Your Event is Just the Beginning: Turn Moments into Movement

Transcript Recording:

Leya Simmons (00:01)
Hello. Welcome to today's 501c Drop. I'm Leya Simmons and I am the CEO and co-founder of Better Unite. Welcome to everybody who is joining me live, also to my friends who are watching a recording of this, as well as what is new for us, those that are joining us via podcast. If you haven't checked out our podcast, it is live on Spotify under 501c drop, go search.

And you can listen to all of this incredible information at any time. I am so happy to have you here today. And today it is just me. I let me stop my share for those watching. I am going to talk to you about something that I actually presented on, ⁓ I guess now it's been two or three weeks at the Virtuous Conference, the Virtuous Responsive Conference. I think I'm getting some of that wrong. Maybe it's Summit. Anyway, I spoke

uncharacteristically about a very analog piece of the event lifecycle and one that I think that a lot of nonprofits frankly are just completely missing or overlooking and not because they don't want to do these things. Lit usually it's a lack of perceived bandwidth. So I want to talk to you all about how to, as the slide said, consider your events as the beginning

Of a cultivation campaign. So I said turning moments into movement, that sounds lovely and great. And okay, Sherlia, but how do we functionally accomplish this? The thesis of this particular episode is a really simple one. Your event data and your donor record should live in the same place. It seems like a very simple thing, yet most systems are not really built to honor that. So you know.

The the data, the information that you gain, that you acquire from your event, it should tell a single story that lines up, matches, and is either imported into or lives natively within your CRM. So that is why we built Better Unite alongside our enterprise event and auction tools. We also built a very, very rich CRM and moves management tool. We also, though,

Integrate with best of breed enterprise CRMs like Salesforce, BlackBod, Virtuous, ⁓ Tessatura, and Microsoft Dynamics. But so just rest assured, none of this is a sales pitch. Stay with me here. I want to be clear about that. If you want to know more about BetterUnite, you're not currently a BetterUnite user or ⁓ or friend.

Then I will show you ways to get in touch with us at the end of this presentation. It will be appended to all of the notes that you'll see on either Spotify or YouTube. So you can get in touch with us and we can show you all of these things, the way that technology can support what I'm talking about today. I would love that. But that is not what we're going to do today. So your event is just the beginning. Sounds like a wonderful phrase. It sounds very inspiring. Hopefully, it got all of you here today.

but I want to tell you or describe to you really a lot more about what I mean by that. My thesis is that I believe most events in the US, and I'll speak primarily to the US, that's where I'm based, where Better Unite is based, and where the events that I have attended have occurred, I believe that they are designed and built wrong. ⁓ they're not run wrong, they're not executed.

improperly or or unwell. As a matter of fact, most of you all listening are incredible event throwers and event fundraisers. You run the events extraordinarily well. But I mean to say that they are designed wrong, that the logic underneath them is flawed, maybe broken. And I think if a lot of us are really honest with ourselves, we we kind of know that, right? The

you know, the morning after the gala, it's exciting and maybe you even raised a lot of money, but but you know, the the the rush of planning is over, all of the volunteers have gone home, and you're you're left with that feeling that I I know very well myself, which is did this do what we wanted it to do? I spent so let me give you a little bit about me. For those of you if you've listened, you likely know a lot of this.

but if you don't, I I I spent more than a decade in development before I built Better Unite. I've run capital campaigns, I have run events with teeny tiny budgets that made me sweat. I have run events that I stepped into with gigantic budgets and ⁓ movie stars who came to be keynote speakers. I have begged board members to attend an event, much less promote an event that they really don't want to have spent.

attend despite the fact that they demanded that the event occur and it's an organization and a mission that they care passionately about. I've I've sat where you sit, as I say a lot of times. But I'm and I'm gonna be a little I'm gonna let me share a secret about myself with you all. I love fundraising events, despite the snark that I just displayed, despite the way that I describe them, despite the fact that I have I know for sure that I have attended well over a thousand

Nonprofit fundraising events in my lifetime, in my personal visual, memory field, I really love them. I love the the organizing and the coming together of a group of people around a central mission to support a common cause as a collective. I I have chill bumps saying those words out loud right now. I really think.

That nonprofit fundraising events are just magic. And I know that I'm probably in the minority in that. I know that, ⁓ you know, there are a lot of folks out there, a lot of people like you, development directors, executive directors, board members, nonprofit consultants, even sometimes event planners, who are just really like, is the event necessary? Is it ever worth it? And I'm here to say that I really do.

in my core believe that they are this incredibly magical moment. And right now I sit in several seats at once. I still serve on several nonprofit boards. I talk to development directors and executive directors literally every day from our customer base. And I also work with technologists whose single focus in day in and day out is to create the very best technology to support these kinds of events.

