"Giving Pyramid Collapse: How Do MSF USA and IRC Fund Their Future?"

Transcript: 

[HOST]

Our three speakers today are Anton Lipkanou, who is president and partner at performance media agency Delve Deeper, Debra Deb Garcia, chief development officer for Doctors Without Borders, and Geoff Handy, head of mass market fundraising North America for the International Rescue Committee.

[Anton Lipkanou]

Thank you. I’m barely 20 when my father died. The official cause was a heart attack that put an end to a lung illness.

The death was only part of the truth. The real reason was something much deeper, something much more complicated that has been building in him for years. My father had always been a mystery to me.

When I was a kid, we grew up in Belarus, a country where most struggle to get by. But somehow, we always had money, more than most. We had a nice apartment.

We never worried about bills. We had vacations. And to convey to you how unusual that level of economic bliss was, you have to understand that most people in Belarus were lucky to make $500 a month.

But I never really knew what he did. Whenever I asked, he would smile, wrap a mic here, and say, just business, son. What I didn’t know is that business was slowly killing him.

I remember one night when I was 12 or so, weak enough to the sound of my mother crying. I peeked through the door to see my father clutching his chest, his face twisted in pain. He waved off our concerns.

He said, it’s nothing, just stress. And we believed him. We wanted to believe him.

We always did. A few years later, my brother came home one day and found him dead. Heart attack.

Another one. But this time, there was no hiding it. And when he died, secrets started unraveling.

My father had been living a double life, working in a world I personally had never imagined. He was a money launderer, a corrupt politician and businessman. That was the price of our comfort.

That was the price of all of those vacations. That was the weight and stress weighing on him for years. And beneath it all, something even crueler had been growing.

Cancer. Age 4. Silent enemy, eaten away at him just like the life he had chosen.

I was angry. Angry at him for the lies. Angry at the world for making him believe that that was his only choice.

Angry that no one, not even he himself, had chosen to see what was happening to his own body before it was too late. That anger could have consumed me. Instead, I chose to transform it.

If my father had to suffer in silence, I wanted to make sure others did not. I wanted to fight back, not against the choices he made, but against the disease that made those choices final. That’s why I do what I do.

Because behind every data point, behind every digital impression, there is a human being, just like my father. And if I can change that story for one family, if I can help one person to not go before they have to go, I will feel like I’m rewriting the ending that my father never got. Now, I’m a marketer.

I don’t know how to cure cancer. But I do know how to raise money for it. And I always believed that if we worked long enough, hard enough, we would always raise more money, would always increase the power of good in the world.

We would keep this vicious cycle going forever. But through my work, what I found to see is organizations, especially the larger established ones, are facing a crisis, a silent one. On the surface, the numbers look great, awesome.

Charitable giving is growing roughly 7% per year on an inflation-adjusted basis. But under the surface, there is a tumor. The first layer is over the last decade, individual giving became at risk.

It was roughly 2% of GDP 10 years ago. Right now, it’s 1.6%. Individual giving is growing slower than the US economy. The second layer is that money is coming from fewer and fewer, older and older donors.

To put some numbers to it, over the last four years, the average age of a donor increased by 4.3 years, faster than purely the time goes. To make matters worse, the average age of a major donor is basically the same as an average age of every mass donor. What that means is there are as many donors over the age of 65 as there are under the age of 65.

And what’s coming after this group? A given pyramid collapse, a title of this session. A paradox we can’t ignore because the major donors are the people sustaining organizations in this room today.

But without mass donors at the base of the pyramid, there aren’t major donors tomorrow. We’re used to counting on the major donors at the top of the pyramid, given $10,000 or more per year. They get personalized attention, an individual given officer, and personalized appeal.

People underneath, those given $10, $20, $50 each, sustaining organizations by their sheer volume, get an email, an occasional keychain, and maybe an impact report. Now, a race that breaks, level by level, without mid, without recurring, without mass, what we have is an echo power in standing with the pyramid. And yes, it’s partially a marketing talk, but also not only.

It’s backed by numbers. And recently, my team and I saw some of these subtle trends in the beginning, such as giving growing slower than the economy. And we dig deeper.

We dig deeper into 50 plus of our clients, as well as the data published by many great organizations. Some of them are in this room right now. Given Tuesday, HGC, fundraise app, Infinity.

We published it recently in a 2025 digital fundraising report, which I’ll share at the end. What we expected to see when we started our research is the picture on the left. A sturdy, durable given pyramid with roughly 30% of math donors over time becoming major donors filled in at the bottom of the pyramid through digital media, through other sources at a positive 2.3 to 1 ROI. What we really saw in the picture on the right, first, not enough inflow, natural inflow of mass donors into mid and major at the top. And second, sub 1 to 1 return at the bottom, making it fiscally irresponsible for organizations to invest more into acquiring new mass donors at the base of the pyramid. And when we’re going through this, we saw five trends.

There are some more, you can read about them in the report, but I wanted to point out five key ones for today. The first one, fragmented, expensive digital media. On average, today, yesterday, 2024, it takes 15 to 20 impressions for a person to become a donor.

Each of those impressions is costing more than it ever used to be. In the last two years, it went from $2.3 to $2.5. Within the month, and it’s two years ago, it costs one organization in this room to acquire a donor for $100 at 12 average impressions and 2.3 cost per tag. Right now it would cost $153 or 53% more if we were doing the same.

That leads to the second trend we saw, low returns across the board. This is the data combined across five categories, anonymized to preserve privacy. Average return of organizations on this slide is 0.5 to 1. They’re getting 50 cents for every dollar they spend in digital media. They look to improve this performance, but when they do, what they see is algorithms continuously acquiring more and more of the same boomer 60-plus-year-old donors, continuing the vicious cycle, basically. This is what contributes to the increase in cost.

Every impression is an option. If there are more organizations going after fewer donors day after day, those returns will only keep going up and down. At the bottom, with the younger donors, the algorithms simply don’t target them.

To make it a little worse, at that base of the pyramid, what we also see is lowest-ever trust. I don’t think I’m breaking anything here. You’ve seen this before.

