Ep. 109: Adapting Crowdfunding Strategies for Nonprofit Growth—Insights from GoFundMe's Success
EPISODE 109
Adapting Crowdfunding Strategies for Nonprofit Growth—Insights from GoFundMe's Success
About the Episode:
Welcome to today’s episode with Michelle Boggs. As an executive nonprofit industry advisor, Michelle has her finger on the pulse of what’s working—and what’s not—in our sector. I’m thrilled to have her on the show to share how she’s integrated these insights into her impactful work with GoFundMe and Classy.
Now, if you're like me, you've seen the rise of these crowdfunding tools, like GoFundMe and Kickstarter. There's so much generosity out there, and it really got me thinking, how can nonprofits adapt their strategies to harness the same success these platforms are achieving?
In the episode, you’ll learn the power of creating and mobilizing your community to advocate and fundraise and lift up your message alongside you (this is also what I teach in my Social Street Team™ method) and this idea of personal style, storytelling one human to another human, instead of the ominous brand that has been stripped of your voice.
This episode will motivate you to see there are so many generous people in the world, and to not get hung up on one or two doom scrolly headlines, and instead, look at the generosity that's happening every single day on these different sites and ask yourself, what am I missing?
Topics:
How nonprofits can develop more of a community-driven fundraising strategy and what Michelle sees most organizations missing in their campaigns
Overcoming the objections of creating more connections and specific actions you can take to build more community and close the feedback loop
The most effective storytelling techniques and strategies that are working right now to exceed your fundraising goals
How to create a better end-of-year giving strategy and plan that is holistic to your organization and develop onramps to recurring giving
Think you’ve reached out to “everyone” in your network? Out of ideas to get noticed and get funded? Generate leads for your nonprofit or social impact business: https://www.splendidcourses.com/prospect
Christina’s Favorite Takeaways:
“We've got to get back to this idea of community, and so the way we define it and think about it is it's a group of people who share an idea, and they also have a way to communicate with each other. Both are super important.” – Michelle
“You need to bring people together and get them feeling like they're part of something stronger, and build that trust and validation that they are surrounded by like minded people.” – Michelle
“It's that personal connection, it's that sense of belonging that's just neat, and that's why people are triggered to share, because they're bought in, and now the community wants to see it be successful.” – Michelle
“When you show donors the milestones you have hit, you're not annoying them, you're showing them what their dollar did.” – Christina
“I'm a big believer in the energy that you put out there, so if you're going into year end thinking about all the reasons why you're not going to be successful, just please don't do that to yourself.” – Michelle
“Life is so short and most of these things don’t really matter at the end of the day… I just center myself back to what really matters to me and my personal values. What’s gonna happen is gonna happen.”
About Michelle:
Michelle Boggs has more than 15 years’ experience in fund development, community partnerships, team and constituent building and strategy for nonprofit organizations. Michelle currently serves as the Executive Nonprofit Industry Advisor at Classy, an affiliate of GoFundMe and Public Benefit Corporation and giving platform that enables nonprofits to connect supporters with the causes they care about. In this role, Boggs provides deep and practical nonprofit industry expertise and perspective for Classy's go-to-market and sales activities.
