Nearly half of fundraisers say they did not meet pipeline goals in the last fiscal year. ‘Staff turnover,’ ‘manual processes,’ and ‘donor discovery and pipeline management’ were cited by respondents as key challenges faced in 2023, according to a new report by Gravyty, a leader in engagement and fundraising technology.
The report breaks down findings from Gravyty’s Donor Engagement and Pipeline Survey, which solicited feedback from leaders representing 160+ fundraising departments, including higher education, K12 and nonprofit organizations.
In this episode, Josh Robertson, Global VP of Product at Gravyty, breaks down the findings of this report, as well as recommendations and takeaways for nonprofits of all sizes.
This episode is sponsored by RSVPify. At RSVPify, you can host ticketed events for free - no subscription required. Host any free event with a monthly or annual subscription. Use the code NONPROFITNATION50 at checkout for an 50% off any annual subscription (discount applied for first year only) - or 50% off any monthly subscription for three months (billed at full rate subsequently).
About Josh Robertson
Josh Robertson is the Global VP of Product at Gravyty. With over 20 years of experience in fundraising, Josh has a proven track record of developing data-driven strategies based on cross-channel analysis of client performance and building successful product roadmaps. He is enthusiastic about helping fundraisers realize the opportunities which exist when you recognize and act on strategic changes that lead to big results.
Connect with Josh on LinkedIn
Email: josh.robertson@gravyty.com
Take my free masterclass: 3 Must-Have Elements of Social Media Content that Converts
Nearly half of fundraisers say they did not meet pipeline goals in the last fiscal year. ‘Staff turnover,’ ‘manual processes,’ and ‘donor discovery and pipeline management’ were cited by respondents as key challenges faced in 2023, according to a new report by Gravyty, a leader in engagement and fundraising technology.
The report breaks down findings from Gravyty’s Donor Engagement and Pipeline Survey, which solicited feedback from leaders representing 160+ fundraising departments, including higher education, K12 and nonprofit organizations.
In this episode, Josh Robertson, Global VP of Product at Gravyty, breaks down the findings of this report, as well as recommendations and takeaways for nonprofits of all sizes.
This episode is sponsored by RSVPify. At RSVPify, you can host ticketed events for free - no subscription required. Host any free event with a monthly or annual subscription. Use the code NONPROFITNATION50 at checkout for an 50% off any annual subscription (discount applied for first year only) - or 50% off any monthly subscription for three months (billed at full rate subsequently).
About Josh Robertson
Josh Robertson is the Global VP of Product at Gravyty. With over 20 years of experience in fundraising, Josh has a proven track record of developing data-driven strategies based on cross-channel analysis of client performance and building successful product roadmaps. He is enthusiastic about helping fundraisers realize the opportunities which exist when you recognize and act on strategic changes that lead to big results.
Connect with Josh on LinkedIn
Email: josh.robertson@gravyty.com
Take my free masterclass: 3 Must-Have Elements of Social Media Content that Converts
Galas are terrible to plan. Anyone who says otherwise is likely in their post event glow. But plan that we must, because for new donors, galas are low risk ways to get to know your mission. A well done event is a really effective reputation builder. They're also a great moment of pride and community for existing donors. So we dread Galas and the six months of planning they bring, but we do them anyway. That's where rsvpfi can help. RSVPify has been partnering with nonprofit organizations for the last decade, helping them create seamless event registration, ticket and table selling and check in experiences. Plan your gala, instill donor confidence and raise more funds for your mission with rsvpify. Get started for free@rsvpify.org dot that's rsvpify.org and use the promo code nonprofitnation 50 for 50% off any upgrade. RsvpFi your mission our software hello and welcome to Nonprofit Nation. I'm your host, Julia Campbell, and I'm gonna sit down with nonprofit industry experts, fundraisers, marketers, and everyone in between to get real and discuss what it takes to build that movement that you've been dreaming of. I created the nonprofit nationwide podcast to share practical wisdom and strategies to help you confidently find your voice, definitively grow your audience, and effectively build your movement. If you're a nonprofit newbie or an experienced professional who's looking to get more visibility, reach more people, and create even more impact, then you're in the right place. Let's get started. Hello. Hi everyone, and welcome. Welcome back to Nonprofit Nation. I'm so excited to be here with you. I'm Julia Campbell, your host. The question we're answering and asking today how to get more donors in your pipeline. Now we're going to talk about the recent findings from gravity's donor engagement and pipeline survey, and I will put a link to that in the show. Notes this survey solicited feedback from leaders representing over 160 fundraising departments, including higher Ed K. Twelve and non profits. And we're going to break down the findings today and talk about donor discovery, pipeline management, sort of all the things. My guest is Josh Robertson, the