The trust in non-government organizations is at its lowest. What that contributes to is lower conversion rate and even higher cost per acquisition. That trust isn’t low because people don’t care about the causes.

It’s not because they care less about cancer or refugees or medical emergencies or earthquakes or anything else than their predecessors. In fact, they might care even more, but they don’t feel heard by the organizations. That’s what they say.

That’s what they say in every survey that goes out there. They say they don’t feel heard because they don’t get the same experience that they get from Amazon or Netflix, the experience they get and used to. The final bug there is that personalization also costs money.

Personalization requires creativity. It requires creativity at scale, and creativity is the most expensive it’s ever been. In the for-profit sector, companies are better than that by investment in AI.

In the last year, the investment in AI has grown by 30% year on year. Non-profit organizations, for the most part, are left behind. Now, those are merely trends, numbers that my team has seen comprised into one version, into one view of reality.

To reverse these trends, we need to solve the challenges that lead to them. Those challenges are like cracks in a stable given pyramid. The first one of them I already mentioned, an increase in cost, but that’s a trend.

The challenge is that effectiveness has stalled. Effectiveness across most non-profits has stalled, and we are getting the same effectiveness from every impression we used to be. With that impression now 53% more expensive, the recurrences are 53% full.

The second challenge is algorithmic bias. My background is data science. There’s a good phrase, garbage in, garbage out.

If there is no training data for the algorithms to grow, they won’t. They won’t target younger donors if they’re not in the dataset. The challenge that goes hand in hand with it is what we call a decline in performance culture.

What that is, is training the algorithm to learn something new when there is no data at the key point. The next three challenges, or two challenges, are a little different. The first one is a lower than possible increase in mid-level given across most of the organizations.

The lifetime value of most donors is lower than it could be, preventing organizations from having excess budget to reinvest. Together with that, lack of diversification. Most donor files of organizations in this room are homogeneous.

Similar channels, similar audiences, similar creative messages for the most part. More and more demand for less and less supply. The final three are internal.

First, I’m sure you’ve heard about this many times, silos. Brand marketing, fundraising, of course. We find a more important silo to be finance and fundraising silo, to not see the donor and the long-term donor view through the same lens.

Usually caused by lack of shared KPIs. And the final one, persistent data gaps. It took hundreds, if not thousands of hours for my team to piece this data together into the digital fundraising report and make sense of all of it.

But that’s not sustainable. That’s not sustainable to be doing at every organization scale. And every one of those data points is a human being, just like my father was.

So, as a human being, I deeply care to solve these challenges. As a professional, I have hypotheses for what it takes. There are data backed by the success of our clients and by what I see in the industry.

I do believe it takes clean data to see every donor. I do believe it takes creativity to speak to them in the way they want to be spoken to. I do believe it takes technology to do it at scale while economically feasible.

I do believe it takes performance culture to be more responsible with every dollar that we get from donors. But most importantly, especially in the days like now, I believe it takes courage and leadership. That’s why today I asked two of the best fundraising leaders I personally know to join me on the stage to talk about how they have been solving these challenges.

Or some of these challenges. And yeah, that’s a beautiful visual. One I didn’t see.

The two of them are really the ones who are writing endings for not hundreds or thousands, but hundreds of thousands of people. The first one of them who I’ll invite to the stage is Deb Garcia, who is the Chief Development Officer of Doctors Without Borders USA. And she’ll talk about diversification as well as touch a little bit on the data gaps.

[Deb Garcia]

Awesome. Thank you. Hi, everyone.

I’m Deb Garcia. That’s just my way of making an entrance. Okay.

So I really have the privilege of leading the fundraising team at Doctors Without Borders. For those of you all unfamiliar with Doctors Without Borders, it’s been about a half a decade, half a century, being an old organization, really providing medical humanitarian aid in a variety of really challenging contexts. We have 60,000 staff all over the world.

And it’s actually, you know, Doctors Without Borders was founded really by volunteer doctors and journalists years ago, really in Nigeria, a completely different model that essentially what today’s outdated, right? Today, everyone is actually an employee of Doctors Without Borders. 90% of staff are locally hired in the countries that we work in.

And, you know, while much of the support that we get is based on the back of mediatized emergencies and thought of from conflicts, only actually 30% of our work is in that space. So there’s a bit of a disconnect in terms of where we work and what people actually think of when they think about resourcing our work. Much of the work is actually in Africa, in the Middle East, and just a little bit in Europe.

From looking at what we’re working on, it’s natural disasters, earthquakes, conflict zones, where definitely at a time there’s like a natural disaster or a conflict, people tend to be on the and these people need care. So we provide a significant amount of care to people on the move and refugees, and definitely most of the care to children. None of these are actually, they’re very much an intersectional response because, you know, people on the move, sometimes our kids and so forth.

So when I joined Doctors Without Borders, it’s interesting because I have actually been in fundraising since 2018. And really, I joined fundraising, I probably should have started off a bit more of a story about myself, with overseeing gender inaction. And I see people here from Planned Parenthood.

I joined Planned Parenthood then, really to work on a strategic pivot, and saw Geoffrey in action, and I was like, oh my goodness, that fundraising is definitely where I want to be. I came from the private sector. And a few months later, I was working for him.

And then five years later, I decided to move on to Doctors Without Borders, really because I wanted a more international, to have a bigger international reach. And so when I joined, it was after 2023, but I was joining off on the back of really an organization that had a tremendous amount of success. When I think of all fundraisers, one thing’s like setting a budget, then at mid-year, you’d set your re-forecast.

And then you have your actual, and you really want to be, as a big institution, to generate this amount of revenue, you want to be almost scientific, you want to have a predictable revenue flow. And we did not really have that. In 2020, you can see we really outperformed both our budget and our re-forecast because of COVID.

And then in 2021, I would say we did COVID 2.0. And that gave us a lot of confidence that moved us then into 2022, where we had the Ukraine conflict. And you could see at mid-year, we completely expected to have a lot more funds. Largely, I would say unrealistic.

I joined in 2023. At that time, in Q1, there was the Turkey-Syria earthquake. And so, but I was still convinced that we should essentially re-forecast our budget down because in 2022, we had not reached our goal.

