31 Years of Nonprofit Consulting with Steven Screen

"There's incredible opportunity and space in the market for nonprofit practitioners who are starting. There are so many nonprofits. And if people can find a pricing strategy that works and help nonprofits see higher ROI, or at least emotional ROI, from the work that they're doing, there is a lot of work available." - Steven Screen 

31 Years of Nonprofit Consulting with Steven Screen

Are you ready to pull back the curtains on one of the legendary consultancies in our sector?

With 31 years of experience in the nonprofit sector, Steven Screen is a fundraising expert and the co-founder of The Better Fundraising Company. His extensive background in fundraising and agency work has equipped him with valuable insights and expertise in helping organizations with their fundraising strategies.

Get ready to be amazed by the power of email and the surprising marketing strategy that transformed his client acquisition game. Dive into this eye-opening conversation to unlock the key to attracting more nonprofit clients and making a meaningful impact in the sector.

Key Highlights:

• Learn what's working for Steven for business development and marketing.

• Learn how to scale your nonprofit consulting firm and take it to the next level of success.

• Build successful client relationships in consulting to enhance your nonprofit's impact and reach.

• Recruit and train staff and teach them to deliver value to your clients.

The key moments in this episode are:
00:00:00 - Introduction to the Confessions podcast

00:06:25 - Structuring Offerings and Pricing

00:10:13 - Thought Leadership and Training

00:13:40 - Finding and Training Staff

00:16:32 - Paying Staff and Subcontractors in Nonprofit Consulting

00:19:13 - Finding and Attracting Small Nonprofits

00:23:34 - Using Direct Response in Business

00:27:28 - The Power of Email Marketing

00:32:47 - The Investment in In-Person Connections

00:33:55 - Understanding Nonprofit Training Needs

00:36:33 - Maximizing Conference Presence

00:39:56 - Nonprofit Fundraising Practices

00:43:24 - Connecting with Better Fundraising

00:45:29 - Pricing Strategy and Transparency 

Find Us Online:  https://www.confessionswithjessandcindy.com

Connect with Caroline Griffin: 

Caroline Griffin (Website): https://marketeronamission.work/ 

Caroline Griffin (Linkedin): linkedin.com/in/carolinethemarketer

Connect with Cindy:

Cindy Wagman Coaching https://cindywagman.com

Fractional Fundraising Network https://www.fractionalfundraising.co/

LinkedIn:  https://ca.linkedin.com/in/cindywagman

Connect with Jess: 

Out In the Boons: https://www.outintheboons.me

LinkedIn: https://www.linkedin.com/in/jess-campbell-outintheboons/ 

Transcript:

00:00:00

Welcome to the Confessions podcast. I'm Cindy Wagman Wagman. And I'm Jess Campbell. Where two former in house nonprofit pros turn coaches and consultants to purpose driven organizations. After years of building up our separate six figure businesses from scratch, we've thrown a lot of spaghetti at the wall and have lived to see what sticks.

00:00:20

We're on a mission to help other nonprofit coaches and consultants looking to start or scale their own businesses past the six figure mark by pulling back a curtain. Whether you're still working inside a nonprofit and thinking of one day going out on your own or you've been running your consulting business for years, you understand that working with nonprofits is just different. We're giving you access to the business leaders who serve nonprofits as their clients. You know, the people who truly get it. No more gatekeeping, no more secrets.

00:00:54

This podcast is going to give you an inside look at what running a successful nonprofit coaching and consulting business looks like. Basically, we're asking people how much money they make, how they get paid, and what has and hasn't worked in their businesses. Listen in as these leaders share their insights, their numbers, and the good, the bad, and the ugly. When it comes to building a nonprofit coaching or consulting business, we're going to empower you to make the power moves that give you the income and freedom you set out to create from day one. You ready?

00:01:29

Let's go. Hey, Jess. Hello. First of all, before we get into the conversation, this is the first time you and I have talked since we were at make it happen in person together. So, before we dive into the podcast, how are you feeling?

00:01:47

I'm feeling good, considering I went from a conference straight to my daughter's school gala, straight to a day of Legoland, straight to a week of work, I haven't had a moment to like, oh, my goodness. Pause. It's coming. If you know me, Fridays are precious to me, and we're recording this on a Thursday. So tomorrow is my official first recovery day.