global VP of product at Gravity. With over 20 years of experience in fundraising, Josh has a proven track record of developing data driven strategies based on cross channel analysis of client performance and building successful product roadmaps. He's enthusiastic about helping fundraisers realize the opportunities which exist when you recognize and act on strategic changes that lead to big results. I love that. So, Josh, I'm so happy to have you here today. Welcome thank you very much, Julie, for having me. Excited to be here. Yeah. So how did you get into nonprofit work? Poor college student. I think that would be the best way to describe it. I was halfway through my freshman year. I was through all of my savings, and I needed to find a job. And I ended up taking a job at the University of Georgia's calling center, which was raising money for the Georgia fund and had never done any type of call center work before. It was the hardest job I thought I'd ever had. And I've never considered quitting a job after day one. But that one I definitely did. But I stuck it out, got better at it, called a lot of non donors that first, those first six months, and started really loving it. I loved the challenge. I loved the downstream impact of the work we were doing and enjoyed generally just talking to people people and connecting with people and finding out what their passions were. And that's how I got my start in the space. Yeah, I think a lot of us fell into it accidentally, so that's a theme that I definitely hear. But we wanted to help people in some way, and then we just sort of fell in love with social change and wanted to make it better. And that's, you know, that's what we're doing. So I want to talk to you about the recently released donor engagement benchmark report. I'm a huge proponent of donor engagement. I think that we can be much more strategic and data driven around this and gravity. Your company surveyed a number of fundraising leaders because you wanted to uncover some of the key donor engagement and pipeline trends. Can you tell me about how this survey came to be and sort of who is this report meant for? Sure. Absolutely. How it came to be is, you know, we, and from a product standpoint, we have a lot of conversations with a lot of organizations across all the different verticals we serve. And the common theme that kept coming up more and more frequently was around donor pipeline. How do we build more donor pipeline? And I think that meant something a little different to a lot of different organizations. For some, they felt like their annual giving program wasn't generating enough new donors. For many, though, it was around the pipeline connection between how do we get people to make their first leadership gift or first mid level gift, and then how do we move them to the point where they're really ready for major gift officer? And we started to just see a lot of common challenges that organizations were having in building pipeline again, whether it was generating new donors or generating this group of discovery portfolios or really feeding the major gift officers their next group of prospects. And so, you know, that was the genesis of this, as we just kept hearing this recurring theme and really wanted to help our clients learn a lot more about what was really happening. What's the why behind the drive here? What are some of the strategies and tactics that they're using to meet their pipeline goals, and where can we be of help? So when you're talking about pipeline, are you talking specifically more about major gifts, major donors? Yeah, a lot of it, I would say, was focused around mid level giving when we started seeing the survey results. I think that's an area that's seen a lot of growth over the past several years for many organizations, and where I think organizations are continuing to think about how they innovate more around that space. Okay. No, that makes total sense. So how can nonprofits use the findings in the report? Yeah, I think there's a couple things, Julia. One, I think just to understand how their organizations are approaching pipeline building, how that stacks up against peer organizations. Right. We always want to know how we compare. And so answering questions like, do we have enough gift officers at different levels, are we using the right tools and tactics? Are we right sizing our portfolios? Are we updating those frequently enough? And then I think the second part is, if I were at an organization today, I would be taking that to really help build a business case for either additional investment or perhaps for pivoting strategy. If I want to pull back from doing something that we've just always done before and are afraid to make a change, I would be using some of those findings to say, if we can't free up additional investment, then how do we take some of our current spend and shift it to some new areas? I really believe that nonprofits want these kind of benchmarking like they want this data, because then it helps them build a case, like you said, where they can say, well, first of all, I'm not alone. And secondly, these are things that other people are struggling with, but also to get ahead of the curve, here are some areas that our organization might need to focus on. So I'm just a big fan of data, using data to improve what you're doing yourself, but also to use data to sort of see into the future of what's possible. So I think that's great. So what I wanted to do, I really loved the themes in the book. It's funny because I love, I love a good challenge. I