Name: What’s Working in Fundraising at Rescue Missions: Trends and Takeaways from the 2025 Benchmark Report
Uploaded: 2025-04-17T19:30:27.080Z
Duration: 1 h 1 min 36 s
Description: What’s Working in Fundraising at Rescue Missions: Trends and Takeaways from the 2025 Benchmark Report

Transcript for "What’s Working in Fundraising at Rescue Missions: Trends and Takeaways from the 2025 Benchmark Report": Hey, everybody. Welcome to today's webinar. We are super glad to have you here. I know we have people coming in. The, the doors have opened, and so everyone's rushing to get their seats. Welcome. We're so glad that you're here. We are gonna be diving into the 2025 rescue mission benchmark report, and we are super excited for it. But, hey, as we get started, I would love to know, who you are and where you're joining from. And so I guess I will get started. My name is Scott with the Virtuous team joining from the Chicago area today. So go ahead and let us know in the chat where you're joining us from. Let us know the organization that you're with. We have people, all over the country who are who are tuning in today. So we are excited for, for today. We have Laura from Nashville. Hey. We got Riley. We got Robert. Awesome. We have pastor Sean out in Salt Lake City. Fun fact, lived in Salt Lake City for a short period of time. So, as someone from the Midwest and Chicago could not understand how you could be that close to mountains. It was unbelievable. Anyway, Ryan, Tim, Caitlin, awesome. Robert, we're glad you're here. Patrick, welcome. Listen. We are excited for today. We have a lot to cover, and, we have some really amazing, guest today. And so, again, if you're wondering or trying to remember what webinar is this that I signed up for, this is the rescue mission benchmark report, brought to you by Virtuous and Masterworks, and we are gonna dive all in. Now, I'm going to, introduce our speakers in a minute. But before I do, a couple ground rules, some things to remember. One, this will be recorded and sent out afterwards. You'll get an email of this recording. Keep sharing where you're joining from. Also, by the way, you can share gifts in the chat, which is one of my favorite things about this platform. So you can find your favorite hello gift and share that if you would like. But we would love to keep the chat going throughout. You're able to submit questions. You're able to interact. So let's keep that going. You will notice in the chat box above, there's a q and a, tab. So go ahead and submit any questions you have there. We'll have plenty of time for that. You're also, Patrick, I love that. Captain America. You're also gonna notice the docs tab up there as well. So if you click that, you're gonna notice the slide deck from today that you can download and the benchmark report that you can download right there. Again, these will be emailed to you. So if you don't wanna worry about them now, no worries, but wanna definitely let you know of those. And, again, just so glad that you're here, that you are joining us today. And we are gonna jump in. Keep saying hello. For those of you just joining us, let us know where you're joining from. Ali, that one's awesome. I love that gift, and I love, that movie as well, as do my kids. But, I'm gonna go ahead and bring our guests on stage today, and we're super excited, for today and and just honestly the amount of wisdom, knowledge, experience, that I'm going to be able to tee up and let you all learn from. So I'm gonna toss it first to Jaclyn to give her introduction, and, and then we'll go from there. Hello, everyone. Welcome. I am Jaclyn Jones. I work at Masterworks as the chief philanthropic economist. So I, focus in on nonprofit and even for profit trends then just make sure that our clients and our prospects are aware, in the market space. I've been doing this for about twenty five years, and for a good percentage of those, I have had the privilege of working with and being, friends with Justine Burke, who is also joining us. So why don't you introduce yourself as well, Justine? Hi. Good afternoon or good morning, depending on where you are in the country. I'm really excited that Virtuous and Masterworks asked me to be here. As mentioned, I'm Justine. I serve as the Vice President of Marketing at Metropolitan Ministries here in Tampa, Florida. Quick quick little background for me. The first half of my career was on the other side. I was in corporate marketing up in the Boston area where I'm from, and I've been here in Tampa for twenty years now and eighteen of those here at Metropolitan Ministries. So I kind of approach, we do here at Metropolitan Ministries. We brought marketing, in right about that time eighteen years ago alongside fundraising, and, we've seen them work really well together and be successful. So I'm always happy to share and help others, learn from what what we've done and how we've been successful. Yeah. Fantastic. So grateful for both of you and for, the perspectives that we're gonna be able to, share from and and really help people today. So I'm gonna give us a quick agenda so everyone kinda understands here's where we're going. We're gonna dive into just, first of all, talking about the study. So what did what did it cover? Looking at some of those details to kind of understand and set, like, level ground for for, where we're going. We're gonna talk about the methodology used. And so understanding, obviously, how we got to the data and how, we arrived at those numbers is super important. And then the bulk of it is gonna be diving into the data and understanding what does it say. So so Jaclyn obviously will be able to walk us through understanding what does it say, but then also what does this mean and what can you do. You know, and both Jaclyn and Justine will kind of be able to to discuss that, unpack that. And so reminder, as we do share those questions because we wanna make sure, honestly, more than anything, this is super practical and helpful for you. That you walk away, whether it's, equipped with more knowledge, whether it's having some action steps or some additional things to explore, we wanna make sure that it's super helpful. So I am, gonna toss it back over to Jaclyn, to jump into talking about this study. Wonderful. So this is the second year that Masterworks has engaged with Virtuous on doing this study. So if you were able to join us last year, welcome back. What I'm really hoping in this version of the webinar for this year is that we do dive into practical applications, which is why Justine is here. But the way that this study, came about, we partnered with Virtuous. They provided us with anonymized data for the different rescue missions. And if you download the report, you can get really into the methodology. It's based on tax codes, and we have a 91 total rescue missions that we analyzed and looked in and, that produced this. So what is about this study? We're looking at trends from 2024 and through 2018. So it's kind of an interesting time frame that we wanted to look at, not your typical five years. And we did that because we really wanted to make sure