Transcript

 

 

Trent:

Welcome to How We Run, a podcast where we examine how nonprofits become successful. I’m Trent Stamp, CEO of the Eisner Foundation.

Julie:

And I’m Julie Lacouture, Founder of Good Ways Inc. Our guest on this episode is Roger Castle, the Chief Development Officer at the LA Regional Food Bank. Roger shares his strategy and tactics for retaining pandemic donors.

Trent:

So one of the things that we’ve seen over and over again in philanthropy and in charity responses is that people give in times of trouble. Americans have big hearts. When something bad happens, they pick up their checkbooks or their credit card, and they make a gift to those that they see on TV, to that need, we saw it with Hurricane Katrina, we saw it with 911, and we saw it again, obviously, with this pandemic, which is people want to help those who are less fortunate. They make that gift based on the need that they see in front of them.

Trent:

So I’m just obsessed with disaster giving. And unfortunately, I think COVID 19 falls into that disaster giving, and people making decisions to give to people causes issues that they had not historically given to. And so, I’m just curious as to what it means for an organization like the LA Food Bank, who obviously saw a rise in donations when COVID happened. And we saw so many people at risk and in danger. And what does it mean for not only their donors moving forward, but for people who historically had given to other organizations that were not impacted as much by COVID?

Julie:

Did you see in New York the lawyers group that suggested that since no one had to go buy coffee from Starbucks anymore, that they should all donate the price of their coffee every day? But this lawyers group raised something like a hundred thousand dollars through people donating the cost of coffees.

Trent:

I had not seen that. I’m sure that Starbucks would like them to donate it to them.

Julie:

What’s hard as an organization, how do you capture that lightning in a bottle and get them as excited again? How do you keep them as a donor when they gave because they were feeling so much emotion and I want to help, and I’ve got to do something. Can you recapture them?

Trent:

That’s the $64 million question for development people everywhere. I know that you talk to Roger Castle at the LA Regional Food Bank. And I’m just curious now that to some extent, the crisis has waned a little bit, at least in terms of the feeling that we have to give our money away right now, but yet Roger represents such a great cause moving forward. And there are so many food insecure people in this county and in its country, what kind of strategies will he utilize to maintain those givers and to get them to continue to support the food bank because tragically, we know that those that are food insecure, it’s not going to go away next week. What were Roger’s thoughts on how he was going to keep his donors?

Julie:

What’s really interesting in talking to Roger is that he actually has a pretty lean staff over there at the LA Regional Food Bank. He mentioned he has three people that work in marketing. And I think one of them is brand new. But in talking to him, it comes down to three things, content, technology, and timing. Content, I would say, is his biggest push, which is that he’s always going out and finding stories. The job in retention is thank the donors and then get that content in front of them.

Trent:

When you do something pressing and life-sustaining as feeding people who are vulnerable and hungry, and there’s nothing sadder in this country than when we have able-bodied people who don’t have food in front of them, it’s just an abdication of our responsibility as a society. But I would think that on the inside, looking out while you want to tell people constantly about how bad that need is and how you need, you take the chance with your donors of them getting turned off in some way, either because the ask is constant or because even though you gave X number of dollars, there are still people hungry again tomorrow. And I’m just wondering if he had thoughts on how to best sustain that giver, keep them fulfilled, keep them coming back without burning them out, and recognizing that there’s an inherent utility in this process.

Julie:

I think what’s important to understand is that the content they’re putting out are not all asks. So they’re telling stories, and a lot of them are success stories. And a lot of them are stories about innovation and different things the organization is doing. And some of their content is the Zoom meeting and hear from the CEO. So I think the key in not burning out donors is that all of that content, all of that messaging, not all of them are asks. It’s a small percentage that are. And what you see when you do it that way is that the donors feel part of the team and they feel part of the organization so that when there is an ask, they’re ready.

Julie:

What was really interesting that he mentioned is they decided not to use an outside agency for communications anymore. They pulled it all internal so that they could be very fast and ready for the sort circumstances. Yeah, it was a cool conversation. They’re doing a lot over there.

Trent:

That’s great. I wish more organizations would try to do as much inhouse as they could possibly do, especially when you’re an organization of the size and stature of something like the LA Regional Food Bank because they know what their needs are, and they should prior those people and get them inhouse.

Julie:

All right. Let’s hear from Roger.

