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How you can begin screening your own database for FREE!
47 Plays9 months ago
In this episode Tom shares how you can start evaluating your own database for free, using simple methodologies that anyone can learn.
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Transcript
Introduction to Fundraising Podcast
00:00:04
Speaker
Welcome to the Abundant Vision fundraising podcast. Whether you're a seasoned professional or a first-time fundraiser, we have the advice you need to take your next step towards major gift mastery. I'm your host, Tom Dauber, president of Abundant Vision Philanthropic
Understanding Wealth Screening
00:00:20
Speaker
Consulting. The past three weeks, we've been doing a deep dive on all things regarding wealth screening and the qualification of newly identified potential major gift owners, or as some like to call them, suspects. A lot of people don't like that term. It is easy though. So anyway, that's what we've been looking at. That's what we've been talking about.
Budget-Friendly Data Analysis for Nonprofits
00:00:43
Speaker
Today, I wanted to cover the basis on what you can do as a nonprofit leader if you're at an organization that has zero budget for wealth screening. you All of us would love to have that.
00:01:00
Speaker
but not all of us do. And in fact, I know some nonprofits where they've kind of taken a philosophical approach that they don't even want to do well-screened. Well, that's if you're opposed to that for moral reasons or what have you, that doesn't mean you still can't look at your data in creative ways to give you some insight as to where your next donor might come from. You can learn a lot about the wealth capacity and affinity of your donors simply by analyzing your own data. And it doesn't cost you anything. It can be done pretty quickly. Truthfully, I mean, when I think about this, all you really need is some comfort with the basic functions of Excel.
Tools for Donor Data Analysis
00:01:50
Speaker
or Google Sheets. That would be about the same. You don't have to be ah a wizard with formulas. I don't even know how to do um pivot tables. Not a clue.
00:02:02
Speaker
They're like alchemy to me. I look at them. I appreciate them. I can see what they do. I don't have the foggiest as to how to implement them or to create them. But what I'm really good at is is using the filter button. I know how to filter data and the data sort. I know how to do a multi-stage sort.
00:02:24
Speaker
to prioritize the data that I want. And that's really all you need. If you can download data out of your CRM into Excel and you can sort it or filter it, you're going to learn so much about your donors and their affinity and capacity. So let's let's start with the most basic thing you can do. And that's ID potential giving capacity using geographical location.
Estimating Donor Wealth through Location
00:02:54
Speaker
You know, much of wealth screening, and we've covered this, it centers on property values. ah Where is their home? So if you've got somebody's mailing address, their home address, and and you you have access to Zillow, which is a free website, you can look up the, they call it the Zestimate, right? The estimated value of their home.
00:03:17
Speaker
Or you know you can even go onto your county auditor's website, in most cases, and learn a bit about someone's property holdings. You might even find the name of the LLC that maybe they're holding their property in, which could open up a whole other door of discovery.
00:03:36
Speaker
But if you can know the value of someone's home, typically your wealth screening software is going to assume about 5% of the net worth really based around the value of their home. Now that's fraught with problems. Like I've said before, those wealth screenings can't see debt. They don't know how big their mortgage is. And so even if I have a million dollar home and you assume that my five year gift capacity is 5% of that. Well, you can't know if I'm leveraged to the hilt in debt on that property. So there's problems, but knowing who's living in the high rent district and who isn't can be helpful.
Visualizing Donor Data with Mapping
00:04:20
Speaker
So what you want to do is download your entire database into a single Excel file and sort that list by zip code. Pay special attention to folks that
00:04:31
Speaker
live in areas that you already know of that have a higher real estate price. And if you don't know, you can certainly Google that online and you can generally find out what the median income is ah in a given zip code and which zip codes have the highest median income. That's something you can search up on the webs. And the other thing you can do that's really helpful is to take all that data and upload it into some mapping software. I think Excel has something called Power Maps. ah There's another web-based thing called BatchGeo. There's a few other software packages out there. Do your own research. But you can visualize all this data in one place. Super helpful.