that we had years prior to the pandemic, so about two years prior to that pandemic. And then we also have those pandemic years, '20 '20 '1, and then what happened afterwards, just to give us all context for what the actual changes have been over this kind of tumultuous time that we've been living through. The other things about this is that we have benchmarks for all missions, and then we have separated out kind of larger missions. So those that have about 10,000 active audience members. And that's just a way to see what are the trends for different groups because we have noticed in the data that they were different, and we wanted to call those out so you can kind of benchmark yourself where where your active audiences are. Over, over this study, what we're really seeing is very similar to what the industry felt, which is we had a spike in 2021 of both revenue and new donors, and then it's been kind of slowly declining in a lot of different metrics. And that has to do with, we assume, both coming off of that COVID emergency peak, but also some of the economy as well. And so as we've come into 2024, we are starting to see some of that turnaround, which is really encouraging. As mentioned, if you download the study which is available, I think it's Scott we're sending this to everyone. Is that right? Yeah. This would this would be emailed out and then I just shared a link in the chat. People can click or again click in the docs tab above the chat and download it there. So all the ways to download. Love it. Love it. Thank you, Scott. So you can download it and dig in, but like I said, the benchmark actually grew this year. We had a 18 organizations last year. This year, we have a 91 in here. So we did actually shrink the tax codes to get a, more narrowed in version. But because of the growth we've been seeing with Virtuous, we actually have more organizations in the study. So that was really encouraging as well. Alright. So I'm gonna move us actually straight into the data, if that sounds good, Scott. Yeah. That's awesome. Let's dive in. Perfect. So you can see that the benchmark for all of the different, rescue missions are going to be the blue bars, and so this is looking at how has revenue grown as a percentage off of the baseline, which is going to be 2018 through most of these slides. So 2018 is a %, and then you can see how far did rescue missions grow off of that. And then there's gonna be a black line that's gonna talk about what's going on with those larger missions, those with a hundred sorry, 10,000 active donors consistently in them. And so you can see we see that spike that's coming up in '20 and 2021. And then for the larger organizations, we're seeing revenue decline off of that emergency peak. For the, benchmark as a whole, it kind of spikes in '21 and then kind of stays flat. So it's not beating inflation, but it's not really dropping dramatically as we might have seen in 2022 across other, organizations. And what's interesting about this is that you can grow your revenue in two ways. You can get a lot more new donors, and that's gonna come at a cost in acquisition and net loss, or you can grow the donors you have, retain and upgrade. And those are kinda two sides of, you know, file health, and we're gonna jump into both of them as we go. But, Justine, looking at this, I know that and I'm just gonna share, I guess, some personal information about Metro. Twenty twenty four, you guys were at, a 49% growth off of benchmarks, and I'm wondering as you as we've kinda talked through this, what has been the driving factors underneath that for Metro? What is it that you think, has helped you as an organization outpace these rescue mission benchmarks? Definitely, it goes back to just our position in the community. We've been around for fifty three years, and we we are relentlessly loud telling the community what we're doing. I'm not even joking when I say relentlessly. We are very intentional and strategic about sharing all the great things that our donors are allowing us to do. We do that in all channels. We do that in PR efforts. So just coming up alongside general and, you know, fundraising efforts, we are fortunate that we do have a marketing and communications team, that comes alongside fundraising. And our our old CEO used to say to me, many years ago, he would say, Justine, just get us to the top of the mailbox. And some of you out there, who have done direct mail fundraising for a long time, I bet you're smiling and shaking your head. And I remember when I first came here, I was like, what okay. What does that mean? And, you know, it just means keep us top of mind. You know, do everything you can above and beyond just your direct mail and your your emails. Show the community what you're doing, and that's what we do. And we have positioned ourselves as well known, trusted, beloved organization that people want to be a part of. And I think that's really helped us. And, of course, you know, I should mention that we I mentioned we we are in Tampa, Florida, and we we do have hurricanes. Yes. And so another interesting thing that happened was I mean, those are horrible to have, and they're but what happens when when a disaster comes is people wanna help, and they wanna give. So we are working hard during relief efforts. We never considered ourselves a relief organization, but the community looked to us. And we said we did it during COVID, and we did it just recently in those back to back hurricanes we had, and we learned a lot from that. We said, oh, wow. We knew we were in crisis resources, but it's even more they the community was looking to us like, what's Metro gonna do to help the community? And so we learned that a few hurricanes ago, and we learned it again this year, and we learned it through COVID, that the community counts on us in times of crisis. And then we we could go on and on. We might be able to go later about crisis donors and how to maintain them, and so retention does does fall into that. Now, of course, we have seen similar results with emergency COVID giving, but we've been able to retain and maintain a a good momentum, despite despite, you know, the fact that COVID is over because of the things that I just previously mentioned. I think those are great points, Justine Burke, because we will always say when we talk with you guys that we make each other look good. So the work that you're doing to NPR and in marketing to make the fundraising look better and be more relevant is so important. I know your team is hitting the pavement at 4AM on those calls with the news, and it it does matter. What's, something else you said that's really key in this is that Metro grew, during this time frame, because of retention. And so when we go through this, one metric that I think Metro really succeeded on, even though you do a lot of emergency response, both in COVID, you guys were right there instantly online with the offers and with, with your emergency with hurricanes, but your retention is strong, and that's really how you've been driving a lot of your growth. It's also probably how you are beating a lot of these metrics