this. Of course, to reduce the time, kind of initial upfront time cost, you can also leverage matching gift automation, or a matching gift database to determine this information. And then, therefore, not only will you have really accurate detailed information on hand, you'll also be able to get that information with minimal time involved. And you can always be on top of program changes. Of course, that then solves another roadblock we discussed, which is your team having little resources to devote to crafting an ongoing kind of matching gift strategy. And so using a matching gift database that already has this information in it can really help you kind of find these companies,

42:25  
whatever mechanism or way you discover that information is not necessarily what's important, right? What is important is being sure that you have a plan to do this along the way so that you can then actively help your donors navigate corporate matching by determining if their gift is eligible, yes, but also if their amounts eligible, if your institution is eligible, how long they have to submit that request, and more. So if you're looking for ways to get started, and the best ways to get started, especially if you're looking at manual research, it can be particularly important and I think helpful to research whether some local or regional companies near you offer matching gift programs. The reason being just that we know that employees that live near you are likely to be familiar with your operations, your mission and mission programming. So it's likely that some of them will be prospective or current donors. So in other words, there's like sure to be a lot of overlap. So by researching those companies beforehand, you might even be able to tell prospective donors of the opportunity and motivate them to action accordingly. And so of course, that could help improve your donor conversion rate, it can help you improve fundraising ROI, matching gift revenue among a lot of other metrics, right? I like to mention that as a tip of how to get started to kind of make it less overwhelming, and show how this can be a low lift strategy for your team and really intuitive.

43:42  
Moving on a little bit. Well, I know it's fairly obvious that the suggested strategy solves for a team roadblock. You might be wondering, how does this solve for donor roadblock?

43:52  
And the way that this can solve for donor roadblocks is kind of multi fold, right? First, you can actually communicate some of those matching gifts companies to your donors. So in your matching gift appeals, you can say something like Did you know many companies like the Home Depot offer matching gift programs, you can actively then get them thinking about that. Or maybe if they work for the Home Depot, they're able to determine their eligibility directly from that appeal, right.

44:17  
But the real way that this comes into play is if you then use your knowledge of matching gift companies, and compare that against the employment data we suggested you capture. If you can do the legwork, and identify individuals who qualify and then directly communicate that with them, you definitely will benefit. And so here I just like to emphasize that it's about the entire picture. Not only is that you want to know where your donors work, you also want to have a good mechanism to be able to tell whether that's a matching company, so that you can later communicate that to the donor and simplify a process for them.

44:50  
Moving on a little bit and going to solve another matching gift roadblock. Let's talk about creating a matching gift page on your website. We know that your website really is this

45:00  
Number One place where donors probably come to learn about your mission, and ultimately make that contribution to your cause. And so then having a page on your website where you explicitly highlight the matching gift opportunity, and you educate donors about this giving Avenue is really crucial to doubling those donations. And so you might be asking, what exactly do I put on a matching gift page, right, where should it live on my website. And so we'll talk through some of those things. And so the first thing to note is that this page should begin with a brief overview of corporate matching gift programs, and information on where users can locate additional information on the topic. Since donors are often unaware what a corporate matching gift even is, having this information accessible, can definitely solve for that roadblock. And it can help you reach more of your website visitors to ultimately then increase their chances of following through and getting their donation doubled.

45:52  
The other thing that you'll want to do here is explained the benefits of matching gifts programs for both your nonprofit and for the donor themself. We talked about how matching gifts are kind of this really appealing appeal that you can make to your donors, it appeals to some elements of donor psychology. And so explaining to donors that they can multiply their impact without having to reach deeper into their pocket could help you use that as a donor motivation tool.

46:18  
An important part of solving for the matching gift roadblock through this page is also to ensure that donors understand once they visit this page, how to determine if they're eligible. So for example, you could embed a matching gift database like we talked about before. And then the donor could immediately kind of be made aware of their eligibility. Or maybe you don't have access to that database. Instead, you can include a blurb, just telling the donor to contact their HR department to learn more. The bottom line is you just want to provide some sort of next step to the donor so that they can figure out their eligibility. The simpler you can make it of course, like with anything else, the better, right, the goal should be to keep donors on your page and on your site. That way, if they see this matching gift information, and it motivates them to take action, they're already on your website can easily and quickly press the donate button, submit their gift, go on to submit their last request as well. We know that every time a donor has to leave your page for information, the chances of them returning might decrease. And so that's kind of why we emphasize creating a matching gift page. We want to do everything in our power to keep donors on our site, give them the information they need, and make it as simple as possible for them to learn about the matching gift opportunity.