And then I also have data from thousands and thousands of events happening across the country and frankly in several different countries that I can ⁓ look at and dissect at any time. And actually, that is a little bit of a teaser for next week's webinar that I will talk to you about at the end of this webinar. All right, so that's me, and that's how I come to talk to you today. The single sentence, however, that I really want you to remember.

From today's talk, if you don't remember anything else, I always ask this question at the end of all of my podcast webinars where I say, you know, what is the one thing that I want you to remember? I want you all to remember this single sentence. You can steal it from me, use it at your next board meeting, at your next committee meeting. Remember it. Your event is not a campaign, it is a cultivation event. So insert.

Gala, walk-a-thon, golf tournament, whatever it is, skeet shoot, whatever it is that you're doing as that event. And I'll talk about gala kind of as a microcosm for all of those different events, even peer-to-peer campaigns. They need to we need to kind of shift the way that we think about these from an event that has a beginning and a middle and a finite end with a thermometer and a drop dead time at midnight, an auction closing, a checkout that's over.

We need to stop considering them as finite and begin to think of them as a launching pad. And you know, many of you listening today are sophisticated fundraisers. You you know what cultivation means. You know the work that that occurs between the from a gift officer's perspective, between a donor's first introduction, that spark of interest, through to

A final commitment, an investment. So here's my question. If cultivation is what gift officers do every day with their portfolios and a ballroom on the night of your gala, it includes and houses 300, 500, even a thousand of your most ardent, engaged, and generous supporters or warmest prospects that you could possibly pull together, or that you will see in the entire year, all together on a single night.

Then why do we treat that night like it's the end of something? We're treating it like a campaign where it's, like I said, finite, time-bound, but functionally, it is the single largest, most expensive, and I hope, most intentional cultivation moment that your organization is going to see all year. So the reason that this matters, let me try and describe it to you in dollars. This is like it's back of the math, back of the napkin math.

For let's again using as an example a $500,000 gala. And the numbers that I'm gonna say you can very much disagree with, they're going to vary wildly by region, by time of year, by by all of these things, but the proportions that I'm talking about are universal. There's the hard costs, we all know this: venue, food, alcohol, beverage, AV, decor, entertainment, talent, ⁓ auction software, all of that, everything all told. We're looking at and again.

Back of the napkin math, depending on where you are, $50,000 to $100,000. Some of you I know are spending far, far more than that. I know that's a very conservative number for you, some of you, and some of you that's a shocking number, and your number's a lot lower. Doesn't matter, stay with me on the proportions. The soft costs for that, again, in this example, Gala, are incalculable. There's nine to twelve months to 24 months of your staff time, hundreds of hours.

hundreds of hours of your board time, effort, talent, and treasure a lot of the time. I know that the donors, the board members sometimes are ponying up for particular parts outside of a typical sponsorship. Then you also have sponsorship and sponsor cultivation, and typically that's gonna start honestly even years before, but almost certainly a full year before the event. Your volunteer coordinator, they're working for six months prior to the event.

Your committee members, who are often also your major supporters and your donors, their hours and hours and hours of commitment, time, and work for your mission and your nonprofit vendor management, the opportunity cost of every other little thing that any one of those people didn't do, particularly your development team, because they were planning a party. Per attendee, you're spending.

Roughly again, somewhere in the neighborhood of 800 to 8, sorry, yep, 800 to $1,000 per attendee, just to put everybody in the room on that single night. So let's call it $800. $800 per donor touched. So I want to put this in comparative value to a number that honestly I know a lot better these days, ⁓ a different benchmark, because I think in the nonprofit sector, we kind of have this habit of

Thinking of or looking at a number like that and feeling like we're spending too much. We feel guilty or bad about a number like that, an $800 to $1,000 per person number. We feel like we're being very extravagant, like a board member is gonna, you know, shame us or ⁓ question it at the next board meeting, put you back on your heels. So I'm gonna put it in context again: the for-profit world, it's something that we use every day. We call it CAC or customer acquisition costs.

It's the amount of money that any company is going to spend to acquire a single customer. And that number for a company, a for-profit company, is going to encapsulate marketing, advertising, ⁓ sales team time, events, swag, free trials, all of it. And we're going to take all of that and then divide that number by the number of new customers that that effort produced. That's CAC.

So for an again, let me use some numbers, and these are very broad numbers and they vary wildly. But for a subscription business, think like your ⁓ Netflix or a maybe like a rental, a clothes rental company, something like that, CAC is going to run about a hundred to three hundred to five hundred dollars per customer. For a B2B software company like a Better Unite, like a a Virtuous, one of those.

We're often in the $1,000 to $1,500 range, frankly, can easily tip upwards of that. For a wealth management firm that is acquiring high net worth clients, that number can run two to three to five thousand dollars per relationship. And these are companies whose entire business model is built around understanding exactly what it is that each customer is worth.