Roger:

Hi, I’m Roger Castle. I’m the Chief Development Officer of the Los Angeles Regional Food Bank.

Julie:

Why don’t you tell us a little bit about the LA Regional Food Bank?

Roger:

The Los Angeles Regional Food Bank is really the largest food resource for food-insecure people in Los Angeles County. Even before the pandemic, the need was great. One in five people in LA County was deemed food insecure, meaning at some point in the month, they don’t know where their next meal is coming from. And so, the Food Bank has been around for 48 years and distribute over 1.7 billion pounds of food since inception. And last year, we provided 145 million meals worth of food to the community.

Julie:

Can you describe your team?

Roger:

Yeah, I am the Chief Development Officer, so that means I’m in charge of the fundraising for the Food Bank, but also the marketing. Sometimes that role is a different person, but I chose the role of the Food Bank so I could be in charge of both fundraising and marketing so I can make sure both of those goals were aligned. Sometimes marketing and fundraising compete for resources. But the team at the LA Regional Food Bank is really a team, and they cooperate and have shared goals. And we found it to be really successful.

Roger:

We have 16 people in development and marketing. So some people will say, “Wow, the LA Regional Food Bank must have a huge marketing team.” But when we go to conferences and see other food banks, they’re like, “How can you get so many blog posts done?” I’m like, “Well, we only have three people in marketing and we just hired the third one last month.” So we definitely have a great team, very ambitious. We want to be a successful fundraising food bank in the country. And so, we’re really committed to the mission of feeding people. And the way to really increase that number is to increase your fundraising.

Julie:

For folks that might not be familiar with the nuances between fundraising and marketing, can you tell me how those exist separately?

Roger:

Fundraising is around the acquisition of dollars, and most times, marketing’s thought of as getting eyeballs on your cause. So at other nonprofits, I’ve been at people have done big awareness campaigns, and sometimes you can’t really see the benefit of those campaigns in marketing. Although we all know instinctually, they’re good. So our marketing is now really helping our annual giving team to acquire new people through digital strategies which we’ve invested heavily in, which is a lot cheaper than doing it in the mail, which those acquisition methods are actually waning over the years, we’ve seen them continue to decline. So we put a big investment in digital. So our annual giving director and our marketing director work very well together to actually acquire new people that we can go out and fundraise. And then he brings them into the Food Bank, our annual giving director. She stewards them and puts them in the pipeline.

Roger:

Then we have those structures, the prospect management tracking system to move people around the system, whether it be to a major donor, a mid major donor, a monthly donor. The way that we work so well as a team together is we know that if one person’s successful the whole team’s is.

Julie:

It sounds like maybe the way you are set up differently than other nonprofits is that you’re not segmenting by like annual fund and major donors. You’re treating it as a whole donor journey from marketing being awareness and acquisition to the team, kind of taking it from there.

Roger:

That’s fair. I mean, we do have our revenue streams segmented. We have people with goals for different departments, but being the leader of the department, I preach all the time that we’re there as a team, and we’re there to help people out. So at some other organizations that I’ve then had, people will fight for credit for a gift. “Oh no, it’s coming through an event. No, it’s a major- donor.”

Julie:

I’ve never heard of that happening. (laughter)

Roger:

Yes. And then, “Oh, can we take one third credit?” I’ve heard that before as well. And that makes the accounting people go nuts to keep track of that. But yeah, we have those different fundraising streams. We have people assigned to those, but the culture of our team is that if the one person’s successful, the whole team successful, I’ve seen other organizations that I’ve actually come in contact with – their event people hold their event donors so closely. Those people are your best prospects for major gifts. And so, if you don’t see the big picture in these things, you can really shoot yourself in a foot and hamstring your fundraising.

Julie:

So what you’re talking about is organizations that might treat event attendees just as event attendees?

Roger:

Correct.

Julie:

And assume that they only want to be invited to events?

Roger:

Correct. And you know that’s the best easiest way to get someone to be aware of your organization as an event. So events don’t typically raise a lot of money in net revenue. They’re very expensive to run other net revenues, 50, 60%. And that’s a great event that you spend all this time with all your staff stewarding the campaign committee or the dinner committee, but really the need to get more people attracted to your mission. I’ve been at events, and everybody wants everybody’s name at every table, but it’s not going to happen. People bring their friends. They don’t want to give up all their contact information. But if you can get a few of those people and put them in the pipeline and get them back to an individual fundraiser who can steward them properly, cultivate them for a big gift, maybe a $10,000 table donor is going to be a million-dollar donor down the line. Maybe they’ll be the honoree of the next event.