00:02:13

But I'm feeling very fulfilled, accomplished. A bit like tired and run down you would expect after a year long project coming to fruition and holding space for multiple dozens of people from out of town and all the things. But, yeah, I'm good. Well, I can tell you, it was such a highlight. I mean, we joked, we did a social media video together where it's like, oh, my goodness, what's the blanking on how we started?

00:02:42

Oh, you know, you're a nonprofit. You're a nonprofit consultant. And mine was like, when your social life is the conference season, because it really felt like a great combination of being with friends and colleagues and learning and growing. And so thank you for having us. No, thank you.

00:03:03

I said this in the promo of the event. I just knew it was going to be magical. And I knew that that wasn't the best marketing descriptor because I knew what that meant, but the world didn't know what that meant. And now coming out of it, I'm also finding that is the best descriptor. It was actually magical, unlike anything I think people had experienced before.

00:03:28

And so, yeah, I'm going to have to read through the feedback form to grasp some better language because unless you were there, it's not going to make sense to you. But it was pretty special for sure. Awesome. Well, maybe. And speaking of our language, I know.

00:03:44

Professional gatherer gather and I feel like, well, icon, icon, legend, Steven Screen is joining us. An OG for sure, who, when it comes to articulating and doing fundraising, but just getting by and people jazzed up about all the things. I feel like Steven's your guy, so maybe you have to have a conversation with him separately. But it is such a pleasure and honor to welcome Steven Screen from the better fundraising company to the podcast. I mean, I feel like you don't need to explain who you are, but just in case any of our listeners don't know, Stephen, tell us about who you are and what you do, how you get paid.

00:04:29

Great. Happy to. And first of all, thank you for having me on. It's a gift to be here. Let's see who I am.

00:04:35

I'm a second generation fundraiser. I co founded the better fundraising company about ten years ago and we're an agency. My co founder and I are in Seattle, or at least around Seattle. And all of our other staff are all across the US. And I'm a fundraising lifer.

00:04:56

I have been doing this for 31 years now and have always been on the agency side, have never worked at a nonprofit. But my first job out of college was at an agency that helped nonprofits raise money. So that's been my professional context the whole way through. I love that. And I'm so excited to dive into this conversation because the changes you must have seen over that time around the business of running an agency or being in an agency and fundraising, so many changes.

00:05:32

So let's start by what do things look like now? How do you structure your offerings? How do you work with organizations? Yes, great question. We have three main product offerings.

00:05:47

One is for a monthly fee. We are your consultants and we have a couple of meetings a month. And we review all of your content, help you answer any fundraising questions that come up and help you strategize for the year. Building repeatable fundraising plans for the year and helping you set up internal systems like major donor systems, major donor management systems, integrating those into your mass donor communications, coming up with scripts and offers for your events. All of the things that, generally speaking, smaller shops are doing in house.

00:06:25

The next level up for us is where we are, your agency, we call this service done for you. And we create your appeals and newsletters and fundraising emails. Up to ten total impacts over the course of a year. Both of these are on, let's see, retainer arrangements. And we do not require long term contracts.

00:06:49

We could get into this if you want, but we have our contracts structured so it's 15 day hire fire in that we don't want anyone tied to us for longer than they want to be. You guys both know that administrations change, agendas change, and that by having our contracts this way and making it part of our sales process, we reduce the barrier to saying yes to us, which proves to be a helpful part of the sales process. Third way we help people is with capital campaigns. And that we have four to five capital campaigns under management at any one time. Just finished one up recently.

00:07:25

That was 40 or $50 million, I forget which it was. Those are the three main ways our business has changed over time. But that's where we're at today. Super helpful. I have three sequential questions.

00:07:40

It was two. And then you kept talking and I. Was like, okay, I'm a third. Would you mind sharing a range of how you price those three different offers? Because you mentioned small shops, and I think that word small is relative.

00:07:52

So I'm also curious what small means to your company and how you price for that. Yes, so great question. Our monthly retainer consulting rate is $3,150 a month, US dollars. The done for you rate is $4,150 a month, where you get all of the things you get from the consulting, plus we make your stuff. And then the capital campaign rate tends to be around there, but it varies a lot based on the size of the campaign, the length of the contract, and the services that are needed.

