Leya Simmons of BetterUnite breaks down how nonprofits can respond to federal funding cuts with a clear revenue diversification strategy, without panic.
/26-03-17/26-03-17%20blog%20Thumbnail.png)
In this week's 501(c) Drop, BetterUnite CEO and co-founder Leya Simmons tackles one of the most urgent challenges facing nonprofits right now: what to do when federal funding gets cut, delayed, frozen, or made so unpredictable that you simply can't plan around it.
This is not a session about panic. It's a practical, role-by-role action plan for moving forward with clarity and courage.
The hardest part of this moment isn't the cuts themselves — it's the uncertainty.
Delays, pauses, grant disruptions, and mixed signals have put nonprofits in an impossible position: caught between it might still come through and we probably need to do something.
Waiting too long to respond is its own risk. Even if some funding eventually arrives, organizations that delay could lose options they can't get back.
Federal funding cuts can also mean several different things:
Knowing which situation you're in matters. It determines whether you're dealing with a budgeting problem, a timing problem, or a full strategic reset.
Leya opened with a powerful reframe borrowed from Shannon McCracken, president of the Nonprofit Alliance: the story of the University of Arizona's biosphere experiment, where trees grown in a perfect, wind-free environment began collapsing in on themselves — because they never had the adversity needed to grow stress wood, the dense, strong material that forms in response to resistance.
Headwinds build strength. The nonprofit sector, facing unprecedented instability, has the opportunity to grow stronger on the other side.
Your job is not just to ask how do we replace this money? It's to ask how exposed are we and how fast do we need to move?
You need to know:
Stop looking at your budget as a single number. Start parsing it — which dollars are dependable, which are restricted, which are already at risk.
Your role just got bigger. When institutional funding becomes unstable, fundraising is no longer one department's job — it's the whole organization's resilience strategy.
Prioritize ruthlessly. Ask:
And don't go silent with donors. Silence is not a strategy. Connect the dots for them — clearly, calmly, without drama or desperation. A simple human message goes a long way: We are facing the possible loss of funding that supports [X]. We need to close that gap to keep serving [Y].
Get practical without getting into the weeds. Move from how can I help? (diffuse) to specific action:
Starting in the 2026 tax year, non-itemizers can deduct up to $1,000 in cash gifts (or $2,000 if married filing jointly) — something that hasn't been available to everyday donors in years.
This is not a headline. It shouldn't lead your appeal. But as a quiet nudge tucked into a donation page, a thank-you note, or a recurring giving ask, one sentence can move someone from not now to maybe this is the time:
"Because of new tax law changes, your gift may now be deductible even if you take the standard deduction."
Note: other 2026 tax changes — including a new floor for itemized deductions and tighter corporate giving rules — may have a negative impact on major and corporate donors. Lean into relationship for those conversations, and always lead with mission first.
A toggle on a donation page is not a recurring giving program. That's an option.
A program has:
At minimum: when a one-time donor gets their thank-you, there should be a clear, compelling invitation to join the recurring program. Converting even a small percentage of one-time donors into monthly givers changes your revenue picture significantly.
When organizations lose government funding, the temptation is to find one magic bullet. A better question is: how do we create enough momentum and new pathways that we're not trapped?
A few places to focus:
Peer-to-peer fundraising works especially well when there's a defined timeframe and urgency. It extends your reach exponentially without burning out your team — your existing supporters become fundraisers who bring in donors you'd never have found on your own.
Events as strategy — not just calendar obligations. Every event should help you identify prospects, move one-time donors into recurring givers, reactivate lapsed supporters, and tell your story. The follow-up matters as much as the event itself. Who attended, who gave, who brought guests, who needs a personal call in the week after — that's where momentum is either captured or lost.
Corporate partnerships go beyond sponsorships. Think employee giving campaigns, matching gifts, volunteer grants, cause marketing, and executive networks through your board. Lean into existing relationships. Don't wait for staff to cold-email someone a board member mentioned once.
When fear sets in, the instinct is to clamp down and wait for certainty. But here's the risk: leadership waits for clarity, so the development team waits for messaging approval, so the board waits for direction, so staff waits to avoid alarming donors — and suddenly no one is moving while the clock runs out.
The organizations that navigate this well won't necessarily be the ones with the most cash reserves. They'll be the ones that move early, find alignment quickly, make their case clearly, and choose a few priorities to go all in on.
Caution is necessary. But caution should guide action — not replace it.
When everything is scattered — event tech here, email marketing there, CRM somewhere else, none of it talking to each other — it's nearly impossible to move fast or see the full picture.
A connected system that handles recurring giving, events, volunteers, donor outreach, and relationship tracking in one place isn't just convenient. When speed and efficiency are the name of the game, the right tech gives you a real advantage.
