Giving to Nonprofits by Millennials
Hey everyone, I'm Sarah Lange and I'm here to spark the philanthropy revolution. The word philanthropy means love of mankind. My show is all about the ways we can revolutionize our fundraising so we can raise more money and do more good.
Sarah: Hey everybody, Sarah Lange here. Happy summer. I can't believe we're hurdling towards the end of July. Thanks for joining me today. I am a professional fundraiser who's raised over $100 million and worked with over 200 nonprofits, and this show is really about teaching you how to raise more money so you can do more good. Today I am super excited to have, as our guest, Dr. Dan Young. Dan and I know each other. He is the founder of TEDx Wilmington, which is one of the largest TEDx franchises in the country and I was lucky enough to be there this past April. And here are some amazing presentations. And I hope to go next year as well. and hopefully next year I'll be on stage. Dan has his fingers in many pies and you can learn all about it. Dan, welcome to the show and I'm gonna let you introduce yourself to everybody.
Dan: Well, thank you for having me, Sarah. It's really great to be here with someone that I look up to in the philanthropy world like you. So thank you very much.
Sarah: Thank you.
Dan: My No problem. My name is Dan Young. I'm from here in Sonny Wilmington, Delaware. And I actually started my career in financial services as a financial advisor and I was lucky enough to you know sell my practice when I was 35 and have some options about what I wanted to do and I ended up going back to school to get a doctorate in marketing, but I really focused my work on social and behavioral marketing specifically to help nonprofits. So my dissertation, which is called an examination of digital nativity, generation, and gender in online giving, was completed back in 2012. And the easy way I can think of it is I was trying to figure out how to get millennials to donate more money to me impulsively. Obviously, the world has changed exponentially in the last 12 years, and I started my program, my doctoral program, in 2005, and it's obviously changed incredibly exponentially since 2005. So I was really just trying to, I was really just trying to crack the code of why some nonprofits had such a hard time having, at that point in time, what we considered the youngest generation to give dollars to them. And so I ended up being a professor and teaching and an administrator for 20 years. I ended my career as a director at the Wharton School of Business at the University of Pennsylvania. And now, as Sarah mentioned, most of my time is in doing different projects like TEDx, being a fractional chief marketing officer and being a co-founder and investor in a couple of different startups. So on top of that, I'm married, I have six children, three dogs. And, you know, I try to keep myself busy.
Sarah: Yeah, you try to keep yourself busy sounds to me like you're already very busy.
Dan: Oh, always, always busy. But I, you know, I can honestly say there's not one thing I do that I don't like doing. So that's a blessing
Sarah: That's awesome. And So let's start out by defining millennials for those folks who are in the audience who don't know them. What, you know, don't really understand when they were born. What are some of the hallmarks of the generation?
Dan: Yeah, I think what's interesting when you get into the research, you know researchers have said millennials the millennial generation can start as early as people being born in 1979 or as late as people being born in 1982, really the major piece that we think about is the fact that every millennial is someone who is a digital native, which means that they started their K-12 education with access to the internet. That's the major difference. The major difference is this ability to learn from screens more than you're learning from people. So the average millennial, you know, at the time of my research had less than 5,000 hours of actually reading tangible books and more than 10,000 hours of video watching from screens.
So this is really the first generation that we encountered what we call the three screen problem, where they constantly were on the phone, the laptop, and had the television set on at the same time. And what we found is these had a lot of impacts on actually how their brains worked. You know, when you looked at MRIs of millennials compared to people in earlier generations,
their brains were shaped differently, they produced different chemicals, they worked completely differently. And so because of this reprogramming of the human brain, most of everything that happened with millennials happened at a faster speed. In education, we'd always say, kids weren't paying attention in class, well, we just weren't teaching fast enough. And we weren't providing enough screens for them to see in our teaching. So in general, to answer, I'm a Scorpio, some long winded. In general, most people would say that millennials are those who were born somewhere between 1982 and the year 2000.