around high value donors. So this is looking at the percentage of revenue that comes from major donors. So donors that have given a single largest gift of $10,000 or more is how we're measuring this. And it's interesting in this time frame that as general donor retention declines, and we're seeing that across the industry and also admissions, so those under $50 donors are the ones that we're seeing the retention fall off from, revenue is still solid as we saw. It's still pacing pretty flat, and that's because mids and majors are stepping up. And that's been a a a story that's been going on since 2022. As those lower value donors fall off, we are seeing an equal increase in value permits and majors. And you can see that as the percentage of revenue coming from caseloads overall, coming from these high value donors continues to grow. And, Justine, I know you guys, have been feeling this. You're hitting about, I think, over 70% right now, 75% in 2024 coming from those majors. And I think, you know, in our conversations, a lot of that is from the efforts that you've been putting into your community and emergency response. Definitely. And also a shout out to our advancement team who is stewarding those donors. We invite them on we have campuses that we love people to come and touch and feel the mission, and so they do a wonderful job of of connecting and stewarding and thanking and making donors feel special. And we've definitely seen excellent retention, especially at the higher end of the file, for sure. And there is something, you know, in that, but what is your, community presence? What is your marketing presence in your in your area, and how does that align with caseload? They wanna be part of whatever is, you know, that the change makers, and what is doing the most good. And so having that PR machine that I know Metropolitan Ministries has, but also as you said, caseload assignments, focusing in on mid level caseload assignments. How are you growing the, hundred dollar donors, the $200 donors into those thousand dollar donors and then into those caseloads. That whole pipeline is important all the way down to your new donor acquisition strategy. Are you acquiring high value donors that are going to to follow that pipeline up? I'm curious, Justine. Speaking about sort of the the scaling the mid level, and looking at okay. Like you said, how do you take $100, 2 hundred dollar donor and scale and grow that? Are there things specifically you did or things that you might encourage others to look at, when it comes to tackling that? Actually, we're looking at it again right now. There our teams are looking at the caseloads, because they're pretty big. But I remember a while back, I feel like we're one we're kind of an early adopter of a lot of things. Right? So maybe several years ago, we took a look at our our file, and, you know, we didn't have the staff back then. You know, we have a little bit more staff now, so that was that's always a challenge, the bandwidth to go deeper in into the file. But we we actually extended stewardship down to the $500 level, and we didn't have that prior to that. It was more transactional at that level, so we had different levels of gift officers working lower mids, mids, majors, super majors, as we call them. So really, simple things, like just that if they give $500 they got a phone call from a from a per they got a thank you letter and they got all the regular stuff. But then we would just call them up and thank them. And people are amazed sometimes when you just call them up and thank them, especially if, you know, they're not giving a million dollars. Right? Yeah. Little things like that. We also, on the digital side, we have a notification on on our phones and on our computers when we a gift comes in that's a $500 gift. I'm sorry. For that one, it's, I think, a thousand dollars or more, and our CEO is also on those notifications. And depending on how much it is, you know, he'll immediately email the person at right from him his phone or text them, whichever way. And I know those don't seem like big strategies, but I can tell you the feedback we got, just implementing those little things and this and this the stewardship underneath that thousand dollar level giving. That works for us. But now we're actually relooking at that, and that worked well. And now as things are changing, we're actually as we plan for our fiscal year, which starts on July 1, we're taking a look at that, us marketing team together with the advancement team. And now when you think of all the digital strategies that we have in place, can marketing take some load off of advancement team and take care of a lot of those emails and newsletters and touch points? We have video stories and storytelling so that they can focus more on that face to face. So there's more to come on that. We're still figuring that out. Yeah. If we could, we have a couple questions that are kinda relevant to this conversation. I'd love to ask those. Matthew asked, how many PR pushes are you doing per year? We do them constantly. So what we do is back to my top of the mailbox comment. So that means, like, you know, looking at if you're a marketer, you know what an omnichannel or multichannel approach is. We we've been doing that. So we look at the fundraising schedule and all the events we have for the year, and then we say, how can marketing come alongside and around that to lift it and lift our awareness and lift our giving? And we've seen it over and over again. So we will plan our PR. We strategically go after PR. We pitch at least once a month on something. We have plenty of stories to tell that align with what maybe it's a hunger story. Maybe it's a homeless housing story for a family that got help. You know, we look at the messaging calendar for the year, what are the events we have going on, what meals are we serving out in the community, And, you know, we we develop relationships with the media locally. And, somehow, you know, it it didn't happen overnight, I can tell you that, but we also have special events that happen throughout the community throughout the year that the that the media now feels compelled to cover. You know? So that didn't happen overnight. It was it was years of time. But that whatever we're saying in the mail and whatever we're saying in email or text, we're also saying it in a story that comes out on the media. And so to end this, you know, just this fiscal year, we've had over 3,000 media stories and mentions in the news media, and that includes repetition, which we love repetition. And then also you see it on TV, but then they also post everything online. Yeah. Yep. That's great. Your fiscal year where you said through 3,000, that's about nine months. Nine months. Yeah. And the PR push, I see the question there. We write press releases and media advisories, and we send them out, and then we follow-up and try to get them covered. We also post all those same things on our social media channels, which the media does follow, and they'll go and ask us about it. And it's a simple key that they all combine together because your team is freed