Salesforce, Classy, Zeck and Edward Norton Discuss Nonprofits: Video automatically transcribed by Sonix

Salesforce, Classy, Zeck and Edward Norton Discuss Nonprofits: this mp4 video file was automatically transcribed by Sonix with the best speech-to-text algorithms. This transcript may contain errors.

Maia Rose:
Okay. Well, I still see some people hopping on, but I would love to get started because we have a jam packed agenda like I mentioned. So. Good morning. Good afternoon. Wherever you are joining from, welcome to our very special Tech Talk: How Can a Little Technology Make Everyone Like You Better? My name is Maia Rose and I'm on the marketing team here at Classy and we are excited to have you all tuning in today. Um, before we get started, I wanted to touch on a few housekeeping reminders first. We encourage you all to ask questions throughout this talk, but if you have a specific question, we would love it if you use the Q&A window so we can keep track there. Feel free to use the chat, however, for any comments questions. We'd love to see the chatter in there, so go ahead. But any questions? Please use the Q&A. And then secondly, we will be sending out the recording of this within 24 hours, along with some relevant resources. So please keep an eye out for that in your email. Now, before we dive in, I'd like to introduce our moderator, Edward Norton. You likely know Edward from his day job as an actor and director, most recently Glass Onion, plus a few little movies like Primal Fear, American History X, Birdman, Rounders, Fight Club, like five Wes Anderson movies, and perhaps my favorite, his cameo on Modern Family as the Spandau Ballet bass player. But Edward has also worked deeply in the worlds of philanthropy, tech businesses and environmental defense. And Edward sits on the board of multiple nonprofits, including the Enterprise Community Partners, Signature Theatre, the Maasai Wilderness Conservation Trust and Harlem Grown. He's also the co-founder of Crowdrise, the pioneering charitable fundraising platform, which is now part of GoFundMe. The co-founder and chairman of a leading media data and analytics firm, as well as the co-founder and chief strategy officer of Zeck. Edward, did I miss anything?

Edward Norton:
No. I got slightly tired listening to it, so I think I'm coming away from that intro feeling I need to pare back. Um. Um. Thank you. And this is. This is a great forum. Um, a lot of people here that we've collaborated with for years and people who have been at the forefront of thinking about what are great ways to assist mission driven organizations, which is a big part of my life and passion. I think that before we even dive into the thematics and what an idea sharing here. I want to introduce the three panelists that I'm really happy to get to draw out on their expertises and perspectives. Um, I'll start with Soraya Alexander is the Chief Operating Officer of GoFundMe and one of the senior team of of Classy. Um, Lori Freeman is with Salesforce for Nonprofits. Vice President, Sales for Nonprofits. And Robert Wolfe is my former co-founder of Crowdrise and now co-founder of Zeck - the board governance software company. Uh, just each of you. Could you just give us a little background? Soraya, how long have you been what's been your pathway with Classy And now GoFundMe. How long have you been in the space of working at tools to assist nonprofits.

Soraya Alexander:
Yeah! Well, thanks for thanks for everybody for being here and for co-hosting with us today. So yeah, I've been with Classy for five years. I get to serve as President now in about a year. A little over a year ago, we merged with GoFundMe. For those of you who don't know, that's why I have kind of two roles at two different companies. And the vision is really how do we equip people to help each other more? So we build tech for nonprofits. We also build tech for individuals to fundraise. And we saw this really big opportunity to bring the two together and unlock a lot more generosity in the world. But I actually started my career serving nonprofits from a strategy and technology and digital lens, went over to do e-commerce and loyalty on the for profit side, and now getting to combine the best of those two worlds for the last five years has been kind of a dream. And I know that you've been on that journey for a long time, so really excited to share some of the learnings from both sides of the aisle today.

Edward Norton:
Great. And Lori, you know, Salesforce is obviously like a behemoth in the in the software tools world, Salesforce for Nonprofits. I remember when Mark framed out the agenda to have Salesforce, um, heavily committed to serving the mission driven world, not just the corporate world. And now Salesforce for Nonprofits itself, just an enormous player in the business tool space, specifically for nonprofits. How how long have you been in in this side of things?