00:08:28

Okay, great. And would you say a small shop is raising like 10 million and under 5 million? Under 1 million.

00:08:39

Yeah. So good question. Small to me means zero to, I don't know, $3 million. Cool. And then my next question is, that is a lot of work.

00:08:59

Right? And I know you have a team, and I'm really curious, Steven, what your role in the company is versus what your role in the company is. Is yours business development and marketing, or is yours, like, you're doing the work, or has that evolved as your business has been running over a lot of years? You started in one place, you're now doing like, what does day to day look like for you? Yeah, great question.

00:09:26

I'll sort of take you through time quickly. When it started, it was just Jim Shapiro, my co founder, and I, and we were in sort of every meeting together, doing all the things, and he was the major donor and board guy, and I was the creative and sort of direct response fundraising guy. We did writing. We used outside folks to contract out for design, sometimes for copywriting as necessary. As our team has grown, Jim still does those things in that we have 45 or so clients now, and Jim is probably involved in 35 of them, and I'm probably involved in five of them.

00:10:13

I tend to handle the bigger clients because my big agency background, the first ten or 15 years of my career was large national nonprofits where I was a creative director and a copywriter. And so that's how I came up through the system, though I was in an environment where I was required to know how to do everything. So we also did customer service and did TV production and cleaned out the files, which was very helpful. Today I help a single digit number of clients. I'm the core writer on our blog, the creator of our marketing materials, and one of the main trainers of our staff.

00:10:59

Okay, I had a question, but now I have a different question. Both are okay. Both are good. Both are good. I want to talk about training your staff.

00:11:07

I also want to talk about the 15 day higher fire, but we can come back to that because way less urgent in my mind. So let's talk about. Because you are a thought leader. You're a thought leader. You are a thought leader in our sector.

00:11:22

You speak at conferences. You have so much knowledge. And how do you maintain that quality or standard of work as you bring people into the company? Tell us a little bit about that training program or what it looks like, and how do you actually get people into your brain?

00:11:46

So that is a good question. And it's a struggle to hold on. So personal struggle to be at the point in my career where I've done a bunch of stuff and seen a handful of things enough times to where it's like it's intuition at this point, and then remembering and being warm for the folks who are on a different place on their fundraising journey. So that's a thing the goal of the blog is to give away as much knowledge as often as we can to sort of download the way we think about things and then specific testing results or approaches that we've got. And so the blog is a teaching and training tool, both for folks outside the organization and inside.

00:12:29

We also have some internal training stuff that we take new employees through that are sort of the core tenets of our approach. It's about 20%, but it's a total Pareto principle thing. It's the 20% that gets 80% of the results for our clients. And when we onboard new people, we generally are having them do training and shadow internal people for at least three months before they're put in a place where they are, say, in charge of the agenda for a client meeting or providing feedback on an email or something like that. Two hands.

00:13:06

For those behind the scenes, Cindy Wagman and I do this raise hand emoji thing so we don't cut each other off. And we both were like, Cindy Wagman, do you want to ask a question like that? Backs off of that last question, because otherwise I want to ask.

00:13:19

Yes. Okay, let me ask. So in terms of the training and the shadowing, I love that, like 20, 80% rule. Because I think sometimes we in our sector, but just generally, as human beings, are perfectionists and we like to have things done exactly the way we would do them, and that's not always important. Guilty.

00:13:40

So tell me a little bit about are you taking fundraisers who have experience and you're just making them better? Are you teaching people without that much experience? I've always found it really interesting, difficult in the fundraising space to, even though I think there's a huge body of knowledge of really good practices, there's a lot of bad practices, and there's a lot of people who say they know what they're doing and actually really are not that effective, especially when you have, in your case, a very specific practice. I'm so curious. Just like, how you find people and then how much are you looking for skill set when they come in versus other things and how that fits with your training.

00:14:34

Yeah. So great question and two thoughts to speak first to the perfectionism. I had to consciously, as our company grew and I moved out of being a one person shop, I had to consciously be coaching myself to be saying, we don't need another me. We need someone who can do the work and be okay with work. That wasn't the way I would like it, but was still meeting the need of the client.