up to do a lot of those PR pushes because you have partners and vendors that are doing the other work on the other side. And it lifts both boats together so well. You know, whenever there's a, you know, really strong direct response campaign, be it an email or direct mail. And we're like, it was so good, but it was so good because of what Justine's team is doing as well. So I'm gonna ask one more. We do have now if you're like, wait. I submitted a question. We're gonna save some for the end. So I your question will get answered. But, Robin asked, what tool do you use to get a notification about, a thousand dollar gift, you know, straight to the straight to the phone, or email? I'm I'm pretty sure we can set that up through our, our current email system, where we can get a notification right to our email when a gift comes in over a certain amount. Cool. Yeah. I think a lot of CRMs do allow for that. And I guess that's the question for you, Scott, even, is, you know, is that something that is a trigger that can happen easily in a CRM? Yeah. Absolutely. Yeah. Gift amount, is certainly one among many, many, many others, that not only then can trigger, various actions or notifications, but also, various tags to allow segmentation. Again, understanding those, you know, interactions and and how, how your donor has interacted with you and and the details on that. So definitely. Alright. Well, I'm gonna jump as forward just so we keep on moving. So we do have time for questions at the end. Growth in active donor file, this is just looking again at that baseline of 2018 and how has the active donor file changed, and you can see that it has declined. We had a spike in 2020 across the industry, and then as we've come away from that COVID moment from some of those tax incentives in 2020 and 2021, the file is declining. And we see this every quarter with the fundraising effectiveness project as well. But when you dig into what's happening underneath, what we're seeing is that it's the lower value donors that are having a drop in their retention in the double digits. So again, those donors that give, you know, less than $50 a year, they're the ones that are falling off faster. The the change in retention for those higher value ones has been minimal. And so right now that is the question of, you know, strategy. What is it who is it you want to retain? When you're looking at your budget, you're looking at your time, knowing that those lower than $50 donors are the ones that are falling off. We like to ask the question, in our annual planning with, you know, with our clients like Justine, who do we wanna go after? Who do we want to acquire? Knowing what we know about the season we're in, and long term goals that you our clients have. So do we want to go after under $50 first time givers or do we want to focus maybe on higher value ones? And as a result of that, we actually are seeing really strong retention, higher revenue growth, but we are seeing active donor files continue to decline as well. And I think it's both, the strategy that a lot of nonprofits are taking as they're trying to manage the increase in postage costs and overall costs, but also what's happening, across the industry. Any thoughts, Justine? As you look at this, I know because this is something I'm I assume even in board meetings and stuff that is a a fear in a way, even though you're looking at revenue like, oh, revenue's doing fine, but as you see active files decline, what kind of conversations are you having internally around that? Yeah. As you mentioned, I mean, the the file decline is looks really scary. That's the one metric that I would say is our biggest struggle is new donor acquisition. Mhmm. I mentioned the emergency donors that we get during certain emergencies here, and they are sort of one off givers, and we're trying to figure out how how can we approach them differently so that maybe we can keep those some of those donors, you know, even though they're just giving in a in a hurricane emergency or some other type of emergency that we have. One thing we did do, though, I mean, strategically, we did move budget, from direct mail to digital acquisition, and I feel like we were early we were brave early adopters of that as well. We didn't stop doing direct mail acquisition. We kept it, you know, moving at a reasonable place where we knew that it was financially sound and good stewardship, because we still have people who do respond through the mail, so we keep with them. But we're we keep investing in digital. We we and every time we do that, we get better results and more revenue and higher retention and higher gifts come in online as well. So they're, therefore, higher value donor. So we are seeing that exact trend, like you said, Jaclyn, where even though we have less donors, the revenue coming in from those donors is still more. So when you look at the revenue charts, they look really great. But when you go deep, you can see that the file is shrinking. And so we're paying attention, and and we're not just accepting that. We're saying, what can we do? Yeah. Definitely. And that kinda brings us to the next one, which is the growth in new donor volume. And you can see here that, again, 2018 being the hundred percent and 20 20 four saying we're acquiring fewer new donors, 92% of that benchmark, this year than we were back in 2018. So we're looking at, you know, more revenue off of 2018, but a smaller donor file and fewer new donors, and that's across the industry as a whole, but rescue missions as well. There is a bigger decline in those larger organizations. So the ones that already have larger active donor files are seeing, a bigger decline in their files and fewer newer donors coming in. And I think that's a really interesting trend that you see with regional nonprofits, which is when you have a zip code boundary, you're gonna hit a saturation point. And when we say saturation point, I don't think this means of the actual area, but of the available donors that fall into the acquisition categories we traditionally go after. So, when we look at with, you know, like, Metro, when we looked at it and said, oh, we're we're seeing that we've kind of capitalized. We're not seeing as much growth as we want. Our marginal returns on the next spend isn't as great, even back in 2018, our thought was, well, who do we go after next? If we've capitalized on direct mail acquisitions, 65 year old evangelicals in your ZIP code, and we can't expand the ZIP code, then we need to keep doing that. We need to keep doing direct mail, as you said, Justine, but we need to then move to a new audience and a new channel. And so that's something that we, you know, would recommend if you're looking at this number and saying, where do we expand when you can't push your ZIP codes? It's really about testing that next group being in CTV, Meta, etcetera, moving into these other areas. And Justine, as you mentioned, that is something that Metro has been a fast adopter of, already in 2018, moving your budgets about $50.50 from direct mail into digital in 2020, testing CTV with us, and it's been going well