Julie:

I think you’re right. When people give, sometimes we don’t pay attention to people until they’ve given a donation, but you have to pay attention when people have given their time. And in a city like LA, it’s sometimes a little harder to give time than it is to give a donation.

Roger:

That’s true. The lucky thing about the Food Bank is it is one of the best volunteer ops in your community. So in LA County or any other county, you’re in America, it’s a really easy volunteer experience. A lot of the times, it’s someone that comes in once a year for three hours and sorts food. Some people come back every week. Some people go to the mobile food pantries and help distribute. Before the pandemic, we had over 30,000 volunteers each year. And it’s a great pipeline for us. I mean, we also have our volunteer board of directors and volunteer committees, but we put them in the pipeline, and a lot of them don’t give. People think, “Oh, you have 30,000 volunteers, or you have 30,000 donors.” No, it’s about the same as any acquisition method. About 2% of them give. The rest, “I gave you my time.”

Roger:

But it’s a long life. And with digital retargeting, we have their email addresses. We can continue to steward them through email, and then hopefully, down the road, they’ll become donors. And then into the pipeline, annual giving up to major gifts.

Julie:

You mentioned when you were talking about your team doing a ton of blog posts with maybe three marketing members. So it sounds like the name of the game for you is a lot of activity with not a lot of people. So what makes your team run well? What are you doing differently or better?

Roger:

I think we’ve done a lot of things and really paid off during the pandemic because, pre-pandemic, we put a lot of strategy in place. The first thing, when I got to the Food Bank, there was some turnover, and a couple other people left. My biggest thing was to hire the right people. So at the Food Bank, I made sure I hired the right people. The first two people I hired was a database manager and our annual giving director. And that really paid off. I started as a gift processor. So I really believe in really good clean data.

Roger:

The best litmus test of a good organization is how quickly they get their acknowledgment letter out. And so that really relies on a good database person. So I think I got the right human capital, and it’s not only quantity, it’s quality, and they are very productive. I might see another team of 16 that wouldn’t do half of what my team does. Of course, I’m very biased and very proud of them, but they have done an excellent job, really stepped up during the pandemic, but also thought about things strategically.

Roger:

During this time, we brought our direct mail and digital advertising in-house. So we went away from an agency. We pulled it in-house. So our appeals look like us. We have fully integrated campaigns. Our emails look like our direct mail pieces. And our annual giving director did an excellent job of bringing that in-house at a huge cost savings. And we’ve seen great dividends. One of the anecdotes is that during the pandemic, we heard some other people with agencies. It took them three months to get out COVID-specific appeal. It took us two weeks. And so it was in home within two weeks with an accompanying email blast.

Julie:

Awesome. So let’s talk about that because I think content is really important in fundraising, but timing might be a little bit more important. Is that what you found?

Roger:

So, I believe in both. They say good luck is when preparation meets opportunity. And that’s really what happened with the pandemic. We already had increased our fundraising over the past four years, about 35%. During the pandemic, of course, with all the awareness from the emergency drive-through distributions, we acquired more donors than we acquired in the last eight years. So, our strategy is content. So we try to capitalize on great stories, impact stories, and then also getting that free media, which we did well before the pandemic. People think about food banks during the end of the year. So we were on local news. There’s a couple local grocery stores that have campaigns, and we’re in LA. So we got some good celebrities to come in and volunteer, but then we can repurpose this content. We repurpose it in our annual giving appeals. We repurpose it in our emails. We have e-newsletters, social media. Content is also a way to show your impact and really steward the donors that you do have.

Julie:

I’m hearing three things from you about what makes your team run really well, which is that you produce a lot of content. You are fast to get it out because you have stuff in-house, but you also repurpose it. So let’s talk about how you get those things done. How do you get so much content?

Roger:

Well, we do lots of content gathering, and other people will say, “Well, how do you get stories about people getting food?” Well, we go to distributions. It’s not easy. You have to walk up to people and ask them to tell their story about being food insecure, which a lot of people don’t. You get a lot of interviews to don’t work out. So it’s really rolling up your sleeves and going to these distributions and getting stories.

