Speaker 1: What we're going to do today is a little sort of art and geometry project from grade school called the Geometry of Fundraising. And I'm going to try to actually fit all of fundraising campaigns and strategies into 15 minutes, kind of like, maybe like that two-minute Shakespeare, if you've ever heard that. And the concepts that we're going to go over I think will be useful whether they're new to you or you've been through many different fundraising classes and that sort of stuff. It's a good way to encapsulate sort of from big to little the way fundraising works. I'd like everybody to, if they have their piece of paper, just draw three basic shapes. We're going to draw a triangle, a circle, and a rectangle. These are our basic geometric shapes that we're going to use to pretty much understand how a campaign, and when I say campaign, I don't just mean like a big effort to raise millions of dollars for a building, but you can use the same concepts if you're thinking about just how much you need to raise over a single year for an annual fund or for your operating budget. First, the triangle. We're also going to draw two other triangles, one right side up and one on its head. And the one here on the left is donors, and the one on the right is dollars. And I'm just going to do a little more drawing here. We're going to put a line here on this one and a line down here on this one. And this is, we're going to put the number 20%, and here we're going to put 80%. Now, this is a very standard mathematical equation that probably most of you know, which says that 20% of our donors give us 80% of our money. And when we say donors, I'm talking about individuals, corporations, foundations. We put government money and earned income sort of outside of that picture. So what does this relationship mean? It means that if we want to make our budget every year or reach the goal for our campaign, we need to make sure we know who these 20% of the people are. And by people, I again mean corporations, foundations, and individuals. And we better make sure that we have strong relationships with those folks. And this is really true. If you go back to your office and you take a look at how much money you raised last year and who gave it, I'm very sure that in almost every organization, whether you're a $50,000 nonprofit or a $50 million nonprofit, you're going to find that there's this relationship. It happens all the time. So the other interesting thing about this is that down here is where typically, for years and years, it would be where people did direct mail campaigns, telethons, all that kind of stuff. This money and those relationships and those activities, those are really important. You can't really run a nonprofit effectively most of the time without them. But if you focus your effort down here, you're never going to get what you need to run your operation, which is this 80% of the money. So a lot of times, for instance, I'll meet with a potential client and they're going to say, okay, well, we need to raise X amount of money. We're going to send out a letter to everybody we know and we're going to ask them to give $1,000. The interesting thing, and $1,000 may be a lot for some of your organizations, just an example. The interesting thing is that that's never going to get you to hear. And when you send out that letter and you get the money back, it's going to come in in the distribution of some people are going to give $2,000. Some people are going to give $50,000. It's going to come in in this kind of distribution. So you need to do things to, again, figure out who these people are. One other interesting thing, before we move on to the next geometric shapes, is today a lot of this work is in online giving, social media, that sort of thing. And that's very exciting. It's very cool. You got to do it. I advise people to do it. But you're making a mistake if you think that's going to get you here. And in fact, social media and online giving took a really big jump forward with Obama's 2008 campaign, where there was a lot of attention on, you know, this was a grassroots effort and it was a very amazing thing that he and his staff were able to do. However, shortly after the 2008 campaign, a report came out analyzing his giving. Turns out that the majority of gifts were either people giving multiple times through the internet so that their total giving was above, you know, $25 or $200, or people giving significantly more. And in fact, the reported numbers show that Obama actually received 80% more money from large donors, those giving $1,000 or more total, than from small donors. It's not very widely known. Circle. Those of you who are drawing, please draw two circles. Circle on the left is called your network. Circle on the right is U.S. giving. We'll get to the second one in a few minutes. So, also in the network, you want to draw some concentric circles. Those aren't very concentric, but you get the idea. These are actually points that some of the previous speakers referred to. You need to figure out, like right here in the beginning, in the center, that's your staff, that's your board, those are your closest friends. So, in order to raise money effectively, first of all, you have to have a center of your circle, you have to have a sort of nucleus of your network there. And over time, you have to figure out how to use this group of people to effectively connect to the people who are somewhat further out in your network. This whole thing right here, this is kind of like the key to a lot of successful fundraising. We don't have time to go into how that really works in detail, but if you can figure out how to do that effectively, you've done a big part of the job. So, you need to know who these people are to figure out that 20% there. And then, you know, sometimes you have people who are, if this is your circle, you've got people here on the periphery who are kind of in the outfield. Sometimes there are people who are out of bounds. And your job is really, you know, who can I use in my network to reach these individuals? And frankly, sometimes I'll sit down with non-profit leaders and they'll say, well, I want to get to Bill Gates. And for some reason, you know, he's still like, he's kind of like a mythical figure even though he's got a foundation now, and everybody somehow wants to get money from Bill Gates, you know, like a personal check. Occasionally, and this is kind of funny, I mean, occasionally somebody will say, yeah, I actually know he's so-and-so who knows, then it's okay. But otherwise, he's really, for most of you, he's in outer space. Okay, so U.S. giving. This was referred to by Hilde also. Let's put a little line there. So we've got a pie, and this here is 75% of the pie. This represents the individual giving in the United States. This doesn't change very much year to year in terms of percentages, okay? So 75% thereabouts of the money that is donated to charity in the United States each year comes from individual donors. The other 25% or so comes from foundations, corporations, and bequests, which actually, if you include the bequests, it makes individual giving significantly more. So the total amount that is given each year is roughly $300 billion, plus or minus. So that's a lot of money that comes from individuals. My point here is that many, many nonprofits focus on government money, corporate money, foundation money, earned income. Really, really important. Great money if you can get it. If you're not figuring out how to maximize your individual donations, as Hilde said, starting us off this morning, figuring out what your network is, you're missing out on a lot of potential money you can get, and you're going to probably have a hard time maximizing this 20% of the people who can give you 80% of the money. Now, it looks like I have a few minutes left. I'm sure everybody's wondering what's the rectangle. I didn't put it on here for two reasons. One, I don't have enough room. But the other is that on the back of this geometry page, which you can pick up on your way out if you don't have one, there are two gift tables that are a sample. And a lot of you are probably already also familiar with gift tables. That's our rectangle. A gift table is a very, very elegant way to put the metrics of how you do fundraising into a simple rectangular chart. And what it does is it shows us both the people, the number of gifts that you need, and then the number of prospects that you need to get those gifts at various dollar levels to reach your goal. And then I put two samples here. One is a $500,000 campaign, and the other is a $5 million campaign. And again, that could be an annual fundraising effort, or it could be a multi-year effort. And what happens is if you take some time to study this chart, you can put some specificity around this, you know, if I need, say, 25 people to reach this 80% of my dollar goal, do I have those 25 people already in my network? Do I know who I can go to? Or am I going to have to spend two months, a year, figuring out how to use this network to reach those people? Very elegant tool. We use it a lot in the fundraising campaign world and also just helping nonprofits strategize on their fundraising. So I think that's pretty much what I wanted to cover, to go over. I just wanted to show you, I brought my business card, which I'm sure is very hard to see from the back there. So I blew it up a little bit, but not very much. And this also kind of refers to Bill Gates. If you can see, and if not, these are on the table out there, and also on this side is my contact info if you'd like to contact me. This is an infinity symbol, and these are little dollar bills. My logo is infinite money. In green, of course. I'm optimistic. And it relates to Bill Gates because he said once, I have infinite money, meaning that I have more money than I could ever personally spend. So may all of our nonprofits aspire to that. Thank you very much.