rolling both of those out to, And I think that has allowed you guys to continue to grow your revenue despite some of the other challenges that are happening underneath. Yeah. I can just mention on the CTV. I remember it's gotta be a year or two ago now when we started thinking about doing it, and it's it it seemed a little risky and scary at the time. Like, well, how can we even track this revenue? How can we how can we make a case for this investment? So we we started out, you know, small. We tested. We saw some promising, you know, results, and we've we've increased it. And, this past, we've not only do are we doing it, but we also improve the quality of the videos that we're putting out and the stories that we're telling, and putting them into those streaming platforms. And, you know, obviously, I wouldn't do it all on its own. It's gotta be part of an omni omnichannel strategy with when you're doing all these other things. But with us adding it, you know, we've seen some excellent results. Like, we're getting a three to one return overall on our CTV, so we plan to increase that investment this year as a new audience, a new way to reach people, reach people where where they are because the traditional ways are not the only ways anymore as we all know. So we've got to be brave, I think, even if it takes baby steps. And when we see good results, as we did last year, I can get more budget to put towards it, which just happened today in a board meeting. I was very excited to hear that. Yeah. And I think that's the beauty of CTV is not only is it bringing in new donors for Metro, but I think it also is, playing nicely with the PR that you are doing because you guys already are, quite often on the news and on these different channels. And so making sure that we continue to cultivate the broadcast donors and the broadcast interested donors, not just in their, you know, Facebook accounts, but also in the places that they're joining us through TV as well. I think too it speaks to the the importance too, like you said, Justine, of an omnichannel approach, because maybe folks aren't at a a place where they can may maybe do the same motions as you. But I think the the big idea of an omnichannel approach and knowing that especially today, we people consume media and content in very different and diverse ways, I think that's that's really powerful to remember. Yeah. And then keeping keeping in mind all the different generations that we are in front of and speak and they all react in different ways and take in information. And even though most of us could probably say in this space, you know, it's mostly, you know, 50 age group people that are the majority of our givers, we can't ignore the future givers. Right? So we have a tough job, all of us, to to speak to all those different generations, even if they're just engaging and maybe they're volunteering or maybe they're just following the work and sharing about it. You know, the hope, obviously, is we can convert them. So keeping that in mind, and it's it's getting our jobs are getting harder, right, not easier because we have to almost feel like we have to be everywhere. And that's where PR helps, for sure. But also our organic social, that also mirrors the same storytelling, email. All all the channels are consistently saying the same thing and and showing it to different audiences where they might be. So agreed, Scott. So the next one is looking at annual revenue per general donor. And so this is saying how much revenue from our general donors, again, general being defined as someone who has never made a transaction, a single transaction of $10,000 or more, how much do they give divided by the total number of? And you'll see that the smaller or I guess the benchmark for all rescue missions is higher than that of those with more donors, and that makes sense. As you go out to a wider and wider audience, the donors that you find are going to be, you know, just lightly, lower in value, I suppose. You have the means to go find the $50 donors instead of focusing in on those mids and majors, who have probably more of a relationship, a personal connection to your offer. This is one where when we were talking about, you know, Metro is, doing retaining their donors, and growing those donors. This is one that Metro has also seen, you know, similar levels to what the benchmark shows for organizations with large, with 10,000 active donors, but your the slope of your line has been higher. You've grown that increase more. And I think it's through some of the strategies that you've talked about, Justine, which is focusing in on digital donors who give a higher first gift upfront. So we're finding more, high value online donors and have since 2018, that's been our focus and our core. And then a lot of the strategies that you talked about, the ones about personal connections, about thank yous and emails and texts that really connect people into your mission, I think that also draws a lot of the value and the upgrading that you've been experiencing. Yeah. I would agree. I mean, we we've we've just making sure we're staying in front of people. The thanking and stewardship that goes on is just as important as the asking. Right? Thanking and and post event strategy or post PR strategy is like, and thanking and and reporting back, you know, always showing the donor, look what you're helping us do. That is the top of the top of our list. And you can never over report good news that the donor is the hero in helping make happen. And not all the things we send out ask for money. Right? We have all those touches that are just telling a story, showing a video, other ways you can engage, come for a tour. We have these sessions that we call Behind the Mission that our advancement team runs, and we even do that in verticals sometimes. So we'll have faith groups in, we'll have corporate groups in, etcetera, and we'll tailor those presentations to our audience. And those are smaller groups that they get a nice presentation and then they get a tour and they can talk to some of our frontline staff. And so we incorporate and we invite you know, once people give and they get into our communication stream, this is when they find out about all these things. So it's it's a we try to have a, you know, a nice balance so that every time our donors are hearing from us, it's not always about asking for money. You gotta ask or you don't get. We do a lot of asking, but we do a lot of thanking, for sure. Yeah. And as we jump into retention, I think that's one of the main reasons your guys' retention is so strong. When we look at organizations that consistently beat Benchmark in retention and I ask, like, what are you doing? The number one response I get from almost every single one of them is we thank our donors regularly, be it calls, texts, or handwritten cards. That is so impactful. And I know it's something you read in every blog that anyone puts out about how do you retain donors better. They say, say thank you, but it's gotta become, I think, a culture of really valuing it. Yeah. I also driving mid, mid level caseloads, those different