Lori Freeman:
Thanks for the question and thanks for the to the Classy and Zeck team for the opportunity to participate today. Great partners and excited to talk to our shared customers and those folks that are really trying to make decisions right now about what they should be using in this unique moment in time. I've been at Salesforce for almost ten years, but I've been working in nonprofit technology for a little over two decades, which still doesn't seem right when I say it out loud. I actually started out directly in the nonprofit sector and had the opportunity in the early days to use technology and the role that I was in and just felt like we always were just a few steps behind. And I was working for one of the largest organizations out there. So it really bore a passion in me for maybe if I go work on the technology side, I can help enable and create more change and have been really fortunate at Salesforce to work with all sorts of shapes and sizes of organizations all over the world. And surrounded by you mentioned Mark... there's a ton of folks at Salesforce who are really mission driven, who really just want to help nonprofits. And our technology platform has been a great platform to do that from.

Edward Norton:
Yeah. And Lori, if I'm not mistaken, Salesforce for nonprofits has on the order of 40 or 50,000 nonprofit customers at this point. Is that right?

Lori Freeman:
We do we're getting close to 60,000, whichever. We're getting ready to have Dreamforce about a month from now. And every time I'm in the audience and see those slides go up, I think about when it was 3000, when it was 5000. And yeah, there used to be when I started. It's just crazy. When I started at Salesforce, there were 50 of us working on nonprofit and education back at the foundation, and now there's well over a thousand folks who are just dedicated to working with nonprofits and education institutions. So it's it's grown quite a bit and hopefully our ability to help with that reach.

Edward Norton:
Great. Well, and I think that's a good segue into a few kind of framing perspectives I'd like to offer for this conversation. You know what's incredible is Salesforce, nobody 40 heading toward 60,000, you're saying. And yet that itself is barely scratching the surface of the mission driven constituency in the United States. In the United States alone, over 2 million registered 501C3 nonprofit organizations today. Um, you know, a global leader still the United States in terms of of the formalization of nonprofit mission driven organizations but obviously a model that's proliferating all over the world that that sector you know, the the mission driven nonprofit sector I think increasingly acknowledged in our world as, you know, vital to to that which we would call progress or advancement that you know, in many cases some of the best social entrepreneurs, the best business entrepreneurs, the best technological entrepreneurs, ecological entrepreneurs, um, so social scientists applying their talents not through, you know, the lens of, of the goal of achieving financial maximization for shareholders or founders or anybody, but actually to achieve missions with a social purpose, missions that benefit us all. And, and so I think, you know, we we should acknowledge first and foremost that this is not, you know, this is a big part of of our society and our life now. People and think a lot of younger people, more and more young people recognizing that there's a there's a deep fulfillment in working within, you know, applying their talents within a framework where where mission and social purpose as opposed to pure economic returns is the is the key.

Edward Norton:
Not that companies in many cases haven't committed themselves to a true purpose through their work. But I do think that, um, I think all of us can relate to the fact that whether in the orgs themselves on boards of orgs or, or in the tools, you know, in, in working the business tools, there's a, there's a real satisfaction, there's a depth of satisfaction in working to support organizations that themselves are, you know, are defined by mission and purpose. And, and everyone who's signed into this call is in that constituency. And I think, you know, I really applaud. I think it's great to to for everybody to acknowledge the strength and the ethos within this community. I think that, you know, I've served on the boards of non-profit organizations since I was in my late teens, literally. And my family, my grandpa, my grandfather was James Rouse, one of the really great social entrepreneurs who founded the low income housing tax credit and built enterprise community partners working in affordable housing finance. I've worked with arts groups. My father's in conservation career, conservationist. I spent my life listening to people trying to raise money for mission driven work and and frankly, struggling to evolve the mechanisms and the tools by which they they could communicate better about that work, support that work, build narrative, build fundraising strategies all all of it.