And exactly what they're willing to spend to acquire that customer. So, in comparative numbers, that $800 per donor touched is not extravagant. Actually, it's kind of right in the sweet spot, if not on the low end, for a disciplined, well-run for-profit company when we're comparing a business to a nonprofit in that in that kind of relational way. So if I told you I'm going to give you a budget of $800 per donor.

To spend on cultivating your major gift portfolio this year, you would be so extraordinarily careful with every single word, every single experience that that donor had with you. You would be intentional with every piece. You'd be writing thank you notes by hand. You'd be tracking, you would be tracking every single conversation, and you would be following up very quickly to.

Any outreach to any contact point. You would assign them next steps in your CRM or your moves management tools. That is what $800 per donor cultivation investment typically would look like when you treat it like cultivation. But when we use that same exact dollar amount in the context of events, often we are spending that $800.

on entry into a silent auction, opportunity at a live auction, and the ballroom chicken dinner that we all know so well. Maybe they get an automated, well they should all always get an automated receipt, but they a lot of times are going to get some form of thank you perhaps we even weeks later. So my point is we are spending major gift level resources on every person in the room at the event.

At the starting line, wherever it is on the T on the green. ⁓ I don't know golf very well, but on the green, I know that's the word. And then we're really throwing up our hands and walking away from the relationship the next day. And that is, I think, to me, the central waste in modern event fundraising. And it's not a software problem. It is a worldview problem. As I said, we're we're looking at an almost

analog piece of the event ecosystem today. So what specifically gets lost when we treat an event as a campaign instead of as cultivation? First of all, and this is a pretty simple one, we lose the second place bidder. The person that bid four times on the Napa weekend but did not get it and they lost by you know $2,500, they walked away with nothing. But

We also, a lot of the time, don't have a record of them. You you don't even know where they were willing to go or what they wanted to give. They told you with every single raise of their paddle, I am engaged. I want to be a part of this. But our systems or lack thereof answered, you know, sorry, you lost. We're also losing the table guest that isn't on file. This can often be a technology problem.

So the example is a sponsor brings a group of people. They did not tell you in advance who they were, despite the efforts that you made to get that information out of them. The person, this table guest, cried during your video, during your appeal video. They they did not bid in the silent auction. And they had maybe they have a name in your table management, but in a lot of cases, a lot of times we all know, sometimes they don't.

and maybe they showed up on a check-in report again. Maybe sometimes they're the partner of somebody that came and we don't actually have their name. And all of that is over on the Monday following the gala or the following day after your event, and they're just gone from your memory. You might have noticed the engaged, the emotional response that they had, but but you can't possibly in a room of a thousand people.

remember each and every one of them, particularly when there is no actual record. They were actually, as it turned out, that person was probably the most engaged person at that table, but you don't even a lot of the times know their name. Another one is the sponsor staff. So I know and I've been there where I've kind of rolled my eyes at the sponsor or a corporate sponsor that rather than inviting the friends that I hoped that they would invite, they've invited their staff instead. The

$25,000 corporate sponsor, they bring nine guests to their 10-seat table. The nine people that are there, again, in your room, on your green, wherever, the only person out of those, actually, I should say 10 people that you have a record of that you're engaging with and that you're following up with later is that one sponsor, the person that purchased the table. Just because they're not the check writer this year does not mean that they are not.

next year or the following year or the following year's really major gift level donor. And then another one that you're going to lose are the P2P Fundraisers Network. So you have a peer-to-peer campaign going on, you get 40 new donors they give through one of your ambassadors pages and it's a personal page and you get these, you know, kind of 40 emails without very much other context or data. You you don't know which one of those folks

Has foundations in their family. You don't know which one has a personal connection to your organization, maybe having experienced something that's really relative to or walking alongside your mission. All you have is an email address and a tag that says P2P giver. So in each of those four examples, the donor themselves told you something. The donor signaled to you. The donor like leaned in.

But the system didn't catch it because it wasn't built to catch those signals. The systems were only built to acknowledge transactions, not to track relationships. And that is what is getting lost. That's that central waste problem that I was talking about. And it's getting lost all across. Don't feel bad. It's not just happening to you, it's happening in every ballroom, on every pudding green, on every ⁓

at every P2P st or at every walk-run starting line across our country. All right. So I wanna talk to you now, and I think this was actually teased in the description of today's session, a framework that I've kind of come up with, a way that you can think about these people. And and we're gonna send you along with some templates that you can use to address some of what I'm talking about. So don't worry, just just listen.