It was our most successful year ever from a fundraising standpoint. But like Anton is saying, we just could not retain those donors. It was a very, very challenging time.

And we had two big conflicts, one that received a significant amount of media attention in Gaza and Sudan, who really were having a very hard time getting people to appreciate the amount of work that we needed to do. And so, in 2023, we had quite a successful year. And so, when Anton was saying, speak about something, I was going to speak about, well, what did we do in 2024?

Because the scariest thing was that we had a lot of success, but our file didn’t look really good. It wasn’t healthy. We did not have a lot of predictability.

We had a lot of variation in terms of return on ad spend. We basically did not have control. Our success was fueled really by the external landscape and our ability to respond to it in a very swift, effective manner, which is something, actually, internally, I would say, objectively, did a pretty good job of maturing our ability to do rapid response.

And the board, the charge was really to raise more funds, because I think any time you’re successful, there’s an expectation that you could do more programmatically and you could do it in a better, more equitable way. We would be much more robust in our sourcing, etc. But we wanted to raise more funds regardless of the external landscape and regardless of how much media attention we were getting and regardless of cost.

But the cost was just increasing. So, we looked overall at the donor pyramid to see what was the opportunity for us. And we were running a very, very expensive operation in terms of having over a million donors.

We were growing on a discount because we had a lot of external emergencies, but we really weren’t providing the level of engagement that typically your peers provided. So, major donors, definitely not to principal donors. It just was not a comparable donor experience and worth marketing and stewarding legacy society members.

So, as a forward management consultant, I got, okay, what are the people, looking at the processes, looking at the system, what could be done differently to enable us to achieve our goal? And it was really focusing on strengthening the infrastructure, trying to own our data, strategically investing across the pyramid in a very tiered manner, identifying key metrics that the whole team looks at and has a shared responsibility for, and leveraging AI so that we could be much more effective and efficient. So, really strategically plan for a very aggressive growth in an unpredictable landscape.

And, you know, I’m not going to say we did it 100% perfectly, but this is what we did and have achieved success today. Number one, we really looked at market research, understanding the economic trends, how we were being perceived, how donors and prospective donors, what was our level of awareness? We never really used the term brand before, but we definitely leaned into market research.

We compared ourselves or team structure to other nonprofits to see what it looked like and realized our shop, if you will, was largely a mass marketing shop. We did not have a lot of high-touch philanthropy. And, of course, high-touch philanthropy is a lot cheaper in terms of cost per dollar raised as you move up on that.

So, we really opened up a few roles, and I have two of my colleagues on a major gift team here to really focus on providing a much more tailored donor experience to get those larger gifts. And we started serving our donors to understand who they are so that we could deepen this understanding and use, you know, starting to group donors to provide this more tailored experience. And we realized that these were some of the cohorts of donors we had.

We had, like, a few patriotic localists that were very low in terms of, you know, economic potential and capture ability because we are a global organization. But we saw, like, hopeful influencers, involved altruists, and informed progressives were our sweet spot. And we would perform incredibly well with these different groups.

Then, once we actually looked at these groups, we doubled down on the hopeful influencers and informed progressives to make sure that we were really tailoring our communications and our champagnes to these segments.

So, we would tailor communication and our campaigns to each segment. And we would review periodically to understand, like, what is our donor behavior? We would be, like, running an algorithm to be much more predictive and using AI to understand.

We had basically been using an outsourced vendor for all of our data analysis. And…

And, you know, we were basically at a point where we had an incredible vendor that was telling our teams what to do. Now we actually have a data warehouse and we have our own algorithms that basically are enabling us to do things at scale. And adopting true donor centricity.

We in ways that donors really did not think of themselves. We were thinking about donors, say, our major donor segment over a two year basis as opposed to looking at their giving in one year. So, we changed our business rules as well to really enable us to think about the donors the way they think about themselves and improve the donor experience.

Aligning the fundraising goals with the donor values that we identified through the research. These are very, like, tailored donor journeys that we have for all of our different audiences. And we have an audience channel set up within our team to enable us to leverage storytelling and enable us to have a tiered donor experience.

Because historically, technically a mid-level donor could have a stronger donor experience than, say, a major donor. And you can actually, when people moved up, they could all of a sudden have a drop in their donor experience. We wanted to improve that.

And so, we have an intentional review of all of the donor journeys. We utilize the custom ask frames to make sure that there is this more customized experience even if we’re doing so many donors. It should feel the same.

It should feel like we’re directly using information from the historic giving. In terms of media placements, this is huge because we get a lot of earned media, especially during emergencies. Like, mediatized emergencies are a great time for us to put on paid media on top of that.

And so, we’re constantly looking at what’s in the news, what we can leverage to get that strong return on ad spend and optimize our ROI. And then, this is all leading into high-touch philanthropy, making sure that all of our donors have a good understanding of the ways they can give, the benefits of giving, whether they’re using different giving vehicles. So, we have a very strong DAF program, making sure that the team really understands why donors give through their DAFs, making sure that people are more mature, that if they want to have a revenue stream connected to their philanthropy, they can do that.

So, we’re working much more intentionally with each donor segment to ensure that we have the best donor experience and give them the best opportunities that they’re looking for, especially with blended gifts, and we’re accommodating different types of donor preferences. And finally, but probably the most important, is this shared accountability across the team. So, everybody knows the metrics, we have shared dashboards, everybody knows what metrics are associated with their scope of work, but also feel a true sense of ownership on our success.

And I will hand it off to IRC.

[Geoff Handy]

So, I’m Geoff Handy, and the International Rescue Committee, like Doctors without Borders, is a humanitarian charity. We’re a work that’s considerably smaller. We work in over 40 countries, and our core mission is to help people affected by complex natural disasters survive, recover, and rebuild their lives.

We’re also one of nine charities that the U.S. State Department contracts with to resettle refugees and asylum seekers here in the U.S. So, we had a dual mission, kind of called the arc of crisis. Is this the sound of the panels? So, my remit is the Mass Marketing Program.

It generates $80 million and almost all unrestricted revenue for the organization. Together with our high value team, which covers major gifts and planned giving, we deliver a net worth of $209 million a year to the organization. Prior to Trump’s gutting of humanitarian aid, we accounted for about one seventh of our operating budget.