Edward Norton:
And and you know, keep in touch with donors that to say it was the family business is an understatement for me it really was. Sometimes people have asked me, why did you get so involved in a lot of these things? A lot of it has to do with my own frustrations witnessed over many years at seeing the vicissitudes that nonprofit organization management teams go through. And we all know we can all relate to what Dan Pallotta, if you I highly recommend you check out his new documentary called Uncharitable, which I have a small voice in. But he he was one of the first people I heard really frame up this issue of why do nonprofit mission driven organizations get treated differently from corporate in terms of, you know, a donor matrix that says, oh, you know, you've got to crush down compensation, you've got to crush down admin and overhead. We don't want to see expenditure costs go toward tools. We want it all to go toward the mission. And Dan's made the great point of saying, hey, you know, like, how do you expect mission driven organizations to do their work if they can't incentivize talent, if they can't use the best business tools, stop hammering organizations about their admin and overhead, unleash them to do just what corporate the best corporations would do in those regards. And I think that's that's a good segue over into the fact that we all experience look, everybody wants to focus on the mission.

Edward Norton:
Obviously, organizations don't exist. They want everybody involved in them wants to be involved in the mission. We want efficiency. But the idea that tools, you know, and in some sense for years, for decades, I think the donor matrix made an enemy of the administrative and managerial component of mission driven organizations. And only in the last decade, I would say in the time really that, frankly, everybody here has been working on this Classy / GoFundMe, Crowdrise, Salesforce for Nonprofits. I think there's finally been in a new Gen X, Gen Z, Millennial generational shift, a recognition that it is completely insane not to deploy the very best of what tech enabled tools offer to mission driven organizations across all dimensions from management, you know, CRM type bread and butter, you know, plumbing to software management tools, to crowdfunding, to communication platforms. The best young organizations, the best organizations in the world are the ones deploying these kinds of tools to to great effect. And and so it's long overdue I think to start talking about having regular mindshare within the mission driven community about what the new the speed of evolution of these tools is lightning fast it moves in in three year, five year things you see new stuff coming on. And when we proposed this forum, what I really said was we this we ought to have regular, you know, forums in which this community shares best practices and invite different people in and we make sure people are hearing about different tools.

Edward Norton:
You guys have kind of always done this with Dreamforce, but I think there's a there's a lot of angles of approach. So that was kind of the, the framing I wanted to put on it. And and I think, Robert, turning a question to you first, um. You know, at Crowdrise, we essentially didn't like what we saw. In terms of Crowdrise and GoFundMe - around the same time pursued the idea of social fundraising - Crowdrise focused on on social fundraising for nonprofit organizations specifically, whereas GoFundMe was doing peer to peer. I'm helping my friend Dave, whose house burned down, and we went through those growing pains of watching organizations struggle in a way to recognize the amount of leverage that was available to them through some of these new next gen tools. Do you, Robert, do you think you sense now, working with Zeck and everything, do you sense a shift? Do you sense an overall shift, a fractionalization in terms of the way that nonprofit organizations are embracing tech enabled tools? Or do you think that that in some ways there's... not a skepticism... but is there still kind of an inherent friction with regard to to to moving beyond old modalities and into, you know, aggressive exploration of of how these tools can work? And if there is friction, what do you think is the source of it?

Robert Wolfe:
I think that we're certainly seeing organizations try to embrace technology. But to your point, the only reason they're not doing it is because they're perhaps handcuffed by their primary stakeholders... in the exact way that Dan Pallotta proposed was a major issue in the giving space. But certainly at Zeck, where it's our business to transform the miserable board meeting, we're seeing organizations understand that if they're putting a 100 page PDF in front of their board the day before the board meeting and expect that group to be able to help them, it's not going to work. They need a more efficient system: their key stakeholders and their advisors who are going to help them move forward, they need better tools and a better system to be able to to to make that happen. And that's that's what we're trying to do at Zeck. I know that's what Classy GoFundMe and Salesforce are also trying to do, but I think it's up to us to find a better way to get in front of those organizations, just like we are today, so they know those tools are available and they have to be hell bent on making sure their stakeholders allow them to take the risk and not continue to use the same tools they were using 20 years ago, because that just won't work. And to me, it's not a matter of if this is going to happen, it's just a matter of when. So the notion that whether it's your board or your key donors can help you make that happen now, instead of in five years, the teams, the executive directors have to be relentless about pressing that.