Roger:

But we also do donor stories. We also do volunteer spotlights. We also do nutrition stories. So we have lots of things, and we just are very nimble about getting these things out. One of the things one of my teammates said the other day was the team was a little spoiled because we got approval through so quickly. And so, I don’t want to be a block in the process for the content. And so, I respond pretty quickly to whatever they want to approve.

Roger:

I’ve seen other organizations where one direct mail letter at the end of the year takes four months because you have nine people that have to weigh in on it. And so being nimble and responsive, and I’ve killed stories before. They come to me, and I’d like, “This is not in the food bank vein.” But I get to them the no quickly so they can move on to something else. And so, I think that’s really one of the great ways that we keep the process moving.

Roger:

The other thing I’ll say is things are cheaper nowadays. We have lots of videos. We probably do five or six a month, but we have a camera that’s maybe $5,000, and we use premiere editing software, but you can do these on your phone. And even the other day, our marketing managers, she was like, “I don’t need the camera. I got my phone.” And nowadays, that’s good enough for, especially if you’re just doing social media videos or YouTube videos and not doing it for broadcast.

Julie:

What I’m hearing is your team is proactive about getting the story. You’re not waiting for stories to be told to the development and marketing team. You’re going out and getting those stories. You’re walking up to people and asking questions.

Roger:

That is correct. And story’s not going to fall in your lap. That’s the biggest thing for people that ask us, “How do you get that?” “Well, you go out, you knock on windows of cars at the emergency drive-through distribution, and you get a knock on 50 of them. You can’t just knock on one and get the story you want.”

Julie:

In 2020 and in 2021, we’ve seen the national news, and everything united us all. And it feels like everybody’s pointed in one direction where it’s very clear how important safety net programs are like food banks. We know that your services are needed more than ever. Did the donors step up for you in 2020?

Roger:

Yes. The biggest silver lining to the pandemic was to see all the community that had the means step up, and they stepped up greatly. We went from about 16,000 donors to over 80,000 donors in 2021. And so people did care. They saw us feeding people, people that had never needed food assistance before. And they stepped up. And I tell the story that when I first got to the Food Bank, there was an executive. And he said, “I was food insecure as a kid, and I wondered out there. When I went to bed at night, did anybody else care that I was going to bed hungry?” And I can tell him, “Yes, they do care.” And they really stepped up during the pandemic to help those that just didn’t have anything.

Julie:

With 16,000 donors previously and then 80,000 at the end of the year, a lot of those people are new to you. How many are you expecting to come back to you and to give again?

Roger:

So I’ve read retention rates over 50% year over year are pretty good. Last year before the pandemic from 2019 to 2020, we retained 60% of our donors. And so that was pretty good. Part of it is we went away from that turn and burn direct mail strategy of acquiring lots of small donors offline. But the other thing that we did really well is start to really steward our donors, send them impact reports, send them these stories that we produce. A story that you put on social media, it can be put into an impact report and mailed to a donor. So that’s another example of repurposing.

Roger:

So we’re being conservative. I hope we retain about 50% of the donors. We’re thinking about strategies right now. I saw our annual giving manager was running lists of people who had given in April and May of last year but not given again this year. So we’re targeting them with digital. We’re targeting them with email, and we’re going to do a special appeal to them and say, “Hey, food insecurity just didn’t go away. Can you please come back?” But we’ll have some attrition. So we’re just trying to be smart about it. And hopefully, by the end of the year, they’ll have heard of the impact of the Food Bank and what their donation did, and how many people they helped. And so they’ll give again.

Julie:

I know a lot of the people that listen to this podcast might have gotten an influx of new donors last year. And it might be their first time getting an influx of new donors. What are some of the things that you all do tactically to steward donors? How do you make them feel like their gift mattered, they’re needed again, and they’re part of your team?

Roger:

First thing, as I mentioned before, I get them a thank you immediately as soon as you can get it to them. Secondly, we send stewardship reports. Obviously, you can’t mail everybody, but we segment our donors. The higher-end donors get an impact report at the very beginning of the year. And then the annual reports going out soon. And then, with the other donors, we tell really good stories in our e-newsletter that everybody gets. And then throughout the year, we do send appeals.

Roger:

For our major donors, I always say it’s about the organic touches. Someone wants to tell me, “Oh, you have to program every quarter to send them something.” I’m like, “No, it’s got to be organic.” So recently, we had an LA Times Article, they came and did an interview, and it was… The food insecurity is not over just because the pandemic is.