00:15:05

And that is still a thing, right? And I suspect. That's the thing for a lot of folks in this little niche of the world that we're talking about, because you're really good at events or you're really good at direct mail or major donor relationships, whatever. So it's hard to go. Okay, hold on.

00:15:24

We don't need another me. We need someone to do the job. Now, what's the job, and what's the definition of success for this job? Not what would I like to do, but what's the definition of success for what the client is trying to achieve? That's thing number one.

00:15:35

And now I've spaced on the second. Question, very long worded question, which is basically, what are you looking for when you bring staff? Got it. Generally speaking, we're looking for smart people who don't have too much experience but have familiarity with the industry.

00:15:54

Interesting. Yeah. So we find that it's way easier to train someone than to retrain them for our specific practice. We have an approach. It's all evidence based.

00:16:06

It works like crazy. And it is breaking so many of what we do in fundraising. It's easier to bring on a smart, usually young person, but not always, who is interested in doing more and being more effective in this one part of the practice. Fascinating, really. Both Cindy Wagman and I were like, I want to talk about something that's come up.

00:16:32

I have a community of nonprofit consultants, and this question has been coming up quite frequently lately around how to pay either staff members or subcontractors. So you mentioned, for example, you have these retainer fees. Are the people that you bring on to support your client work subcontractors or employees? Employees. Okay.

00:16:56

And then how do you think about the pricing structure and then the salary of your team? Because at the end of the day, this is a business, not a hobby. And I think that people just don't know. Is there a formula you go after? Is it based on experience?

00:17:17

Is it based on the level of maybe FaceTime you and your partner need to have versus someone who can really own the project? How do you all square that? Let's see. Without giving you the dissertation, the super simple answer is 2.4, plus the art of pricing in the market. The 2.4 is the multiplier where you want to pay competitive salaries.

00:17:48

And so we figure out what competitive salaries are for this type of work in the agency world. Not in the nonprofit world, in the agency world, because that's who we're competing with. And then you multiply their hourly rate by 2.4, and that's what you bill the client. Or at least that's how you calculate the cost that the business needs to be making in order to make a profit and pay everybody. Now, that 2.4 figure, that's an old figure that was developed, I think, in the 1950s in the agency world.

00:18:19

And we could go into that if you guys want. But then there's how much are nonprofits of the type we want to work with able to pay for this service so that it's a good ROI for them? And that's a thing that changes depending on the size of the nonprofit, the vision of the board, whether they've got McKinsey Scott as a donor or not. Right? There's a whole lot of stuff in there, but, yeah, I think that's the short answer.

00:18:44

Yeah. And that's helpful. And I think that to your point, it's going to be different whether you work with organizations that have 100 million dollar budget or you have project that's a project based versus the ongoing structure of a retainer, there's a whole different bunch of factors that I think having any kind of formula to even have a starting point is really helpful. So thank you. I want to talk about these small nonprofits and how you find them.

00:19:13

So one of the exciting things about having you chat with us today is you have something a lot of our other guests haven't, which is just this 30 years of longevity of the business. Right? Like people who've come up in the last five or seven years, they've been through the pandemic or whatever, or an election or cycle or two, but you've been through literally several. And the world has changed, marketing has changed, business development has changed. And I'm curious how you are both finding and attracting organizations present day and what that looks like maybe differently from years past.

00:19:59

I'm specifically interested because I know you have a very big focus on your blog and your email, which is like the 180 of how nonprofit consultants are marketing their businesses these days. Allah like being heavy, heavy on social media, which maybe you are too, but I know that wasn't your origin. So. Yeah, I just love to hear about that evolution and what you find to be working present day for finding and maintaining that 45 ish kind of client load. Let's see.

00:20:35

Right now, 75% or 80% of our clients come from people who have been on our mailing list, usually for multiple years. And that's an email list, right? Yes. So we have an email list and a blog subscriber list. Those two lists overlap, but are not perfectly matching.

00:20:57

And so our thinking there is sort of dual purpose. The original name for our company was better fundraising for all, and we were trying to give away the best practices that the large organizations have figured out over 70 years of doing direct response fundraising and share them. And we did not have a good revenue model. So we went into more of a classic agency structure and started making more money immediately. When people pay for your services, they are more likely to actually do what you're telling them to do anyway.