47:30  
At the same time that this page can help you close the Donor Awareness gap. This page can also help save your team time. By having a page that educates Sooners match and gives you around helps them determine their eligibility, your team might not have to reach out as manually to donors, or devote the same amount of time to highlighting these opportunities directly to each individual. So the longer this page lives on your website to the more familiar your donors will become with matching gifts. The more they'll see matching gifts as part of the donation process and a really important next step. Of course, that saves you time in the long run as well. There's less need to follow up right so time savings is a really big benefit of this page. As a note here, you'll want to make sure this page is accessible and easy to find. So make this page available from your navigation bar nestled within your ways to get page where you kind of highlight all of those avenues through which donors can give to you. I think that by doing this, you can demonstrate your responsibility to donors and show them that you prioritize maximum maximizing donations and look for the smart opportunities to stretch their dollars further. This matching gift page can certainly help you begin leveraging kind of the power of matching gifts.

48:40  
Moving on a little bit for sake of time. Our next strategy here is to provide actionable next steps to donors post donation. And I think that this is something we've hinted at thus far but not yet explicitly highlighted.

48:52  
Once you proactively market matching gifts capture that employment data research matching gift companies encourage donors to submit their gift. The next step is that you'll need to follow up, you want to let your match eligible donors know their specific and personalized matching gift next steps. by personalizing your follow up messaging so that each donor understands their specific next steps, you can increase the number of donors that follow through with that request. Again, the more actionable you can make those next steps, the simpler the matching gift process will be for donors.

49:24  
To kind of to give an example I think to make this more concrete if a donor told you that they work for the Home Depot during the giving process, if you can then follow up and direct them to the Home Depot's matching gift request portal. It makes it really easy and simple for the donor to follow through. That, of course solves the roadblock of donors not knowing where to submit a request. And it helps you create a really engaging matching gift follow up strategy. Rather than just sending donors generic instructions for how to get their gift matched and generic messages that might seem mass generated. If you can send those personalized matching gift to touch points that show the donor that you value that

50:00  
unique relationship with your organization, you value their gift, you want to see it matched, you'll experience a lot of success. And so that roadblock will be solved for within these follow up. So you can make them really kind of appealing and compelling by addressing your donors by name, recognizing their gift amount, leveraging your branding, colors, voice, all of those elements of your organization, right. And that will help you create this engaging strategy that not only helps you double donations, but also helps you cultivate a strong ongoing relationship with the donor. Because it's a really good engaging post donation touch point.

50:35  
In terms of timing of these emails, we recommend sending these in the hours or days after the initial donation was made. Of course, that's when it's most timely, but also at key times throughout the year, like maybe as those year ends, deadlines approach. And so those are just a few important follow ups here. I know that I mentioned segmentation and making these emails personalized, to solve for that time roadblock that your team encounters. Remember that you can also automate these emails, and maintain personalization and automation to achieve this, you can automate this outreach and still make it seem really authentic and engaging, so that these emails do appear to be individually crafted, even though they might just be running in the background. And so you want to find these ways to save your team time and solve for multiple roadblocks at once. And while email certainly makes sense as the delivery vehicle for these follow ups, you can also use something like your confirmation page to provide those direct connect steps if you kind of have a mechanism to do so. Of course, the benefit with using the confirmation page is that you can deliver those next steps closer to the actual point of donation, where we know the donor is most connected to your organization anyway, and still kind of in that giving mindset. And so whether it be through a confirmation page or email follow ups, the sooner you get donors to submit their request and take action, the less kind of extra time and resources you'll have to devote to to matching gifts overall, which we know is important to your team's success. We want to give donor steps in the immediate to eliminate that confusion and start kind of earning more.

52:05  
Our next piece of advice here is just to collect relevant matching gift data. And this suggestion primarily is aimed at eliminating some roadblocks for your team. In order to fine tune and optimize your matching gift strategy over time. It's important to track your progress, have a good snapshot or understanding of your success thus far. And so we suggest not just that your team collect data, but that you collect really relevant data that can inform your decision making moving forward. And so keeping track of relevant data such as the number of match eligible donations received is important. With that information, you can then gauge kind of your potential. You'll also want to track things like your total matching gift revenue, donor engagement with the matching gift process, your top matching gift company and more. The important thing to remember here is that you'll want to be able to understand matching gifts, kind of how you're doing as a whole or on an aggregate level, but then also be able to drill down and see how individual donors are engaging with the journey.

53:03  
With these metrics, you can compare your strategy over time to identify areas of improvement celebrate points of success. collecting the right data makes it really easier to fine tune your strategy moving forward and double those donations more effectively. I know I highlighted a few of the potential metrics to track here to show you that you don't have to collect every piece of information and kind of eat away at team time by doing so. Rather just focus on a few important metrics that can capture your overall matching gift strategy, and provide insight into how that strategy might be evolving.