And see what sounds familiar to you. This all came up when I was talking to a friend of mine. It's actually a friend and not a donor relationship. And we were just having coffee. Her name is a real person, but I am actually going to shield her name and call her Amy. But this this person is a friend of mine from college. I've known for a very long time. And again, in the context of this conversation, we were just chatting. We were not, this was not an appeal. I was not meeting with her as a donor. But her and her family.

Are major gift level donors. They they donate from family funds. I'm based here in Austin. They sponsor events all across Austin and the Hill Country, which is just out west of us, and frankly, even in other places as well. But they don't they don't ever do it for a return. They never ever, Amy and her family don't ever give money with any sort of ROI expectation or even they they frankly say no to them. ⁓ they don't want any of that kind of recognition.

They are, and I'm using Amy's words, they look for no return and expect no recognition. Those are literally her words. And they just want to support work and causes that really matter to them. So again, we're having coffee and she said, To me, you know what I've noticed? Most of the organizations whose events we sponsor never reach out to us except at event time. We get a newsletter, I might be signed up for something else, we get a thank you note, of course, but then it doesn't ever feel personal.

Nothing that says that they know who I am. And then she said something that I wrote down and I'll say it exactly here. I hate the once-a-year impersonal touch. And this is somebody that is writing five and six-figure sponsorships to nonprofits across Texas. Someone that wants zero things in return. If you had to describe your ideal donor and then mold them out of clay, you would describe and mold Amy. They

It would have been so easy at any point for any one of the executive directors who were involved in these organizations to to simply have a conversation. ⁓ but the organizations that that she had been funding were really just treating her like a transaction. And I'm I wager that they were treating her like a transaction because that's what their systems were built to do. So I you know, this is one of those things that like you can't unhear once you hear it. And and I you know, as I always do, I think.

Well, if Amy is invisible to these organizations, that this is somebody that I know, and I'm a development director, how many other AMIs are there out there? And so once I started paying attention, I kind of kept seeing this situation come up. So I now have this framework here that I've written down and presented on, ⁓ where I've got five distinct kinds of people that are attending your events. And I think out of all five of these personas, let's call them,

We're really only equipped to handle one of them. So it's the five roles in the room framework. This is my title. Every ballroom, room, et cetera, they hold five archetypes. They're archetypes. There's another word for it. Most development teams, like I said, they can cultivate one of them, but the other four are kind of sitting hidden in plain sight. So first of all, we have the check writer. So this is that person that you know how to handle. They're the sponsor, they are the corporate donor, the

Person who's named in the program or who's actually receiving the award, they're in your CRM, you know how to handle them, they're doing just fine. They are being cultivated. The event is actually just one touch point in what's typically a longer relationship. And we, as an industry, as a sector, we really serve the check writer really well. We we you don't need anything more from me on this one. The other four, I think not so much.

The plus ones. These are the sponsor staff that I described earlier. They're the table guest or the spouse of a table guest. The friend maybe it's even the spouse of the sponsor. They're a friend that a board member brought. They are off your radar, but they're in the room. So these plus ones, many of them are future donors. They are blocked by generational aspects. They're just younger at the time that they've seen you, but they're hidden behind.

Your check writer. Number three is the almost donors. This is that person that I describe the second place bidder. This is the person that like almost gave slash bid in your silent auction, you know, kind of almost, almost. They always thought about it during the appeal. You know that they did. You they they watched the silent auction, they watched the live auction, they watched the appeal.

And maybe they did put one bid down. But they, you know, they got outbid and they stopped, they were socializing, they didn't worry about it. But in all of those actions, they also told you that they wanted to give. And number four are the network multipliers. These are the P2P example that I used earlier: the fundraisers, the ambassadors, the volunteer captains. They recruit everybody that they know to come to your events.

Well, I you know, we see a lot of these people, and a lot of the time, I think that they still end up being treated in a transactional way or like they are collateral, right? They they might not be and I think this might be because despite the fact that they are influencers, a lot of the times they're not really your biggest donors. ⁓ but these people are actually their own type of portfolio. And number five.

The Quiet Ex observers, the Quiet Observers. This is that board member's guest that been to every single gala for the past six years. They've donated, maybe at a $500,000, $2,500 level every year, but they've never been asked for a more significant gift. They're a longtime attendee, and you might even know them by name, but you've never

Sat down with them with the intention of getting to know them and understand why they're giving and why they're giving to you. Each of these five roles have five very distinct cultivation tracks. Most events, however, as I said, only really honor the one, the Czech writer's path. So that's the gap. And I'm gonna talk about that for the rest of the time that we are here today, so we've got a little bit longer.

And it but I'm really gonna hyper focus on the plus ones and the quiet observers. These are the two that I think that have the most potential and also are the most often overlooked by our sector. So something that I know that is true in every single organization that I've worked with and the ones that I encounter today, when a corporate sponsor commits at the table level, let's say like $15,000 for a table ⁓ of 10.