Connect with Michelle:
FREE Resources from Splendid Consulting:
How to Work with Christina and Splendid Consulting:
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Christina Edwards 00:05
Welcome to the purpose and profit club podcast for nonprofit leaders, mission driven creatives and social entrepreneurs, get ready to stop dreaming and start doing. Here. Ideas become action. We prioritize purpose and profit. You ready? Let's go. Welcome to today's episode with Michelle Boggs. She is an executive nonprofit industry advisor, and I was really excited to welcome her on because she really understands the latest trends of what's working and what's not in our sector, and has weaved that into her work with GoFundMe. Now, if you're like me, you've seen the rise of these crowdfunding tools like GoFundMe, like Kickstarter. There's so many out there, and it really got me thinking of what can nonprofits do to adapt their strategies the way that these crowdfunding sites are really, really working and having much of like so much success. So when an individual starts a crowdfunding campaign, I see very, very often that campaign hit or exceed its goal. And it's not necessarily that I want you to listen to this podcast and go Well now I need to start a crowdfunding campaign. No, most likely you already have a fundraising tool that is right for your nonprofit. It's not a it's not about just shiny object and hopping to a different tool or a different tech device or a different CRM, right? It's about, how can I adapt what's working over here for individuals, particularly on crowdfunding sites, where it's individuals fundraising for a specific outcome, like whether it's medical related, or we see it oftentimes for things like house fires home, things like that. And saying, what's working over here, and how can I adapt it to work for my storytelling and my fundraising campaigns? And what you'll hear is a couple of different things, this idea of community, and not this vague idea of community, but actually creating and mobilizing your community to advocate and fundraise and lift up your message alongside of you, because I don't want you fundraising all by yourself. Okay, so the way that I teach this is using my social Street Team method. That's that piece of getting advocates to champion your message, online social shares, that's huge. We talk about that today on these crowdfunding sites. The second piece is this idea of personal style, storytelling one human to another human, instead of the ominous brand that has been stripped of your voice, stripped of the actual heart of it, that's what's happening over here on these crowdfunding sites. That's working so so well is their personalized stories, human to human versus over here, typically, on nonprofits, you know, fundraising pages, they can be very, very broad and very, very vague and very, very formal. So I want you to inject that in some of your end. So I hope you enjoy this episode with Michelle. I hope it motivates you to see there are so many generous people in the world and to not get hung up on one or two Doom scrolly headlines, and instead, look at the generosity that's happening every single day on these different sites and ask yourself, ooh, what am I missing? Who can I call who's in my community already that would love to be a part of my street team that would love to be a part of my next campaign? All right, enjoy. Welcome Michelle Boggs to the podcast. We have been already getting into it in the green room, and I had to hit record. We are talking today about really the rise of crowdfunding for fundraising, and how you can adapt what is working over there, particularly with GoFundMe, and how you can adapt that to help your organization's fundraising growth. So welcome Michelle.
Michelle Boggs 04:03
Thanks so much for having me. Christina, it's great to be here. Good morning, good
Christina Edwards 04:07
morning. So we are talking all about so many things I want to jump on today, but let's start here with this idea of what prompted this conversation. So I'm seeing and in in the nonprofit world, I'm seeing that we you know, there's the Doom, doom and gloom headlines, you know, giving us down, and it's so hard. And then I see so many fundraisers on GoFundMe just absolutely blow their goal out of the park, right? And I see the social shares we're going to get into that. I see social shares being so important, the importance of community really, really working over there, and in my coaching program, there's no conversations about this. Well, is that, is that the magic bullet? Is that what we should do? Or how can we adapt what's working in crowdfunding and make it help our fundraising campaign? So I. Let's start with this question around community like, how can nonprofits really develop more of a community driven fundraising strategy? Like, what are they not doing? What are they missing?
Michelle Boggs 05:10
Yeah, I love this question. I love that you're thinking about this. I love that you're coaching your clients and nonprofits to be thinking about this before I dig in, because I'm afraid I'll forget to say it. I just wanted to congratulate you on 100 episodes. I'm sure this is a labor of love and a heavy lift, and just as someone in the sector who has been in the sector almost 20 years, I just really appreciate you taking the time to put this content out as a resource for folks. So
Christina Edwards 05:39
thank you. Yes, thank you. Thank you. Yes, I started out learning how to do the whole thing, and I'm very grateful now that I have some support to make it
Michelle Boggs 05:47