00:21:37

The blog is a way to get people on our list and to be helpful to folks and to help them raise more money. And so that when they need an agency, whether they're changing from an existing one or trying one out for the first time, they think of us. That is now, as of last year and more this year, we're starting to do more outbound stuff like conference sponsorships, and we're isolating sectors that we have real strengths in. And they're going to be reaching out cold, calling to similar organizations where we've had real success with, but in different markets. Very cool.

00:22:14

But in the beginning, it was just our sort of personal network. I had been in the agency world, and so I knew some small nonprofits. If you work at an agency of any size and you tell people that they do fundraising, you get somebody's aunt's nonprofit, or somebody at the swimming pool for your kids meet says you get all of those. And then when you start, if you're focused on the smaller nonprofit end of the ecosystem, you have all these leads and you can just contact them and tell them, hey, for $1,000, I can do this thing for you or whatever your service or pricing strategy is. And we still get some leads that way, some clients that way, and from personal connections of just being around in communities.

00:23:00

Both my business partner and I are lifers where we live, so that's helpful, too. But the mix has absolutely changed.

00:23:12

Okay, Stephen, we are back for another round of our rapid fire questions. You ready for the game? Yes, ma'am. Okay, cool. So, as a direct response fundraiser, I'm curious if you use direct response in your business, and does it work?

00:23:34

Absolutely. And yes. Okay. I mean, we send sales emails to our list. We try to deliver value in each one of those sales emails to make more people read them.

00:23:46

We monitor open rates, click through rates, and how well our forms are doing on our landing pages. We know which types of emails work better and which types don't. And we know what times of year we are more successful than others. And I'm curious to back on that do you do any physical mail? We don't, but that is on the table to do this year.

00:24:13

Okay. We'll have to have you back and you'll report. Okay. My next question is, every day after school, I play a game with my daughter where I ask her what the thumbs up and the thumbs down part of her day was. And I'm curious, what are the thumbs up and thumbs down of running a consulting business?

00:24:29

The thumbs up are watching organizations make the leap to the next level of understanding, of sort of how the fundraising game works. And it's that leap, a change in belief or an understanding of an idea that leads to different tactics that lead to different results. So that's super fun. Earlier this morning, I led an offer development meeting for a nonprofit where the program people were sharing all these incredible things and the marketing staff were saying, you guys have never talked about these things before. It's because I went in a window where they'd been trying to go in through the door and the organization leveled up in that hour.

00:25:14

And it is so fun to see that happen. The thumbs down for me is some parts of the personal conflicts that happen anytime you got a team of people, because you get a group of humans in a room who are smart and interesting and have agendas, and there's going to be conflicts sometimes not all promotions are available to all people. And some of that interpersonal stuff is, I have to say, okay, so here's what I'm doing now. And now let's do this. But that is harder for me than solving fundraising messaging challenges.

00:25:51

And then my last question is, as someone that's been in business for over 30 years, where do you go to get your professional developments? Are there any podcast or books or coaches or programs that you absorbed that have been really meaningful to you? Yeah. The leading one would be the Tim Ferriss podcast. He has so many interesting people doing so many interesting things.

00:26:18

And there are all these little things that have popped out of that over the years that have improved my ability to do stuff. I read anything Seth Godin puts out. And so here's a deeper cut. There is an author by the name of Roy Williams. He's known colloquially as the wizard of ads.

00:26:38

He has three or four books, the wizard of ads trilogy. They're incredible at helping you understand advertising, marketing, audience selection, messaging. He's not talking about fundraising, but there's so much good stuff in there and anything by Brene Brown. She's not talking about fundraising, and she's totally talking about fundraising. Her stuff on vulnerability and fear and brave leadership is all the things.

00:27:08

All the things. Cool. Appreciate you playing. Thanks.

00:27:16

Okay, we're going to dive into this a little bit more because first of all, Jess loves email and I love sales.

00:27:28

Can you tell us, A, how big your email list is? And B, you mentioned that you're the first person or company they think of when they're ready to hire for this. That's our hope. That's your hope? Is that then passive, where you're just in front of people often enough and then they kind of reach out?

00:27:51

Or do you actively, I guess, solicit or ask your list to sign up, buy from you, hire you, et cetera? Yeah. So great questions. List size is a little over 5000 at this point, so not that big in the grand scheme of things. I know multiple people who have larger lists.