You cultivate just a single person at that company. It's typically like your VP of engagement or community engagement, or it's a you know CEO, CTO, CMO, somebody that's in a C-suite, ⁓ and they're the person that actually physically signed the agreement. And you have that person, again, you've got them on their clear path, the written thank you note, the impact report list. You're inviting them again next year in a very personalized and very special way. But the Knight of the Gala, like

At that table, there are 10 whole distinct human beings there. They all show up, each one of them is a different person, each one with their own separate story in relationship to your mission and to the work that you're doing. And frankly, also to the people at the organization. There's another piece that I think that we forget a lot of the times is sometimes the relationship is less with the actual mission. Some, I mean, all of our missions are lofty and wonderful and amazing, and we want to support them.

But sometimes the support does come because of the folks that are involved with the mission. They're very curious humans. They have, like I said, their own path, their own interest level, their own reasons for being around. And we need to start to find a way to understand more of them. I'm not saying each and every one of them, but more of them.

Some of them are employees from our sponsor, as I said. Some of them are, you know, some people were invited as like a corporate gift. Hey, here you go. Let's get dressed up for a night, eat and drink on me. Sometimes those folks are often board members of other nonprofits in your areas, sometimes mission-adjacent as well. And the truth about that table is that the cultivation potential there by attendee will often exceed the cultivation potential.

Of the single person that you've been talking to the whole time. The sponsor is gonna give you that corporate sponsor, they're gonna give you a corporate amount, the amount that was approved by whatever it was or that was designated at the beginning of their fiscal year. They're giving you a dollar amount that has a ceiling. The other people at that table, however, are distinct individuals with their own independent giving identity.

their own portfolio, their own philanthropic ethos. And they've also, all of them, all 10, have just spent three hours immersed in your mission. And most organizations don't really have a good process for capturing those other folks. ⁓ And it's such a cultivation miss. We built these incredibly sophisticated systems, all of this technology for engaging the transaction at the top of the sponsorship.

Pyramid, if you will, but we have zero ability to understand and no system to talk to the relationships that the pyramid carries underneath it. So I'm gonna pull in a little bit of data here. The Fundraising Effectiveness Project, or FEP, their data, their report from last year tells us that mid-level donors, the $1,000 to $10,000 range donors, those have declined by roughly 17% over the past five years.

And according to Giving USA, part of the Giving Institute, while total giving in the US crossed $557 billion with a B last year, the donor base itself is shrinking. So $557 billion, higher than it had been before, but the number of donors giving is actually fewer. Fewer Americans are giving, and the ones who give in the middle.

Those are the ones that are evaporating the fastest. This is a very concerning trend on the 501c drop. We've talked about it in the past. But that group of people, the plus ones, though that donor segment, those are the ones, those are the ones that occupy that $1,000 to $10,000 range. They're typically mid-level. They are capable, ⁓ but they are undercultivated. So here's my suggestion. Here's my first functional suggestion to you. Before the night of your gala, well in advance, three days.

actually I should say three weeks before, not days, three weeks prior to your gala. You should call every single table host and you say, I want to send a personal welcome from our executive director to each of your nine guests. Could you send me a list of the names and emails so I can make sure that they feel welcomed by name when they arrive? Now at Better Unite we have this wonderful little tool that

Sends out an automated reminder to any group ticket purchaser that has not yet confirmed their guests. It's a great email that goes out. It tells ⁓ the donors, and frankly, it has a really good response rate. You can customize the top of that email to say that, right? Like we want to be able to ⁓ to engage each one of your guests personally, let us know. But it's so much more impactful if that's a phone call.

That you make, and it would be easiest to manage that through your moves management system. That single, those two, I should say, those two sentences, they do so much. Let me say them again. Because the last time I presented this, I got this request, and I'll even write them in the show notes. The sentences are I want to send a personal welcome from our executive director to each of your guests. Can you send me the list of names and emails so I can make sure they feel welcome by name when they arrive?

It does a couple of things, frankly. It tells the table host that their guests matter. Just it like our donors and their experience matter to us. Our hosts, their guests' experience reflects upon them and matters to them. It is so important. It accomplishes also, I mean, functionally, them giving you the data that helps our check-ins move faster, allows you to.

Text and email your their guests prior to the event so that the silent auction goes off, they buy raffle tickets prior to all of the things that are you know functionally helpful. But it also says to them that you're going to take extra care of their guests when they arrive and that their guests will be experiencing something lovely. And number two, it also gives you a list so that your data is there for you.

So that you can make post-event cultivation actually happen. And number three, it also, and this is a final one, but it's actually a really important one, it positions your executive director as a person that cares about the room as a whole. It's not just the single sponsor, not just their the contact. So on the night of, so you've we've done this, we've gotten the information from as many of them as have provided it, the night of.