love talking about challenges facing nonprofits. I just think it's something that we can all relate to and people listening, you know, they're fundraisers, they're marketers, they're development directors, they're volunteer coordinators. I think they really are going to understand a lot of these themes. So I wanted to review the key themes sort of one by one. The first key theme is staffing. So can you tell us about that? Yeah, that consistently comes up in conversations, and we saw it as the big flashing sign when we started looking at our survey results. And I think there's two sides to it. One is there's a perception that we just don't have enough people. And, you know, in our findings that really manifested itself and we don't have enough gift officers. Some of that was around discovery officers. As we see, we see more organizations start to hire for those type of roles. Different names, right? Is it a discovery officer? Is it a digital gift officer? Is it a digital experience officer? But same, same type of thing that they're looking for. And then a lot around leadership or mid level giving. And so there's this perception that, you know, we don't have enough people. The encouraging thing is we saw, I think it was around 59% of organizations were hiring at least, at least one mid level or leadership giving officer, but only about a third were looking to hire discovery officers. At this point in time. And in the forecast, you know, it's, it's always hazy the further out you, you look, but the forecast for the year ahead was a little less optimistic. There was still this great need, but only, I think, about 71% weren't planning on hiring any more mid level giving officers after they filled their current roles. And that was shocking to me. That was really shocking because there's this continual, I think, need and desire to again feed the pipeline with people that can bridge the gap between annual giving and major giving. How much staffing do you think is optimal? I mean, it really depends, I believe, on maybe the budget of the organization or the goals or what are some things to consider? I think it's budget and goals, but I think part of it is, you know, how large is your donor base today, right? How many people are you generating and where are they falling across? Whether it's a pipeline or a pyramid, are you generating enough people? Are you stuck in the middle? You know, I think for a lot of organizations that may be stuck, you know, the number of mid level donors that they're generating is the same now as it was four or five years ago. I think those are the organizations that should really say how can adding additional headcount here really help. Now, I think there's another aspect of this, Julia, that also came out of the survey and some of the follow up conversations, which is around turnover. Right. Turnover, when we think about staffing, is such a big part of the problem. And, you know, I was talking with a VP a couple weeks ago, and they mentioned that, you know, we know exactly what we're going to expect from a new gift officer, and it's like a bell curve. Right. We know that it's going to take ramp up time depending on who we hire. And, you know, in a year from now, we're going to be firing on all cylinders. And then two years from now, we may be back to the point where that person turns over again, and then we're just not making the continual progress because of that that we could otherwise make. And so I think for a lot of organizations, they're thinking about how do we keep these people on board for a longer period of time? How do we give them opportunities to grow with their organization? Exactly. Another theme that emerged in the report is, of course, my favorite, the omnichannel outreach, specifically the use of video and text, which I think is really exciting. So can you talk about that? Sure. Absolutely. We'd love to. And, you know, and I'll recognize that, you know, we talk a lot about omnichannel in the space, Julie. It's a, it's a passion topic of mine. Yes. But, you know, when I talk to a lot of organizations and we pull back the onion, a lot of times, what we see is it's multichannel. It's not really an omnichannel approach. Right. They have a lot of panels that are not talking to each other through the survey, I think we saw a couple things. One, I was surprised that only 41% of people were using video as part of their outreach strategy. 45% were using text. You know, I can see right now on our webcam, obviously, I would love to know how many texts you've sent in the past 24 hours. I know. I've said a ton. And, you know, when we think about where our donors are today versus how our organizations are trying to be relevant and relatable, I think there's a missed opportunity. When I see those numbers. It's just, you know, 100% should be using video, you know, 100% should be using texting as part of their outreach. And so I think that was, those are two of the things that really, really stuck out to me when we were, we were going through the survey results. So I. What do you think are the sticking points for not embracing omnichannel? Yeah, I think that for a lot of people, it's, we would love to do that, but maybe next year, right? Or I don't think we have the budget for it now. And, you know, it's easy with working with organizations but not being at them to make this statement. But I think if I were consulting with an organization, I would say, why can't you start testing now? Let's not wait six months or twelve months. Let's think about in the next 30 days what a successful