128 – Boost Donations in Tough Times with James Misner

Episode Transcription

David Pisarek: When the economy changes, donor behaviour does too. In this episode, James Misner breaks down how to adjust your messaging, retain donor trust, and lead your team with confidence through change. We’re going to dive in and transform how your non-profit approaches fundraising.

Welcome to the non-profit Digital Success podcast. I’m your host, David. In this episode, we’re going to be talking about donor behaviour shifts, federal funding cuts, and smart fundraising pivots with James Misner. James is the founder of the Kipos Group. With over 20 years of fundraising leadership, James has helped small and mid-size organizations raise hundreds of millions of dollars, sustainably growing their revenues so they can better focus on their mission.

James, thank you so much for hopping on the show with us.

James Misner: It’s great to be here. We’re big fans.

David Pisarek: Awesome. I always love raving fans for sure. To everybody that’s listening to this or watching this, we are on YouTube. We’re on all the social platforms. We’re on 12 or 13 or 14 different podcast platforms. Share with your friends, like, and subscribe. It’s going to help us grow our platform more.

James, welcome.

Tell us, I guess, a little bit about yourself and what Kipos Group does.

James Misner: Yeah, I’m James, lead of The Kipos Group. We are fundraising specialists for small and mid-size non-profits with the idea that so many non-profits have discovered unique ways to bring change and transformation to the world, but they don’t know how to get it funded. So we are all hands on deck, rolling up our sleeves and jumping in the trenches with you. Everything marketing, fundraising, and communications to help you get the revenue that your mission deserves. We’ve been doing it, all of us, for 20 plus years, and our team are specialists in their areas, and we genuinely love to help. We would all, even though we don’t do this, we say that we would do it even if we didn’t get paid to do it.

David Pisarek: So when we think about fundraising, a lot of people think donors, right? Get people on a monthly plan, they give a dollar, $10, $500 a month, whatever works, or the one-time donors. We know that Giving Tuesday and end-of-year giving are usually the biggest donation days of the year. Do you work with helping people rethink and reshape so that they are able to approach maybe corporate sponsors and work on that side?

James Misner: One of the interesting things is that there are so many misconceptions out there on what fundraising is. I hear you mention Giving Tuesday. It’s a great thing. I’m so glad they started it. But it represents an incredibly small slice of the overall fundraising pie.

Last year, Americans gave 550 billion to charity. $550 billion. Only 3 billion of that, plus or minus, was given on Giving Tuesday. What we try to do is help match our clients to the overall trends in fundraising. The number one most sustainable source of funding out there are individual major donors. Of the $550 billion given last year, almost 70% was given by an actual individual, usually of high net worth, to an organization, to a non-profit.

There are lots of things that monthly giving is great. Everybody should do it if you don’t do it. Giving Tuesday is great. It’s a get your message out there, get your brand out there. It’s wonderful. But we try to help people get the funding that actually matters materially to their bottom line. Right now in this economy, it’s the major donor game.

Corporates are not being generous right now. Foundations are tapped out because of the precipitous decline in federal funding where they maybe had a thousand applications last year. They have 10,000 applications this year. If you want to grow, you have to look at major donors right now.

David Pisarek: I love the idea about that, right? If you can go after major donors, where every organization will have a different amount of what they consider a major donor. But if you go after a major donor for, let’s say, $100,000 or more, it’s much easier.

You have to cultivate relationships. You have to find, you need to engage, you need to talk about the impact your organization has, and you need to bring yourself to the forefront.

But, if you’re going after one person, let’s say, for $100,000, it’s easier and less, I’m going to say less effort, than going after a thousand people for a thousand dollars. Or that math didn’t work. A thousand people for a hundred dollars, right?

James Misner: I mean, the math didn’t work, but we all understood what he was saying there. It is monumentally easier, okay, to do that. The number one thing that’s holding non-profit executives back from it is fear. When you ask somebody for $100 or $1,000, sometimes even $10,000, it’s not sitting down for lunch, it’s not multiple coffee meetings, it’s not site visits. It’s one-to-many across, usually digital and direct mail platforms.

Non-profit executives, by and large, are very fearful about using their digital platforms to cultivate the 20, 30, 50 people that they then have coffee with, they have lunch with two or three times a year. They bring to the office or take on a trip to see the site. Why? Because as humans, we’re all afraid of rejection. It’s easier to be rejected by an anonymous source online than it is by the person you’re having coffee with.