We're going to assign a staff member, not your executive director, not your development director. This is not a task for any of you, but some staff member, maybe of your development team, but it could also be somebody else. They are going to do nothing but circulate among the sponsor tables and they'll sit briefly with each plus one and they're going to ask them a simple question. How did you come to be at this event tonight?

It feels like an odd or I I don't think it feels like an odd question, but it kind of can feel a bit uncomfortable to ask. I actually don't think that for other people outside of the people that planned the event, maybe the board members and the development team or executive director, it doesn't feel as uncomfortable or vulnerable to ask that question. How did you come to be at the event tonight? The answer to this question is so valuable. It it might be I came to be at this event because I wanted to get dressed up and have a few drinks.

That's okay. That's information worth noting as well. Information that can tell you where to put the individual people on your post-event cultivation chart. It could also tell you that they are a future board member, a future ambassador, or that they are, you know, like I said, they're just showing up. It could tell you that they have ⁓ a child that is affected with the same mission that your organization is addressing. You just don't know what's going to come out of that simple question.

It could be very, very simple response. It can also open up so much opportunity. And also, again, this is not a software problem. It's a process problem. It's a person problem. It's a do I have people that can circulate in the room kind of problem. So I know that, you know, there's a lot of, this is a lot of advanced work. So now I want to like, I want to talk a little bit about what's going to happen when we're actually in the room.

As we did with that person that's walking around. ⁓ the almost owners. So it this is one place where I am gonna go back to something that Better Unite built, but I'm I'm talking about it much less in a sales capacity, but much more in the way that I is an example or ⁓ an example of what it is that I want you to understand. A traditional silent auction. Someone bids, someone's outbid. They get notified, they get notified by text, maybe they're writing it down, doesn't matter.

The auction closes and someone loses. Someone's winning as well. To the losers, we say, Thank you for playing. There we go. The night moves on. The thing is, the person that lost, they told you something along the way. These were all signals again. And again, is another moment that we just said goodbye. So what what happened last year? This was last, so last March, March of 2025, we had a customer that came to us and it said,

Why should the moment the our customers said, why should the moment end there? What if my outbid donor could donate the amount they were willing to pay to my mission, even though they lost the item? So that was this. I still remember the moment that I heard this suggestion. And it didn't come directly to me. It came through our sales, our account executives. And I was like, that is just brilliant. So we built it. And by August, we had what we now call donate your bid.

⁓ it was really an impressively simple piece of technology, but the organizations that turned it on have seen so much impact. It has increased by eight to fifteen percent the revenue from their silent auctions. And what it did was it convert converted a moment into a actually I would say it converted momentum into a giving moment.

And again, I'm not really telling you this to promote donate your bid, although it's very cool and you should check it out. But what I really want you to understand is the logic that is underneath donate your bid. The almost donors, the almost winners, they told you that they wanted to give. And a traditional auction says, thanks so much for playing. Goodbye. The rethought or reworked auction said: here's another way that you can engage, that you can say yes.

So that is this whole philosophy in a microcosm. Every single interaction that you have with your donors, every single potential donor in that room at your event is a signal. The bids, the questions, the conversations with your executive director or board members, the people that you saw crying during the video, the people that texted your ⁓ table hosts just after the event, thinking about still your appeal video.

All of those are very important. And it is my mission and our collective goal to recreate event fundraising so that every time a donor signals almost, we can convert that into a yes. The second place bidder could also get a follow-up email that says, Hey, I noticed you really wanted this. We have a second one available. That happens all the time. We see that a lot. So for somebody that's sitting and crying at the table, that is a

An offer for a coffee with a board member or an executive director, but it's not just the generic thank you. And none of this, outside of that, donate your bid piece, requires our software. All it requires is that you start treating almost as a signal and one of the most important signals in your data. Which brings me to the next part after the event. What happens next? The longer that you wait after an emotional moment to follow up, the more the

The energy of that moment dissipates. And the more the energy dissipates, the more, the lower your conversion. And it's this is not new. The fundraising effectiveness project tracks this exact phenomenon. Their data on first-year donor retention is like decidedly grim. And most of you all have seen this too. Roughly 19% of first-time donors give again in a second year. Repeat donors, however, retain at about 60%.

Difference, 19% versus 60%, is the entire argument for treating that first 48 hours post event as the most valuable cultivation window in your entire year. Because everybody in your ballroom, at a minimum, is a first-time donor candidate. Every single one. And the choices that you make as an organization the next day and the following day determine whether they become a repeat donor or

Forgotten. So this is the quiet observer. Us and and you know, we can ⁓ I've got a story here, but I don't think I really have time for it. ⁓ well actually I'm gonna I'm gonna tell it anyway. So my friend runs a development office. I worked for it at a school called University High School, and they hosted a giving breakfast every single year. It's a very ⁓ well, I mean it's not all that traditional, but it was a traditional gratitude event. There they're

Once there was an auction, usually there wasn't an auction. There was definitely not a silent auction. It was really just a community gathering and some form of appeal. And after one of these breakfast breakfasts, a man emailed the executive director, my friend Julie, and he had attended as the guest of a sponsor. It was again a corporate sponsor, and this was one of the employees, a staff employee. He did not raise a paddle. He did not make a donation the day of.