pilot might look like. What would a successful test look like? And even if that test isn't successful, it doesn't mean that new channel doesn't work. It might mean that your use case didn't work. And I think more organizations need to get more aggressive around testing new channels. And then I think the other thing is, I think that more than 41% are using video. But I think the people that were responding to the survey, their group is not using video. And I use the example, Julia, I was talking to someone yesterday, and, you know, they said, we use video quite a bit for stewardship. And I said, okay. I said, so what happens at the end of the stewardship video? And they're like, well, it's just to thank them. And I'm like, well, that's a missed opportunity. What might that donor want to do next with the organization? How might we learn more about that donor after that stewardship video? And then why are we using it for a single purpose versus thinking about, great, we're using it for stewardship first. How do we start to use that for engagement? How do we start to use that for actual solicitation? And I think sometimes everyone's so busy, we forget to think about, all right, we have tested a new tool, or we have sort of adopted it, but how do we expand that usage? I believe that video is so important for stewardship and cultivation. And I think in my line of work, because I talk about social media marketing and how to acquire new donors and convert donors on social media, people tend to think of it just in advertising, or they tend to think of it as, oh, getting more people aware. But it really is such a phenomenal way to create that deeper relationship and to take that donor along the pipeline. Right. To take that donor along the journey of where you want them to go and text messaging. I just, I know, why are nonprofits only to the party on this? I'm looking at my phone like you just said, and I have text messages that I've signed up for from a variety of places. Sure. I don't read all of them. Maybe I unsubscribe and then I resubscribe and, you know, it's just like anything else. But I believe that, you know, it really, especially for advocacy organizations or organizations doing events or something that's incredibly timely that we should be looking at these brand new tools and technologies. Absolutely right. Especially, you know, it's interesting, sometimes I'll hear an organization say that a channel they're using is not working, and the solution to get better results is to use more of it. And it's like, okay, that's the definition of insanity. You hit your peak, and everything you do after is probably going to have declining results. Sure. You should absolutely tweak your subject line, change your text in your email. All those things are important, right? Test different senders. But at the end of the day, you've got to start layering on some other channels that your constituents are using. Right. And test with that, see what works, and then weave them in. So the omnichannel piece, I think is really, really key is think about opportunities to be in front of your donors when it's relevant for them. And I use the example sometimes of if you're, you know, it's easier in higher ed or the k through twelve space. You know your donor's birthday. Right. If they're an alum from your school, send them a birthday message. And sometimes the response I'll hear is like, we don't have birthdays for everyone. Great. Send them for those that you do. Right. Why does it have to be completely 100% perfect? And if you're not in an education vertical, that's okay. Think about their first gift to the organization and a happy gift anniversary video. Right. It can be quick, easy, fast, but no one's expecting it. I don't remember. I'm sure you're the same way, Julie. I give to a lot of organizations. I don't keep track of when exactly I gave to a particular organization. Do I know that? And so if I got that nudge or reminder, I would think, wow, that's kind of cool. I had no clue. And they may have fallen off my radar list for those donors that give to a lot of other organizations, but it's a great way to bring them back in a personalized way. Yeah. I give to an organization, actually was a former client, but they're called the night ministry, and they serve LGBTQ homeless youth in Chicago. And they sent me an email. Now, I don't remember giving them my birthday? I probably did somewhere along the line, but they sent me an email and said, hey, your birthday is coming up. And they talked to me about doing a Facebook fundraiser for my birthday. I thought that was brilliant. Like, they said, happy birthday, and they said it was so wonderful. You know, they, I, they do a great job with stewardship. So it wasn't like this was out of the blue. But I thought that is something that is probably so easy for a lot of us to do if we have this data, just to send that one extra little happy birthday or your giving anniversary kind of, you know, invitation to participate or to look at the website or look at this video. I think it's great. It's so relevant, right? It's about your experience with the organization, not just about what they want to share with you. They're combining the two, I think, in a really compelling way. The first time I ever gave years ago to an organization that does a lot around food insecurity, I made a gift. And partially I wanted to make a gift because I'm passionate about that, partially because I wanted to see, you know, I was giving to a lot of organizations. I think it was a giving Tuesday. I wanted to