Sarah: All right. I just learned a lot. It's funny because, so my son was born in 1996, and he used to tease me sometimes as he got into middle school and high school About how you know,
there were certain things that I just didn't really get and I had to just hand things to him and we go fix this, figure this, show me how to do this and I tried to help him understand like the first time I touched a computer I was 22 I was, you know typing my senior thesis at my boyfriend's apartment and his housemate came home and said, What are you doing? I'm like, oh, I'm typing my thesis. He goes "No, what are you doing?" And he took me up to the computer center on the hill, which I didn't even know existed. So here it is my last semester, my senior year of college,
and I'm just learning how to use a computer. And I said to him, I said, "You started using a computer when you were three." Like this is your first language. For me, it's like probably my third language, you know? But yeah, I hadn't really thought about the whole screen thing. I'm sure I must onboard my students at Clark University of Tears with my old school approach.
Dan: Yeah, I always say I kind of came up in maybe the absolute worst time for the internet, meaning that I graduated from college in 1997, which is really the first widespread use of what we kind of consider graphical user interface of websites, right? So when I was a freshman in college, we had this new crazy wacky technology called email. And just the concept that you could, you know, hang out with a girl like one night in college and be able to reach out to her like on the other side of campus without making a phone call was phenomenal. And so by the time I graduated and people were creating websites, buying URLs on GoDaddy, we were just kind of like going off in the world thinking that this website thing may be a big deal, I don't know. So it was very interesting 'cause I'm old enough where I got to use email, but young enough where I don't really remember not using it in a way, you know, we still had the basic in high school, like all that fun stuff, but it's a very interesting time to grow up. And so whenever I meet anyone who's younger than me, and they're like, you don't know how to code in HTML.
It's like, no, we just, I just missed that. No clue.
Sarah: I know, right? Yeah. And now I have, but now I'm trying to wrap my brain around ChatGPT. I'm like, what?
Dan: Yeah.
Sarah: Yeah. So what are some of the things that you learned about millennials and the nonprofits that were kind of able to actually capture their attention and engagement?
Dan: Well, I mean, one of the things to always remember, and this is pretty much what anyone who has a PhD will tell you, Right? In the research, it was very specific in terms of what we were looking at because we can't look at everything. So the first thing that I researched was just the difference between digital natives, those people who grew up their entire academic life with the internet, and digital immigrants like myself and you, who basically we had to get indoctrinated into that later. So what I found in the research was that there are significant differences and once again I always have to make sure I preface that this is research that I defended my dissertation in 2012 so some of these some of the viewers will think oh no duh like obviously but keep in mind when this was done beforehand this was like the cutting -edge stuff right so
obviously we found that there are very different ways that these groups engaged with and trusted online platforms. We found that different groups had different definitions of altruism in terms of what altruism meant to them and they had their own unique motivations and behaviors.
And then we also had groups had different definitions of their parents altruism. So what does this mean practically. The first thing that it means is that a lot of nonprofits at the time and after I defended my dissertation. I kind of went on some level of, like a road show to nonprofits to talk about how they're engaging. The first thing that meant is that you need to, on your website,
have two different offers, or make your offer in two different ways. With anyone who is a digital immigrant, someone, let's say, older than a millennial, they were more likely to give impulsively based on mission, right? So if I have someone in my family who is affected by cancer, then I will then give to the American Cancer Society. In terms of millennials, they were more interested in affiliation. So a good example here in Delaware, like a lot of places we have multiple sclerosis like MS Bike to the Bay. Most of the people who participate in that are millennials and most of them do not know what multiple sclerosis is or can even spell multiple sclerosis. They just want the affiliation of being part of something together. So that was one piece that I discovered. The other piece I discovered is this concept that people who are digital immigrants are more interested in offline and local contribution. So when I was growing up, I would go with my dad to the Sunday breakfast mission and feed food to people, and that was my definition of altruism offline and local, whereas millennials and younger were more interested in online and global.