He didn't even, and I think at this time it was like maybe 20, I think it was like 2017. So we still had the impact cards on the tables. He didn't put his name on any of this, but he emailed Julie and he invited her to coffee. So a lot of times I know this happens, and you know, that's easy to move past in the busyness post-event. You've sometimes even taken a couple of days off, which is typically not a very good idea, but that happens a lot as well. But for whatever reason, Julie said yes. She went.

Coffee with this gentleman. And then the other thing that's notable is that she scheduled the coffee for very close in. She scheduled it for the very next week. She didn't, you know, waste much time. She didn't stay. None of the signals were there. There was no, and I don't know that they were using while screening at the time, but there was none of the, you know, signals of any sort of major donor pro profile were visible with this gentleman.

But she had the coffee anyway, and they had a very real, this was actually very common of Julie, but they had a very real conversation and he asked very thoughtful questions. This was actually an organization that worked in recovery spaces, and it turned out that this gentleman's son had just entered into recovery. And a month later, with zero solicitation and actually, frankly, very little follow-up from Julie following that coffee, he sent the school a $10,000 check. That $10,000 check is directly attributable to that event. But

What's really going on in the story is it's really not about luck. It's a story about a quiet observer who self-identified. And then somebody that worked for the nonprofit that actually went the extra few steps to engage before the energy of the event had completely dissipated. So, I mean, and it turned out that that guy had actually been thinking about this organization for some time prior to it.

But the sponsor connection hid him in the room, again, hidden in plain sight. And he just needed a reason. He just needed just a little bit more to get to the donation. So the quiet observers in your audiences are doing this every single year at every single event. And so many of those signals are there if you begin and when you begin to start looking for them. So for as a suggestion, before your next event, sit down with your team and assign a single staff member. And again,

Not your executive director, not your development director, but one designated person. This actually could be a volunteer as well, that they do nothing for the 48 hours after the event except respond to the signals. They find they they gather the emails from the attendees, they they hear about and ask for the text that the board members received, reporting conversations, the notes from volunteers around who talked to whom. The person's only job is to make every single warm touch, every single signal.

That was sent warm-touched by the end of those two days, by the end of that 48 hours. And you know, that's something that is I have never been a part of an event where I have known a single designated person to have that job, to do that job. So it's a very strong suggestion that I'm gonna make to all of you. And if you do everything that I've described so far, if you treat all five roles in the room as distinct portfolios and you capture the signals and you respond inside of 48 hours.

If you make that cultivation moment last, what's going to change is your retention numbers. They're going to begin to move. Even small movements can compound. If you took your first year donor retention from 19% to 30%, which is a completely doable lift for any organization that does this 48-hour follow-up, you have just functionally doubled the long-term value of every dollar your event raised.

Because those donors are now in a pipeline. And if you take some percentage of your second place bidders, your plus ones, your quiet observers, and you know, those folks that were previously invisible to you, and you move them into cultivation tracks, then you're growing your portfolio without having to acquire new donors from cold outreach. And donor acquisition is the most expensive thing that your organization does. Most of you spend, and this again,

Common knowledge, and I know most of you know it, most of you spend between $1.50 and $3.50 to acquire every $1 of new revenue from new acquisition. Cultivation of existing relationships can change all of that.

All right, so I've kind of touched on this, but again, this sounds great. How do we make it happen? And I and I we don't have the bandwidth. That's the that's really the pushback that I hear. And this is the pushback that I heard at the at the Virtuous Summit. And I think that that's right mostly. Because I think what the hard part of this is not strategy. Anyone can write down strategy, it's actually really kind of tooling it because it is genuinely difficult to capture.

the plus ones name and email at scale sometimes depending on your systems. And it's genuinely difficult to make a second place vis a second place bidder visible to your CRM. Even in our donate your bid scenario, not everybody does it. ⁓ It's it's difficult to route a quiet observer signal into a 48-hour cultivation queue. And again, I think this is that that kind of failure on the part of the technology because a lot of our technology was

They were built to process transactions. They were not built to track relationships, as I said at the very beginning. And this is where I have I'm I'm gonna be honest and about my my partiality to certain systems and certain integrations, because you know, we built a company that was designed to solve this very problem based on experience that I myself had expi had had. And it's really why we exist and it's why we integrate so deeply.

with the our virtuous, with our black bods, with our Salesforce, with our testaturas, because your donor record, your event donor record, needs to live inside of your CRM. It's why we built our own really robust CRM as well, our own moves management tracks and workflow tracks. Because that that CRM that is enriched with all of that data, all of that context ⁓ is not a closed transaction.