see, you know, what that post gift experience was. And one of the things that really struck me after I made that gift is they sent me, they sent me to a website to see what food insecurity looked like in my area and the county I lived in the time. You didn't see homelessness that often. You didn't. You just assumed that food insecurity wasn't a thing in that community. And when I looked at it, you know, I drilled in and put in my zip code. I was shocked. I was absolutely shocked. And what did it make me want to do? Maybe you want to do a lot more of that organization. It. Maybe you want to give more than the 25 or$50 that I gave as my first gift to that organization. And I'm still giving them to them today because of that love it. Relevancy is so vital. So let's jump into maybe some of the challenges that were identified, this survey and that are discussed in the report. So one of the top challenges is around prospecting and prospecting tactics. So tell us about this finding. Yeah, we really wanted to see how organizations are identifying their next group of portfolio prospects and whether that's a discovery portfolio or someone's primary portfolio, one to understand what tools are using. And this was an area where, honestly, Julia, I was a bit surprised. I don't think that we've made enough progress in this space in the, in the past several years. And for any prospect researchers that are listening, you know, your budgets and your staff size hasn't grown a lot over time. We know that. And so we see people still using things like gift history. Right, the RFM kind of model, which you would expect. We see people using wealth scoring. About 70% used a wealth score. But, you know, you talk to a gift officer and say, how valid do you think your wealth scores are? And you see this immediate eye roll. Right? It's, it's very rare that they say, wow, I'm glad I got this wealth score, and it really delivered a lot of value, and that really put me in front of the right prospect at this point in time. I think it's an important data point, but it's not the be all, end all. When we think of forming a portfolio, a couple of things that really shocked me is less than half were using what we would call wealth events. And so if I'm an executive at IBM and I sold shares, that gets made public. If there's a company and there's an ipo, you know who the officers are in that company. And there's a lot of data that you can access now that help you understand wealth events. Right. And so when is someone really coming into maybe a significant amount of wealth and using that as part of your strategy? That may not help if someone's not already in your pipeline and you haven't been working with them, but it's something that everyone should be doing. Only 31% use the predictive modeling. And I was a little surprised by that. Maybe it's because of cost. I think sometimes predictive modeling can fall short if you're just modeling very broadly on who your donor base has always been. And I think that's a big area of focus. I think organizations should be looking at their engagement data. I think they should be applying predictive models based on the donors they acquired the previous year or the previous three years, not the people they've had in their database getting for 25 or 30 years. Wow, that's really interesting. I think that goes to another challenge you identified in the report, which is the challenge of creating strategic priorities. So maybe talk about that and how this all kind of dovetails together. How can we be better about identifying strategic priorities? Yeah, that was, it was interesting to see. And so there were a few areas that surfaced. Some of the things that were called out were portfolio management as a strategic priority, which is a big catch. All right, I think about the size of your portfolios. Why do we seem stuck at the same size portfolio that we've had for years? Are we keeping a portfolio for too long of a period of time? Meaning should we always, every quarter be bringing people in, taking people out? We've identified as an area for a lot of organizations, like why aren't you, why aren't you filtering people in? I hate to say daily, because I think that might make some people cringe, but if I have a giving day or if it's giving Tuesday, if it's a month or three months before those prospects that you might identify make it into portfolio, you missed your opportunity. And so portfolio management was this big topic, donor retention. And Julia, I'm sure we've seen the same numbers. They don't look good. No. And I think that for a lot of organizations, they want to do more here. I think some of it goes back to what we talked about earlier. They need to deliver a better donor experience, more donor engagement, and they need to use the channels that their donors are using every day. Right. And not just hope that these people are magically going to give again or make the assumption that they're intentionally not giving. I think sometimes donors get busy. Your email and direct mail piece either didn't resonate or frankly, they just didn't notice it. Right. And you can always tweak and tune there, but you've got to bring in some additional channels if you really want to optimize donor retention. And then the last part was around investing in tech and data management. Right. And we are seeing more people saying, if I'm struggling with turnover, if I'm struggling to be able to hire the people I want for some of these roles, with the budget I have, what can I do? Right. You can't give up on your organization, its