53:36  
While this data capture obviously solves a matching gift roadblock roadblock for your team by saving them time in the long run, it can also benefit your donors. The reason being that if you're able to see how individual donors are engaging with the matching gift process, you can kind of reach out to them help them move along that journey if they need the extra help. And so you can decide the best way to help them get their gift matched, which is really important. So the point here just being that we want to be able to look at matching gift metrics from both in aggregate and individual level, the more we can kind of engage donors with matching gifts and fine tune our strategy over time, the better positioned we will be to succeed. So that's why we kind of emphasize the importance of data.

54:15  
I know that we're kind of close to time. So I'm gonna save this slide to look through some of the questions that we have coming in. Feel free to kind of let us know what questions you have. I'm gonna try to look at those quickly. But if you want to bump anything back down, Oh, awesome. I see a questions on how to put search box on the donation form. And so as we kind of mentioned at the beginning, we were more educational focus today. But we do have an integration with a lot of neon, one product so you can add by signing on to 360 Match pro, you get access to that search tool that you can put on your neon CRM donation forms, your neon fundraiser forms and really been begin capturing employment data. And of course that search field is backed by a database of over 24,000 employers so it automates a lot of the process for you

55:00  
All of these best practices that we kind of talked about today can be automated by leveraging kind of your existing neon one. And 360 Match pro integration. So that's a big value add there.

55:12  
I'm trying to look through here.

55:16  
You want me to choose Sunday go over?

55:18  
Yeah, that would that would help. I'm trying to there's so many chats, I'm trying to read them.

55:22  
I know, we have so many questions. So we're gonna get to as many as we can. I will say y'all, if you don't have your question answered, there's an opportunity to opt into receiving information from double the donation. So they will send you a ton of great stuff on these topics. So I know you mentioned

adding a field that collects employer information.

A lot of folks are interested in the double that donation widget. I know, there's obviously a way to do that with that widget. How would you begin outreach? If you were not using 360, macro or anything else? How would you take your donors Employer Information and reach out to them about matching gifts if you weren't using a database?

56:09  
Yeah, I think that that's a really good question. And I think it relates to another question here of like, that I'm seeing about employer question on the donation form, should I just call it employer? Or should I provide more context to so I'm gonna try to answer all of that in one, I think the first thing is, even if you're not leveraging the integration, you're not leveraging automation. Simply asking your donors on your donation form, having a field that says, See what see, let us know where you work. So we can see if your match eligible, or see if your employer will match your gift, whatever little context you can provide around that field to collect this information is really important. And it will help you kind of begin that follow up process. If you're not leveraging automation, a few things that we talked about. So let's say you find out that you're doing or works for the Home Depot, the best place to start is looking on the Home Depot's website and seeing if they have information on their matching gift program. If you can determine that kind of automatically, then I would say you can reach out to your donor, either by manual email, or by phone, whatever makes the most sense for you to let them know, hey, the Home Depot does offer a matching gift program, let me help you get your gift matched, I still think it's important to help them in that way and help them navigate. Maybe you don't have time for that. Or maybe you can't find out this Home Depot as matching gift program. I think emailing the donor and saying hey, you told us you worked for the Home Depot, you should reach out to your employer and see if they have a matching gift program because this will allow you to have double impact on our mission is also a really valuable way to do it. And so I think that it really depends on your bandwidth, and how you communicate with your donors. I always like to stress that matching gifts should be a part of your fundraising strategy. It shouldn't be like this cumbersome process, you want to make it fit into the rest of your fundraising strategies that you're engaging your donors in a really kind of a selective way.

57:46  
That's really helpful.

And I know that the the manual process of doing that can kind of take a long time and someone else actually called it there's another part of the process that can take a long time, Tara said that they find that the corporate gift awards portal takes forever. And they also don't frequently have insight into who actually made the gift that is being matched. So there's kind of a two fold question. One, is there a way to kind of shorten the length of time between when you submit a gift that someone has made for matching? And is there any workaround that they can use to appropriately recognize the gift if they don't immediately know who is submitting and get for matching?

58:30  
Yeah, that's a good question. Unfortunately, like a lot of things are the matching gifts which we discussed as a roadblock, in terms of like the actual payout process and how companies handle that it differs from company to company. So there's not like this great answer of a way that you can expedite the process and make sure that once the donor submits their match request, you receive it really fast. There's not like a perfect answer to that question. In terms of figuring out where that match is coming from, maybe it is coming from a third party vendor, and you can't determine who the individual donor like it should be attributed to, I think a great place to start, which I probably sound a little bit like a broken record is asking your donors to let you know when they submitted their request. And so if you ask your donor, hey, will you let us know that you submitted your request to the Home Depot, you then know to expect that you know, to expect it from this third party vendor. And you can kind of track that accordingly, as a side note there because I think I saw something about thanking them. Once the donor does tell you that they submitted their request, that's a really great opportunity to engage them further. And say thank you so much for taking the extra time to do that. We really appreciate this and you're going to have this huge impact on our beneficiaries. Your gift is going further. It's enabling this outcome. And so kind of circling back to that storytelling piece that I was talking about before. You want to make sure that once donors do that they let you know they submitted their request, you kind of have extra room for engagement.