Edward Norton:
Yeah. And I think it has to be said that, you know, this poisonous kind of... this poisonous metric that donors and especially major institutional foundations I think have tended to apply to mission driven orgs, which is show us almost like your gross to net. We want to see admin and overhead constitute less than 20% of total budget, etcetera. And so by definition you get into this negative feedback loop where you're not even allowed to hire the internal talent. Let's loosely call it IT or tech strategy or whatever, because that's viewed as internal team cost structure that they don't want to see, even though there are massive benefits to having that kind of competency. And yet at the same time, it's true that if every mission driven organization, whether working on cancer or housing or, you know, nutrition or whatever it is, at the same time, everybody can't be software experts. They can't be... they can't build their own platforms. They can't build these things. And so the idea of outsourcing strategy, the idea of outsourcing the development of key tools makes total sense, as it does in the corporate world. But it's somewhere in there is I think there's a blend between the recognition that, yes, it shouldn't be our core competency to come up with crowdfunding strategies and certainly not the tools, but we need to be allowed to bring in the internal talent that knows how to monitor and use and deploy those tools and stay up with what's best in class, the newest, best tools.

Robert Wolfe:
So I also think, just one additional note, I think there's this mindset out there that these kind of tools create bureaucracy and will make organizations actually less efficient. And I think the opposite is true, that if you don't have these systems in place, then your team can't get aligned, you can't get on the same page and have common goals, collaboration, a shared vision. You need these systems so that you're not solely going from crisis to crisis, which we found that we were doing prior to embracing Salesforce and and all the tools that we're talking about today.

Edward Norton:
Yeah. And I think it has to be said, too, in any organization you get inertia, right? Somehow everybody knows that we shouldn't be using PowerPoint slides to organize board meetings anymore. But it is what's familiar and there is a certain lift that's taken to a to adopt new tools. Um, Lori, let me shift that question to you. Sort of a two part question. One is obviously Salesforce has probably been in the game longer than any of us in terms of dealing with both corporate customers and mission driven nonprofit customers. Look, for the nonprofits especially, you know, software tools are a cost structure, right? And they get friction around cost structure. How has how has Salesforce been able to articulate in a persuasive way assembled data around what do you guys what are the perspectives you guys have in terms of what helps defrictionalize that so that so that the delivered value, let's call it the ROI or the dividend of the types of tools that Salesforce for Nonprofits just clearly deliver, you know, rationalized their cost. And it's almost terrible we have to have that conversation. But in mission driven organizations, you always get held to it. So how do you guys help concretize or prove the the clear the value of the investment?

Lori Freeman:
Yeah, it starts with value. Before I talk about the technology, you're touching on so many topics and I have the benefit of watching the chat and seeing lots of "preach" and "fire" and folks getting all fired up. The I'd be remiss if I didn't say how great I think the Salesforce technology is, but the reach that we've been able to have has actually been born out of the passion of individuals that are directly working in nonprofits that way back when saw in Salesforce a platform to connect their entire organization. So I think it starts there. A lot of other technology solutions over time. If we go back to the 80s and 90s and even early 2000 or even today, a lot of things start from a point of view of, well, what's better than a spreadsheet? Salesforce started from an aspiration that it was much better than more than a spreadsheet, but it was the community of folks around this platform that came together and started saying, this thing that you're trying to do in a basement in Omaha, we're also trying to do it in a church in in Philadelphia, and we're trying to do it in Colorado. We're trying to do it in California. And it'd be much faster if we did it together. So the technology has to be responsive enough to enable folks to collaborate around it. And then the technology partners that you're working with have to be able to create collaborative environments. Classy has been great at doing that with the tools and the audience that you all have to get folks together because it's the change makers that are making the difference. I mean, I work at Salesforce. I love the technology, but it's the folks out in the sector who are organizing together. And whether it's the work that Dan Pallotta did with the overhead myth years ago or his new work, it's clear the donors that were working with the participants that were working with, they want a modern engagement with us. So we have to make sure that the tools connect and do that. Soraya, I'm sure you have thoughts around this collaborative piece as well.