mission and its goals. So if you can't get enough people, you've got to invest in technology. You've got to make the lives of the people that are doing the frontline fundraising work easier, more effective. And I think that's a key focus. How can we get more people in our organization on board with prioritizing donor engagement? I just know that donor retention numbers, like you said, are abysmally low. And for a lot of my clients, it's. Well, my executive director thinks that we're talking to donors too much or we're emailing too much and they email once a month. So I think, oh my gosh, there's somehow this assumption that we're annoying our donors. How can we get rid of that and convince the higher ups that we need to be doing more of these things. Yeah, that amazing question. So I think it's qualitative and quantitative, right? It's quantitative in terms of. I think that if we're gonna do something new to try to drive better performance, I think we should start out with a hypothesis that we share across our organization of what we think it's gonna do. And we can be wrong. Right. But we should at least have that hypothesis, because if we don't, let's say that you started leveraging video a lot more and you're using, let's go back to our example earlier. You're sending happy birthday and happy gift anniversary emails, and we think that's going to improve renewal rate. Well, what if it increases renewal rate by 3% or 5%? Maybe that's good. But if we don't set an expectation from the outset that this is our goal, then it's easy, I think, for someone else in the organization to say, we only got 3% more donors from it. Like, I don't know if this was worth the time and money. And now we're trying to defend something that we should have had a point of view on earlier on. To me, like, this is so key because I've seen a lot of great things be done that have been ripped apart after because different people had a different expectation of what success looks like. Yes, I think that is just so. Critically important, making sure everyone is on the same page with the expectations, because that, I see that all the time as well, especially doing social media fundraising or digital fundraising, where there's never been a campaign done before and everyone thinks they're going to raise $300,000, like right out of the gate. And you have to say, okay, well, here's how we can look at things that you've done before and things other similarly sized organizations have done, and looking at your donor file and all of that. I think absolutely. That's what happens, is people say, well, I've been posting on Facebook for a month and we only got $100. Okay, but was there a strategy? How often were you posting? Like, you really have to go back and look at all of the things that you did before you completely write off a new technique because maybe, like, increasing donors retention by 3%, let's do it. I think that's amazing. But for some organizations, that might not be enough or they might add a small potatoes. It's interesting you mentioned that. Right. So in the world of product management, we talk about retrospectives a lot. So after there's a big release, you know, we always talk about with our engineering colleagues what went well, what didn't go well, and what are we going to change for next time to shore up anything that didn't go well. And I think we should be doing the same thing from a fundraising standpoint. Right. And it's not a, oh, I want to hide this thing that didn't do well. No, those are the things we absolutely should talk about. Not to. Not to beat up the idea or the person who championed it, but to make sure that we're driving the organization forward. Yeah. I think the other piece of it, Julie, is the qualitative piece. Right. We. We live in a world where storytelling is really, really important. We all know that. And it's easy to get lost in an individual donor story and not look at the quantitative results. I think you have to marry the two. Right. So if it was, if it was a giving Tuesday and you put a lot more channels behind it, had some good success, maybe you set good expectations. I would be looking at the stories for after. Right. So it's the hey, great that we generated$200,000 on giving Tuesday. That's awesome. 10% increase from last year, but equally as cool. We end up with 20 people that raise their hand, that aren't in a portfolio today, that are interested in meeting with a gift officer or that signed up to be a volunteer with our organization. And, you know, we looked at our CRM and here's who one of these people are, and they're really interesting. And so I think internally at an organization, you've got to tell those stories to connect back to the people. The strategy that you're executing, I think that's kind of the aha or wow moment for me. I love that thought about qualitative data as well, because sometimes you run a campaign and you hear back from donors that say, oh, I love this, or I love this story, or I love this video, and all of that should be taken into account. So we should be celebrating these successes and then figuring out how we can grow and build on them for the next iteration of whatever it is that we're doing. But I love that advice. So, actually, I wanted to talk to you about fundraising trends. So we talked a lot about challenges. What are some trends you're seeing that you are excited about? One of the big ones is around hyper personalization. I think that people are now using a word that was a scary word in the nonprofit space a few years ago. We all know we need to