David Pisarek: You touched on this briefly. Clearly, there’s a volatile economy. We don’t need to get into politics about who did this or who did that and how. But there is an effect impact that is hitting across organizations, businesses, not just in the US, but globally. In terms of donor behaviours, are you seeing any changes that have happened? What are your thoughts in terms of how non-profits and charities could maybe shift and try to get ahead of it?

James Misner: The economy right now is a really interesting question. Putting the politics of it aside, because frankly, it’s not helpful for this question. I live outside of Washington, DC. It’s not helpful for this question, guys. Let me just tell you that.

There are some really interesting data points: one is that the stock market is at an all-time high, and it keeps hitting all-time highs over and over and over again. But we need to double-click on that and look at what’s causing that. The S&P 500, the broadest index that measures the economy, comprises a third of that entire index, known as the MAG7, or the Magnificent Seven stocks: Tesla, Apple, and Google. You all know what this is. The rest of the economy could have a down day of 5 to 7%, and the MAG7, because they disproportionately represent so much wealth, could be up a percentage point or two, and things look flat.

When you look at just the indexes, everything looks up and to the right, but they’re disproportionately affected by companies that have $4 trillion valuations, which is awesome. I’m not your financial planner, but they seem to be in for sure bets right now. There seems to be no end in sight.

When you look under the hood, though, at economic indicators, you see some really interesting things happen that haven’t happened since the pandemic in 2020 and in 2008. You see credit card defaults skyrocketing right now. You see car loan defaults skyrocketing right now. You see them in the bottom half of the economy. The top folks who are invested in the hundreds of thousands in NVIDIA, Apple, and Google they’re doing great. Their jobs are not insecure right now.

The people who have blue-collar and lower-level jobs, they are feeling the squeeze of inflation that has really never come back down to that benchmark level. Again, not a political statement, just a data statement spanning two presidential administrations. Has it come down, and wages just aren’t increasing right now, with all the uncertainty because corporations don’t know how to handle the tariffs and all of that.

Okay, so back to fundraising. Now that I’ve done my little pretend-economy spiel, what we’re seeing is that low-dollar-value and some mid-level donors are starting to drop out. They’re starting to self-select, and they’re telling us that this is actually very painful for them right now. They don’t want to do it. We’re seeing monthly donors cancel their monthly subscriptions at organizations across various sectors, and they’re sending apology emails. ‘I’m so sorry I have to do this, but I lost my job. My wife lost my job. My kids are in college, and I can’t afford it anymore.’

So you see two things from this. You see, one, that they’re cancelling, but number two, the pain that comes from it. This isn’t a choice they want to make. It’s a choice that economically they have to make.

And they tell us, ‘Hey, we’ve already cut this. We’ve already cancelled Hulu, or we cancelled Disney Plus, or whatever, but now we have to do this. We cared so much, we held on to the end.’ That’s one side of the economy. The other side consists of the major givers who are invested in these Mag7 stocks in the market. The disproportion of 90% of their wealth is not in cash assets. They’re doing fantastic. You see a really interesting trend that airlines are selling more premium tickets than they ever have before, but they’re not filling up the economy section of the airplane like they did in the past few years.

These daughters are really interested in making big gifts right now because they have the money and they want the tax breaks, while there are some really interesting tax incentives for them for the remaining part of 2025 that disappear come January.

David Pisarek: It’s a very interesting conundrum. Part of me, as you were talking about that, I was thinking if a huge number of people’s donors disappeared and they’re relying on big donors, that gives big donors potentially some very serious sway over what organizations do or they don’t do. If you’re relying as an organization on just a handful of major donors, it could be troublesome, no?

James Misner: I think that there’s a positive and a negative to it. The positive is that those donors are very connected. They care deeply about the organization. Maybe they will reach deeper into their pockets to help right now. Maybe they’ll invite their friends. Maybe they’ll host a party and invite six other high-net-worth individuals.

If you can channel them to the right things. It’s a great story to tell. I’m a big believer in staying close to small and mid-level donors who might have dropped off, as they will come back if you treat them well during this economic situation.