Soraya Alexander:
Yes, I do. And I think it's yes to everything you're saying, yes to everything that's showing up in chat and actually tie a lot of the lamenting despair, anxiety around eroding donor pipelines, inefficient boards, tension with our constituencies and how we're talking to the public about what we're doing. And then this limitation on investing in tech like the way that tech is deployed. Well, when you see it deployed well in terms of engagement with your board, in terms of back end understanding where your donors are coming in, where your supporters are growing, what the opportunities are to communicate, how you're telling that story and converting people and retaining them. All of that comes when tech is deployed really effectively to actually be a facilitator of those relationships and you don't notice the tech. It's the stories and your organization and the relationships that come to the fore. And then you can kind of set yourself up for proactive engagement, for sustainable engagement for the long term. And the fact that we've been held to this unrealistic kind of repressed standard on tech investment. And then we're saying like, well, why aren't people getting behind us it's because we've never been equipped, the sector has never been equipped to actually do that in any real way. And so I think that those conversations are not separate. It's the two conversations that we're having so often. It's this, you know, unfair burden on overhead, and it's this declining donor participation at an individual level, at a family level, at a dollar level. And we're saying like, how do we... the solution to one is the solution to the other. And the more we can see this together and we educate our boards, we educate our constituencies on what is this allowing us to do at scale, the better for for everyone.

Edward Norton:
Let me shift, Soraya, while you're on that too, something I think is unique to this, you know, this new fusion that's of Classy / GoFundMe / Crowdrise - and let me let me just give a little context. You know, in 2010, when we all kind of started, Crowdrise was really working on on replicating kind of the Kickstarter crowdfunding model specifically for nonprofit organizations. And we were building white label multi-event platforms for like the New York Marathon and Boston Marathon and Ironman, things like that. Classy was building real SaaS, white labeled platforms to help organizations be able to have their fundraising platform. And GoFundMe was doing this incredible job at at direct peer to peer assistance, right? Jump to 2023, and those companies have all come together now. The modern GoFundMe, Classy, the fusion of it all encompasses the fundraising platform tools, the crowdfunding strategies, the incredible donor data matrix that sits under GoFundMe writ large, which is far and away the largest donor database in the world now. Um, and, and just to share something with everybody, you know, having joined GoFundMe and now been on the board for a long time even even through Classy joining us GoFundMe last year GoFundMe's average donation is still under $100. The the average donation on the platform is still under $100 and every year for the last few years, GoFundMe has transacted closer to $4 billion than $3 billion.

Edward Norton:
Nearly as much charitable money is being moved on the GoFundMe / Classy platform as the Gates Foundation moves every year, except in less than $100 increments. So, if you want a testament to how powerful the idea of lots of people giving small amounts is, take in that through that platform every year, the largest crowdfunding platform ever built in any form, as much charitable money is being moved as is dispensed by the Gates Foundation every year, in very small increments. If you imagine the amount of donor data that sits under that, it's really astonishing. I think a lot of that power is a function of, of storytelling and I think Classy and GoFundMe both do an exceptionally great job at, at using story to drive engagement and really caring to drive empathy and to drive contribution driven by empathy for mission and for assistance - and I think - and purpose. How do you... now that Classy and GoFundMe are sort of integrated and working together... What do you think looking ahead? What should organizations view as the value add to the goal of of turbocharging relationship with donor developing new donors? How do you think storytelling works through that? That the fusion of these of these tools that Classy and GoFundMe now represents?