Roger:

It was a great third-party article from the LA Times that we put out in e-newsletter. But we also repurpose that content to send us some major donors and say, “Hey, did you see this article? I thought you might find it of interest. Would you like to come out for a tour?”

Roger:

The other thing we did and we still do is communicate, communicate, communicate. We send lots of email updates. We provide our CEO for virtual updates and tours. Every month we do a virtual update, and I walk around with an iPad and show people the facility that used to be an in-person lunch and tour. But now, I mean, we’ve seen such success to these that we’re going to continue to do them. We do a webinar. So, we can accommodate lots of people, but then for major donors, we’ll do Zoom calls that they can actually interact with the CEO face-to-face. I give credit to my CEO, and if their CEO’s out there, make yourself available. He made himself available for all these donor updates, all donor calls, and all these media requests. And it really paid off for us.

Julie:

You said, reaching out organically. So the example of that LA Times Article, it did not come out when you had a scheduled quarterly newsletter. And I think that’s a really important point of using stuff as it comes in and when it’s timely.

Roger:

Yes. And then the amount being before.

Julie:

Yeah. Not being held to a calendar you made 16 months ago.

Roger:

Exactly. And that’s nimbleness, and that’s what you were saying before timing. I like to learn from things that I make mistakes on, and I like to fail at something. It’s not scary. I have this joke in the office, and now that they’re not in the office, they tell me that I don’t walk in with my bad idea of the day. So I come in with a crazy idea now and then, and I’ve had some that have gone well, and I’ve some… I did this shelf life guide that I thought would be a great acquisition tool for lead generation. So people would call in and get a shelf life guide. And it is not resulted in any revenue.

Julie:

Oh, I love of that idea. Wait, so this was you. What was the idea as you pitched those that had that-

Roger:

A shelf life guide. So a can of beans isn’t bad once as the expiration goes. So for our volunteers, we have this guide that shows them they can put it in the bin if it’s still good. And so I thought, “Well, let’s repurpose this for donors. They want to stop food waste. And so let’s put it our website, have a shelf life guide. We produce this nice brochure.” And I thought, “We’ll get all these people searching for shelf life guide, they’ll sign up for it. We’ll get their email. We’ll retarget them. We’ll convert them to donors. It’s a no brainer.”

Julie:

And it was like, “Enter your email and you can download this guide and you had a bunch of people do it.” And then?

Roger:

No one gave.

Julie:

They were purely interested in the shelf life guide.

Roger:

Yes. (laughter) The biggest example that I learned from, and it was… So during the federal shutdown of a couple years ago, there’s all this messaging government workers were going without paychecks. And so, the need for them to get food was greater. And I came up with this with my marketing director. We came up with the strategy. We’re going to add a little bit of advertising to the digital marketing budget for messaging around the federal shutdown. It was a February. It’s not a great fundraising month in normal times. We raised like $125,000 more year over year. And I was like, “Whoa, I am so smart.” I just patted myself on the back. I was like, “Oh,” telling my philanthropy committee, how great and smart I was. So I go to a conference, and I see the CEO of one of the other food banks, and I’m telling him about this. And he’s like, “Oh yeah, well, we went all in and we raised an extra 3 million. We actually even put a food pantry in the airport.”

Roger:

So I thought to myself, “Okay, well, he went all in.” And so, when the pandemic hit, we immediately started spending our year-end budget for digital advertising. And, of course, it paid off. Our ROI was 22:1 at one point. And we could have waited and said, “Oh, well, the pandemic might be over in a couple weeks and we won’t want to capitalize on it.” But that was something I learned from a previous mistake. And that’s why I say you always learn from things in the past. You don’t have to do them the same way.

Julie:

It sounds like what you did, I mean, you got to a question I was about to ask, which is what did you do to adapt to the changing environment? But I think what you did there, and correct me if I’m wrong, is you identified the changing environment was an opportunity to connect with people, invested in it, and yielded great results for your organization. Is that fair?

Roger:

That is fair. And part of that was also just communicating. Some of our informational e-blast about the coronavirus were open rates of 40%, which is unheard of. And people wanted to know what was happening. And we put up an emergency page standard crisis management is to put up web page LAfoodbank.org/coronavirus. And that was one of the biggest lead generations to our website. And so, I think we did go all-in immediately and took advantage of the timing of the pandemic.