happen, and you've had wonderful guests and wonderful sponsors. So congrats. Yeah, really awesome. Thank you. So yeah, I think we You said this. You took the words right out of my mouth in the green room, but I think this idea and this word community has really been kind of a buzz word lately, and we've been trying really hard at classy and GoFundMe to define it in a more meaningful and actionable way for our clients and supporters and everybody that we get the pleasure of working with every day. In fact, classy does a big conference for the social sector every year called collaborative, and we did it this year in Chicago, and like the entire theme of the conference was around this idea of defining community, building community, viewing yourself, no matter where you sit in your organization, and no matter the size of your budget, viewing yourself as like a chief community officer, and your job is to bring people together. So let me first explain a bit why we're so passionate about this, and then I'll talk about, you know, how we think about community, and maybe help your listeners think about it, maybe differently. So you know, years ago, the nonprofit sector. And typically how money was raised was really through community. You think about all the big peer to peer events, bringing folks together. You think about things like the Elks club. I mean, talk about religious groups giving. I mean, it was all centered around bringing people together in community and gathering in person, exactly. And then I think with the rise of technology, it did a lot of wonderful things for us, right? It allowed us to scale and automate and reach people. We never thought we could reach and move quicker, faster, stronger. But I think sort of the downside to all of that is we have, over the past few years, certainly coming out of covid, we've lost this community feeling, and so what we're really pushing at classy and GoFundMe is like a marriage of both, using incredible technology to scale, to show impact, to reach audiences, to do things in ways you never thought possible. But we've got to get back to this idea of community. And so the way we sort of define it and think about it is it's a group of people who share an idea, and they also have a way to communicate with each other. So both are super important. And in our mind, as a social good organization, your responsibility really is to find and put mission activists so your rabid fans, your supporters in close proximity to each other, build the tools that they need to accomplish their missions and their ways that they want to impact your organization, and try To focus as much of your attention on those people, rather than all of our attention on our own organizations. So we tend to sort of have this one way messaging, right? We create these campaigns, we talk about our mission, we put all of that information out into the world, and we don't really allow like that social validation feedback, where folks are also talking to us, they're talking to each other. Does that all make sense? Like we're just we're missing that piece, and so we feel like that's a that's a that's a fix, that's something we can do differently. So
Christina Edwards 09:18
very granularly, for nonprofits, what does that look like? Is that like, especially for organizations that are, say, international, is that like they they've got to meet up on Zoom? Is that a Facebook group, a Slack channel? What if they're not technology savvy, really? So it's like, how do we I can hear the objections. I can just hear them all. How do we actually do it? By the way,
Michelle Boggs 09:38
I love that that's like your how you approach everything, because you know your clients are going to ask. And I just love that, because I'm a big fan of, like, if I'm going to go to a conference or listen to a webinar or podcast, like, I want actionable things. So yeah, so look, it's, it's obviously you alluded to this. It's going to look different at every organization, but there's a couple, like, exercises. Is, I would encourage folks to do is like, first and foremost, start with your team, and it doesn't have to be super complex, but jot down an audit, take write down a list of all the things you're currently doing around marketing, stewardship, cultivation, events, all the things that you're doing with your supporters. Jot them all down and then rate or think through. How am I using these things to connect my supporters with one another? So let's say that you do a small 5k race at your event, or, excuse me, at your organization. You do it every year. You encourage people to sign up. You encourage them to fundraise. They come to race day. How can you think about that event that you're already doing and connect those people that are coming to the event with one another, whether it's like smaller groups, whether it's a post race party, whether someone you know hosts a happy hour at a pub like and so start to think of how you can layer on and bring people together and go through each of the things that you're doing. So let's say that you're going to send out a end of year, thank you. Email. Is there a way to have your supporters do it. You know, take that burden off of you and make videos, and share the videos with one another, and then it becomes one larger video. So just trying to think through creatively. How do we take what we're already doing and think about I need to put people in close proximity to one another. I need to provide that social validation feedback loop. I need to think about, you know, getting them feeling like they're part of something stronger, and building that trust and sort of validating. Yeah, I'm surrounded by like minded people, and now I feel responsibility and ownership to them. So do it as an internal exercise. And then if you have a board or you have a committee, get them involved, like tell them this is what we're trying to do. We're not doing a good job of bringing folks together. How can we think about it differently? And then I would go to, you know, big corporations that support you, or maybe it's, you know, you have this group of philanthropists that give large individual gifts. So sort of go to your areas and just have the conversation around like we've been doing this one way communication. We want our volunteers to meet each other. We want our donors to meet each other. We want our benefactors to know who's helping them. So I hope that's like, exactly, you know, yeah,