We expect, we’re working on the FY26 budget now. We expect that amount would be one third of the total because we’ve had to cut quite a few programs. So, the program I’m going to talk to you about now is even more important. So, the challenge I want to talk to you about is mid-level giving.

And I’m using this as a case study, but I’m hopeful that if you’re on the major giving side of the house, or you run sustainers, do some other kind of work, a lot of what the approaches we use are going to be applicable for you as well. So, I was two weeks into my job at the IRC in December 2020 when I got this email from the head of our mid-level team. She was a talented fundraiser, although we did change her name to protect the innocent in this email.

And you can read it. She would basically celebrate the fact that one of the mid-level donors had made a $30,000 gift. But I highlighted the sentence that kind of stunned me in white.

And she literally said, we’re sad to see some of our mid-level donors move over to major gifts, but that’s the name of the game. It was pretty clear we had an incentive problem here. And I looked into the situation more deeply.

And indeed, this individual did not have a target metric of donors who graduate into qualification. And similarly, philanthropy wasn’t sending donors who were burned out from the relationship management back down to the mid-level program. So, it’s really a one-way street.

And so, this quickly became one of those areas of opportunity to improve the program. Not one of these people comes in and goes to the board and executive leadership and says the program is failing. This was a successful program.

We had opportunities to do it even better. And so, we created this challenge. And there were a few unique things about this challenge.

It wasn’t just about tactics and strategies and building a new program, although it certainly was the bulk of it. This really involved a change in mindset, as evidenced by that email I just shared with you. So, it really is about getting the team to think beyond this year’s budget at its core.

The other thing is what Anton set up and Deborah reinforced just now about the collapsing donor pyramid. Our mid-level donors, we define at the IRC as a more expansive definition of most charities. You’re a mid-level donor if you give $1,000 to $20,000 over a period of 24 months prior.

And so, we literally roll people in and out of that program accordingly. As such, in this program, these 20,000 to 25,000 donors constitute half of our mass market revenue. During periods of crisis like Ukraine and Afghanistan for us, they were big ones, they generated even more than half because these donors tend to really step to the plate when you need them to.

They also fund, along with donors who graduate to major in Planned Giving, they also fund the bulk of our net unrestricted revenue for the organization that helps programs, helps people’s salaries, helps keep the lights on in office buildings, right? Pay for travel, all that stuff that donors don’t want to pay for. It’s that unrestricted revenue.

And most importantly, it funds our acquisition investment. And so, what we’re trying to do here essentially is create that virtuous loop of optimizing retention programs, particularly for our higher value audiences, in this case, mid-level with the standards of our other one, so that we can maximize the return on investment of our acquisition spend, right? For every dollar we spend on acquisition, the better you get at retention, the better off that loop’s going to operate and help prevent that collapse in the pyramid that Anton described.

So, I’m a big fan of sayings and mantras. My team loves and hates them sometimes. And I often will say, don’t let perfect be the enemy of the good.

If you’re going to make a mistake, make an act of commission, not one of omission. One of my personal favorites is the early bird gets the worm, the second mouse gets the cheese. I always tell my team, like, I love innovation, but sometimes if you want to be second to market and learn from the mistakes of the person who’s first to market.

For this particular challenge, there were three things that I’d preach over and over. My team mom knows this. I meet with every new team member in the first week, and I go over this kind of stuff with them.

The first is, it’s about lifetime net unrestricted revenue, right? This is clearly related to the incentive problem with my mid-level leader when I joined the IRC. Yes, we have to meet our target this year.

Yes, we have to set realistic budgets to do so. Yes, it’s stressful. We’re fundraisers.

Sometimes I wonder why because it’s really stressful. You’ve got to make decisions. You’ve got to look at your investment spend, your retention metrics, external market forces, and come up with a target that you know is achievable because our clients and your colleagues are depending on you to deliver that revenue.

In mass marketing, we’re also doing something else. We’re actually stewarding and acquiring the donors for major and plain getting down the road. In fact, if you don’t know this off the top of your head, I encourage you to find it out if you’re on the mass marketing side.

You should know what percentage of giving on your mid and plain giving team comes from donors acquired at the mass marketing level. For us, it’s 60%, not including plain giving. It’s 60%.

Plain giving donors is much higher. I don’t know what I thought in my head, and shame on me for that. But really, stressing the fact that, yes, you’ve got to meet the target, but you also are stewarding donors to do even better things, and you’ll never get credit for that revenue.

It’s not going to be a part of your bottom line. It’s critical to your job. Lifetime is really, really, I stress this nonstop.

Think about what you are going to do with this donor? It takes seven years on average for a newly acquired donor to reach the mid-level, and several more years for a mid-level donor to reach that $20,000 qualifying gift to be put into qualification by the major giving team. The other words here, net and unrestricted, are pretty self-explanatory.

Net, obviously, is the reason we’re here. It’s the money that goes to the mission. After we pay salaries, our wonderful vendor partners, posting and printing, and all the other stuff, posting and printing, all the other stuff we’re going to do.

And unrestricted, I mentioned, is the most useful revenue, because it comes without restriction. In fact, we only do one purposely restricted campaign each year, and everything else we do is unrestricted. And even when a donor emails or calls us, our support team is trained to actually talk them out of restricting their gift whenever possible, or making it a little bit less restrictive in many cases.

All right, my second mantra is to focus on the top end of the file. And this is really interesting, given the research that Anton just provided. But for us, it’s where we need to be right now.

Wealth and income inequality has increased in the U.S. every year since 1973. The rise of major and planned giving programs are in large part mirroring what’s happening in society. I think many of you would argue and agree with me that our current political climate is in part a reaction to that trend.

There are entire companies now that are created for the top 5%. There’s a dating company that has a $12,000 a year membership fee, because it’ll help you ensure you’re dating someone else from the top 5%, right? And so we’ve reflected this.

We’re also at the early stages of the largest transfer of intergenerational wealth in our history. And so I tell my team, if you’re going to invest time and energy on developing a new program to acquire under 40 donors, or optimizing our planned giving marketing program, you’ve got to focus on the latter. Again, as Anton pointed out, it’s going to run out.