If you're an Executive Director or CEO: Build a funding exposure map. List every federal source, the amount, timing, restriction, and risk level. Then create a 13-week cash forecast across three scenarios: delayed funding, partially funded, and fully lost.
If you're a Development Director: Write your emergency case for support. Then choose one revenue push — a recurring giving campaign, a peer-to-peer campaign, an event follow-up strategy, or a targeted donor reactivation — and build it this week.
If you're a Board Member: Make a gift. Open three doors. Ask leadership proactively what would actually help. And be ready to support faster decisions than you're used to.
For everyone: Don't wait for perfect certainty. It may not come. You need just enough clarity to act responsibly — and enough courage to move before delay becomes damage.
This isn't just about nonprofit finances. It's about focus, leadership, and whether organizations can adapt quickly without losing sight of why they exist.
The good news? Nonprofits do this all the time. You adapt. You stretch. You find a way forward. And when you pair mission-driven urgency with smarter fundraising strategy and better systems, you come out stronger on the other side.
Transcript Recording:
Leya Simmons (00:00)
Hi everyone.
Welcome to the 501c drop. I'm Leah Simmons. I am the CEO and co founder of Better Unite. It is my pleasure to have you here. I am thrilled that you've decided to spend a little bit of time with me today. We are talking about a heavy topic, federal funding cuts, those that have happened that are kind of looming. And what do we do? How do we react and respond as a as individual organizations, as donors, as people as an nonprofit sector.
But I hope to provide some clarity as well as some true ⁓ action items that you can take away and use today and in the coming weeks so that this heavier topic feels maybe a little more manageable. I can't promise that I'm gonna make it feel lighter, but perhaps more manageable. So we'll dive in, but if you do have questions or things that you'd like me to know, put those into the chat. If you're watching the recording, you can always send any questions that you have to support at betterunite.com.
We'll definitely get back to you with answers. This video, the recording of this will also be sent out to everybody. So if there's something that you're really craving and want to know information about, just hold on. I will ⁓ make sure that you get that over the next week. So, all right, let's dive in and talk. Like I said.
Not exactly a light topic, a bit heavy. And the thing with this, these, you know, federal funding cuts is that it really does hit and impact our nonprofit sector and individual nonprofits really where it hurts, which is in our stability. It's not just about the budget, right? It's not just about operational stability or staffing or program. It's the kind of stability that lets
you plan more than 30 days ahead without feeling like the floor is going to drop out from underneath us. A lot of organizations right now are dealing with some very, you know, some, some variety or some version of this exact thing. So any one of those buckets, if you will, ⁓ if federal funding gets cut or delayed or frozen or made so unpredictable that we just can't rely on it anymore.
What happens next? What do we do? That's what I really want to focus on today. That's what this session is all about. It's not, please, let me say at the outset, there is no way in which this is a political conversation. As a matter of fact, in a little bit, I'm going to talk to you about how you can absolutely avoid even the hint.
of this becoming a political conversation. And it's also, even though I'm talking about something that is very fear inducing for many of us, this is not ⁓ a session about panic or emergency relief or actions. My goal is to help you get clear and understand what is happening right now.
what matters most, we're really going to work on prioritization, and what actions that your nonprofit can take to mitigate the effects of these cuts on your nonprofit and things that leaders should be doing right now.
So we're gonna cover four things broadly. First, what's actually going on with federal funding and why so many nonprofits feel like they're in some sort of limbo. Second, how to think about this in different, in the different positions that you may all be in as an executive director, a development director, and also a board member. I know there are many other positions up and down the org chart, but those are the three that we will focus on today. However, much of this conversation impacts everybody on a nonprofit org chart.
Third, we're gonna talk about what it looks like to move, shift or pivot from federal funding dependence, government dependence to a more diversified revenue model. And fourth, we're gonna talk about how technology can really help you in moving faster and moving more efficiently when speed and efficiency are the name of the game in this environment. So let me start out with ⁓
with talking about what's happening, what's going on here. I think that the hardest part of this moment is it's not just the cuts themselves, as I said, it's not just the financial constraints, it's much more the uncertainty. And for a lot of nonprofits, the problem is that they cannot seem to get just one clean answer about what's happening, what's next, and how can they plan.