So that's the reason why there can be a, you know, a typhoon in Haiti, and Weiss -Cleves -Jean or like Austin Kutcher says, "Hey guys, you should give." People don't even know where Haiti is,
but they're more likely to give to that than they might be to their local Sunday breakfast mission. Also, for people who are digital immigrants, our contribution, our altruism, usually had to be some level of hands -on time -consuming, where millennials and younger felt as though their altruism could very simply be pressing a button and giving. And there are similar levels of altruism that were displayed from both people. So nonprofits, when they created their website, most of them clearly, especially in the early 2010s, they would spend a lot of time talking about mission. And what I found was when millennials reviewed those websites, they were not likely to make an impulse online donation. However, if I basically said, hey listen, pause for people, we help people, you know, give to dogs here in the state of Delaware, but if every single state save this many dogs, there are this many more dogs in the world, got way more interest. And you know this from being an expert in philanthropy yourself. If we can assign what's called an attitude object to thing, then it's way easier for us to give. So when both you and I were probably growing up, especially in the 80s, you'd see one TV commercial that says, "Hey, there's three million starving kids in Africa," and that would get a certain number of donations.
But what always got more donations was Sally Field in Africa saying, "Hi, this is Johnny. Johnny's starving. Will you give to Johnny?" Always got multiple 10x of the notifications because we could easily assign an attitude object to what we were given to. And what I found is most nonprofits, they didn't think through these things on a website to give both the attitude object, but also to talk about the mission of the organization.
Sarah: That's so interesting because I, you know obviously I come from my own points of reference and um I think it's really interesting that millennials and it makes sense given that you know they're digital natives that it would just be second hand to them to just push the button and I know that you know even my son who's not necessarily a millennial but he'll get a text and he'll be like Okay, there's a tsunami in wherever. Dang, here's $10, and I always tried when he was younger. So interesting looking at kind of historical events through a different lens. Yeah, he and I used to go volunteer at Heifer Farm. So Heifer Farm distributes animals both locally and globally to help people improve their quality of life. So we happen to have the Northeast Education Center of Heifer Farm about half an hour from our house. So we used to go there all the time to feed the animals, take care of the gardens. And he enjoyed that up to a certain point, but at some point, I think he was probably like nine or 10 years old. He's like, "Why can't we just give money?" He's like, He didn't want to go in muck stalls and slop the pigs and, yeah, weed the garden.
Dan: What's funny is I talked about Heifer International in my dissertation, and their website was, especially back in 2012. I haven't I probably haven't looked at it since then but back then they would basically similar to what you're saying They would have a page that says, you know one cow is $2 ,000, one chicken is $50 and they would have a way for you to share that link with multiple people So I even found one group of kids at the University of Delaware, one story I got from someone was like, "Yeah, like one night we came back from the bar. We're all toasted. We went on Heifer International. We bought a cow. Like it was phenomenal.", but here's the funny thing. The funny thing about it is, at least back then, at the very bottom of the Heifer International page, it would say with a little asterisk, with little super small like pharmaceutical writing, Yeah, we don't actually buy cows, we don't buy chickens. But that thousand, that is the monetary representation of what it would be to buy one for this particular place. So they figured out a way to have an attitude object cow, have a dollar amount, $1 ,000, that a lot of people cannot afford who are younger, but giving the opportunity to share the link with people to buy the cow. And if you think about it, even now, we see this type of work with many things. In fact,
I just went to the wedding of one of my former students, and she had a great registry with a bunch of stuff that no one could afford. But you basically could share the link with other people and say, oh yeah, $4 ,000 for like a we're awesome like wine fridge. And it would show how many people donated to that one and the amount of money left. And as we all probably know,
like mom and dad, right before the wedding's over, they'd probably check to see, okay, well, they're $200 left for this one, a hundred bucks left for this one, $500 left for this one, let's just fill those out so the kids get all the stuff that they're looking for. If you now see that type of strategy in all kinds of different places.
Sarah: Yeah, that's so interesting. And it's funny that, you know, we end up talking about Heifer because one of the things we used to do was we would save all this loose change for a while.
And then, oh, we've lost you there, Dan. It looks like you're talking, but we're not hearing you. Oh, there you are.
Dan: There you go. Sorry about it.
Sarah: That’s okay. So what I was saying is, you know, we used to save up all our loose change from turning in bottles things, and then we would actually buy like whatever animal that change so we'd save it up all year and then right before Christmas, we buy like a flock of chickens or, you know, whatever it was a goat, a third of a goat. So It was a very effective strategy, I'll tell you.