things that you talked about as well, making sure that you are focused in on that mid level experience, and then sustainers, monthly giving programs is what drives a lot of this. And I would just say for anyone who say, I don't know what to do with monthly donors. How do I even start? What we have seen in our research is that the sooner you ask a donor to become a monthly donor, the more likely they are to do it. So there was this belief that you needed to wait until they had been on your file for so many years and they had made so many transactions. The actual data says no. As soon as you get a new donor, ask them, and ask them repeatedly, because they are most likely to join that program in the first twelve months. And so that also helps drive this metric. And Yeah. It helps drive some of the other metrics we're gonna talk about. But first. Yeah. First, we have a poll. One of the things I love, is, again, to engage. I know you all are listening. We're so glad that you're here. We're chatting, but we have a poll here because we want to know kinda where you're at and what you're walking through and working on. And so I'm gonna open that poll right now. You're gonna notice, the poll, tab, open up with the red dot. So go ahead and click that, and we'd love to know just where you're kinda struggling most. What what are you what are you working through? What are you seeing in your organization? Donor retention, maybe it's donor acquisition, again, reactivating lapsed donors, finding those you haven't heard from in a while. Maybe a second gift conversion. Like, we already talked about your donor file and seeing that grow. We're actually gonna share, just to be able to see percentage wise where some of these results are. And so if you can't see fully, you can scroll down on the screen there, to be able to see kind of where other organizations are at. But we would love to know that. So keep keep filling that out for us here. Again, it it just kinda helps us and maybe even helps you to know, hey. Turns out we're not alone. You know, we're we're kinda fighting through this as well. So definitely let us know, where you're at. We'll leave that pull up for a couple more minutes. But it's really good to see some of these and to to understand kinda where where folks are at. So we'll leave this up for just a minute, Jaclyn, but, yeah, I would love to, love to keep going here. Yeah. Let's jump into retentions. You want me to leave the, perk. Alright. Yeah. We'll put we'll throw that back up. Perfect. So retention of active donors is pretty much the next section, and, we wanna give about you know, we wanna leave some time for questions at the end. So we've broken this out by detail. So you've got overall retention of active when you look at the report, you've got high mid donor retention, second year retention. They're all in there for you to dive in. And I think some of, what we can talk through is what we've already covered. Metropolitan Ministries, as I've said several times, is beating these retention benchmarks. And I think it has a lot to do with your your PR machine, your strategic PR machine, Justine, that you drive, your thank you program. And then I think there was something else you mentioned about really owning seasonality, being the trusted partner for those emergency moments in your community, but also you guys own Christmas in Tampa. You have spent years kind of doing this. Can you just talk through briefly about what that is and why that is so important, to the community of Tampa, your tent? Oh, sure. First of all, we own Thanksgiving and Christmas. True. We'll get it right. So I guess think about the the Salvation Army and how they have the red kettle and the bell ringers, and everybody knows it, and everybody knows who that who that is. Right? So think about your organization and think about what's your red kettle, so to speak. What What do you have that's unique and special about your organization in your community that maybe you could use or leverage, to, you know, increase engagement? And we have what we call the holiday tent. Very basic. We didn't make it a fancy name on purpose because it is a super grassroots effort, where many years ago, we served out of one single room, you know, a few hundred people with Christmas gifts and Thanksgiving meals who need who needed help. And, this was, you know, way back in the eighties that this started, by our original founding, CEO. And then it just grew and grew and grew. And one day, they they couldn't fit it in the room anymore, and and he said, why don't we just throw up a tent outside? And everybody said, we can't just throw up a tent. What do you mean? And so the joke is that they threw up a tent, just a you know, one of those big white pop up tents, and then it grew to something, now, today, is the size of a football field, the tent. And when we have multiple tents now that are in different areas of need in multiple counties, but this now like, I mentioned that we've been around for fifty three years, so this happened over many decades of time. But the holiday tent has become, you know, a beloved, well known staple in our community that everyone now rallies around. And the whole community, it's almost like we've gotten to a point with the brand efforts that we've had that it's it's like who doesn't get involved with the holiday tent. And and if you aren't involved, what is what is wrong with you? And so, we've got corporate groups volunteering. So it's it's more than 20,000 volunteers. So it's a huge volunteer effort. It's a way to get people touching the mission. Businesses get involved. The media gets involved. Service partners get involved. So everybody feels a part of it. And the tent just has food and toys in it for two months straight. And we do a registration process in October for people that are in need through our outreach centers. And then we schedule times for them to come back, and it's just become this amazing community effort where we always say it's not just we can't do it without you, community. We can't do it without you, donors. And it's a wonderful way to in this world where many things are transactional, this is still face to face, grassroots, you know, people helping people, help your neighbor, love your neighbor, really manifested. It's it's beautiful thing. And it also, by the way, helps a lot of people, and it raises a lot of money. And it makes people and, again, we're lucky because, again, you can see it. We did some market research. We do it probably every at least every ten years where we get a pulse of what the community thinks about the work that we're doing and what their perceptions are. And we learned that if people see you if people see you doing things in their community, they wanna they wanna know more and they wanna support that, and the tent certainly does that for us. What I love about what you said too is find your cattle. Like, find what it is that is unique because every single mission is playing such a huge community role, and they all are so unique, and they all are bringing such, transformation to their community and sharing those stories and