00:28:11

And by the way, one of the reasons we're not on social media is because we want to own the list and the platform. I'm not interested in someone else being a gatekeeper, so I'm going to put in the effort to own it. Don't give up control over something that's so valuable. Then we do a mix of both in terms of passively. So one of the things that happens to us all the time is that someone at a small nonprofit who is a fan of ours, seen us at a conference, been a subscriber of the blog, downloaded one of our ebooks, which are fantastic for list growth, by the way.

00:28:54

They have an acute need. They move to a new organization and need some help as they build out a team or at their current organization. A person leaves who used to write all their stuff and they call us. And our sort of long term presence in their life of being helpful for free makes us hopefully the first person that they call. And we've got this email list where we send what are effectively sales emails every once in a while.

00:29:23

We tend to group those sales emails around the two seasons where we tend to have a lot of nonprofits saying, hey, we might need a little extra help right now. And so we're doing both of those things. Sorry, I'm not using my feature, Cindy Wagman, but okay, so I do, I love email. I find it to be the most effective marketing tool. And yet I still come across dozens and dozens of nonprofit consultants who don't want to start an email list or who are hesitant to use an email list to sell or name the excuse they have it.

00:30:00

I wonder what you would say to those people who are going ham on LinkedIn but won't send an email to their email list. What would you say? Well, let's see. I am not an absolutist in that I am sure that there are sales to be had on LinkedIn, certainly because there's a lot more happening there than there was just 18 months ago. That is becoming more and more of our marketplace.

00:30:26

And great, two different things. I will also say that in terms of email list, I was born on third base because my background is a direct response copywriter. So that's sort of what I do. Easier for me than most. First of all, I want to own the list and be in control.

00:30:47

I don't want an algorithm choosing who my audience is and making changes like that. And number two, the purchase cycle is long in this nonprofit consulting business. This is not someone goes to the market every week and buys a new kind of cereal. This is a once in a three year purchase or something. And so you sort of need to be around and be familiar.

00:31:10

And I don't think people get to know you that well. Hold on. As well on social as you do email and blog posts. It's not for everybody. I know that just like a direct mail package, most people don't read the whole thing.

00:31:27

But if we're there regularly, it's sort of like nonprofit fundraising. And one of our core principles that we help organizations with is never go dark. And we follow the same principle in our stuff. We always want to have something new and interesting out. Oh, speaking my language, Stephen.

00:31:48

Okay. The next thing I want to talk to you about a little bit is this investment you've made into in person, connections. You've mentioned conferences a few times. I know from our dear friend Rachel Bear Bauer that you also maybe still do host this thing at the farm. I don't know if that's still an offer where you gather people in person.

00:32:13

And I'd love if you could just speak to the power of those investments, because as someone who just hosted one myself, they're a big investment, both in time and money. But my prediction is that they will also pay off. So I would love for you to speak to someone that might be listening, who has yet to go to a conference, speak on a stage, sponsor conference, gather people in person. Why do you do that? What has been the fruit of that investment?

00:32:47

Let's see. It's really an acknowledgment that not everybody who is a potential customer takes in information or forms relationships in the same way.

00:33:02

I shouldn't say I can't. I think we are more successful because we have a blog and we have an email list. We'd probably be more successful still if we had social, too, but we just haven't prioritized it and go speak at conferences and be on podcasts like this one, so that you're out and about more and get more exposure to people so that people have multiple ways to interact with you. And then once we were known enough, that opens up other avenues, like, so say we had a mailing list, and then. So Chris Davenport, the founder of the nonprofit storytelling conference, he and I started these intensives where we would invite people to the farmhouse for three day intensives of in person training.

00:33:55

And again, that's sort of a function of the same thing, in that some nonprofits would like to buy an online training thing that they do by themselves over six months. Some would like to spend a few thousand bucks and come get it all done in three days. Some would like to hire an agency. And so we went to our strengths first, because I came out of an agency background, so that's what we started first. We knew that how the revenue worked, we knew how to structure it, all those things.

00:34:19

And then as we grew, we're just aware of all these other different nonprofits and ways that they like to consume information. So we've tried lots of different things. I'll tell you a failure. We tried paid two hour, basically mini teaching sessions in Seattle that did not work, where we were emailing our list, giving them the chance to come down to a place. We were renting a room and $79 or whatever it was, and come learn for 2 hours.