The other side of that coin is, I want this program to be run this way. ‘Hey, buddy, you’re a financial executive. What do you know about stopping homelessness?’ They don’t sometimes, okay? Now, some people say never take donor advice. I’m not that guy. Sometimes donors have brilliant ideas, but it’s really tricky when a donor has ideas that are just really not great ideas for your organization, and guiding them through that like, ‘Hey, we’re not going to do it, but we still want your 100 grand,’ is a really delicate leadership task that the executive directors have to get good at.

David Pisarek: That’s such an interesting idea. Let us look into that.

James Misner: ‘It’s so interesting. Have you thought about this? What would the implications be for this?’ I tell people exactly what you did there. Ask questions, don’t make declarations.

David Pisarek: Exactly.

James Misner: So it’s in the issue, Donors. These are people that are used to getting what they want in the world, and telling them no could be dangerous for you.

David Pisarek: Yeah, for sure. People are trimming budgets. I think they’ve been doing that really for the last probably 10 years, 8-10 years, but definitely more so in 2025 than before. Organizations are not immune to this.

As funding dries up or is cut or is put on pause, as donors dry up a little bit or they back out from stuff, obviously, organizations need to start thinking about shifts and where they could maybe leverage different platforms or AI or maybe trim down the organization to focus more on their core mission and vision.

What are your thoughts about if an organization is struggling, where should they cut, what should they protect, or what should they double down on doing?

James Misner:

I think one of the myths right now about the economy is that saving, cutting, is the fastest way to get growing again. I don’t think that’s actually accurate.

If you can, if you have a cash reserve, I think that it is worth, at the edges, trimming the sales, so to speak, and figuring out what’s not efficient in your organization, where things can be optimized. I don’t think that’s going to help. What I think that does is it actually puts more constraints on the organization. At the end of this period of economic turbulence, you’re limping out of there.

What I advise organizations to do is, yes, trim the sales, get rid of some of the platforms that you’re not really using, demise things. So at the end of this rumble, you can come firing out of canon back to life again. And I think just broad-based cuts are not the answer to that.

And unfortunately, I saw so much of it happening in February, March, and April when the government funding dropped precipitously, and the organizations now are like, ‘Oh, my gosh, we cut too deep into that, and it’s hard to get that talent back. They’ve moved on.’

Content, I believe, is king in fundraising, okay? Your donors need to know that when they write a check, something changes in the world. And the way that you communicate that is through stories. So many people cut comms when they get nervous about the economy because it’s a nice thing to have, not an imperative to have. And by comms, I mean everything. I mean your social media. I mean, your blogs, your podcast, your website. Those are the things that many executives think, ‘Okay, those are just at the edges of the desk. It’s okay if they get sloppy for a while.’ That’s your interface with the world.

If you’re going to double down on anything right now, you need to double down on communication with your folks in a world where, honestly, none of us know what’s happening from day to day in the world right now. Again, not a political statement, just a statement. We just don’t know.

The way to build trust is to stay in constant connection with people. Anything your organization does that stays in connection with people, if it’s working well, do not cut it. Dump more money into it, make it better, and figure out if you need to save some money, some other ways that you can do it.

David Pisarek: When we think about companies and organizations, there’s competition out there. For everybody listening, there is another non-profit out there that is doing something very similar, if not the exact same thing, as you. They might not be in the same city, so your catchment might be a little bit different. But there are other similar organizations. There are very few and far between that are extremely unique, and nobody’s doing anything like that. If other organizations are doing the opposite, and they are cutting, and they are pulling back, and they’re not advertising. They’re not putting time, money, effort into marketing, communications, getting in touch with donors, and cultivating relationships. That is your time.

That is a prime opportunity for you to step in, take over where they are slacking. Non-profits, we shouldn’t think of other non-profits as competition. At the end of the day, though, there’s only so many dollars to go around. You’re competing for those dollars.

People are not giving as much. They’re not as generous. They’re worried about paying their own bills and stuff like we were talking about. If an organization is backing off and cutting staff or cutting time or getting rid of software that automates blah, blah, blah, whatever, if you step in and fill that gap, you are going to come out further ahead at the end of the day when things return back or turn into whatever the new normal is going to be.

James Misner: 100% agree.

Perception is reality, and donors, specifically high-net-worth donors, want to bet on a winning course.