00:05:17
Speaker
Because you can't tell by looking at an address if that person has waterfront property or lives on a golf course or lives somewhere else really desirable. You just wouldn't know by look, especially if you've got a nonprofit that is a constituency that's all over the country. You might be able to tell your local neighborhood, like you know the areas where the really wealthy people live, but it's going to be hard for you to know that in every state, ah every region.
00:05:47
Speaker
um So this this can be helpful there. I can think about a time when I did this and I realized that a particular person in our database you know had a property overlooking Central Park. i knew I knew immediately that this was a person that I wanted to try and get in front of. and Ultimately, I did. It took forever. I had the darndest time getting past his gatekeeper, but I did a cold call with a gift ah from the university. I got right in. It was fantastic. He was everything I expected he would be based on where he lived.
00:06:24
Speaker
Yeah, it was remarkable. The other thing that's interesting with the mapping is you might have two donors who are big advocates and fans of your organization who are next door neighbors and don't know each other. It's the way our culture is these days. You could live just down the street from somebody and not know about their giving. And you can begin to help build some bridges and to help you take advantage of some relational networks that they wouldn't know existed otherwise.
Identifying and Re-engaging Lapsed Donors
00:06:59
Speaker
Now, you're downloading all this data from your CRM, a few other things to do. In the same download, you want to include all the giving information you can. Sort by the number of GIFs,
00:07:11
Speaker
You know, and and take a look at how many years of giving to your organization your donors have, because the number of those gifts should tell you something about their affinity for your organization. I'd also include like last gift date in there too. That could be helpful. Like if they made 40 gifts to your organization and then just immediately stopped 10 years ago, you know, maybe they hate you now. I don't know. It is worth a question though. You might want to follow up with them.
00:07:41
Speaker
and say, hey, I know she gave for a long time and then you stopped. What happened? Did we let you down somehow, right? Questions like that, as long as they're asked without judgment, are usually well received. Even if someone's mad, maybe they have some things to get off their chest and you reconnecting to them could be the thing that brings them back into the fold. And maybe your organization has an apology to make that you just didn't know about, right? You just don't know.
00:08:06
Speaker
you know recently Recently, my alma mater sent me a ah giving request, and ah they they have my ex-wife's name on it next to mine. Now, being in the profession, I have a lot of grace for that. But for some people, you know that might be enough to write off the organization. And that might be the time to say, oh my gosh, Mr. Dauber, I'm so sorry. We didn't know you were divorced. We didn't know that happened.
00:08:33
Speaker
Anyway, and and maybe they've been doing it and I just noticed it for the first time. Who knows? All I'm saying is there's a story there. If someone gave to you for 20 years and then just stopped out of the blue, there's a story there as a director of development, as an executive director, as a nonprofit leader. You want to know that story and find out what happened.
00:08:55
Speaker
tom be they just were abundant they shove all phil andropic Sometimes people go to nursing homes. Fundraising can be right and then they kind of be hard mentally get into the place you need to be in order to give see new opportunities. Everyone struggles with you anymore. You just can't see the water they're swimming in. That's when having outside expertise. there's any number of reasons, and you should never assume the go in with a state of curiosity and you want to look at the numbers of gifts because the folks that have given you the most, your gifts are generally going to be the people that have the highest opinion.
Recognizing Top Donors
00:09:34
Speaker
And if someone has a really long giving history, it can be a very easy and simple transition, especially if they're older. Back to the conversation about an estate gift.
00:09:46
Speaker
You could say something like, Bob, I noticed you've been giving to us for 30 years now, every month. That's a lot. That's amazing. We're so grateful forever. Have you ever thought about what's going to happen to your annual gift after you're gone? Would you be open to a conversation about how you could keep that annual gift alive and going long beyond your time on this earth? Many people, if they love your organization, either they haven't thought about it um or if they have, they'd probably be okay with having that conversation. So ah use that. Now, the next one's pretty obvious, maybe too obvious, but you also wanna get not just your number of gifts, but your cumulative giving, the total lifetime giving, and sort that from greatest to least. Make sure that you really know who your top donors are. And you should always have that list handy. You should always be thinking about your top 25 donors, top 50 donors.