The problem is that there are delays, pauses, ⁓ grant disruptions, and mixed signals. think that the worst part is the mixed signals, the different messaging that you're getting from different sources, and also, frankly, changing rules and a lot of just, you know, we don't know yet. Wait a minute, we don't know. So that is instability. That answer.
is the essence of instability. And that kind of instability is really brutal for nonprofits because it's not like, you know, typically a nonprofit is sitting on a lot of cash reserves. You're not built.
to sit around and just, you know, wait it out when things get shaky like some investors in a stock market can do. So when people say, you know, hold on a minute, we're not sure, just wait, and then that wait continues to get extended and extended, that is the, you know, that is a very difficult place for particularly a nonprofit to be. So I do want to also talk about
what the term federal funding cuts can mean when we hear that even in the title of today's webinar. It can actually mean a different, kind of a mix of different things. It can mean proposed cuts, actual cuts, obviously, delayed disbursements. That's another way of that playing out.
grants that are paused, stop work orders, disrupted agency processes. I think that is probably the most prolific thing that is occurring right now. And then there's also just a general confusion about what's still available, what's under review, and then eventually what may never come through. And those distinctions really do matter because you do need to know whether you're dealing with a budgeting problem or a timing problem.
a resource allocation problem, or if it's just a complete full-on strategic reset. And I really do think that that, like I said, the instability and the not knowing, that's what makes this so emotionally exhausting for nonprofit leaders. ⁓ It's not just that it's bad news, it's that it's uncertain news. It's unstable news. I mean, look.
We're nonprofits. We work with hard truths. We're built to address hard truths. It's the moving targets that become really difficult to absorb and to plan around. That's really the key.
So if your organization is feeling like, you you're stuck between, it's still might come through and we probably need to do something, that is, let me validate for you that that is a very real and also rational place to be. And it's also why delaying action could be very dangerous.
Because even if some of the funding does eventually come through, organizations that wait too long to respond might lose some of their options. I was in December at the Nonprofit Power Conference and I listened to Shannon McCracken, who is the president of the Nonprofit Alliance, speak about this exact topic, this kind of general...
⁓ shake up in our nonprofit world relative to the federal funding, the flow of federal funding, right? And she likened it to a biosphere experiment at the University of Arizona. So for those of you that don't know, there is a biosphere at the University of Arizona. And this biosphere is this like perfect environment for ⁓ biology, for the natural world to... ⁓
to be very prolific. So perfectly clean air, the water is pure, the soil has never been touched by man, right? Like everything is perfect. And so there's the goal of this is a research center so that they can understand, you know, where things have gone wrong, what we can do and all of this. So they're growing all of these, you know, plants and the biodiverse ⁓ ecosystem within this biosphere. And the scientists began to notice that the trees weren't
growing very tall. as a matter of fact, as again, Shannon is telling this story. As a matter of fact, Shannon says that they, they noticed that the trees were actually kind of growing in on themselves, like collapsing in on themselves. And of course this is a complete, like nobody's expecting this. This is perfect water, perfect air. Like how is this happening? What's happening? And what the trees were missing was wind.
The trees needed adversity in order to get tall. They needed what to grow, what actually is a thing, and you can look this up, they needed to grow stress wood. In response,
to wind, to diversity in order to reach their full heights. And I love that analogy because right here at the beginning of talking about this, I would really like to offer Shannon McCracken's very wise analogy for our common nonprofit sector that while it feels as though headwinds are strong, what happens when headwinds occur is stresswood.
is this very strong wood that grows and continues to help us as a sector grow, hopefully at the end of all of this, even taller. So I really did appreciate a reframe in that because a lot of this can feel, as I mentioned earlier, very heavy and as though there's not a real end in sight. But maybe, maybe we are forming our own version as a nonprofit group of stress wood.
All right.
So as I mentioned earlier, I wanted to take this topic and kind of break it down, role by role, and to what you might be seeing and ways that you might respond. So if you're an executive leader, so CEO, executive director, ⁓ executive vice president, your job right now is to provide clarity. It is not just to ask, how do we replace this money? Your job is to say, how exposed are we and how fast do we need to move?
You really do need some data points here. You're going to need a clear picture of what percentage of your revenue is tied to government funding, what programs are going to be most impacted or most exposed, how much of the revenue that is delayed.
or actually gone? How much of it is delayed and how much of it is actually gone? What is your cash runway? That's always a good thing to know. And then what decisions will get harder if you don't take any actions in the next 30 days? This is a moment to stop looking at your budget as just one single number and start parsing it out and understanding the individual granular components of it. Which dollars are dependable?
Which ones are restricted? Which ones are already at risk? And at risk means like it might stay, but it might not stay. That's, know, the might stay piece is tempting. It's tempting to lean into that, but let's look at it as if it's not going to stay.
What programs are mission critical? Absolutely nothing can touch these. And what costs are fixed and which ones can be adjusted? Because we need our leadership to be able to answer those questions very quickly on a dime, know them like the back of their hand, so that you may make decisions in the face of this kind of need for quick action, quick resolution. If you're a development director,
⁓ Your role has gotten bigger. That's pretty much just a fact. If your organization is being faced with this. Because when institutional funding becomes unstable, fundraising is no longer just one department's job. It is in everybody the full organization's resilience strategy. And that means that your work should shift from business as usual to fundraising fast.
and focused and prioritizing revenue diversification.