Christina Edwards 12:45
no, it's, it's like closing the loop instead of the one way, I love the idea of the feedback loop. And how can organizations close that feedback loop? I'm going to share two examples. One was an organization that was very successful, 10 plus years old, and in working with them a while back, we had been working together for some time before I was like, wait, wait, wait, really, they serve, they serve children. And what I realized is they always get the families together. They do like a family event once a year or twice a year or something like that, to get all the families and all the like, previous families who have, who have gone through their programs together, but they've never, ever gotten the donors together. And I was like, Oh my gosh, right, they communicate. They're excellent. They are excellent at communicating with donors. They're excellent at that. But I was like, Can everybody play in the pool? Like, can we all get in the sandbox? Like, or, what does it look like to to build that true community, because those are people who have given for 10 plus years, right there's some heart there. There's some engagement there. And so what a missed opportunity, or what a great opportunity to do right now is like, what is their feedback loop that they haven't even been asked to do, to participate in? That would be like a heck yes for them,
Michelle Boggs 14:00
yeah. And just really quick on that example, it's so true. And I'm sure, you know, hopefully listeners are thinking like, oh my gosh, yes. Like, there are these moments of that we're missing. I think a big part of it. And the reason I encourage, like, a team to get together, and I'm very guilty of this, is I think some community found formation is roadblocked by, you know, departmental and data silos, right? So, like, maybe, and I'm just speculating here, but maybe this org, you're talking about the folks that bring the families together, or maybe more on the programmatic side, right? So they're thinking, and they're not thinking about their development peers and vice versa. So that's a huge, huge issue. And then I think the second thing is, when you talk about this, people immediately, and you'll probably hear this from your clients, they immediately think the lift is then on them. It's like, oh, you're talking about another event, Christina, like, I don't have the bandwidth, and I would just encourage that's where you have people that you can tap, that have been supporting you if you share this vision. You know, allow them to really take this and run with this. And a part of that is like letting go of control. But I think we've also like, become so prescriptive on how folks can support us, and that is such a turn off as a strong word. But like, certainly as as we look at our younger donor populations, like, they want to do it in the way they want to do it, and but there are people who will roll up their sleeves and be like, Oh my gosh, I would love to do that, but you got to let them do it, you know, provide support. But so we can dig into that a bit more too, because I'm super passionate about that,
Christina Edwards 15:37
yeah, like, let the creative ideas in, right of like, just because you're like, Well, we have to do it in this one event space. It has to be this one way and this time of year. Oh, if somebody has and they're really excited about doing a backyard barbecue, oh my gosh, let them do a back Yeah.
Michelle Boggs 15:52
So I've been talking about this over the last, like, year. I'm like, cringing thinking about before coming to classy and go fund me. I was at two pretty large, like, Fortune 100 nonprofits. And talk about, like, very controlled, constrained. So if someone reached out and said, You know, I've been impacted by this, I would love to support you guys and do this event. It was like, here's the third party fundraising, you know, kit, follow these rules. Like nothing about it was, like, inspiring, fun, anything. And then the worst part was, like, talk about terrible follow up, stewardship, cultivation. Like these people were literally telling us, I want to do peer to peer fundraising on your behalf, this is what I want it to look like. And we were like, you know, I'm being super dramatic, but like, Thank God, you know, we're starting to evolve and get away from that. Because at classy and GoFundMe, I could tell you hundreds of stories of innovative orgs who have released those, you know, those tight puppet strings, and some magical stuff has happened. So that's really exciting. But also, cringy, when I think about some of my past stuff, yeah,
Christina Edwards 17:09