Soraya Alexander:
I love this question because there's two really distinct things that I think about when you are putting yourself in the position of a GoFundMe donor. More often than not, it is somebody in your immediate network. Somebody has something that's going on in their lives, you know them. You've got a very deep connection. You understand the full context of their story. You know that your dollars will have impact. Even those small dollars are... it's not just the dollar relief... it's also the sense of community and solidarity that is expressed by that donation that is really powerful. And so when we're thinking about storytelling, it's the context and the sense of my role in changing somebody's outcome and feeling that there is a community behind them. That's really what's driving a lot of this. But then the question is suddenly these people are now touched by whatever cause it is by medical debt, by drunk driving, by whatever that is, and they see their own power in that story. And so how do we think in the nonprofit sector of translating all of these potential new donors into champions of your mission working at scale? So a lot of what we're thinking about are these momentary acts of solidarity translating into long term donor communities and how do we facilitate that on behalf of the sector. There's something really powerful there.

Edward Norton:
And let me ask you a specific question within that, because I think people are very familiar with GoFundMe capacity almost as a verb now for the way people can help other people in crisis. But Classy, Classy has been very specifically driven to help .org to help mission driven nonprofits achieve some of that same leverage. For organizations on this forum today who aren't using the fusion of GoFundMe's donor data with Classy's tools, what do you think is how you would characterize what's the use case that an organization that's not engaging with Classy / GoFundMe what's the alpha that they're that they're missing out on? How would you characterize the the lift that Classy and GoFundMe are able to provide, what do orgs who are using you have that orgs who who don't not have.

Soraya Alexander:
Yeah well you're taking me up to do a really direct sales pitch. But I will tell you the cool thing...

Edward Norton:
I want people to understand it. I mean think, think there are there are some people, there's a lot of white noise. And ultimately we should do this again with more companies and more things. But I think that it is a chance for people to hear you say, if I'm not using this combination of tools, what should I be using them for? Because it's hard for people to penetrate the fog of all these different things and think an incisive sense of what am I not... what am I not doing that I could be doing? What do you... how do you guys differentiate, in essence, what we can do for you if you're not using these tools?

Soraya Alexander:
Yeah, well, it's so we build our tech on three pillars. There's one which is the storytelling, which is what you're talking about. If you can't really clearly, very succinctly, very powerfully tell your story of where do you fit in our broader ecosystem? What's the impact you as an organization are trying to have and what's the impact your potential donors can have through their gift? Being able to really blow out storytelling and these really elegant ways is really critical for us. The second is actual conversion. So when you're thinking about tech, back to that, it should be a facilitator of connection rather than standing in between you. You finally made this moment of connection. The stories have resonated. You found, you know, potential donor and then they've got to like go ruffle around with, you know, credit cards and you're going to wait for things to load. And it's really it looks like tech from the early 90s, like you've lost them. So really thinking about elegant experiences is critical. And then the third is the data that you're talking about. So because of that scale, we know most of the visitors to your page. If you're a nonprofit on our platform, we have seen your visitors before, whether they've come to your campaign or not. And so what do we know about them? We know their cause categories. We know the frequency with which they donate. They know how much they're usually donating. We've got a lot of intelligence. So what do we do to actually help make that experience feel more personal and authentic and and human via technology... really good technology actually reinforces the humanity behind it in kind of a funky way.

Soraya Alexander:
And so we really believe in that. And I think the lessons that we learn on the GoFundMe side around what resonates: it's this ability for people to own their own stories and to talk about their causes, but in their own life experience. And I'm going to borrow something that I heard on stage at our collaborative conference. It was from Catherine ... who's at To Write Love on Her Arms, and she was talking about engaging with Gen Z. And what she talked about is how do you let go of the brand controls you have on your organization and the stories you want to tell and give people the power to tell the stories on their own? So when you talk about crowdfunding and where Crowdrise came from, where GoFundMe has really kind of defined itself, where class he's kind of moving, it's allowing people to tell stories that resonate about your organization and letting go of that sense of "I need to control my own story" that makes people really feel invested. And the more you do that, the more you allow people to see themselves in your story. We find that and again, tech can help you do this, we find that the the long term relationships really extend, expand... Robert's changed locations... we're now inside of his home. Hey, Robert. And we see that. We see that.