finding the way to bring light to that, and then pushing time and spend behind it because you guys do do both of those. You push marketing budget and a lot of time, and I know you're always out there pounding the pavement with your your news, partners, etcetera, every morning, and it does make a difference. But I think when we look at retention, the things you can do is make sure that you are the community leader, of change and that it's seen and that it's visible from your marketing and your PR, that you're thanking your donors, that you're sharing your stories widely, and then again pushing that monthly giving offer, that's gonna help in retention as well. When you download the report, you'll be able to dig in. You'll see all the different ways that we have split up retention because, obviously, these metrics change based on the different groups you're talking about and who you wanna focus on. So you can look at those 500 plus donors as well in there, which is the group that, you know, is gonna drive a lot of that long term revenue. I'm gonna jump real quick to the lapsed one. We'll just jump through some of those retention ones. We do have time at the end for questions, and I'll just touch briefly on this. This is looking at the reactivation of recently lapsed donors on the left and then deeply lapsed donors on the right. And we want to focus on reactivating lapsed donors, whenever we look at budgets before we go after new. So when we look at Masterworks budgets with our clients, we say, alright, we need to spend at retention, then we need to spend at reactivation, and then you spend at new. And the reason for that is that the retention rate of a reactivated lapsed donor is actually higher than a new. And because they retain better, I know that sounds strange because they've lapsed once and sometimes people get so hurt. They're like, oh, they've turned against us. I don't wanna talk to them anymore. But they actually retain better in their second year after they've been reactivated, and therefore, they have a higher long term value than a new donor. So just spending here, giving a time and attention to reactivating those donors before you spend budget on new is gonna help you grow revenue long term better. So just something I would, recommend to everyone, as as a tactic. So retention first, then reactivation, and then acquisition. But I think that brings us to the, fifty minute mark. Yeah. You wanna jump Yeah. I would. We got a couple along the way that I did promise we'd save to the end, and I wanna keep my word. Robert asked, how much automation are you using for gift officer interactions or unassigned donor interactions? Yes, Steve. That is absolutely you. For I'm think I'm thinking about the specifically to majors for automation majors. Is that what the question was? Yeah. Except for gift officer, I think, yeah, I think we could we could go with major, but even maybe hitting on some of the mid level as well if you're using automation there in any way. We do, in general, we do we do a new donor wealth series. Robert clarified mid major and monthly in the chat. So, new donors, I'll start there. For new donors of any size, we do have a new donor welcome series that's digital that goes out. And it's, you know, the thanking, the not the asking, the thanking, a storytelling, other ways to get involved, and then eventually evolves into an ask. And, of course, we're trying to get that second gift to keep them. The here at Metropolitan Ministries, we do have a great advancement team, and like I said, some of them start at the $500 level where if someone gives $500, they'll still get the marketing, you know, thanking and automated banking, but then they'll they'll get moved into the advancement team group where $500 is stewardship only. So they'll get a they'll get a thank you note. They might get invited to an event, one of those behind the missions, a tour, you name it. They'll they'll offer out all those things. And then when we go a little higher into the majors, we do have they do do some they are starting to do some more automation of their own, and that would be in the form of, you know, emails that that would go out from a gift officer, on his dashboard or her dashboard, but they would be personal from that solicitor instead of just generic Metropolitan Ministries. So they try to make it look a little bit less mass produced, even though some of them are. And and, actually, that's a that's a great question because that's something we're currently finessing, and we're trying to figure that out. And one of the ways we're figuring that out is we we actually are moving, Nobody asked me to nobody's paying me to plug this, but we are moving to Virtuous. We just, happen to sign an agreement with them, and that that is a CRM, and marketing automation system that's gonna help us be more future thinking so that we can have these capabilities to get more personal even through a digital channel. And one of the one of the challenges, you know, for the advancement teams is their their caseloads are huge. We have 36,000 active donors, and of those, you know, at least 5,000 of them are what I would consider major donors. Right? And so we have five people working 5,000 donors, so give or take a few people. And so we're honing in and trying to lower those caseloads maybe so that they can really focus. And then how can automation come in and stay in front of those donors in a way that doesn't feel like mass marketing and too impersonal. But when you're dealing with digital, you know, we're having our major gifts officers even do mass mailings, and so we're we're working internally to align, like, who's doing what when and making sure that we're aligned so that we're not putting too much into the mailbox, email box, mailbox, you know, between thanking, asking, me mailing, texting. We all gotta be careful, right, of how our donor is receiving all that information, so we're working really hard on that as well. Yeah. And then, mostly, you asked about we we branded our monthly giving program called the Hope Force. And, again, it goes back to that red kettle mentality where help people wrap their heads around it, make it interesting, or may as a special group that you can be a part of. And I think we haven't even scratched the surface there, and it's going to it's it's an ongoing goal for us to grow our hope force, and that's also a way we can get at, hopefully, the younger donors who maybe they can't afford to give $500, but they can give $10 or $20. And then, you know, hopefully, we grow them and and from there in our in our system, of course. Yeah. I see a lot of questions. I'll I'll let you decide, Scott. Yeah. Absolutely. There was one from Caitlin. You know, what was your mid level file size, and how do you scale the work of thank you calls for your staff? I think you spoke to a little bit of that. Yeah. Tim just asked this is this is a kinda detailed question, but I think it's helpful because I I kinda wrote down as well a little bit of some of what you're talking about earlier. And, k, how do you maybe replicate that or scale that if you're at a