And if their perception is, ‘Oh, my gosh, the homeless shelter down the street or the food pantry across town, they’re letting people go.’ Their first thought isn’t, ‘Oh, the economy got bad or rough.’ Their first thought is, ‘Oh, they don’t know how to manage their P&L.’ That’s what a major donor thinks. That’s their perception. So perception is reality.

So what do you do? Make sure you’re out there with people. because then you will look like the organization that saw it coming, that knew how to manage their resources, that invested in what mattered. They will say, ‘Oh, my goodness, this organization will be able to leverage my dollars much better than the ones who could have managed their bank accounts.’

David Pisarek: Absolutely. Let’s take that one step further. Let’s say an organization lost a few major donors, a big corporate sponsor, or something like that. How could they maybe turn that funding loss into a compelling story that could attract new donors, private donors, new corporate donors, or whatnot, without sounding desperate? I think a lot of people are like, ‘Oh, we lost all this. How are we possibly going to communicate or make a case for support?’

James Misner: There’s only so many chances that an organization gets to make that story, to tell that story. If you’ve told it more than once every 3-5 years, that’s probably too many times. Okay? Once every three to five years is enough. Now, in January and February, many, particularly those who were affected by the dismantlement of USAID in the international relief and development space, told that story, and they ended up okay because it was on the news. People realized it was through no fault of their own. Again, not political. It happened.

So let’s just talk about it. People responded really well. If those same organizations go out Q4, 2025, and say, ‘Oh, my goodness, they don’t have the funding,’ the donors are going to say, ‘Well, we gave you back in January, February, March. What have you done with it, citizen?’ That story of ‘we’ve lost funding because of how many, how broad funding cuts were this year,’ it’s falling on deaf ears now. If an organization didn’t get big funding cuts in the first half of the year, and they’re getting them in the second half of the year, the news story has shifted. We’re going to have been there, done that situation.

In the country right now, they need to tell the story of opportunity. They need to tell the story not of ‘Hey, we helped three homeless people last year.’ They need to tell the story of ‘We’ve identified 1,200 new homeless people this year, and we need you to help house them.’ So it needs to be a story of opportunity, not a story of deficit.

And the enemy can’t be that whatever corporate partner no longer gives or that the US government doesn’t give them. That can’t be the enemy. The enemy has to be that there’s not enough food for five-year-olds. The enemy has to be that homelessness and mental health issues are rising. The enemy has to be something that you can’t control, that doesn’t look bad on you, but that the donor is like, ‘Yeah, I need to do something about that. That’s a really bad thing out there, and I’m going to throw some dollars to fix that.’

David Pisarek: Exactly.

Organizations’ missions shouldn’t be about themselves. It should be about the challenge that they want to solve.

And that’s exactly what you were I was talking about, James, where the problem isn’t you save three homeless people. The problem is there’s 1,200 that need, right? I think we need to think about reframing things from that perspective because that tells a much bigger story that you are trying to help solve.

James Misner: I look at hundreds of non-profit appeals every year. Digital, direct mail. 9 times out of 10, they are patting themselves on the back. ‘We did this, we did this, we did this.’ And you know what?

The ones that change that pronoun from ‘we did this’ to ‘you did this.’ ‘Hey, donor, you did this, you did this. Now, let’s do this next part together.’ The ones that do that, they are always doing better financially from a revenue point of view, always, because they make the story about the giver that’s fighting this great big enemy, the splayed out there. And the non-profit is simply the broker, the mechanism, the guide to help them accomplish what they really want to do accomplish in the world anyway.

David Pisarek: Yeah. And who doesn’t want to help a compelling story?

James Misner: Everyone does.

David Pisarek: That’s it. If everybody just stops listening to this episode right now, go and change your messaging from ‘we’ and ‘I’ and ‘us’ and ‘the team’ to forward talking about the problem that you want to solve. And also, the people are attracted to the word ‘you.’ So, use that in your messaging as well.

I worked in non-profits for about 16 years. Running the agency for the last nine and a half years. Burnout is real. I think everybody at some point in their career, maybe even as a student, has felt burnout in some way, shape, or form. But what are your thoughts on how to balance big fundraising goals as well as being mindful of staff well-being and retention?

James Misner: I think this is one of those top-down, bottom-up situations, okay? I think if you work in the non-profit space, you know the statistics that marketing and fundraising professionals spend an average of 18 months at an organization. I think it actually ticked down to 16 months this year, which…

David Pisarek: Probably because of return to work stuff and remote work, and that is playing a huge role in that, too.