00:34:50

And it didn't work. It didn't work like it didn't sell. It didn't sell as well as we thought that it would. And it didn't turn into any new clients because this is one place where we have gotten better at. In fact, I can tell you another, learning just from the first conference that we sponsored last year.

00:35:12

It takes a lot to take full advantage of a conference sponsorship and presence at the conference. And, oh, my goodness, was there a learning curve there for us? Right. We did a pretty good job, but absolutely failed in a couple of areas last year, and we couldn't have done that five years ago because I wouldn't have had the bandwidth or time to make that happen in addition to the work. So do I want people to sponsor a conference?

00:35:44

Yes. Would I even advise myself to do it seven years ago? No, we were not ready. So there's a bunch of, you can't just stick that on, and that's going to work for everybody. Okay, I want to get into this a little bit more because I want to geek out because Jess and I have both played around with conference presence.

00:36:07

I wouldn't even say sponsorship because no shade to conference organizers, but I find the sponsorship structure very antiquated. I don't want my logo on all over the place. I don't think people paid that much attention. And so I'm curious. You mentioned you have to go a little bit more all out in terms of what you do to build presence.

00:36:33

So tell us a little bit about what you tried and what you learned, and if you're going to do it again, what would you do differently? Yeah, let's see. So we knew that sitting at the table and having a couple of ads in the program was not going to do it. And so we developed two different ways for people at the conference to interact with us. One was a survey that we filled out, that we provided, and we gave it to people, and we gave them a $20 gift card to the hotel lobby sundry shop so that they could go get lunch.

00:37:13

And the survey was pitched in a way that the people who were likely to be good clients of ours were more likely to fill out the survey. Right. So we framed it to try to get who we wanted to fill out the survey, and then we made recommendations. We got back to every single survey taker with recommendations for what we thought they should be doing to grow over the next year. And so that gave us a bunch of leads and new relationships we did not follow.

00:37:52

It's funny, this is two or three threads weaving together. We did not follow back quickly enough because I was too much of a perfectionist in writing all of the recommendations based on the survey results that it took so long that we didn't get back to people in a timely manner. So some of the money that we spent on the sponsorship did not have a high ROI, but, okay, failure of the system there. And so we fixed that for the next conference we sponsor. A second thing we did to get interactions was we offered free reviews.

00:38:28

And so we had our staff at the conference and we had sign up sheets where we would do a free review of your email, your direct, your direct mail, your annual report and give you feedback based on what we have seen working in the market or not. And people at the smaller nonprofit range. Right. This conference has a lot of folks who are newer to the industry. They don't have a lot of expertise at direct response.

00:38:53

They ate that up because when do they have a chance to talk to a professional out of their context? That's a real gift. So we had a lot of interaction there that was fruitful, and it was somewhat fruitful to our bottom line, and we're thinking about how to do that even better next time. That's awesome. And what I love about that one is a lot of it is service.

00:39:16

Right? You are giving value to people, and this fits in with the strategy you've already talked about in terms of growing your email list and providing value through all the things. And I think that that's always been one of the best ways, I think, to build community and people who want to work with you in the sector. Okay, we're getting to our confessions question, so everyone's favorite, but will you share with us something of a confession about your business or about consulting in the nonprofit space that you haven't shared elsewhere? Yeah.

00:39:56

I confess that I'm astonished by the lack of awareness of good direct response fundraising practices. And I guess if I'm really honest, I confess that I'm astonished at how little people want to change their fundraising. They want to raise a lot more money, but only do a couple little different things than they've done before. And so few people do the thinking of, well, if I only make tiny little changes, I'm probably only going to see tiny little changes in results. And they don't know that if they want meaningful changes, they're going to have to do things meaningfully different.

00:40:43

Yeah. Has that come up with clients? How do you deal with that? I tell them, obviously there's the broad sector, but when you're working with an organization, it's hard to just be like, get over shit and trust me.

00:41:05

Again. In my position. Now, I've been around long enough to where I can say, you guys, please trust me. I have 30 years of experience, and I'm like, okay, fine, but if you're new, that's a really tough place to be. What I do more and more is I try to share with people the illogic of their thinking.