It's not like a random activity. As a matter of fact, one thing that I'd really like for you to take, it's not like, let's try everything all at once and see what sticks. We really need to prioritize in these moments. So what can generate revenue in 30 days? What could generate revenue in 90 days? What helps retention and what helps acquisition? What can the board support? And what can staff actually execute without completely burning out? And so, you know,
The other piece that we'll really want to lean into is donor communication. It's so important to be very clear with our donors. And I understand the kind of knee-jerk reaction to hold everything close and to not really say much. It's frightening in this, particularly in this environment, everything feels like it can be turned into a political statement.
And the other piece of that is, as fundraisers, all know nobody wants to sound desperate. That is not a good color on anybody. ⁓ And we also don't want to stoke fear in a fear-laced environment. ⁓ We just don't want our donors to think the organization itself is in trouble. And at the same time, silence is not a strategy.
Donors do not automatically, you just need to not assume, don't assume that your donors automatically understand what the environment is or the fact that your organization is or might experience federal funding cuts. You do want to at some point connect the dots.
for your donors. We're not gonna do this dramatically, absolutely, absolutely not. As a matter of fact, without emotion, but it should provide clarity. Your messaging should provide clarity. And for our board members, those that are watching, thank you for being here. And thanks for being board members. They're important and wonderful, and we're so happy that you're on our side and you have a job in this environment.
Job for our board members right now is to get more practical. Now, that does not mean get into the weeds. Board members should absolutely stay out of the weeds. But, you know, a lot of times our board members will say, how can I help? And that's this kind of like big broad term. And it's very well intentioned, but it's very diffuse. It's not focused at all. And I would encourage you as board members, myself included, I'm also a board member, to get specific with your organizations. A board member could help.
by making a leadership gift. Right now, as quickly as you can, as soon as you can, make a leadership gift to your organization. And there's always more.
Introduce possible qualified prospects to your development team. Open doors to corporate sponsorships or corporate relationships. You can also help test the case for support. Try out different messaging on different friends. Let your development director, your communications director know what resonates, what lands in your experience. This is valuable information for your staff. ⁓
You can also support scenario planning, knowing that that is happening at the organizations that you are on the boards of, begin to help and not make the staff feel any kind of, I don't know, shame or, ⁓ you know, more fear around that scenario planning. Like these are things that we have to do with clear eyes and looking at data.
And then also give your leadership, your organization's leadership air cover to make hard but smart decisions early. I'm gonna keep emphasizing that throughout this time together. The board, as I said, should not be in the weeds, but it should be engaged because resilience, the organization's resilience is not just a staff issue, it absolutely is a governance issue as well. Okay, so what do we do now? There's our landscape.
Let's get practical. When organizations lose or find government funding to be destabilized, uncertain, potentially leaving, I think that there's this temptation, I know there is a temptation, to immediately say like, how do we replace it all? Let's go find this one magic bullet. ⁓ And that's,
Often, I mean maybe sometimes it is, but often it's really not the first, it's not the right first question. A better question would be how do we create enough momentum, enough confidence and enough new revenue pathways, diversification, so that we are not trapped? And the
goal of all of this is so that you're making these adjustments today for this environment because of what's happening right now. But these actions that you're taking today will continue. And the next time headwinds face your organization, will already, some of these strategies will already be in place. That's the real goal. You're just trying to buy back some of your options. And it's going to have to start with a revenue pivot.
So the first thing that you're going to want to do, and I think this probably lives in the executive leadership and development director space first, you're going to want to create a kind of short-term emergency case for support. You're going to want messaging that explains what changed, why does that matter, what is at risk, what support makes possible, and why does it matter right now.
These, all of those answers should be in very straightforward language, just plain English, not policy, not internal language, no shortcuts, short hands that you all use inside baseball, ⁓ not we are experiencing disruptions due to federal appropriations. All of those things could end up feeling in some way political.
We want to say it in human terms. So I'm going to say, here's an example. We are facing the possible loss or delay of funding that supports fill in the blank. And we need to close that gap to keep serving fill in the blank, people, animals, environment, whatever it is. And in a specific subset of those broad categories, I just said, that's the message.
And before we move on, I do want to flag one thing that kind of got buried in a lot of the news cycle around the federal funding cuts. And honestly, it's something that I've actually seen spoken about at some conferences, but fewer than the nonprofit space and more in the like, you know, giving fundraising data space. We've been having this conversation around the...
tax, non-itemized tax ⁓ benefits, not benefits and not credits, which are both things that I'm trying to say, but the way that you're going to, the way that ⁓ we're going to ⁓ deduct taxes. There we go. Sorry. I could not think of that word for a moment. There is a new charitable deduction that starts with the 2026 tax year for people who do not itemize their taxes. I want to read this because I,
Every time I, when I think about this, I can get it right, but when I try and talk about it, it becomes ⁓ difficult because it is murky and it is a bit opaque as much tax law is. ⁓ But there are changes in the 2026 year. So not things that are going to happen when you're filing on April 15th, that's 2025's taxes. That's in this next upcoming year, the way that donations and the charitable contributions.