It is an ongoing pipeline. So I I, you know, I can't pretend that I'm neutral about the software question. Obviously, I'm not. I don't think anybody here would have been surprised by that sentence. But ⁓ but but I what I do want you to hear beyond my own bias that it doesn't totally matter the software that you use. Shh, don't tell my sales team I said that. What matters is whether your event tech and your CRM can talk. That's truly it.

If they share a common worldview, that's they they need to be built, both CRM and event and auction tools. They need to be built by people who think of events as bigger than transactions, who see our events as cultivation opportunities, the cultivation opportunities that they are.

So I think I'm gonna finish here with just a couple of suggestions. And again, we're we're gonna follow up with all of you or in the show notes, you're going to find an event timeline planner. You're going to find cards that somebody can use as they walk around and ask, how did you come to be at this event? And we're going to give you an Excel spreadsheet, the template that you can use for that 48-hour follow-up timeline.

But I do want to encourage you to do a couple of things. One, start manufacturing momentum well in advance of your event. 12 weeks out, if if you have a fall event, right now is the time to start right now. If you have a spring event in 2027, right now is the time to start if you have any bandwidth at all to do so. 12 weeks out, at a minimum, 12 weeks out, you can start to recruit six, four, six, eight people.

Who can commit to a leadership style gift, to a pre-event fun. And it's one of the single highest leverage moves that I know that I could suggest to you. It really can change the room's belief about the night before the night even starts. And it gives you eight, four, six, eight successful cultivated relationships that do exist independent of whether the event is a success or not. Number two, capture all of those signals.

Use the signal cards, don't use the signal cards, create your own, talk to Claude about it. Find a way to get that information from the room into the hands of something that can somebody in some entity that can do something with it. So, I mean, of course, I'm recommending a moves management system, but there are many other ways that you can do all of these pieces, and it doesn't need to fall all on one person. I'm suggesting that you have a single person responsible in those post-48 hours, but I also

Really do believe that you can disseminate the work of the outreach among your committee, your board, your executive staff as well. And again, so I've alluded to it already, follow up within 48 hours. Designate that one person. ⁓ It can be a happy and big thank you note on day one, ⁓ the next right ask on day two. You will figure out the follow-up steps that make sense for your organization, for your ethos, for the way that you fundraise, for the way that you talk to donors.

But make sure that something happens in those 48 hours afterwards. So I want to thank you all for joining me today. I want to thank you from the bottom of my heart for the work that you're doing. I know that I am in this talk doing something that I really don't love doing, which is giving you additional tasks, but I would not be doing it if I did not truly believe that this kind of work, this shift from event as endgame to

Cultivation opportunity would not truly move the needle for your organizations. I am very passionate about this, as you can tell. Let me share my screen again for those of you watching. I ⁓ want you to send me a note if you have questions about any of this. Leya, L-E-Y-A at betterunite.com. I was supposed to have a LinkedIn site on here, but I'm Leya Simmons. Again, Leya Spelledweird Simmons on LinkedIn.

⁓ connect with me there. I post videos about this kind of stuff all the time as well. ⁓ And please message me. I will respond to each and every one of them. I'm really fascinated by this topic. If you've got other ideas that are working, let me know that feel ones that you feel like sharing with others, even better. ⁓ We all are supporting each other and getting through all of this. And then let me tell you about next week. Also, our 501c drop next week is still on events and still hosted by just me.

But we are going to look at Springs data, the Better Unites capture, the data capture system that we have, looking at events across more than 1,500 organizations throughout the US, Canada, Mexico, Australia, I think England and Ireland. We have a lot of information. We are going to look at the data, see what worked, see what didn't, and I'll bring all of that to you with the report and talk to all of you about it next Tuesday, which is June 16th.

At 1:30 Central, as always, if you're looking, scan that QR code, sign up now. We'll send out more information soon as well. I would love to have you. And as I said, if you're interested in taking a look at Donate Your Bid, our moves management tool, our enterprise events and auctions from BetterUnite, you don't know what we're what you're missing, scan that QR code and set up a time with our team. We would love to learn more about your organization as well as take you on a tour of some really impressive software, I think.

if you don't have ⁓ visibility to my QR code, you can also email us at support at betterunite.com. Thank you, thank you, thank you for everything that you do. Thank you for showing up every day and doing the hard work for all of your missions, and thank you for joining me here on a Tuesday. I hope you have a wonderful rest of your day and let's all go do some good. Bye-bye.