00:41:26

Two examples. Number one, I often say that your organization is perfectly designed to raise how much money you raised last year. If we don't change the design of your communications strategy and content, you're going to raise the same amount. So let's get on the table for some big changes we'd like to make, if we'd like to see big changes in your revenue. And people are like, oh, okay, well, that makes sense.

00:41:50

Second thing is, I call people's attention to the differences in, they say they want to raise a lot more money and get a lot more new donors. And that those donors probably need an easy way into the organization to understand what the organization does. But they say that they really need to educate all of their donors about all of the things before people will give. And I point out to them that, hey, so we're saying two contradictory things. You're saying you need to make your fundraising more accessible and inclusive, but you're also saying that you need to educate everybody into all of the things and your mission and your vision and your programs before they'll give a gift.

00:42:29

One of those things is not right. Awesome. And then they're like, oh, okay, got it, yeah, I see. And then they have to deal with some emotional internal conflict, and then usually they will go, okay, so what would you do? And now all of a sudden, they're doing something that they want to do, as opposed to doing something that I've told them that they should do.

00:42:51

And that dynamic right there is a massive shift. That's so valuable, I think, because whether it's fundraising or almost anything else, guarantee we're all butting up against organizations that have done things the way they've done things and don't actually want to change, or want to change, but are resistant to it. So that's super helpful. All right, Steven, where can our listeners connect with you online?

00:43:24

The best way is to go to betterfundraising.com and subscribe to our blog. We publish twice a week and we try to publish a couple of ebooks a year where we're getting super tactical with exactly what we're seeing. Work in the market. Everything is evidence based, and that's the best way I answer every comment that's made on the blog. And that's really the way to get in touch with me.

00:43:50

I've purposefully walled myself off from social media because I want the work to be the thing. I don't want Steven to be the thing. I love that. Steven, thank you so much for joining us on the podcast. I'm also super impressed by your recollection of all your numbers.

00:44:06

You just came up with those like nothing. So that was. Thanks. Thanks for having me. And if I could sort of say something, I think there is incredible opportunity and space in the market for nonprofit practitioners who are starting.

00:44:25

I think there's, especially in the states, it's a little different in Canada, but especially in the states. And I think it's true everywhere. There are so many nonprofits. And if people can find a pricing strategy that works and help nonprofits see higher Roi, or at least emotional ROI, from the work that they're doing, there is a lot of work available.

00:44:51

One really big marketing change that we made, that made a material difference in the number of clients we landed, which was we came up with packages of activities based on what we saw clients needing and what types of clients we wanted needing. Put a price on those and publish them on our website. Don't make people call you to figure. Out, come on, we should have talked about this earlier. Yeah, it made a material difference in the number of leads that we got because it just lowers the barrier.

00:45:29

And they know very quickly, is this for me or not? And, man, I did this wrong, right? I hit my head against this wall a long time when I left the big agency world and started my own practice. So I would do anything for anybody. And it wasn't until we're like, here's what we're going to focus on, and here's what the cost is, and bam.

00:45:52

Love that transparency. Yeah. But there's a lot of space, and this work is so valuable and people need it so much. And if there are warm, heartfelt, genuine people who can go help people at nonprofits, leave a little bit of their sort of world behind and make all these generous acts of fundraising and helping donors change the world and building relationships and increasing awareness of our causes, all of this is really good work. And I feel like it's a gift to get to do it as a career, and I want more people to have that same thing.

00:46:21

Thank you so much. What a great way to end our conversation. You're welcome. Thanks for having me.

00:46:30

Thank you again for listening to the Confessions podcast for nonprofit coaches and consultants. If you enjoyed today's episode, which I sure hope you did, you can show your support in one of three ways. Number one, post the screenshot of this episode to your Instagram Stories or LinkedIn profile and Tag Cindy Wagman and I so we can repost you. Number two, share this podcast with a fellow nonprofit coach or consultant. And number three, leave a positive review.

00:46:56

On Apple Podcasts so we can continue. To grow and reach new listeners. And of course, make sure you subscribe so you can get the latest and greatest reviews as they drop every Thursday. And to our fellow nonprofit coaching and consulting friends, remember, we're an open book. And here to answer your burning biz questions.

00:47:15

See you next time.