We have to do acquisition too. But right now, at this moment, when we’re starved for cash, we’ve got to focus on the top end of the pile. The last mantra is retention is job one.

I was a kid in the 1980s. This was when Japanese imports were flooding the US car market. And they were better quality and more reliable.

And Ford, which when I was a kid, the acronym for Ford was Fix or Recall Daily. They lost a huge campaign in the 80s. It was all over TV called Quality is Job One.

I often cite that. It was a time in Ford’s history where it was critical for them to overcome and get past it. As you know from that area, some automakers required bailouts to get past it.

Now, my son had never even heard of that Ford thing because he goes to Ford. It’s perfectly reliable. Things have changed now.

But back in the day, it wasn’t. First, retention is job one. And it requires a lot of work.

It’s the day in and day out work of optimizing your support journeys, making sure the payment process that you’re working correctly. Is your support care team trained and achieving a saving donor to call any cancer the month they get all that kind of work? So I want to talk about how we organize our audiences by giving levels.

You see there on the right, my team, Mastermind Pursuit USA, we have four key segments. Philanthropy, which is our high value team, has the major and principal leadership giving. And then clean giving donors are shared between the two.

And I’ll talk a little bit more about that. I’m talking today about mid-level giving, but we’re applying the same framework to the other audiences. I am going to point out that the breach giving is our newest audience.

This consists of donors who’ve given $500 over the previous 24 months or are modeled to be an audience from the standard file. So the idea behind this is our mid-level file absent crises are shrieking. We do something for the standard donor file to get more people into that mid-level.

So it’s kind of like mid-level junior, we call it. All right. You’re not supposed to read this chart.

I want to talk about the general approach we use to what I call the new things on my team. So this was the first strategic plan I created with my team, the FY20 strategic plan. And the methodology I use is a derivative of a trademark strategic planning process called the one-page strategic plan.

I encourage you to Google it. I love it because unlike other strategic plans, which are like these giant volumes and people are caught up, what’s the goal versus what’s an objective. This is very easy to do.

You see in the top left, we have our mission, the middle row, how we have five strategies and the right column, I’m sorry, the middle column, the right column are 25 plans that collectively roll up to those strategies. I’m going to talk about the six plans. I’m going to show them to you on the next slide.

So you can actually read them and see them. But I would let you know, this is the approach we use to what are the new things. And by the way, every plan has a single owner and a completion date.

So it might be like Jeff, Q2 of FY20 for a certain plan. This is a collaborative effort. And the way I like to, you know, my team has a lot of trouble with what’s operational and what’s strategic.

And the way I describe it is operational is the stuff you need to do to meet your target this year. So we’ve got 22 mailings across acquisition standard files across, you know, appeals, renewals, reactivations, cultivations, and acquisition, I guess. And then, you know, there’s 22 mailings you can pretty much deliver within a plus or minus percentage range, our budget.

The new stuff is like the stuff that you want to try. It’s more than just incremental testing. It’s more than just like trying to meet your control acquisition package.

One example is doing. So three of our mailings now to the standard file are DAF mailings. So these are, so instead of like a reply envelope or a reply card, the ask is to make a grant to the IRC from your DAF.

And this was part of a strategic plan before. And we tested it. We tested one.

And then we had to do all the work of a kind of link the donor value spend goes back to the mailings we did. And now it’s operational. So that’s how I kind of distinguish the two.

So this particular challenge, I don’t know why this is doing that. We had six plans related to mid-level. These are the plans.

One was to develop a roadmap, which all this progress you’ve made over the last four years were in that roadmap. The second was to map the mid-level journey and test interventions. The third was to design implement a, what we called then a concierge program, a relationship management.

The fourth was to launch a mid-level sustainer program. And the fifth and sixth were to partner with philanthropy on a better working relationship and a claim giving marketing program. The first four of those were stuff that we could mostly do within our own team.

And because strategic planning is a living and breathing process, we actually postponed the launch of the mid-level sustainer program in favor of developing brand and giving societies. And I’ll show the example we did in a second. Okay.

I’m not going to spend a lot of time on the tactics we used. I’m going to run through these really quickly in terms of time. I’m going to go through each of these real quickly, but basically this shows the growth in the program since we started in 2021 to today.

The first and most important for us was starting relationship management of a certain cohort of mid-level donors. So basically, for those of you who don’t do this yet, I actually, we were behind a lot of our peers and this is why we wanted to do the first thing was to do this. But basically what we do with the mid-level file for 5,000 donors, the top donors, we kind of combine the mass marketing tactics.

So sending mail, making phone calls, sending emails and texts with how major donors would do it, building relationships. And we now have 5,000 donors in the portfolio and we have six relationship managers for that, for those 5,000 donors. The first three on the left are actually the three people who run the mid-level program.

They’re IRC employees. They’re on my team. Fantastic.

And then the other three are with a company called THD, which is one of the companies in the Moore family of fundraising companies. They’re also fantastic. By the way, we have a strategy partner for mid-level file, which has been the architect of a lot of our successes called Faircom New York.

So if you’re going to do an RFP for mid-level work or even just direct mail, I encourage you to give them a call. THD has also been fantastic. One thing I’ll point out here before I move on to the next thing is unlike major giving officers, these relationship managers do not make an ask.

They are purely stewardship and cultivation. The asks actually come from the mass marketing touch points, the direct mail appeal, the email appeal, that kind of stuff. And I’m not quite sold on that myself, other than where the program is right now.

The one flag is that it does make hiring internal staff for mid-level more challenging. You’ll need to develop, you need to have a skill set to do that kind of work. The next thing we did was really develop what Ishmael on my team calls the omni-channel program or the surround sound approach to mid-level giving.

And this is a classic example of one of our campaigns that kind of mirrored one of the ones that Deb showed for Doctors Without Borders. In week one, we do a big launch. And the in-home date of the first direct mail mailing is big for us because we kind of tie all the other pieces to that in-home date.