Julie:

I see it less as taking advantage of it than making yourself relevant, where you clearly were, and tapping into the thing that people really wanted to do. And that always gives me great hope because, in times of great need, people really do want to do something. And it’s our job at nonprofits to make sure that they know that that something is right there for them. And well done.

Roger:

Yeah, that’s a great point. But the other thing that I always talk about in staff meetings, when I present my fundraising update to the whole staff, even the all staff, even the warehouse guys, and the truck drivers, is everybody’s a part of fundraising. And so whatever their impression is on someone taking a tour, whatever, we can do to make sure a celebrity gets their photo op. So it adds to our own marketing, our own earn media. So they’re all part of it. And they all part of the mission. But the biggest thing is they went out, and they fed people. They went to parking lots and set up food distributions, and the media covered it. And if it wasn’t for their work, the fundraising wouldn’t have happened.

Roger:

So they’re all a part of fundraising. They’re part of the success. I don’t want to glaze over their efforts, and the front lines of the fight against hunger really, really paid off and showed everybody what food banks were all about. And reminded them in a disaster, we didn’t think it would be a pandemic. We always thought it would be an earthquake in LA. And then we would be feeding people that just got disrupted supply chain, but we were there when people are needed. And don’t forget about your local food bank, because they’re going to be there when you have a hurricane or an earthquake, or a pandemic.

Julie:

How is your messaging going to change for year end this year? I’ve heard from some people. They think there’s some COVID fatigue. I heard from other people, they think there’s some giving fatigue. What are you seeing? And how does this change things for you this year?

Roger:

We’re seeing a little bit of a lull like everybody else is seeing. There is some nervousness. It always happens in the summertime if you’re in development. I remember years ago, I was the VP of Development at the Prostate Cancer Foundation. And I was worried about some big gifts coming in at the end of the year. And my brother was like, “Well, maybe you should get out of this line of work because you’re always going to be waiting for those gifts to come in at the end of the year.”

Julie:

I was just going to say fundraisers can always find something to worry about. That sounds totally right to me.

Roger:

But I always tell my team, “Do the work now, all the work we’re doing now is really going to pave the way for year end success.” So yes, we are worried that some of the people will go on to a different charity, but there lots of great nonprofits, people have different changing tastes. And the other thing, it’s a long life. You’ve acquired them. They know about you. You never know when someone has some money to give away. We had a… I actually had a corporation call. They said, “I need to give money out by July 31st.” And so we have one day to get a proposal to them and then get back to us. So we definitely-

Julie:

Love the end of the fiscal year.

Roger:

I know! You got to love it. And that’s the other thing that I’ll say as a little bit of advice is be responsive. I think one of the things we did great during the pandemic is the entire team responded to donors calling in. Media requests we responded too. That’s another secret of media. If you get the story they want, they’ll come back. And we you’ve seen that time and time again is that they get a great story from us. And then, oh, three months later, they need another story. They call us and see what we want to pitch to them. And so same thing with donors being responsive. I mean, even as getting them our status update and our wiring instructions immediately responding to that phone call, answering the phone call.

Julie:

I would love your advice for somebody that might be listen in this and saying, “Yeah, that’s great if you get phone calls from people,” or, “If people know who you are,” or, “If people know your organization.” What’s a tip for someone that might not be in the place where they’re receiving calls?

Roger:

Yeah. So one of the things that I hear at conferences a lot is, “We have no prospects. We have no prospects.” But you do. You have your current donor base as your prospects. And so steward them and show them their impact, and you will retain them. And you’ll get people that will start giving you more. I can tell countless stories of an annual giving donor giving a thousand, and I just kept stewarding them and stewarding them. And four years later, it’s a hundred thousand dollar gift. And you never know when someone’s going to come into some money, a woman me last year or two years ago and said, “Hey, I’ve got a significant gift to give you. I’ve been giving for years, but I have to give this money out. And it was $600,000.” I will say if I was new to nonprofits or at a smaller nonprofit, investing in digital is great.