James Misner: …It really is. I think there’s some interesting things there.

One is, non-profits need to do a better job being clear about the expectations of individual roles. Particularly small and mid-sized non-profits have these Jack-of-all-trades fundraising positions where you are sending out the emails, you are updating Instagram and Facebook, and you’re at the edge of your desk trying to schedule some major donor meetings. It’s the rest to be for failure. Nobody can… Those are different skill sets, okay? Finding somebody who can do all of it is a slim-to-none chance. Non-profits need to be very clear. ‘Here’s the goal. Here is how we measure you. Here are the intervals at which we measure your performance. And here are the systems that we’ve set up to help you be successful here. And, oh, here’s a team that’s going to get your back. If your kid gets sick one day and you got to stay at home from work, don’t worry, we’ve got it covered.’ Community is really important.

Also, the consequences are really important. What happens when you don’t meet your numbers? What happens when the lead indicators are bad? One month? Okay. Two months? Okay. When I talk to people who are burned out. Clarity around expectation comes in. Bad team dynamics come in. But the number one thing is, ‘Why am I going to go out and leave it all in the field when so-and-so on the team can do a half-hearted job, and there’s no consequence for it? I can’t bear the entire weight of this big goal by myself if they’re going to keep a B player.’ People think that A-level players pull up B-level and C-level players. They don’t. B and C-level players pull down A-level players every single time.

That’s on the organization side, on the individual side, I’m going to get in trouble here. Okay? Please don’t send hate mail to my house. We have a resiliency problem as a society and as a culture. Okay? We really do. You signed up to do a job. Do the job. Show up. Do the work. It’s hard. You are trying literally to change the world. Non-profits solve problems that governments haven’t been able to figure out and big business hasn’t been able to monetize. You didn’t sign up for something easy, folks. There are some mismanaged organizations out there, but sometimes we have to be big kids and do hard things together. Hiring managers should be able to tease that out in an interview process. Do not hire somebody who doesn’t have resilience.

Jim Collins has this great quote in his book Good to Great: ‘When you don’t know what’s coming around the corner, the thing that you need is a team of people who can adjust and be resilient on your bus.’ I butchered that quote, but the idea is we don’t know what’s coming as a society. We don’t know exactly what’s happening in the economy. We don’t know what’s happening in the government on a day-to-day basis. Your team needs to have the resiliency and the agility to adjust to it.

David Pisarek: I have a couple of thoughts around that.

I agree. I do quarterly strat planning as the business owner. I do it with my team as well. We all have clarity in terms of what we’re going to be working on so that we follow the EOS methodology. We’ve got Rocks. Everybody in the team has one. Like I tell everybody, you might not be doing the main focus of the business, the stuff that I’m focusing on, but all the work that you’re doing does filter in and work towards the ultimate goal. The ultimate goal is this: ‘-‘ and there are going to be parts.

After that, I meet one-on-one with everybody in my team, and I get a lot of clarity from them around what are they working on, what do they love working on? What do they like working on? What do they hate doing, and what do they never want to do again. We try our best to get the stuff that they hate and never want to do off their plate. Either a growing team, outsourcing it, forgetting about doing it at all, whatever that happens to be. But I always tell everybody there’s always going to be something that is part of the job, hopefully not, but there’s usually something that’s part of the job that you don’t like doing.

And honestly, you just got to stick it out and work through it and not every day is rainbows and butterflies. There are some days where you feel like you’re slogging through. I don’t want that for my team, but it’s the reality. And we need people to understand that: ‘Okay, I hate doing this reporting thing, but it’s five minutes a week or three hours a month or whatever. Fine. Suck it up. Let’s just get through it.’

James Misner: When I was 16 years old, I worked for a public affairs organization in Trenton, New Jersey. The whole organization was lobbying, basically, at the state level. And one of the principals, as I was leaving to go to the next year of high school or college, I forget, I worked there for a few years, said, ‘James, let me give you some advice. You are never going to get too high up in an organization to stuff and lick envelopes.‘ Now, I mean, non-profit leaders, please hire a direct mail shop. Don’t actually do that. But none of us is above stuffing and licking envelopes. I think it was some of the best advice I ever got.