smaller you're at a smaller team looking to grow? But, Tim's question was, we asked about how many employees does Metro have, but mentioned a team of 30 as far as marketing PR comms. Says that at City Gospel Mission in Cincinnati, we have a seven person marketing advancement comm PR team. What are some of your keys to scaling from 80 to 50,000,000 in eighteen years? Our president wants us to go from 10,000,000 to 20,000,000 in five years. So any help, I'm sure Tim would appreciate. You know, all the things I all the things I mentioned when when we when I came, we're I don't how did they they must have looked that up because I don't know how they knew that we started at 8,000,000, and now we're at 50. But, you know, back then, we had two ways of raising money, direct mail and face to face, and we had maybe, like, one major gifts officer and me. We had no team. So we really relied on transactional, you know, on the math side, and we grew it from there. You know, it's it's there's so many things that go into how fast you can grow. It's also how how much you can invest and the and do you have people do you have the people on the team to do to do the work? So, you know, for us, it was gradual. You know? We started with one person on the advancement team, and there was no marketing before I came. And so that was the start of it. And in the first year, we saw double digit increases just by aligning our messaging and being consistent. We we do believe in brand here and how brand can lift your fundraising as long as you do it correctly. He says, I looked it up on LinkedIn. Yeah. And I like that. Good researcher. I think that the 10 to $20,000,000 in five years, I remember I I mean, that's a pretty that's a pretty big BHAG, I guess. That's doubling your revenue in five years. So Jaclyn over here would tell you, what do you what can you invest to make that happen? I remember, you know, we were in a meeting with Tim once, your your wonderful president and CEO, and he was saying, you know, Jaclyn, when I took on this role, my predecessor had made big investments in acquisition with your team, and it helped me. It made us look good as I started. And I think that's something where it is, you know, new donors in that first year, you get a spike, and then it they don't all retain. And so it is a consistent plan. It's, a consistent investment that you continue to make. And I think a lot of people, you know, they wanna push a one time budget in, and then they'd see that drop and it feels disheartening rather than a slow and steady race, where you're growing that file, where you're building those audiences and the understanding of where you're going next. And for the organizations at Masterworks at, you know, we see that consistent growth like like Metro. It hasn't been an overnight thing. It's been eighteen years of every year making an you know, testing a new audience, trying a new channel, not getting disheartened when it doesn't work quite right away, trying something new, but making consistent increases to the investment as you grow your active file, as you find those new audiences. And I think that's the long term view that your team, Justine, brings is why you've been able to as you said, you started the 1980, you know, with some of these tactics, and they're still going. And that that belief of the tent is still moving forward. It's it's a long play. Yeah. I will say they didn't pay me to say this either, but having a partner like Masterworks alongside us, with their expertise, you know, I always believe that when you hire a partner, you you hire them for a reason. You know, they're adding to your team. They're helping you be better. So it's a true partnership, and that has made a huge difference, in in our success as well, truthfully. Yeah. Having them an extension of our team. Yeah. And we just actually opened up a poll for you for those of you that want to connect with the Masterworks team, because, yeah, I know that that's that's that's played a huge role, and there's a lot of organizations that can say that about, working with Masterworks. And so, we'll leave that up. Go ahead and click the poll tab up there. Answer that. It's kind of a easy yes or no. But we would love to to connect you if so. So that poll stay open for another minute. Just, Jaclyn, do you wanna just kinda walk people through the InsightsLab newsletter that they can sign up for as well? Yes. So a Masterworks post every week, different insights, learnings, and blogs that you can sign up for. We'll send them straight to your inbox, or follow us on LinkedIn. We post them there as well. And we are always happy to answer questions. If you have any questions from this that you wanna follow-up with, you can send me a message on LinkedIn or to, through my Masterworks account. I I love engaging on these things, so reach out and, let us know. Yeah. That's awesome. A a couple more things as well as we're wrapping up here. We do have, RNS coming up, which is the responsive nonprofit summit, hosted by Virtuous that we would love to invite you to. And so you can register for that. It is free, zero cost. We would love to have you attend June. It's two half days, and it's virtual. So, you don't have to travel, but you get a ton of value and are able to, yeah, hopefully really grow. And there's a ton of speakers, tons of topics. So I know Riley shared a link. Robert loved the, shout out there that it was great last year. Really glad to hear, and we're hoping believing it's gonna be great, this year. And then also, we wanna give you a chance as well if you'd like to connect with the Virtuous team here as well, for a demo or to connect with our team. So, go ahead. I just opened up another poll, and you can select yes or no there. And you can let us know if you're interested in having a conversation. We would love to connect with you. Again, today was about diving into the benchmark and understanding what, is going on, how does your organization stack up, and we're so thankful, for Jaclyn to walk through that. But then we also wanted to look at what can you do, how can you apply it, how are organizations growing. And Justine, so grateful for you, being on and sharing those insights today. And so we hope this has been helpful. Again, we'll email out the recording. We'll email out the slide deck. We'll email out, the benchmark report. You're gonna get all the things, and it will be sent to you, probably by end of today, if not early tomorrow, to make sure you have these insights ready to go. And so, again, let us know whether it's the Virtuous team, the Masterworks team, what we can do to help and serve you. Yes. Give some love to Justine and Jaclyn today. Thank you, Jane. Thank you for the love for facilitating. I feel like I have the easy job though if I'm honest with you. And so we're so grateful, for Jaclyn and Justine today. Thank you for those of you with us. We are grateful, and we will continue to bring content like this to you and hopefully walk alongside of you all, and and help you create the impact you're wanting to see. So thank you so much for being here, and we will talk to you later.