Dan: Yeah, I mean, you definitely always read the small print. But that ability to create communities with digital natives is huge, especially post -COVID, where all you had was your online community. I remember getting into a whole conversation with my 16 -year -old, and obviously at the time he was 12 years old and I was talking about the amount of times he spent playing video games and it's not great. And I'll never forget him very tearfully looking at me and saying, but dad, this is where all of my friends are. And I was like, oh, shoot, you got me there. And then he went back to playing Call of Duty or whatever. But post COVID, if nonprofits have not fully integrated the lessons that we learned from communication and COVID, you're clearly missing out on a lot of funding. And the lessons of COVID were super clear in terms of online outreach, online payment structures, the importance of subscription -based models, the importance of like ongoing giving instead of one -time gifts, we learned a ton there. And what I find is because the needs of the community from nonprofits were so great, many of them did not have the time or did not give themselves the time to work on the business while they're working in the business. But any strategic planning session now with a nonprofit should really take a look at, you know, doing a very clear digital audit, setting goals about what you want these things to look like, you know, training and developing a digital team and then just updating, you know, your web -based approach and your social media -based approach and then putting in measurement structures to see how those numbers increase. Anyone who's not doing this is really missing out on that opportunity.
Sarah: So, for those people who are now sitting on the other side of this screen going, "Oh my God, we have to do this," how does one go about doing a digital audit? Like, what does that look like?
Dan: Well, I mean, obviously it looks a little bit different for everyone, right? I mean, all the digital audit means is just really taking a look at your online presence and seeing if,a lot of it's maybe like a lot of focus group work, getting a number of people onto a call of different generations. Every day, and this obviously, everyone's read all these different features about the greatest transfer of wealth in human history that's going to happen as traditionalists and baby boomers leave the job market and in some cases, leave the planet and give these dollars to people. And then also on the other side of that, because of digital technology, we get about 1,700 new millionaires every day. And the fastest growing tranche of millionaires is our people of the ages of 13 to 21,
Sarah: That's insane, that’s a crazy pants.
Sarah: Well, also keep in mind that the things that are important to these folks in terms of these young people in terms of wealth, in terms of riches, in terms of all those things are not the same things that are important to people who are my age or older so they're certainly not going to country clubs they may or may not be buying Mercedes They may not be investing in real estate. They're just buying tons of clothes and tons of stuff. And so it doesn't really necessarily pop up on the wealth and luxury indexes, indices, that we tend to see. But people need to think through the fact that, A, these young people are going to be getting all this money from the wealth transfer. Also, they are making all this money and they're engaging with digital technology in a new way. So basically, you always, from the digital audit, you want to take a look at your website, social media presence, email marketing, and just kind of assess the mobile friendliness of what you have, the user experience. Are you including any sort of gamification in what you're doing? And the easiest way to do that is just by simply getting a number of people in the virtual room that are in the different generations and have and have a cut this is this crazy pants to some people and having a conversation with them looking at the website and looking at the media to say, hey will this get you to give impulsively, will this get you to give today, that's the important thing because if you go to like a 20 year old and say hey, American cancer society, you know, would you give to that? Who's going to say no? Like that's, that's like, absolutely not. Like, of course they're going to say yes, but, what would get you to give the day? And then from that setting, very clear, you know, smart goals, everyone knows what that means at this point, you know, specific, measurable, actionable, realistic and time bound goals. About how you want to improve digital engagement and how you want to improve fundraising. So for example, can we increase online giving by 20 %? Can we increase social media followers by 30%? Can we increase website conversion ratio by 15 %? Whatever that looks like for you. So it's a little bit different for everybody, but it really is just basic marketing research, focus groups and surveys, and then making those changes to make sure that your site reaches out to each of your constituents in the way that they want them to reach out. They want to be reached out to.
Sarah: Yeah, I find everything you're saying so interesting and it's so in alignment with my whole thinking and approach. But when I talk to people about their website and I'm working with somebody right now and I was talking to them over that donations page and they serve kids,
right? So, you know, kids are like very easy to give to. They're very compelling. You put a little picture of a little kid saying, "I love coming to this place." Like the heartstrings,
right? They're in the top three, kittens, puppies and kids, right?
Dan: Yes.