David Pisarek: Hands down, everybody’s part of the same team.

In the organization, you need to have your guiding principles. If people are not living up to those guiding principles, they need to not be part of the team. The guiding principles, whatever they are for your organization, it needs to be the metric across everybody. We all want A players. We all want people that care to solve this problem. Let’s bring their assets, their experience, their skills to help with that.

James Misner: Absolutely.

David Pisarek: Okay, so we talked a little bit about communication and strategy and stuff, but let’s talk a little bit specifically around digital or communication strategies that help build trust during financial uncertainty. People have websites, they have social channels, and they do email marketing. A lot of organizations don’t have donor journeys, like email sequence journeys and stuff. What does working on those pieces look like? What are your thoughts?

James Misner: I think you mentioned what at the very end, ‘the donor journeys.’ We took on a client in September of last year, so it’s been 13 months. They were able to capture a very large number of emails on their website through their social, through their Google Ad Grant, through all the things. They also got a lot of first-time donors. They didn’t do anything with them afterwards.

This is the simplest hack out there that you do for your clients; we do the same for our clients. Everybody should do this. When you get a new email address, you need to put them on a journey, a 7-10 part email series that invites them into the story to give a first-time gift. Then, once you get that first-time gift, and this needs to be completely automated, they need to go on a separate journey, another 7-10 email sequence with some analog in there, with some text messages, handwritten notes, a phone call, maybe depending on the level, to get them to either give a second gift or to become a monthly donor. This organization grew 24% by just doing that. They did a lot of things well, but there were no donor journeys.

And so you sign up for something, you give your email address away, and nothing happens. Now, some really great stuff happens for the givers and for the organization. So if you don’t have a basic welcome series, people just stop right now and do this? Do the whole pronoun thing, we, we, we to you, you, you, and then go to the welcome series, big stuff of that.

Second thing, non-profits do not communicate enough. The number, let’s call it four or five questions that I’m asking, is: I hate tracking questions that people ask me because I’m super curious about what keeps them from doing what I know they can do. Is it that we’re already sending out too many communication pieces? The answer is no. I have never met a non-profit who is always sending out too much communication. They are always sending out too little communication. They don’t send out too much communication because they’re so afraid of unsubscribes, and they’re spamming people.

When you look at unsubscribes and disengagement, it comes from two ends of a spectrum. You are spamming, literally, every day, two or three times a day. Think of Bed, Bath, and Beyond, Bath and Body Works, those types of organizations where they get your email address, and every 30 seconds, there’s a 15% off sale. Yes, you unsubscribe from that. The other people I unsubscribed from are the ones who I forget who they are, because they haven’t communicated with me enough.

I tell this story a lot. I have kids, they’re elementary school-aged, and when they have a half day at school, which I think is the worst thing ever created, either all in or all out, people. When they have a half-day at school, the school district they’re part of sends 10 different communication pieces to parents to remind us that it’s a half-day. Because think about it. If we don’t get the kids to where we’re not home when the bus drops them off, it’s a huge burden for the school district. My job is to keep them alive. The school district has figured out that they need 10 methods of communication, 10 touchpoints. An email a week in advance, an email three days in advance, a voice or a ringless voicemail, text messages, four text messages, two the day of, three the day before, two the day of. ‘Hey, your kid just got this dismiss from class. Be home in 10 minutes.’ They’ve gotten that sophisticated. And you know what? Last year, I forgot it one day.

David Pisarek: No.

James Misner: And I worked from home. Okay, I forgot it, and I work from home. Okay? It just slipped my mind. If the schools in our country have to communicate to be home for our kids, how much more do we have to communicate to a donor audience who thinks way less about us than we think about them?

David Pisarek: Very fair.

I was on a call with a prospect earlier today, about four hours ago. We did a website audit for them, and they wanted to follow up and talk a bit more about it. We jumped into conversation, and we were talking about how they don’t have an email list. They don’t have an email list. They’ve been around for, I think, about 25 years. They serve a very specific thing. They’re a sub, I guess they’re a local for a bigger organization. They get all kinds of funding and whatever. They run programs for youth and basically anyone, I think they said from 8 through to retirement. They don’t have an email list. I was like, ‘Are you kidding? You need an email list.‘

For the last 20 years, people have been saying that email is going to die. Everybody’s going to web and everybody’s going to social, and then everybody’s going to VR and everybody’s going to AI. People still have email. You have an email, I have an email. Email still works. People have cell phone. Whatever it is that’s going to connect you with your audience to let them know what’s going on, what is of interest to them, this is where you need a CRM.