And then telemarketing, we start a week after the in-home date because that direct mail piece really sets up our calling program. Depending on the campaign, we’ll layer in different things in weeks three and week four and eight, depending on the campaign. If it’s a three-week campaign versus a day-a-week campaign.

This is an example of our creative from the Turkey Syria earthquake. We have, like I suspect some of you in humanitarian organizations do, we have a bunch of paper stock ready to go. So we get out in the mailbox in four days.

You saw there’s like a text alert, email, paid digital, all layered, all coordinated. And then for the mid-level program, we add a lot of what we call high touch touch points. So like handwritten thank you notes, emails from the relationship manager from their personal outlet box, thank you videos from our CEO, calendars, recipes.

We have a lot of things for a lot of mailings. We actually will paperclip the business part of a relationship manager on top of it. High cost, a lot of effort, but worth it for this particular audience.

We also fix the issue I identified in that first email. So our mid-level lead has a number of donors that they’re responsible for upgrading into qualification. And our philanthropy colleagues know what that number is.

So she’s accountable, not just to me and her performance review, but also to philanthropy for delivering now each year. And these are the things we track. Obviously upgrade revenue, upgrade donor account, upgrade average gift.

This slide was a slide that we prepared actually for finance, trying to constantly link in their minds the connection between mass marketing and philanthropy. I mentioned the branded program. When I joined the IRC, our mid-level program was called the Compass Collective, named the organization’s International Rescue Committee.

And so we had a problem there. One of my colleagues quipped, the Compass Collective would have been a great name for a maze rock band. So we created, worked with a company called MadDuck to create a newly branded ecosystem called the Rescue Collective.

So if you’re a monthly donor, you’re a rescue partner. If you’re a mid-level donor, you’re a rescue leader. And if you’re putting planning posts in your wills or make a bank gift like a charitable gift annuity, you are a Rescue Collective change maker.

This is back to the strategic plan. There are two things that involve building a partnership philanthropy. We made tremendous progress on it.

I came from a charity that did overnight a scoring of all new to file donors. And I come to the IRC and we’re doing scoring or file on an ad hoc basis. I was like really shocked by that.

We’re now at monthly, which I think is not quite enough, but it’s standardized. We’re doing it well. I’m really happy with that.

And then we built a partnership. It’s stated here about meetings, but I was very fortunate because four months into my tenure at the IRC, we hired a new vice president of philanthropy who was as partnership-oriented as I was. So we worked together.

The hardest thing was the new set of business rules on movement among the two teams, who gets credit for what, that kind of stuff. And I like to say the movement is all goodness and light or the partners are all goodness and light, but it requires constant care and feeding. We had an episode last year where people on my team felt that the major gift offices were holding onto the donors and they had agreed to send them back down for a hybrid treatment.

And then conversely, at the same time, the mid-level team, whoa, the mid-level team felt that we were not actually upgrading donors as aggressively as we’ve said. So we had agreed that we would add donors to qualification before they made the qualification gift if the indicators suggested that they’d be worth from that. But anyway, we met in New York at a very positive meeting and worked it out and started with just a request that everyone be radically candid with each other.

All right. And then we collaborate now on events. This is an example of an invitation.

I just have the five-minute warning by the way.

And now last but certainly not least, I believe the first dollar of every marketing investment should be in the Planned Giving Marketing. You’re going to have to wait a few years for the ROI to pay off, but it’s going to pay off handsomely. And so we worked on a business case.

It was a collaborative project between my team and philanthropy on a Planned Giving Marketing lead and associated budget. Got that over the finish line. These are some of the examples of that program.

Left is an ad, a Facebook ad, and right we’ve added notification checkboxes to donation forms, event invitation, RSVPs, et cetera. And I’m excited because we are only a little bit more than six months into the fiscal year. We’ve already generated 400 new leads to the Planned Giving Director since in that period.

Our average request is north of $100,000. So even if just three of those leads convert to that average gift, this position and the budget would have paid for itself already. And that’s just three.

Of course, it’s going to be much, much more than that over time. But we’re only six months. Okay.

So I’m going to run through the numbers pretty quickly. I wish I could spend more time because Deb mentioned Ukraine. And the humanitarian charity is very difficult to separate the impact of crises from the work that you’re doing in terms of strategy and tactics.

But I’m a big believer in meeting indicators. We have a mid-level dashboard that tracks all this stuff. And you can see here that the Ukraine impact on the overall retention rate jumped to 52% and down to 45%.

That was all Ukraine. But incredibly, our first year retention rate after Ukraine jumped up, which was a major moment of celebration for this team. And you see the average gift is doing well and that 55% is where we are year to date.

So we’re pretty confident we’re going to meet that. And then of course, for the lagging indicator, the actual revenue, we’ve got a pretty healthy trend line. And by the way, this is despite the fact that our donor counts have been declining since Ukraine.

This is a screenshot from our actual Power BI report. And I’ll mention here that you can see that the donor count and the gift count have gone up and down over the last couple of years. But all the other metrics, revenue, average gift, gift frequency and revenue per donor have increased tremendously.

So we feel really good that support was working. And I should have mentioned that the October, December time period is a period that we feel is most immune from the impassive crises. Ukraine was February, March, Turkey, Syria, earthquake was February, Gaza was March.

So this time period is pretty divorced from those periods. And also Q1, it’s the big year in theory for us. Okay, I’m going to end with this other email I got.

It’s rare in my career. I don’t know how you guys feel, but I feel it’s constant struggle, constant challenge, and rare to have a moment where you’re like, wow, we actually made a lot of progress here. I did not change for Susan Lane.

She does lead our mid-level program. And she sent this email literally one month ago today. She sent it to me and the full mass markets team and lots of people in philanthropy.

And basically, as you can read, we got a $150,000 pledge from a telemarketing campaign to our mid-level file from a donor. I didn’t include it here because her email was longer, but this donor had actually gotten a direct mail piece a week before and mentioned that to the caller. And what Christine shares here, this donor had been disqualified from major giving.

When I started, we never would have seen that donor. We had this donor back in, and this is what happened. And this email got a really nice response back from someone in philanthropy, basically saying, you know, yeah, we’re going to take this donor and put her back, put her back in, maybe with somebody different.