are going to be deducted with people's filings with the IRS is going to change. And there are some important differences and I wanted to use the word nuance, but it's really not nuanced. These are specific changes that are coming. And as I was mentioning earlier, like I hear this getting talked about in the giving Institute and in these places where we look at data around ⁓ fundraising and how fundraising is happening broadly, but I don't hear it talked about.
in much among nonprofit leaders. So I feel like it might be the trickling down might not quite have happened. So I do want to bring it up. Okay. What matters is that for years, a lot of everyday donors were taking the standard deduction and they weren't getting a separate tax benefit for charitable giving.
Starting in 2026, this upcoming year, that changes. According to the IRS, non-itemizers can deduct up to $1,000 in cash gifts if they file single or $2,000 if they're married and filing jointly.
So I want to be really clear here. And this is why I'm reading this exactly. What I want to be clear about though is that the tax deductions, we have so much data that tells us this. The tax deduction is rarely the incentive for people to give, very, very rarely. We think it's going to be a bigger part of their equation in their psychology, but...
Cheery and Koshy and lots and lots of other ⁓ data researchers around the reasons for giving will tell us that that deduction is very rarely the reason that individual gifts get made. People give because they care, because they believe in your mission. They want to help the people in their close community. But why I'm telling you this is because this is, it could be one more reason that they might feel able to give or like notch that giving up just a little bit more.
In a year like this too, where we're talking about all of these headwinds and the things that might be impacting our fundraising, every little bit could count. So I did wanna bring it up in this conversation. What I like about this change is that it's not about major donors. This particular change that I'm talking about gives nonprofits a practical talking point for small and mid-sized donors. Better Unites our own 2025 state of giving.
Our playbook flagged the return of a universal charitable deduction as a 2026 change that could, hopefully will,
boost small and mid-level donors and giving potential. And we specifically recommend preparing donors for the 2026 tax law because we all know that education will help retention. So a few takeaways for your nonprofit leaders. You don't need to suddenly sound like a tax seminar. Like I feel like I was just slipping into there and I was trying to pull back and I'm trying to also make sure that I'm being very clear and reading exactly the right words. ⁓ This should not be a headline. It should not be the lead message. We don't want to
Turn our appeals into a lecture on the tax code that will drive people running in droves away from you Don't leave don't lead with tax policy. You're gonna lead with your mission as you always do
But when someone is already on the donation page, or they're reading your direct mail piece, or they're considering whether or not to make this gift, a little small part of that message could be helpful. Something as simple as, because of new tax law changes, your gift may now be deductible even if you take the standard deduction. That's it, just one sentence. Short, it's helpful.
Hopefully feels pretty human, understandable, very, very digestible. You could use that on a donation page, a, like I said, an appeal, on ⁓ a thank you note that encourages people to become a recurring donor, follow-up messaging. All of those places are a good spot for that one single simple sentence. One single simple sentence.
And for some organizations, especially those that are trying to grow recurring giving, maybe you're trying to reactivate those that were lost last year or gave last year but didn't this, one sentence could move, that one sentence could move somebody from not now to, maybe this is the time to do that. ⁓
Now, I do want to note that there are also other 2026 tax changes that ⁓ are happening at the same time. And our same playbook notes a 0.5 % AGI floor for itemized charitable deductions. So the itemizations, now there's a floor. And there's also tighter deductibility rules around some corporate giving.
and changes that might impact your higher level donors, your major donors. ⁓ External reporting has also noted that the same broad pattern, new non-itemizer deductions, and now we're talking about non-itemizers, that might, while it might bring in ⁓ smaller donors,
Some of those other changes could have a negative impact on large scale giving ⁓ for tax efficiencies with certain high net worth donors or corporations. there's certainly some bad news in with our good, but my advice would be that for your broad based donors, there's like, this could become a gentle nudge. For your major donors,
you're going to want to lean into the relationship, make everything very personal. And for everybody, just remember that the point is not to sell on the tax policy. The point is to always lead with your mission, but we always want to remove any friction possible. Anything that's standing between your donor,
and the donation that their donor potential, right? So in a moment like this, when we could use some other reasons for our donors to give, particularly small and mid-sized donors, which is what we're hoping to see more of anyway, every little bit of clarity can really help. Okay. Speaking of recurring giving, let's focus on it.
If I were talking to a nonprofit that needed more stable donations, that needed more stable revenue and a more projectable budget, I would immediately tell them to look at their recurring giving programs. Because recurring giving, it can really do two things. First, it helps smooth out volatility. And second, it gives you something that's predictable that you can build on.