You need to be tagging people. They need to be put in the right buckets, which is going to sound a little harsh, but they need to be categorized for the specific persona, so you can connect with them in a meaningful way that works for them. And that’s where you’re going to start to see growth.

What do they care about? You need to understand the ICP, there are these terms. You need to understand the ICP, the ideal customer profile. You need to build and or avatars, whatever you want to call it. You need to understand their demographic, geographic, and psychographics. And then, only then, in my opinion, correct me if I’m wrong, but only at that point, are you going to be able to connect with them in an emotional way to get them to care about your organization.

James Misner: I had nothing to add to that. It’s so how it works. Maybe the only thing I would tweak is that they need to see you in multiple places because we live in different realities. They need to see you on email because that is one part of their life. They need to see you on social because that’s another part of their life. I’m a big fan in the omnichannel or D, all of the above. People live a varied life. You need to show up in varied ways to them, but around the things that they care about most.

David Pisarek: Absolutely. We could probably chat for another three or four hours. Maybe we’ll have another episode down the road where we dive in on maybe something specific. If you have any ideas, questions, things that you want us to dive in deeper, get in touch with us. Leave a comment on the show somewhere. Shoot me an email, shoot James an email. We’ll get together. We’ll have more conversations.

James, before we hit record on this, we were talking about you’ve got a promo. I think you were saying it was five reasons why your revenue doesn’t match your impact. What’s that all about?

James Misner: If there is one question that I get asked all the time, it goes like this: ‘I know our program work is really good. It’s changing lives. It works. I can’t convince people that it works. No one seems to see it. We’re the best-kept secret out there.’ That’s like one of those non-profit clichés, right? We’re the best-kept secret out there.

Every non-profit says that, even the big ones. So we decided to do an audit of all the non-profits that we work with, about 30 to 40 a year, to figure out why do we get asked that question every single time. And we came up with five different reasons that people’s revenue doesn’t match their impact. A lot of the things we talked about today, how they tell their story, how they get it out there, but even deeper into fundraising strategy. So if you want that, it’s free. Just go to our website, thekiposgroup.com, K-I-P-O-S, and you’ll be able to download it there. I’ll send you a link so we can throw it in the show notes if that’s helpful for folks.

David Pisarek: Absolutely.

James, amazing insight. Love the conversation that we had around navigating economic uncertainty, protecting revenue, and building resilience. I think a lot of people are going to get some really great insight and some gold nuggets from the conversation today.

And I want you… So this is a question. I said right before the show, I’m going to ask you a question at the end. So here we go. If you were to issue a challenge to everybody listening to the show, that’s something you want them to do in the next 24 hours. What’s that challenge?

James Misner: You told me this was going to be hard, but I actually think it’s easy. It’s three steps to it. So I know I’m probably cheating with that.

David Pisarek: That’s okay.

James Misner: Number one, I want you, as an executive director or a revenue leader of your organization, to make a list of the highest-potential givers to your organization. I want you to email them and invite them to lunch sometime in the next two weeks. So make the list: number one. Invite them to lunch, number two, number three, when they sit down for lunch, say, ‘Hey, I just wanted to tell you this story about the impact you’re making.’ Tell them the story. Don’t tell them how you did it. They don’t care how you did it. Tell them the story of a life transformed. And then say, at the end of lunch, ‘Hey, over the next two months, as we get ready to wrap up 2025, can we invite you into a deeper conversation about how you’re giving to accelerate this change?‘ Do that and watch what happens between today and December 31st.

David Pisarek: Love that. You already mentioned thekiposgroup.com. We’ll have your website as well as your LinkedIn. It’s got a sound word. We’re going to have it linked on the show notes for everybody.

James, thank you so much for joining in. It’s been awesome having you here on the Non-profit Digital Success podcast. Everybody listening, if you want any of the links, the insight, the conversation that James and I had, just head over to our podcast show notes page. You can get there by going to nonprofitdigitalsuccess.com. Click on this episode for all the details. 

And until next time, keep on being successful!