But you know, this is an example of our great partnership together. So I’m going to stop there in the interest of questions. I have a few more slides, but they’re not as impactful.

I think that’s a good way to end. Yeah. I mean, I think hopefully, you know, I mean, obviously execution is the key to all of our work and just the discipline and daily discipline of getting the job done, meeting your deadlines, getting the materials out, making them compelling.

But really, you know, partnerships. I’m a partnership first person. That’s how I operate.

And, you know, we’re all different fundraising structures, right? You know, for us, you know, we don’t have a Deb. We don’t have a CDO kind of like setting the tone for the two teams, but we have to do it ourselves.

And, you know, eating, you know, something as simple as adding a depth, a widget or an issue form relies on marketing technologies to do for us, building the mid-level dashboard, which is so key to tracking our metrics. We let our analytics go for us. And so, you know, again, this is my, my, you know, I, when I look back on, on mid-level, it’s really, yeah, I have a great team, a great set of vendor partners.

We execute really, really well, but really the partnership is kind of that missing ingredient, that special sauce that kind of puts over the top in my view. 

[Anton Lipkanou]

I mentioned in the beginning, introducing Deb and Geoff.

Thank you both. Yes, there are tactics. Yes, there are hypotheses for how those challenges can be solved.

But I believe the most important part is the courage and leadership of people in their organizations. And just as Geoff, I also love quotes, and one quote I love, which I’ll end this with, is motivation follows action. It takes a person to start internally and just stick with it and start solving through the challenges.

It might be a wrong hypothesis. It might be the right one, but as long as it’s new, that’s probably the right thing to do. I’ll stop it there.

These are the two fundraising leaders that I’m bound to be one of the most courageous in their leadership of their organizations. I’m sure they will welcome any questions now or after the session. And I think we have 12 more minutes until I see the card.

I’ll look and get some Q&A.

[GUEST QUESTION]

Hi. It’s mass marketing and the kind of, forgive me if I call it a mercenary kind of approach to marketing your fundraising is impressive and it shows results. And I saw a session yesterday where it was clear that this kind of stuff raises a lot of money.

My organization has a culture that has been entirely antithetic to that kind of fundraising. And I’m open to it. And I’m interested in your thoughts on how to talk to leadership and ease them into a changed mindset where they may be open.

The idea of using a telemarketing firm would cause heart attacks in my organization, right? Let alone the mail pieces that you showed us, which clearly work, but my organization would look at those and say, how could you possibly, what would that do to our brand? So if any advice you have on how to ease leadership into this kind of a mindset would be greatly appreciated.

[Deb Garcia]

There we are. So I would throw out the assumptions because when I joined Doctors Without Borders, our board was not even philanthropic. And it was really because nobody had actually even, nobody had done a solicitation.

Our board was incredibly engaged and spent a lot of time. And I remember when I said at the end of it, coming down to the end, I said, okay, nobody has given yet. And my boss said, no, no, no, that’s not an expectation.

And I just did the ask. And by the end of the meeting, I had 100% board participation. So I think sometimes you just, if you act as if, no, we absolutely need to do this and come up with your best ideas, especially in this environment, because I feel like the reality is many organizations are going to be really resource constrained and trying new things to engage private donors.

So I think this is your moment. And I wouldn’t make the assumption. What do you think?

[Geoff Handy]

Yeah, no, I mean, I think I would add just this is about the numbers. It’s like, you know, the mass market is expensive. And when you’re starting from zero, you’re upside down for a year.

TV is face to face. There’s a standard, they’re passive programs like, if you’re increasing investment, you’re timed actually being a cash break even for four or five years. So we’re going to have enough resources to do that.

So you got to start somewhere. So, but, you know, it’s really, how are you getting most of your revenue now?

[GUEST QUESTION]

Well, we also have the benefit of natural disasters. And a lot of revenue comes in organically. We focus on earned media and ratings agencies.

So when donors are interested in Ukraine or Turkey’s earthquake, all of that, they find us. We have a surge in acquisition, a surge in revenue. And then we work on stewardship to maintain and our retention rate is a fairly low number.

But that’s kind of the pattern of the trend.

[Geoff Handy]

Yeah. So what I would do is just, I mean, because you’re already well set up for the mass marketing process, you already have all those ingredients. And just, you know, work with finance to get enough money to create a test.

And you have to make the decision. Is it going to be digital, which is probably cheaper, right? Or direct mail, which is expensive, but much easier to project.

And then, you know, use experts like your consultants, other charities who have done it to kind of like be the voice of reason that since you’re a staffer, it’s not going to listen to you, staff, picking the board and do a test that way. I mean, it’s like, and just let the numbers guide the program. That’s what I would do.

I think, yeah, I don’t know if you have anything else to add. 

[Anton Lipkanou]

Stressing out what you said about testing, at least what we see across the industry is, especially in the finance team, was to fix predictability and control. And emergency fundraising is unpredictable and not controllable.

Evergreen Digital, especially Evergreen Mass Given is predictable and controllable as long as it’s not in paid search. And framing it through those two is what we found great success in starting small, right? Like I love talking about the vicious and the virtuous cycle, where the vicious cycle continues, like the definition of insanity is doing the same thing over and over.

The virtuous cycle is starting from $1, going to $10, going to $100, going to $1,000. Because I’ve seen a belief before that, especially digital mass given cannot be profitable for a very long time. And sorry, I call two letters, like BS on that.

[GUEST QUESTION]

I work in public media fundraising, and we’re currently experiencing a federal funding catastrophe at the moment. So I’m curious with both your organizations that are looking at the same kind of federal funding, either decline or uncertainty, how aggressively or not are you targeting your mid-level giving donors to be responsive to that? Are you creating an emergency appeal around that?

[Geoff Handy]

We did. What’s interesting is that at the major donor level, they really responded quite well to that appeal. And then mid-level was pretty good.

At the lower levels, it was terrible. Like Ukraine, because Ukraine’s been in the news a lot, Gaza’s been in the news. Ukraine and Gaza just outperformed.

And so we did messaging and just let the market tell us what was working and what was not. So like for mid-level programs, the hybrid of some appeals are related to the funding gap, and some are just great through our usual bread and butter stuff.