not everybody wants to do it that one way, yeah. So let's kind of move into that piece, which is this, this idea, it feels like, so I'm gonna, just like, get into the shoes of a frustrated nonprofit, and it feels like, let's say they're fundraising $10,000 okay. And for them, it feels like they can create their normal fundraiser that they would do, and it would have, you know, the $10,000 goal, and whatever they normally do for that on their fundraising tool, or they could create a GoFundMe, and it feels like it would get so much more traction. And they're like, What? What am I missing? And I want to dig into what they're missing. I have some thoughts myself, but I'd love to hear your thoughts of like, what typically is that difference? I think it gets very sterile over here in the traditional way. And I see go fund me have this, like, do it your way, very personal, high social shares. So tell me what's working on that. So
Michelle Boggs 18:12
probably the best way for me to unpack this is to sort of approach it in like the three buckets. So the first is, really like we believe so strongly in delivering high level giving experiences. And that, again, is a reason why GoFundMe is so popular and why it works so well. Because when you go to set up a GoFundMe, it's so easy, it's a couple clicks, you can do it in a matter of minutes, and we make the sharing super easy. And in fact, our data has shown us that Go Fund Me campaigns are shared three times more than an average like campaign that a nonprofit is doing or that someone is doing on your behalf through your nonprofit, if that makes sense. So you know, think about Christina like when you give to a nonprofit now, especially again, as a younger donor, because I'm always thinking like, forward, you know, future, it needs to be on par with, like, ordering my Starbucks. It needs to be on par with making an Amazon donation. So that's first and foremost, is like, can you access tools that make those giving experiences, modern, intuitive, all those things. So that's sort of the first bucket. And again, GoFundMe is just so easy to do and
Christina Edwards 19:29
and I my like litmus test for everyone is always, can I donate from my couch? Do I have to get up? If I have to get up? You've lost me. And there are and I just want to earmark before we keep going. There are so many amazing fundraising tools out there, and the answer here is not necessarily to hop till you find the perfect thing, right? The answer here is to go, what am I missing in the story? What am I missing? I do think there's a cultural thing happening here. Is that people are a little bit. More trained on a GoFundMe, or even, like, a Kickstarter, or what's the other one? There was a third one to share, like, there's a cultural or, like a, oh, this is what we do when we do this, right, which isn't quite totally there with other fundraising tools
Michelle Boggs 20:16
we know people give to people. So I'm sharing it with my friends, my family, my colleagues, and that has sort of goes back to a lot of my other points with nonprofits. It's like we've sort of lost that, and we don't empower folks to do it in the ways that they want to. Versus on GoFundMe, there's nobody telling you how to do it. You're just doing it, you know, for all the right reasons, from the heart, and you're bringing your community along. It's that personal connection. It's that sense of belonging that's just neat. And that's why people are, like, triggered and to your point, almost trained to share, because they're like, bought in, and then now the community wants to see it be successful. So it's like, it's that feedback loop. So,
Christina Edwards 20:58
so a couple things I'm hearing. So when somebody, an individual, starts to go find me, there is that imperfect personal story. Because it's not going through an ED, a board, a development person going tweet, right? It's, it doesn't sound like it was written by somebody who has an MA or whatever, like some a journalist, right? Perfect, and that's something we can kind of use to our advantage, and I would imagine would make some organizations uncomfortable. I'm not suggesting that it should have typos, but I'm thinking, how do we how do we tell better individualized, personal stories on fundraising pages like, what does that look like for especially for larger organizations who are like, oh god, that's gonna be different.
Michelle Boggs 21:47
Yeah. Back to the like, my my school fundraising, you know, bad experience was, yeah, they would like, give you these templates, these email templates, and like, you know, out of pure laziness, it's like, All right, I'll just use this template. But it was, like, terrible, like, no one speaks like that, yeah, yeah. We're seeing much more success in just in general, just thinking, you know, talking about cutting through the noise and getting your message out there, not specific to anything like GoFundMe, but we're seeing a lot more success in, like, raw authenticity, like shot on your iPhone. And it's funny, you even brought up the typos, because we were talking about, I'm like, fascinated by, like, human behavior, but there was like, this crazy thing where, if something has typos, people are more likely to actually, like, stop and read it, versus, like, 100% you know. So I just find that fascinating. Like, maybe we should put typo
Christina Edwards 22:41
if you ever mistake an email like, let's say you send an email blast out to your list and you forget to like, include the link, and you have to send another email that day and the subject line has an oops in it, or a wrong link. Oh, you're gonna get so many open writing. We just and I think it's fascinating, and I think the reason behind it is we just want to go up. She did it too. Yeah, okay. I don't think people are like, how embarrassing. I think they're like, oh, there we go. I think it's like, Finally somebody let their guard down.