I think that the mistake that a lot of organizations make is that they kind of, there's that toggle, right? Do you want to also offer a recurring donation opportunity? And so it's, you you default to the monthly giving on your donation page, they can turn it off and then, you know, we call it a day and that's our recurring giving ⁓ program. That's not a program, that's an option. And I would really encourage all of you to...
Think of your recurring giving strategy as just that a strategy and make it a program
So it needs a name. It could use to have some benefits. It could have its own positioning, even its own branding, right? Separate from, but tied to the organization's branding. It should have its own follow-up, so its own moves management system, or not system, but its own moves management tracks, ⁓ your workflows and your automations that flow from it. And you should pull reports on it so that you can continue to talk about it, continue to monitor the efficacy of your...
messaging and everything else that you're using and doing around your giving, your recurring giving program. And you also need to have a retention plan. Like what happens when we see our numbers start to dip? How do we continually boost those numbers or keep them going? So if you just like do that switch to, know, now we're going to offer a monthly giving option. I mean, that's actually, it is a good start. I would encourage you to take one more step. And at the, when anybody gets a, ⁓
customized the thank you following their one-time donation, that there is also in the wording there a button that they can push and an encouragement and a reasoning why they should join one of your recurring giving programs, because now we're going to convert them into programs. If you just do those two things, you know,
without creating the programs, you're definitely leaving a lot on the table. So refocus and try to build out what you can with your recurring giving. Another thing that you can do is activate peer-to-peer fundraising. Hear me out. I know this is not everybody's favorite, but it is a very good peer-to-peer fundraising strategy is really effective when there is a timeframe, when there is a definable end.
to the timing of a campaign. It's one of the fastest ways as well to increase ⁓ reach without putting a ton of burden on your staff. So when your existing supporters become your advocates and then your advocates become fundraisers, you have just exponentially increased the reach of your appeals.
as well as the return on every minute that you spend on your work. So your fundraisers now, your advocates turned fundraisers, they can bring in entirely new donors that you would never have known about. And you can start with a really simple message. Again, this could also be in the thank you follow up to your donors and get as granular as that. If you care about this mission, please help us bring more people into it. It's really that easy.
Peer-to-peer works, like I said, it works especially well when there's urgency, when the cause or the timing is urgent. And also, another moment where clarity is of the utmost importance. We need clear messaging around our peer-to-peer appeals. And what it does is it gives our...
already engaged supporters, it gives them agency. It gives them a way to support your organization and further increase the reach of their own gift. So think about that in terms of maybe running shorter term, nearer term, peer to peer fundraisers. There's so many different ways that those can look.
You knew I was going to talk about events. So what I will encourage you to do in this time is to reframe your events as fundraising strategy. So rather than just because it's on the calendar in six months and we know we have to preparing for our luncheon or our gala because we do it every year, because we've always done it, one of my least favorite sayings, let's start thinking of events as a whole for your organization as
as a real strategy for the real work of your development team. They should be helping you not only bring in gifts, that is certainly something that they should do, but it's not the only thing. They should also help you to identify prospects. Your events should help you identify prospects. They should also move one-time donors into recurring givers. They should reactivate lapsed supporters or activate new supporters.
And they should, and this is always the case, tell your story, give your mission, and provide context for it. That means that the event itself, that one-time community gathering, is really just one small part of the story. I mean, maybe it's not a small part, but it's definitely just one part of the story. The follow-up, I'm gonna say it here, it matters as much as the event does. So 50-50 at a minimum.
who attended, who gave, who didn't give, another important thing to know, not just a metric, a list of people, who brought guests, those are your influencers, who engaged with the story in some way with your board, with a committee member, and then who on that list, on any one of these lists, should get a personal call from someone on the staff of the board in the week following the event. This is where...
A lot of organizations, a lot of teams lose momentum. It's where I lost momentum when I was an event-based fundraiser. I know this because I've made this mistake.
You run the event and then you move right on to the next thing. You cannot afford to do that right now. At the time that you are planning the event, as you're building out your, hopefully, if you can, as you're building out your sponsorships, as you're creating your ticket levels, as you're building your full campaign, begin to plot out and plan the workflow that will happen for individual levels of.
I mean, people that engage with the event. So I'm trying to say, could be people that attended. It could be people that didn't attend, but sponsored in some way. It could be anybody that bid or gave. So whatever you define, however many you can, and there's certainly a bandwidth issue here, but.