00:10:44
Speaker
Are they happy with you? There might be some people that have fallen off the radar. Maybe no one's talked to them in a while. Well, go do that. If someone has a history of giving at your organization that has put them into your top 25, top 50 donors, you wanna make sure they're taken care of and you wanna make sure you know what their story is. If someone has stopped giving, who is in your top level of giving, this is another opportunity to be curious.
00:11:10
Speaker
Again, why did they stop giving? What was the story? Get them re-engaged. Let them know you care. And they need to blow off some steam, like I said before. But just remember, anger is just another way passion expresses itself. So if someone's angry with you or your organization, what you know is that they care. yeah That is so much better than apathy. So to take a look at that list there too, of cumulative giving.
00:11:38
Speaker
And you can even compare those two numbers. How's the number of gifts compared to cumulative gifts? If somebody's at the top of your cumulative giving and they've only made one gift, that's a real sign that they have a lot of money. If someone's taken 100 gifts to get there, that means they have less money, typically, right? So just just be thinking about that.
00:11:59
Speaker
And then the final thing I'd say to look at is find out if your CRM also tracks non-giving related engagements. So what I mean is outside of the giving information, can you see constituents who are giving their time as volunteers?
00:12:21
Speaker
Can you see if they are attendees at your events? Can you see if they are signed up for your newsletters? All those sorts of non-giving things. Those are all signs of affinity. And if you can establish that someone is a volunteer or an attendee or an advocate for your organization in some way, you know they have a strong affinity for your organization.
00:12:49
Speaker
And that means they should be more likely to give than someone who does not have strong affinity for your organization and is not giving their time and is not attending their events. So these are people who, through their actions, are telling you that they love what you're doing and want to be a part of it. So call them today, and again, find out why. What's their story? What's the thing that drives them to to give their time, to show up at your events?
00:13:19
Speaker
and it very well may lead to a giving discussion.
Celebrating Donor Contributions
00:13:23
Speaker
One other thing I wanna say, as we're looking at giving histories of particular, you're gonna find things. You're going to discover a particular donor who's given 20 years in a row, 30 years in a row. Keep an eye open as you're analyzing this data for opportunities to say thank you in special ways and to celebrate them in special ways.
00:13:49
Speaker
Many of your donors don't know they're not keeping track of how long they've been supporting your organization, or how many gifts they've made, or they just reached $100,000 in total giving. It took them 20 years to do it, but they got there.
00:14:06
Speaker
Be the one that finds that information and brings it to them and expresses gratitude and celebrates them. That's a wonderful way to let your donors know that you care, that you're thinking about them, and that their gift matters to
Fostering Donor Relations through Interaction
00:14:21
Speaker
you. So we've talked about a lot of things in this series, but remember,
00:14:28
Speaker
If you wanna find new major gift donors, the best thing you can do is get on your phone right now, as soon as this podcast is over, and make phone calls.
00:14:40
Speaker
Meet with people. Be curious. Ask lots and lots and lots of questions. Get to know them. Find out what makes them tick. Find out what motivates their philanthropy. And take great notes. And always say thank you. And you're going to do a great job of uncovering new donors.
Upcoming Episode Preview
00:15:00
Speaker
Well, that's all the time we have for today. But I hope you'll join me next week when I interview Steven Newland. We're going to have a very lively discussion about how fiscal officers and fundraisers can do a better job of getting along and playing nicely with each other. And just to be clear, Stephen Newland is a CFO, he's a fractional CFO, provides great services to people. This is the first time I've ever had a fiscal type on my show. But it's important to me to do it because what I find is a lot of times
00:15:35
Speaker
accountants, fundraisers. We don't always get along. We don't always count money the same way. And that can result in the budding of heads. And so Steven gets what we do and has some great insights. And I want to bring them on to try and Help all of us fundraisers out there get a leg up on building positive constructive relationships with our fiscal officers in our organizations. I think it's going to be helpful to everybody. Well, if you enjoyed today's episode, please be sure to subscribe and give the Abundant Vision podcast a five-star rating on your podcast provider. Share what we're talking about on social media. Get more people involved in the discussion. We'd love to have your help with that. And lastly, thanks for joining me, Tom Dauber, as we journey together towards Major Gift Mastery on the Abundant Vision fundraising podcast.