Roger:

The direct marketing companies will always talk about lifetime value of a donor. You’re going to get your money back after five or six years. With digital marketing, you can put ads on Google at Facebook. And I was doing them before. We had a full team in a place. So if I could do it, everybody can do it. Set up these simple ads, and you can acquire new donors, and you can pay for how much you want. So if you have $500, you can try to acquire 30 donors. And so consistently building that slowly over time and build your donor base, but make sure you do both. You retain, and you acquire the old model was just acquire a bunch of people through direct mail, and then let half of them go, or three-quarters of them go next year.

Roger:

Really focus on stewarding your current donors. Because the trend before the pandemic was, you’re going to get larger donations from a smaller number of people. They give you 100 different charities. They get $50 to each of them. But now younger philanthropists are starting to say, “Okay, these are my top three. I’m going to give a more significant gift to make a bigger impact.” And the more that you can show your nonprofits impact, the better you’re going to be.”

Julie:

When you’re talking about digital lead generation, what kind of ask are you making, or what kind of messaging are you putting out in the digital ad to get someone to come in as a donor?

Roger:

So the beauty of digital is you can test a lot. And so we create different ad sets. And so, during the pandemic, it has been coronavirus response, pandemic response. We’re feeding people. We’ve transitioned to back to school. We’re going to start soon back to school, summer hunger, things like that. But it seems like the coronavirus already is winning that.

Roger:

But we test ads. Is it a kid versus a senior? A girl versus a boy? Is it a happy girl versus a sad girl? And so they’re is a lot of good testing. And the best thing about its data. If you get a report from Google or Facebook, you can see which ad is winning. And we even tried this. We tried to do a segment targeting of our coronavirus. We call it our coronavirus one-time donors, and the ROI dipped under one. So we turned them off, and we went back to the normal ads that we’re doing for everybody and putting our funding into that.

Julie:

Last question for you, Roger. What is the big idea for moving forward, and how will we get there?

Roger:

So, I mean, the big idea is to continue to fund fundraising. And that was one of my things. At the CEO and board level, I would implore you, please don’t ignore fundraising. I know a lot of people come out of the mission. They come from the operation side or the program side, and they want to put every dollar to that. But fundraising is the engine that moves your organization forward. Because we raised 77 million last year, we were able to reach 900,000 people each month. While before the pandemic, we were only reaching 300,000 people.

Roger:

So if you think about it, that is a significant increase because of the fundraising. And I’ve even heard anecdotes from other people, this one other food bank. They got a 3 million estate gift. This is several years ago, she said, and they spent all of it on programs. And at the end, they’re like, “Well, how can we sustain this program? We don’t have money left.” I mean, it’s an estate gift, right? So you’re not going to get a repeat gift. And so, I would say implore the board and the CEOs out there and incrementally improve.

Roger:

I didn’t come in overnight and change all the structure of the fundraising of the Food Bank. We didn’t go out like a big university and hire 20 fundraisers. We hired a couple people a year. It may not be a major gift officer. It may be a database person. I know one of our small nonprofits that we give food to – the Executive Director enters the gifts. Think about how much more she could do if you hired a lower-level person out of school to enter the gifts. And so that would free her up to do more individual fundraising and fund more fundraising.

Roger:

So I would say fundraising, we’re in the middle of 165 million campaign to acquire a new food bank and renovate it. We actually acquired it last year, but we started in 2019. Quietly, did a lot of work around it. We’re pretty successful before the pandemic and the pandemic as just forward. So that’s the big idea. But what’s really going to make it successful is the team that’s in place. And I just can’t reiterate human capital is the most important thing. You have to give them the tools to succeed. We’ve invested in technology, we’ve invested in training, but it’s really their output that moves the organization forward.

Julie:

That’s great. I will note: I think that the technology you’ve invested in is nothing super, super fancy, though. Even the stories you’re telling me, you’re not using something that’s outside of the grasp of most organizations. It sounds like email and ads and then stories.

Roger:

Yeah. All of that stuff is fairly inexpensive. The basic thing that I would tell smaller nonprofits or newer nonprofits is invest in a CRM. You can buy really expensive ones, but you can also get some that are just web-based, but you need a place to keep track of your donors for your pipeline, for your emails, for your email list, for your digital ad list. And so, investing in those simple technologies, it’s not that expensive, and most nonprofits can afford them.

Julie:

Get it out of the spreadsheet, right?

Roger:

Yes. Get it out as shadow database. That’s a bad word.

Julie:

Excellent. Well, thank you so much. I learned so much from you. So thank you so much for the conversation and for being here.