The goal of any sort of moves management, which is what this is, is to take work that would take one person a very long time to do and diffuse it through automation, some automated emails, but primarily through messaging to key people within your organization that are going to make phone calls, do follow up, take people to coffee, send handwritten notes, whatever it is over the course of the 90 days following the event so that for sure,
Anybody that came to your event, the next interaction with your organization is not just an invitation to next year's event. They cannot just hear from you 11 months later. That ⁓ is not what most people want, honestly, thinking of yourself as a donor or as a participant in our nonprofit ecosystem. We really want to be able to engage people along the way. ⁓
Okay, I'm going to move on to corporate sponsorships. We get a lot of questions about this. Rather than calling it corporate sponsorships, I'd like to call it corporate partnerships. ⁓
I think that we have historically is don't, I did this too again, something I did in my own experience. I kind of shied away from it because frankly it's difficult. It's hard to do, hard to find the right person to talk to at any given corporation. It's one of those things that invariably someone at a board member will say, we should really engage so and so or someone from XYZ Corporation local company.
And if nobody on the board knows anybody, it's kind of left to the staff person to go, okay, well, I guess I can, maybe I'll try and go try to find somebody that they can then be in touch with, sending a blind email. that just from the jump was never going to work that well.
What you can do though is you've got this board of directors, you have these advocates for your organization, you have relationships in your community, lean into those and keep your ear to the ground. Find out where there is already some sort of relationship. know, sometimes a corporate partnership does mean a sponsorship. That's wonderful. That's great. Mercedes-Benz is going to be the title sponsor. Your local Mercedes-Benz dealer is going to be the title sponsor of your gala. Great. Love it.
no one's going to turn that away. But it can also mean employee giving campaigns, matching gifts. We have a lot of very cool tech now around matching gifts through a double the donation where we immediately and automatically look for corporate matching programs. There's other and new social matching that's coming that's very, very exciting. Stay tuned on that.
volunteer grants, can also be a really wonderful thing to look for within your corporate partnerships, local business partnerships, where are we going to source our silent auction items, mission aligned cause marketing, that is an incredible space to look to with any, again, local corporation, but honestly, when we're talking about that cause marketing, that's where you can really kind of climb up the ladder to get to some larger corporations, and then executive networks through your board.
As I've already mentioned, when we're in these tight environments, it's really about building ⁓ more outreach through the organization, meaning not just a single person, the organization, all of the people that are in it. We're not waiting for or looking even for one single hero to save the day. Okay. There's a leadership shift that's necessary right now. And that's kind of what I really want you to hear.
When all of these funding things get shaky, our instinct can be to clamp down and get cautious. Like our animal body, our human animal body, when there's fear, when fear sets in, danger is out there. Something seems uncertain. Like what do we do? What do we physically do? Like our stomach tightens, our fist ball up, furrow our brow. I think that's way you say it. So there's a tightening and a clamping down, right? Like that is what...
evolutionarily has served us. And then we begin to look for, scan the horizon for further danger. This is again, this is what our animal body does and it bleeds over into the ways that we respond in our personal lives as well as in our business acumen. And some of that is good. Some of that caution is so, so necessary. And also what we really need to have happen is
that caution to guide action. Hear me out. There is the possibility, and it happens a lot, that when you become cautious, you shut down and stop moving, right? There's the play possum piece of it. It's not necessarily playing possum, but we kind of hunker down. There you go. That in and of itself is risky in a different ⁓ way.
So what we, know, so what that could look like is leadership waits for clarity from the market, from the federal government, from the state government. Sometimes our federal funding is actually, you know, ⁓ backing a state grant that we were supposed to get. And now the trickle down effect has occurred. So we're waiting, we're waiting, we're waiting for clarity.
⁓ And then, because our leadership is waiting, our development team waits to get the right messaging to push out. And there's approvals that are necessary for that, but they're not even sometimes going to suggest items until because we can't craft a message around something we don't know that's not certain. Then the board is also waiting for staff to tell them what to go do. They're your soldiers, know, give us orders. We don't know where, what to do or what to say.
⁓ Our staff is also afraid. We don't want to alarm donors. That's for sure. And then what we have is everybody just wasting these precious moments when we could be taking some sort of proactive action. the ones that are going to navigate, the organizations that are going to navigate this well are going to be the organizations that are cautious and take action and take action.
with some amount of clarity, with the strategy behind it. They are not necessarily going to be the ones that have the most money or the most cash reserves. They're going to be the organizations that move early, that find alignment quickly, that make their case clearly. And they're going to be organizations that choose a few priorities and go all in.
They are going to stop pretending that this is temporary noise when all of the signs say otherwise. I see that I've got a shadow on my face. I hope it's not too distracting. If it is, you can turn off the video and just listen. So again, caution, yes, be cautious, but also, and take action.