Sarah: And so I'm looking, there's no photographs of these adorable kids, right? There's lots of text. It's not quite as bad as the pharmaceutical inserts, but it's not much bigger than that. And then there's like three different calls to action, all of which pull you off the page, you know? It's like, you know, and there's resistance when things like that get brought to people's attention and there need to be changes. And they're like, well, we want to make sure everybody knows about everything. I'm like, okay, but now you're, they know nothing about anything because they're being, their attention is being split and the confused mind says no.
Dan: Correct. Yeah, I mean, I think that's one of the major issues with marketing in general. People have a very hard time niche marketing because they believe someone's being left behind. But in reality, the stronger your niche market is, the more likely they are to refer other people because they feel as though you're talking directly to them. So all target markets have to be defined demographically, geographically, psychographically, and behaviorally. Psychographically and behaviorally are the most important ones because, for the most part, men and women both give. You know, Kamala does a conference call, she gets 1.3 million donors who are men, 1.3 million dollars from men, 1.4 million dollars from women. Both of them gave, like when she did her conference calls to raise money. But psychographically deals with someone's attitude, interest, and opinions in their social class. Behaviorally talks to when is someone likely to give during the day? What do they do as a family member? What do they do as a husband, wife, grandma, and granddad? You want to target your web page to specific types of people, right? So when I'm creating a web page to try to get impulse online donations by millennials, I'm going to have the big obnoxious button that says, "Give now to change the world." Like, I'm going to say like, "Hey, some people don't believe that we can do this, but we can." You have to have very specific language in your offer to people, right? And that offer has to have specificity. It has to have clarity. It has to have actionability and resonance and familiarity, otherwise known as the scarf method. You have to construct it. And I think the problem with a lot of people now who are using AI, they're getting a very, very vanilla content when what you really wanted was Rocky Road, or at least Chubby Hubby. And so I think that that is part of the strategic planning piece to basically say to yourself, hey, listen, there's a lot of different people who are raising money for a lot of different things. We want to corner the market on impulse fundraising for this person. And in doing that, if you're online, you will not only pull in that person, but you'll pull in their family members because they see how fired up, like the person who gave to you is. And also to touch on something that you mentioned before because it's not what you said, but it's something that I thought of when you said it. Yes, kids and puppies and ice cream, people want to gift to that, obviously. But if you have something that's a little bit more difficult to imagine, you have to then create some sort of a magnet. So for example, if you think of the ice bucket challenge with ALS, most of the people who gave to that have no idea what ALS is, nor can they spell ALS, nor they know what's going on. All they know is they dumped a bucket of water on their heads and they called people out, but they still raised money. So if you have something that's that's the type of thing that's what I would call an unsought like charity, like anything that's dealing with, in some cases, cancer, Alzheimer's, ALS, things of that nature, you know that you're going to have to have something that pulls people in that may have nothing to do with the charity. So on the website, you can tell everything that you want about ALS, here's what we're doing. But in social media, to get the views, you might have to have something that's a little bit more viral to get people to the website and to say, hey, listen, I'll get, you know, for millennials and Gen Z especially, hey, I will give just because that was a kick -ass marketing campaign because they will do that. So it's really important to think through those different people, those different pieces there when you're talking about the target market and having something for everyone to be able to give impulsively.
Sarah: Yeah, and I think all those points are so valid and just through my own experience what I know to be true. Somebody wanted to do their own version of the bucket challenge, but they wanted to do it with like high school kids And so it was like they were talking about love bombing like with a bucket and I was just like thinking High school kids, you know Throwing buckets of stuff over each other. I'm thinking nails, glass, maybe some dog poop. I'm thinking, no, wrong wrong group to do this. I'm just thinking about how my son was in middle school and high school. And I'm like, no. But I mean, you know, as my mother used to say, bless their hearts because they were trying to think of something that was attention grabbing. And but yeah, I think we all have to think about liability and safety these days as well.
Dan: Yeah, I mean, I think that everything, like just like you mentioned, everything goes back to the target market, right? Because the Ice Bucket Challenge had a couple of different pieces to it. When you deconstruct it, it says why it went viral, right? So, and all these different things deal with demographics, geographics, psychographic, and behavior. The first thing was, for the most part, the Ice Bucket Challenge really began and took shape in Boston when a Boston College,
I believe a Boston college baseball player got an ALS and some of his teammates rallied around him with the ice bucket challenge because guess what in the locker room where do you have, you have ice, thankfully they did not do the icy hot challenge which most of us who've been in the locker room we know what the icy hot challenges Don't do that one.