Michelle Boggs 23:09
Yeah. And just really quick. So another thing on the GoFundMe piece that I think nonprofits can really take a page out of is, you know, so you start to go fund me the way that the product is built is there's also this, like, strong urgency to, like, share updates. And so when I give $20.03 days in or a week in, usually I'm getting an update from the person who started to go fund me. So I'm now again, it's like that feedback loop of like, Oh, I'm so glad to hear they were able to buy, you know, clothes after the house fire that they suffered through. That is. And again, I don't think we, we send those timely. We make everything so complicated. We do these, like, year end annual reports that nobody's reading, you know. And so there's a piece of that I think that could be a really easy tweak of, like, going back as a team and saying, like, we're doing these things, how are we updating people along the way and showing impact and outcomes, or, God forbid, thinking, thinking, thinking,
Christina Edwards 24:09
yeah, so that's so smart. I love that updates during the campaign, and those are baked into a GoFundMe. And again, y'all, it's not about, let me go start a GoFundMe today. It's about we teach this in my programs, which is, if I'm looking at a seven day campaign, so hot tip, let me know halfway through the campaign how the heck it's going, and if I did give to the campaign, tell me. Tell me what's new, what happens, like closing those loops, but also keeping people updated, especially for a longer campaign, 3060, days, something like that, to say, hey, this milestone was hit. This milestone was hit. This milestone was hit. And giving your people those prompts, you're not annoying them, you're showing them what their dollars.
Michelle Boggs 24:54
One of my greatest mentors, like just taught me this in me. Amazing lesson along those lines. And it like changed everything. And I try to tell everybody to do it, but yes, like, instead of thinking about it as an annoyance, like, you owe it to those individuals to report back, but you're also perhaps overlooking an opportunity to allow someone to step in as a hero. So let's say that the campaign goal is $250,000 you're leading up to, you're going to do some sort of in person gala or dinner, if you're letting the person know, leading up to that, like, hey, you know George, we're at 225 like, we're so close. Like, you might provide these special moments for George to make an announcement and say, you know, I'm gonna give the remaining $25,000 to help them reach their goal. And obviously that can happen on a smaller scale too. Of like, you know, we're we're $100 away from our goal, we're $1,000 away from our goal. And if none of that updating is happening, you're also perhaps losing opportunities. There are people who are going to want to kind of be the hero and step in and help. So, yeah, don't look at it as like a it's your duty to keep them updated on you know, how things are going.
Christina Edwards 26:07
I see people giving generously every single day to help people. Like, that's it full stop. People want to help people. It happens to me often where I'm like, Oh, I didn't expect, I didn't know that this happened to my friend who had a house fire. I'm gonna give today. Like I hadn't planned to give, but I was motivated to give in that moment. Of course, I want to help, and I'm not unique, like that happens every single day. So it is a matter of like, but he didn't tell a vague story. He told his story, and he didn't put a stock photo. He put kind of a crappy photo up, right? He did what he had, you know, and he did stay updated. And I did know when he got a new place to live, like those touch points matter. And I did know when he didn't reach his goal, by the way, somewhere in the right, those touch points matter. And so those are all points where I think sometimes the I have to be so perfect, I have to be so formal, I have to be so whatever. In the nonprofit world, it's keeping us from saying I didn't meet my goal yet. Or, let me give you, you know, we're $25,000 away from our already big goal, but we haven't made it yet. Like, okay, well, somebody was probably does want to help you get across the finish line. That is very motivating for a lot of people. Yeah, for sure, as we move into year end and just thinking about what's working and thinking about what to ditch and what to do more of in year end, what do you see? What do you see in your crystal ball? What should we do more of?