[Deb Garcia]

Yeah. So we are actually 100% privately funded, but of course, the whole ecosystem has changed dramatically. I think the wealth divide right now is so large, and the economy is such that our mass donors and mid-level donors are not as responsive.

Like the conversion is not there. However, one area that I think we should really all be focusing on is DAFs, right? Because those people essentially have already set aside that money for philanthropy, and we’ve seen consistent increase there when we put out an update, this is the moment to give for humanitarian aid.

And I would say that segment of donors, the response has been very strong. 

[GUEST QUESTION]

Okay. This has been such a helpful presentation. Thank you.

And I’m Madeleine. I do mass marketing at the ACLU. So just a lot of this is really resonating.

And I was hoping to just hear a bit more from both of you about your tech stacks, because what I was really hearing is that data and analytics is integral. Deb, you talked about AI integration, and Jeff, you talked about the dashboard to the mid-level program, right? And some of that, it sounds like it’s coming from your internal team, but I imagine there’s also external partners that you’ve needed to work with through that.

Also, Deb, you talked about personas, donor archetypes. So I would love to hear more about how you use data and tech tools to get that done.

[Geoff Handy]

Yeah. I mean, our analysts, we have a great analytics team. We have got internal engineers, analytics partners.

And so I’ve never had this much data in my life. It’s fantastic. And there’s a whole system, monday.com, for us to request new reports, the analytics reports, and really strong finance partners too. Marketing technology, I’m not a real fan of the MarTech stack we have at the IRC. Salesforce is our CRM, which is very difficult to use, and doesn’t do all those things you were asking, Marielle. But yeah, from what I had before, it’s actually kind of quite shocking, speaking frankly.

And then, yeah, and we don’t have right now a system for, we’re like you, we’re transitioning to this audience-led, where the channels are paying back seats to the audiences. And doing our FY26 budget is going to be our first audience-led budget. But we don’t have the capacity right now to introduce a marketing cloud type, marketing automation software that’s across channel, which is what we really, really need.

So our tech stack, we’re developing a five-year roadmap, kind of mirroring what we do from mid level, kind of figure out what we need. And actually, Anton and his company are quite helpful on the digital pieces of that puzzle. So yeah, it’s a good question.

It’s a challenge for us, for sure, on the tech side.

[Deb Garcia]

Yeah, so our tech stack, we literally just made a big change. We moved on to Classy. So we have, and I’m not going to say Classy yet, because it’s still a very, very early days as we are using Salesforce.

And now part of it is with the Classy stuff. But I would say like a nonprofit, especially coming from the private sector, it’s hard to get that good optimized experience, right? So I feel like we’re always going to be a little bit unsatisfied in working with, working with what you got, and work to optimize it and actually be comfortable making assumptions and being, you know, just easing into that, because the reality is things don’t have to be perfect, right?

You just need it to work well enough to get decent results. And I think that is, because I see people on our data team feeling really frustrated because people want things constantly tweaked. And it’s like, just work with what you have.

[Anton Lipkanou]

And if I may want to, may add one more thing to, especially in the upside there about working with what you have. What we’ve seen across most successful organizations using their technology is turning the current tech stack into a revenue center, not a cost center, where this is really hard because at this, what we see is media is always in the forefront. Like I love a two by two.

If I had a board here, I would draw a two by two, visibility versus value, where I would have media in the low value, high visibility, and tech in the high value, low visibility. But using technology to highlight the value of media and really not only technology, but tech and data in media, like Gav mentioned a couple of projects where using the data that you have in your, maybe it’s a CRM, maybe it’s an email marketing solution. You just start small.

And instead of trying, like instead of using it for generating more revenue, start contracting costs in media while keeping the revenue the same, is what we saw as a very good trust generator within the organization, turning the conversation around.

[GUEST QUESTION]

Well, I want to say thank you. First of all, my name is Elizabeth and I admire both of your organizations immensely. So thank you.

Thank you for the work that you’re doing and thank you for your presentation. I’m from a large international organization and we do not do a lot of mass mailings, but one of the things that we have been trying to figure out is how different generations absorb information and how, particularly in that mid-level donor range, how do we meet them where they’re at? On, you know, we have millennials now who are accessing information differently and I heard the term geriatric millennial, which I just thought was really cool.

It makes me as a Gen X skill very, but you know, how are you, are you looking, I know you’re looking at a lot of data, but are you kind of, how are you implementing how you’re providing information out and reaching donors based on kind of their age, or is that less of a concern?

[Geoff Handy]

That’s how, yeah, I mean, that’s a good point. I actually feel, you know, I mean, hearing from Deb, I mean, you know, I think for us, one of the next frontiers of mid-level is really being more sophisticated with our segmentation. You can see the audiences that we segment on around giving level, right?

And there’s been a lot of work done about age, personality, commitment to the organization. So, and then, you know, and now the persona development that they’ve done, you know, are there, you know, we’ve done some of that, but we haven’t been able to make it work in the market. But, you know, we do for like an average mid-level mailing, we’ll do eight versions.

So for us, if you came in on Gaza versus Ukraine, for example, you know, it makes a difference that we continue talking about Gaza with the Gaza people, Ukraine with the Ukraine people. So we used to do that kind of stuff, but it’s pretty unsophisticated. And so I think your question is that the next great frontier, I think, I think 10 years from now with AI and better use of data, I think we’re doing much more fine and lower costs of segmentation, much more fine, like figure out who’s who in the file and what, what, what triggers they’re given.

[Deb Garcia]

I would echo what he said in terms of, that’s why we brought our data warehouse inside because we need to be able to do much more than we’re already doing. We are definitely segmenting by age and like we don’t like to give, except for when they give, like we’re doing a lot and we have a lot of different tweaks that say the same mailings, et cetera, but there’s so much more that we can do. Right.

So, yeah.

[Anton Lipkanou]

So I think we’re out of time. I wanted to close this. I’m always testing.

This is directly my phone number. There’s nothing else. So if you want to, please don’t give it to that $12,000 a year.

Deb. Geoff. Thank you.