Sarah: Don't do this as a fundraising strategy.
Dan: Correct. But part of the genius of it, without them knowing as genius, those of us who understand that there are probably only three places in the United States that are fanatical,
not like where you're from, blah, blah, blah. They're fanatical about where they're from are Texas, Manhattan, and Boston. So it became a Boston Pride thing in a city that is really a collection of small neighborhoods. So the virality of it took off because being in Boston other Bostonians wanted to participate. Then because it was a sports team, the Patriots got involved,
the Bruins got involved, the, you know, the Red Socks got involved, then when that happens everyone in Philly is like oh wait a minute we're better in Boston we can do this and then people in New York are like, hey listen, I'm outside Philly, yes we are, and so that so that added to the virality but also the thing that added to the virality is that it was just enough pain, right?
it's like just enough. It's like you're not putting yourself. It's not like an icy hot challenge You're just in enough pain for a short amount of time where it became a thing and it was just uncomfortable enough for other people to watch to keep their attention. For something to become viral it depends on where it starts, It depends on what the network is, it depends on the pain level, one of the podcasts that's so popular now is having celebrities and they're eating hot wings, right? And they have, they ask all these questions while they're eating hot wings. And they're like, trying to answer the question about what's it like to work with the rock?
Like just sweating? Like, Oh, my God, like, it was, it was awesome. Can I please have some milk? It's like, no, I have some more questions. You just have to have just enough pain and uncomfortability for something to be viral. TikTok, why? Because grandma's dancing in front of other people, and grandma never danced in front of people before. Just enough uncomfortability, just enough pain, just enough outreach, so that it becomes viral, and people think, okay, that's interesting. So these are the things nonprofits need to think about when they're like, oh, we'll just make this thing, it'll go viral, That's not how it works. There's a very specific formula to be able to do something to make it go viral. And it all deals with who the target market is and where the virus is starting from.
Sarah: Yeah. Again, so many really good solid points. I wanna go back to something you were saying a little bit earlier about this huge transfer of wealth that's happening. You know so many times nonprofits are undertapping their market and I think part of it is just Individual donor work is akin to dating. It takes time. It takes investment, like you can't just ask somebody to marry you on the first date, like you got to take them to coffee and then work your way up to lunch and then maybe dinner and then maybe the weekend away, so, you know It doesn't have to be like the slog fest with each donor but you have to figure out how do I draw this donor in? How do I engage them? And you can't use the same techniques or approach with every single donor. So, you know, again, it has to be kind of customized stewardship. But the other thing that I find so interesting that you said, which also totally attaches to this huge transfer of wealth and who's getting it, is when somebody gets really fired up and engaged, that fire spreads through their community, right? So 63 % of people give to causes recommended by their friends, families, co -workers, and networks, right? So it's not just that people see them getting fired up. It's like they're looking for good causes, and if they see that you're fired up about this cause,
they're gonna be like, "Oh, tell more about this and then they're going to turn and donate, right? So the more you niche down and target your market, the better you're going to have in terms of the spreadability because people are going to be deeply engaged and more fired up and more willing to talk about it with friends and families and their networks, which in turn boost donations instead of just trying to be vanilla, right? So I was always taught in business, you want a red flag or a green flag, right? You want people to be like, yes, or no, right? You never want that yellow flag, which is meh. Like you want to incite, yeah, you want to incite either a strong yes or a strong no. And I think so many nonprofits, like you said earlier, are afraid to like leave the middle ground, but really you want those red and green flags. You want to be super clear about here's who we are for right here is what we're for right and so people can gravitate towards that or if they don't relate to that at all they're going to go find another nonprofit anyway so you might as well niche down because it's going to draw in a specific customer base that you're looking for.