Michelle Boggs 27:37
Yeah, I mean, this might sound funny, but like, I'm a big believer in, like, the energy that you put out there, and so, like, if you're going into year end, like, thinking about all the reasons why you're not going to be successful, like, just, please don't do that to yourself or your teams. We are talking about this a lot knowing that it's, gosh, I can't even believe it's August. Thank God, my kids go back to school on Monday. I've had enough of them this summer. But yeah, I mean, this is, this is, this is the time to give. And I always like to share these crazy stats, but, like, typically, it can range, but on average, most nonprofits will receive 25% of all of their donation volume between Giving Tuesday and December 31 and giving Tuesday, I think, is December 2 this year. So you're talking about such a small window. And so it's just such an exciting, exhilarating, scary time for nonprofits. But I think a couple things like, really stick out to me is, like going into it thinking about, okay, what are our goals? What data do we have to back these goals? What are we looking to do? What do we want to move the needle on? Are we looking to, you know, raise $75,000 in year end? Are we looking to raise $20,000 what's our plan bringing? Again, it might sound not earth shattering, but I can't tell you how many organizations do not bring everyone together around the end of your giving strategies and plans, so maybe just marketing and communications is running that workflow and development. You know, the gift officers, they're just trying to meet with their individual donors and hit their own specific goals, and there's no collaboration or communication happening, which is, like shocking. So try to get everybody together and have an entire meeting dedicated to like, what is our plan end of year? Going back to what I talked about, no matter what campaigns you're going to do, especially obviously on the digital side, is like, whatever you can do to create those incredible direct giving experiences. So again, to your point, if I'm not, if I can't give on the couch, on my phone, it's not going to happen. And then one area that I think could be super strategic is building on ramps through your and if you're giving asks and plans building on. Ramps for recurring giving. So I also think that's a huge Miss for a lot of organizations. Is this idea of the subscription economy, it's the fastest growing way of giving. Are you providing those opportunities of hey, Christina, you know, thanks so much for your $15 gift. Would you consider becoming a monthly donor at $15 a month, or whatever it is. So making sure you're asking that, and you're asking it often, and then thinking about again, meeting with marketing, and how are you strategically amplifying your campaign? You know you can't reach everybody, but you have to reach people where they are. So your specific donor base, if you know they're mostly on social, if they're mostly on Facebook and Instagram. Like, do you have a plan to show up there? And can you segment and talk to your donors in ways where they feel super personal? Like this organization really gets me, and they know me, and then really, really important is like, what is that engagement and stewardship? Path, post giving season. So back to kind of the lessons learned from GoFundMe. Is like, how am I showing progress towards end of year giving? How? What's my follow up plan throughout? And then, just to run a thread through all of this, is back to that community piece is like, how do I put some of these end of year donors or these supporters that I know have been there for throughout the whole year for us? How do I put them in situations where they can share ideas and get to know one another and feel like they're part of something bigger, and you're driving that sense of connection in community. So thinking now thoughtfully how you can do that in the next three to four months, at the end of the year, those are some of the kind of tips and tools we're coaching our Yeah, our classy clients and partners on
Christina Edwards 31:57
amazing we ask everybody on the podcast who comes on to share with us one thought that they like to think on purpose. So this could be an affirmation, this could be a saying. This could be just a guiding thought that keeps you moving forward. Would you share yours with us?
Michelle Boggs 32:15
My gosh, I love that. My I hope it doesn't seem like doom and gloom, but it really does help me. If I ever, like, when I have anxiety or stress, I'll just think to myself, life is so short and most of these things don't really matter at the end of the day. Like, what matters most to me is my family, and there's some weird piece in that, like, I just it immediately, like, alleviates stress and worry about things I have no control over. I just center myself back to like what really matters to me and like my personal values, and then I just and like, what's going to happen is going to happen. And I don't feel I don't feel like that unnecessary worry and stress. I just tell myself that, that at the end of the day, this isn't really that serious.
Christina Edwards 33:00
Yeah, that's what I do. I love it. It gives you peace. It does amazing. Well. Thank you so much for coming on. I hope that this motivated organizations to really think about a couple things, really think about how they can create community and true community like really adding that to their strategy, letting some imperfection right, letting some letting the guard rails down a bit and updating, updating people during the campaign, after the campaign, the way that we see the be so successful. And like with GoFundMe and with other crowdfunding like letting okay, how do I get how can I activate people to share more? Oh, wait, I guess I need to ask them. Oh, wait, I guess I need to update them. So thank you so so much, Michelle. We really enjoyed having you on thank
Michelle Boggs 33:52
you so much. I just wanted to throw it out there. I am very active on LinkedIn. So any listeners, please connect with me. Come find me. We'd love to meet you. I always love to, you know, meet new people doing this incredible work, and we can talk through more of the stuff I talked about. Or if you have any other questions, or please reach out. We'd love to meet some of you guys who are listening. Perfect,
Christina Edwards 34:14
awesome. Thanks, y'all, hey, hi, achiever. I know your sights are set on ambitious, world changing goals in the purpose and profit, club, group coaching program, you can get the support, motivation and strategy to accelerate your impact. I like to say it's where the inner work meets. Big Impact and big funding. Go to splendid courses.com, forward slash wait list, and you will be first to be notified when we open up doors, and you'll get special bonuses when you join our wait list. See inside you.