You also need to think about infrastructure here. So ⁓ in a moment like this, your team doesn't need complexity. What it needs again is alignment, clarity, and you need to know where is revenue coming from, which campaigns are working, which donors are responding, who needs follow-up, ⁓ who attended, who gave, as I mentioned, who opened, clicked, who's lapsed, all of those things. And then what we really need to know is what should the team do next? And if you're
donor data is scattered in multiple different systems. event tech is over here. Your email marketing is over there. Your CRM lives here and none of those things are talking to each other. It's really difficult to get an idea of your full picture and have that full picture show up for you quickly or clearly. So this is where having robust technology, it's not just in and of itself robust, that is also connected or interconnected is going to be very
essential. We need to have that kind of central brain, the single source of truth that we can move from. So, you know, if you're trying to diversify your revenue quickly, you need tools that help you to do that without having to like
make all of those stitched together platforms. You need a place where you can do at the same time and in the same space, recurring giving, run your events, manage your volunteer programs, donor outreach, relationship tracking, moves management, it's all going to happen in a single place. It's going to be so much easier for, particularly for small teams, to navigate this kind of new normal and navigate it very effectively. The point is that the right tech,
can help you to respond with a whole lot more speed, visibility, and connection. And again, when you're a lean team, and trust me, this piece I know very well, that very much matters. So I'm gonna now close, because we're here at 13 minutes past the hour, so I would like to close with a very practical, tactical advice.
If you leave this webinar and you do nothing else, here is what I would like for you to do in the next seven days, depending on what your role is within your organization. If you're an executive director or a CEO, create a funding exposure map. Look at the data without blinders on. List every federal funding source, the amount, the timing, the restriction, and the risk level. Then build a 13-week cash forecast
and do that for three different scenarios. First one is delayed federal funding, the second one is partially funded, and the third is fully lost. You need that level of visibility and scenario planning so that you can execute well on the rest of this plan.
If you're a development director, you're going to go ahead, no matter what you're hearing, you're going to go ahead and write your emergency case for support. Then you're going to build one, in the next seven days, just one concrete revenue push for a recurring giving campaign. So you're gonna choose just one of these, a recurring giving campaign, a peer-to-peer campaign, an event follow-up strategy.
or a targeted donor reactivation campaign. Pick the move that gives you the best combination of speed and upside. And then if you're a board member, again, we love you and we need you to get to work here. So if you are a board member, make this a tangible piece. Make it, make a gift. Open just three doors. Introduce three very, ⁓ I mean, I don't even wanna say likely, but open.
give your organization three prospects for donors. Ask leadership, go and ask them proactively what would actually help. And be ready to support faster decisions than you might normally have needed to with your organization. Don't be shocked when that happens.
And then for everybody, we've got people that are just, that are not just, that are the most important, that are donors, that are volunteers, staff, at any level, don't wait for perfect certainty. It it truly may not come. It's certainly not in the next few years. You might not, in all honesty, you may never get that perfect certainty, but what you do, what you need is just enough clarity to act responsibly. And then you also need to have some courage so that you can move before delay.
⁓ ends up becoming damage. And so again, it's not just about nonprofit finances. This is operational. This is staff. This is mission. What this moment really is about is about focus and it's about leadership. And honestly, it's also about testing whether organizations can adapt quickly without losing sight of why they exist in the first place.
The good news is that you all as nonprofits, you do this all the time. You adapt, you stretch, you find a way forward.
And when you pair mission driven urgency with smarter fundraising strategy and better systems, you're going to give yourself a much better chance of coming out stronger on the other side. You're going to build the stress wood that is critical to being the biggest and best nonprofit that you can possibly be. Okay.
Thank you so much for coming here today. I truly appreciate your time. It means absolutely the world to me. I am dropping into the chat, the link to next week's webinar. Let me go ahead and put that in there. It is, I Will Be Joined by Tom Cotar.
of backpack friends and it is going to be an amazing talk around resilience and when taking the struggle that you face becomes the mission that you advocate for. Tom has an incredible story. I hope you will join me. That's going to be on March 24th, Tuesday as always at 1.30 Central. As always, the link is in the chat or it's appended here to our video, our recording. ⁓
Join me then, you really don't want to miss Tom talking about that. If you have other questions that you would like to ask, please do, I'm gonna show you a couple of slides here. Please do scan this QR code and you can actually, this is a QR code for you to scan to request a demo. But if you also just have questions, support at betterunite.com.
As always, that's where you can go for questions about Better Unite or anything else. If you have other needs or ⁓ need additional help or support, we are here for you. Even if you're not a Better Unite user, reach out, ask us questions. We do truly love it, and I promise you will get an answer. ⁓ Thank you again for your time today. I truly appreciate it. We are built for this moment. Let's go do some good.
Gain expert fundraising insights with BetterUnite’s Leya Simmons and renowned strategist Gail Perry as they unpack the Giving USA 2025 report....
Unlock the secrets to a high-performing auction with expert insights from BetterUnite’s Leya Simmons and benefit auctioneer Dean Crownover. Learn how...
Benefit auctioneer specialist Seth Weiner shares expert strategies with Leya Simmons from BetterUnite on how nonprofits can leverage donor data to...