Dan: Very true I mean I think in general, in the perfect world if you're a nonprofit that produces a good or a service, you don't, in many ways, you don't want anyone to even care if you're a nonprofit. You just want someone to basically claim like, "Hey, that's my thing that's going on." And I think that you're 100 % right and it lends itself, and I think it's worth reiterating, it lends itself to the importance of understanding the behavior of your target market. You know, there was a great business four years ago that was obviously very slanted to the Democratic Party that was really looking to have President Biden elected. And actually it was a little bit before the last election and they created a series of easy buttons and that you could pick the easy button on your desk and every time at the time when Donald Trump was president at last, every time he said something crazy, you'd like slam the easy button and automatically sent $5 to the Democratic Party.
Sarah: That's genius.
Dan: And so people were just like listening to this guy, like while he's probably, it's like, it's like hitting the easy button. It's like, that was easy, $5, that was easy, $5. And that is like an unbelievable example of understanding ‘behavior’ of a target. And so I think that the more that you can really, really delve into it, you know, any sort of, for example, American Cancer Society can say, "Hey, here's what we want to do." You know, understanding that every nonprofit, your job as a nonprofit executive director is to put yourself out of a job, because like whatever you're advocating for does not exist anymore, I think a lot of people don't go that far. I think a lot of them aren't like taking a step back and saying okay how can I be out of a job in 10 years? What has to happen at what level, at what speed? Now who are the people I need to get 100 % of to buy into this and I target them? Most people like you said are playing very much in the middle. They say, basically, if you have a wallet and a heartbeat, we'll take your money. But what I would say to those folks is, OK, but if you have to keep going back for grant funding every year for five years straight, you are probably doing something wrong. I'll say it's like the blanket statement that anyone can disagree with because you have more and more welcome to disagree with it. But unless you're providing some sort of value to somebody, then you're not going to service all the people you want to service from your nonprofit. So this laser focus on target marketing should be a part of everybody's strategic planning process with every nonprofit.
Sarah: Yeah, I agree. I'm a big fan of like future visioning and then reverse engineering and figuring out what the dollar amount and the plan is like okay great here's where the train is here's the destination of the future what are the tracks need to look like and and what's the train we need to build is it a bullet train is it a steam train is you know like what kind of train are we building and you know there's so many times when people are just going from one year to the next and they're not thinking of five, 10, 15 years down the road. And I think some of that is, you know, more than 60 % of the nonprofit sector is bringing in less than a million a year. Like that's a micro institution. So I think for a lot of nonprofits, sometimes they don't even think that's possible, but that's what I love to do is play with them and say, oh, but it is possible. Like there was over $500 billion given away last year, like, let's get you some of that, you know?
And it's not that the money's not out there, it's just that people don't know how to go after it and get it. And this comes back to what you and I have been talking about is, you know, this is how you go get it, you know, you create these digital environments where people can come in and maybe buy the cow together, right, whether they're wasted or not, or you'll have to understand who your target market is and and what experience are they having when they come into your world you know and what's their experience when you go out to their world you know one of the things I love doing with my clients is donor surveys because that's how you get inside the brain of your donor, right? and so I love to ask donors, could you give me five words to describe yourself as a donor. And then literally, I tell the directors of development, use those words, because then you create the resonance, which ups the engagement level. Then you're literally creating, oh, we're on the same wavelength. I'm like, so create a word cloud of your donor's favorite words and then start using them. We know how generous you are. We know how kind you are. We know how much community matters to you. Like, literally, I don't care what words you want to use. Use their words, you know? Yeah, because otherwise, it just ends up being like a missed opportunity because you're talking in a different way than they are listening and hearing. So yeah, I think that's so important.
Dan: Yeah No, absolutely. I mean, I think that overall, for whatever reason there's been a very big chasm between like I mentioned the post Covid economy, a lot of which is kind of some level of like a gig economy where people have said hey you know, I don't want to drive into work anymore I want to work from the beach all the time. And some of those time saving and more importantly, like spirit saving activities, I found that most nonprofits went back to business as usual. And like, yes, our fundraiser, our fundraiser is to have the annual dinner. And our top in our way of doing it is government grants and $10,000 donors or $500,000 donors. And I think nonprofits once again, because we're so couched in the mission, We are always working in the business as opposed to on the business. But this is why 13 year olds can figure out how to make more a million dollars faster than a nonprofit with 15 employees can. So all these are opportunities to collaborate and talk to each other and get best practices. Because once again, when nonprofits do well, the world is a better place.