I love that and I think especially if you are asking donors to take that extra step. You taking the extra step to reiterate how important that is to you is a really helpful way to kind of acknowledge the time and effort they're putting into thatmatch. Exactly, exactly. I think donors appreciate it when you do. Absolutely.

1:00:05  
So there are two questions that I think are related. And I'm going to try to, to kind of hold them together. So on the one hand, someone said that there are instances wherein their donors are looking at the list of organizations that are eligible for a match of their organization or at their company. So say like, I am a neon, one employee, and I'm interested in having a gift match to the SPCA, Florida. But I don't see that on my on their list of companies that they're willing to match gifts to, is there a way that nonprofits can reach out to a company to build a relationship and kind of see if they can be added to the list of of organizations that are eligible for matches? And if they can, is there a responsibility for fundraisers to steward relationships with organizations or companies that are willing to match those donations?

1:00:58  
That's a really good question. And one I actually like to talk a lot about. So let's say that Abby was trying to donate to the SPCA of stood, you say South Florida. Yeah. And she noticed that it wasn't.

1:01:10  
It wasn't match eligible. It wasn't on that company list. She could approach the SPCA, you kind of let's say she tells the SPCA, that you want to leverage your donor connections and use that engaged employee as a segue into the company or kind of a door opener to initiate those conversations with the company. I think something that we're seeing a lot is that these matching gift programs, the CSR initiatives and corporate philanthropy are a way for companies to attract and retain employees. And so they want to support causes that their employees care about. And so if an employee comes to them and say, Hey, I really want to give to this organization, and I want the match program to extend there, they might be really receptive to that. So that's one way you could do it. If that doesn't work, you know, you can also make the business case as a nonprofit, and tell the company why they should do this, kind of show them what partnering with your organization are matching to your organization, what problem that could solve for them, how it could help them advance. And so I think those are kind of two ways to go about that. In terms of stewarding relationship with corporations, I always suggest you do that. I know I talked briefly about employment trends before. If you do notice that a lot of your donors, maybe work for the same company, use this as a way to nurture the relationship with the company, see what else you too can partner with together to drive that joint value. It's all about joint value.

1:02:21  
I love that. And I will say shameless plug I when I send emails to all of you with links to this presentation and everything. It also includes a link to an ebook that double the donation did for us that talks about, among other things, how to steward a relationship with a corporate donor, that link is in that email, you'll get it anyway. So if you're interested in learning more about that, check out that ebook. It can it's got some really helpful information. Yeah, I know we're at time, but someone asked a fascinating question that I've never heard before. And so I'm gonna ask anyway,

1:02:55  
Andrea asked if there is a way to identify corporations that maybe do volunteer grants or matching gifts as a perk for their retirees. So one, is that a thing? And two, is there a way to identify those organizations?

1:03:08  
Yeah, the easiest answer, of course, you can do the manual research and stuff. But double the donations matching gift database is actually a matching gift and volunteer grant database. And so we have all of that information in there about what companies offer matching gifts, kind of what programs if they offer volunteer grant programs, and then who those programs apply to. So I think using a database to help is definitely kind of important and can help simplify the process for you and not make it a huge investment of time. Perfect. Yeah. Yeah. I've never thought about any of those opportunities, like for retired people, so they know, when so many opportunities that can really easily fall through the cracks, which is why hopefully, some of these strategies helped.

1:03:51  
Good. Well, um, there are still some questions we weren't able to get to. But we are at time, and I want to be respectful of everyone's very intense schedule that I know comes with being a fundraiser. So that said, do keep an eye out for the email that you're gonna get tomorrow morning. It'll include a link to the session, it'll show Mackenzie slides, there are some other resources in there that might help you put some of these best practices into practice. And then I highly recommend either opting into getting additional information from McKenzie and her team after the webinar, or at least going and checking out their blog. Their blog is a wealth of information. I check it all the time to learn more about some of these topics. So honestly, like do go check it out. There's a lot to learn. This is a very complex topic. And you can find any answer to any question you have on their blog. So check them out. Other than that, everyone, thank you so much for being here. I know you work really hard at your job and that dedicating an hour to learning about anything can be really difficult. So thank you for being here. We appreciate all the work that you do. And thank you Mackenzie for being here.

1:05:00  
and sharing all this information with us. We really appreciate it. Thank you for letting us come speak today. If anyone wants to reach out to me, the email is on the screen there. Perfect. Alright everyone, I hope you have a beautiful Wednesday and keep an eye out for the session recording tomorrow morning. We will talk to you then. Bye bye

Transcribed by https://otter.ai