personalize. There's basic personalization in almost every organization. Those are now table stakes. And I think that for a lot of organizations, they're excited about this and they're also concerned with how do we do this with the team we have today. And, you know, the thing that I always encourage people is how you do it at scale is the right question to ask. Not every single donor needs a personalized video or a personalized text that you crafted especially for them. Some do, some don't. Right? But you can do semi personalized messaging that the average donor is probably not going to realize that it wasn't sent to that person. Right. If you make it relevant or relatable, like we were talking about earlier, if I get a short video saying, hey, thanks so much for making a gift yesterday during giving Tuesday, I think that's toward me. Right? And you don't have to spend a lot of time and energy on some of it. So hyper personalization is a big one. I think there's a big drive toward how do we make our teams more productive. AI comes up all the time as kind of the buzzword of, like, we're going to leverage AI with everything. And I'm like, what are you solving for? Right? Because if your problem's productivity, do you need to use a tool that helps you prioritize the right prospect to reach out to today and make sure that you don't have 25% of your portfolio that's getting ignored? Do you need a tool to help you craft messages based on what you know about a donor faster while still putting you in the driver's seat, your hands still on the will, you can still massage it, but does that help your team go faster? Right? Do you need nudges to tell you that it is someone's birthday so you're not having to do a ton of planning and digging through your portfolio and your CRM and trying to figure out some of that stuff for yourself. And then the last thing I'd call out there is, I feel for everyone in advancement operations or advancement services because they're getting blasted with more technology and tools that they're expected to support, and a lot of them don't talk with each other. And so we met with a school recently that said we have 14 different technology partners in addition to our CRM, and they don't all talk to each other, they don't all talk back to the CRM. And so we end up not being able to deliver the donor experience that we want. We end up not having the insights we want available centralized in one place. And so you're seeing more organizations, want to work with fewer companies that can do more to help solve for some of that. It's just, it's unmanageable. Mm hmm. It's completely unmanageable. I agree. So really we're wrapping up here, but I want to know where should, like a smaller nonprofit start with this information? Like, if they don't know where to start, what's the first step? I think the first step is use your size as your advantage. Right. And I think the easy thing when you're a small shop is to say, we just need more people right now, and you may need more people. I do want to stress that if you don't have some of the basic roles and you have a large enough donor base, maybe you need to add a person. But I would start with what are your goals for the next twelve months? And then what are the top three things? Not four or five, certainly not top ten. What are the top three things that you need to do to accomplish that one goal, that primary goal for your organization, and use that really as your north star. Jettison things that are not essential to those top three things you're going to do to hit your goal, obsess about the ideal donor journey and how you can deliver that with the people you have today and then figure out how the technology can support those three things at scale. Right. If you're a small shop, you're going to have to be really nimble. You can still hyper personalize. You can still make life easy for the small team you have, but you're going to have to really leverage technology to do some of that. Fantastic. Well, thank you. And Josh, where can people find you? Find gravity and learn more about this report and the work that you do. Yeah. Anyone? Feel free to connect with me on LinkedIn, my profiles there under my name, Josh Robertson. So would love to, love to connect there. And then you can learn more about gravity@gravity.com. dot we've got a ton of resources and case studies and white papers and of course our donor pipeline report and all the findings associated with it that are there to use and share. That's how you could best reach out with us. Great. Yeah, that's gravyty and I will be putting all of these resources for us in the show notes. But thank you so much for being here with us today. I really appreciated your insight. I love talking trends. I love talking technology and innovation, all of my favorite things. So I really appreciate your insights. It was a pleasure being here. Thanks, Julian. Well, hey there. I wanted to say thank you for tuning into my show and for listening all the way to the end. If you really enjoyed today's conversation, make sure to subscribe to the show in your favorite podcast app, and you'll get new episodes downloaded as soon as they come out. I would love if you left me a rating or a review, because this tells other people that my podcast is worth listening to, and then me and my guests can reach even more earbuds and create even more impact. So that's pretty much it. I'll be back soon with a brand new episode, but until then, you can find me on Instagram. Uliacampbell 77 keep changing the world, you nonprofit unicorn. It.