Sarah: Absolutely. you and I agree 100 % on that because you know people sometimes they go you know government is the answer or corporations are the answer but there are so many groups and situations that neither of those entities want to take on and they won't so you know I often will say if you think about the quality of life in the United States, it really comes down to nonprofits that are affording us this quality of life because if you stop and think about our country without any 501c3s in it, right? Now you're talking about no hospitals, no universities, no social services, no adult daycare, no animal rescue, no environmental. Okay, well, let's all move to Siberia because it's probably less hostile than this country would be if we took out all the 501c3s. Yet, youknow, I think part of the reason that 501c3 have a hard time dreaming beyond next year is because they're just handcuffed. They've got the golden handcuffs. You have to keep your overhead low. I'm like, no, you have to keep your overhead at a reasonable rate. But no one would tell Google, Apple, or any of those guys to keep their overhead low. Overhead is the operations of your company, so, you know, people like, well, I don't want to, I don't want to pay for overhead. I'm like, okay, well, staff is overhead. So who's going to deliver the programs, not robots. Right? So do you want them to work in the dark without computers? Like what overhead would you say is, you know, luxurious? Oh, well, the executive director is getting paid too much. I'm like, okay, well, what do you, What do you code is too much? What is too much? Well, $100 ,000. I said, well, what if they're running a $19 million agency? Well, then maybe six figures is okay. You know, it's just so funny to like, when you start unpacking these beliefs held by the general populace about nonprofits, but, you know, you and I both know, like we would be up the creek without a paddle if we didn't have nonprofits in this country.
Dan: Absolutely. There's a really great TEDx talk by a man named Dan Palota.
Sarah: Yes.
Dan: That's probably, yeah, right? That talks about nonprofit executive compensation. And to your point, nonprofits are the glue that pretty much holds the entire country together. So they should be paid for being that glue. And so I think that definitely agree with everything you said there.
Sarah: Yeah, I love Dan's talk and I used to teach a class on fundraising as part of the MPA program at Clark University here. And first night, that was how I opened the whole course, was making them watch his talk. And before I would say, you know, I want you to write down everything you know about nonprofits, right? And so at the end of the talk, I'd be like, I want you to look back at this list you just wrote and see how many of your beliefs or thoughts or attitudes about nonprofits are actually not true, you know, and they'd all be like, oh yeah I love Dan I just I was really lucky I was able to facilitate a discussion of his film at a conference called cause camp where it is he was coming out with the the movie so that was great to have people see that film and discuss it and become aware and Yeah, I'm a big fan of dance and he's from Massachusetts so bonus points
Dan: Yeah, I know we used to talk badly about Massachusetts like down here in Philly but you guys have been on good run this for the 21st century, you know, Patriots and Bruins and Celtics and Red Socks and all the things. But, you know, Philly's going to make a comeback at some point, time.
Sarah: At some point. Yeah. I spent my high school and college years right outside of Philly. And so I used to go to a lot of Philly's games back when vet stadium was still there and went to a couple of Eagles games. And yeah, I was a big fan, but, you know, then I left and, you know, had to, had to migrate my preferences accordingly.
Dan: Fair enough. Totally get it.
Sarah: Yeah. Well, Dan, this has been so interesting and insightful and helpful. And I really want to thank you for taking time out of your busy day, post vacation, and, and spending some time with us talking about how to jigger our approach to do better with millennials?
Dan: Absolutely, and I'm always glad to help. And I know there are a few questions. So if anyone wants to reach me, they can reach me at [email protected]. That's just D -R -D -A -N -Y -O -U -N -G -7 -9 @gmail.com. And any friend of Sarah's is a friend of mine. I'm glad to help wherever I can.
Sarah: Thank you so much. Yeah, we'll make sure that we include your email with the transcript we send out and so people can reach out to you. So thanks again for being here and I'll be back in another two weeks with another episode of the Philanthropy Revolution. Just wanna thank everybody for joining us today.
Thanks for tuning in. I'll be back in two weeks with another episode. Got topics you want me to cover? Organizations you want me to showcase? Let me know. Also, I'm here to help you revolutionize philanthropy at your nonprofit. If you want to talk about what that looks like, drop me an email.