Edward Norton:
You know, I sometimes think to just to play back that underneath crowdfunding and fundraising, all these things. One of the things I think sometimes we've been in a long time we bury the lead. I saw this in the Obama campaign. Nothing to do with the politics. They were incredibly successful at getting young people with a donation capacity of $25 to raise 10 $25 donations and become a 10x leverage. I still think we under talk about that. We don't underline specifically that one of the outcomes of these tools correctly deployed is that you lever the small donor into a micro fundraiser and a donor with the capacity. Let's take I'm going to take an organization. My father was a director at the Nature Conservancy where I have lots, lots of friends. The Nature Conservancy is an organization that does hundreds of millions of free cash flow every year because they have, on the order of 1.5 to 2 million members who donate about $200 a year average, right? So that's really enviable. A huge, huge membership base contributing small amounts. But I used to think, imagine if 25% of the Nature Conservancy's donors could be educated to tell the story about why they care to their friends and go from being a $200 donor to just a $2,000 a year fundraiser. Raising $2,000 a year is not that hard. Right? That's literally a that's a dozen friends donating a small amount. What it means for an organization to have 25% of its donors lever themselves 10x is mind boggling when you start to run the math. And I think that it's storytelling, but it's really creating leverage where the donor base becomes a micro fundraiser base, and it has enormous implications if you achieve that leverage.

Robert Wolfe:
No, you go ahead. You go, Soraya.

Soraya Alexander:
Well, I was just going to say that the one thing on that and the thing that I saw earlier in the chat, somebody calling out is all of the things we're talking about are engaging with people kind of at scale, making sure those small dollar donors feel connected enough to then become advocates for your organization. That is really hard to do because as we've discussed, these stabs are really pressured. They don't have the ability to to scale from a capacity standpoint. And so what they do is they focus on the big dollars who can move the needle very quickly because that's what they're basically being given permission to do. And I think that now everybody understands the power of tech, hopefully, but we're in this discussion, so we'll make it really explicit. You can't do that at scale with small dollar donors. When you've got a small staff, you can do it at scale. When you've got tools like Salesforce, like Classy, like Zeck kind of coming together and allowing you to say... we're going to get crazy personalized, but then we're going to automate and that's going to give us the space, the flexibility, the ability to be creative for additional little moments of connection. But that baseline engagement actually can come with lots of, you know, hundreds, thousands, maybe millions, depending on your organization of donors. You can't ask a staff to do that on top of everything else they're being asked to do without powerful tech that talks to each other. And you should expect that for anybody on the call, you should expect that at this day and age from your technology platforms, if you're not getting it, you should demand more because technology, worth its salt, it should be there for you.

Edward Norton:
And to that point, Lori, you know what out of you guys are always innovating too. What have you guys... what should people who are here on the webinar, who they know, they know a lot about what you guys do, they know about your CRM tools, your management tools, stuff like that. What's Salesforce for Nonprofits brought out recently that people that people might not know about, that they should know about? Like what? What what should people know that's new "best in class", innovative that you're getting great feedback on that you're hearing like what things what what should all of us know that we don't know that's that's come out from Salesforce recently.

Lori Freeman:
Yeah. I think probably the most important thing to focus folks on beyond the artificial intelligence pieces, which I'm sure we'll get a chance to talk about throughout the call, is we made a really significant shift earlier this year to move away from selling solutions that were based on fundraising or program management and now offer a solution that has fundraising, program management, grantmaking soon to come, outcome management pieces built directly in. And it's really a direct result of you touched on the overhead myth at the beginning. You know I think about all the GoFundMe pages that I've engaged with over time and all of the nonprofits that I've donated directly to ultimately my impetus, and I think the impetus of so many folks that engage with organizations that are helping is I want to help, right? So when I go and go fund me, I can see directly this is how I help. And when I have donated a lot of other organizations, I can't readily understand from their website, from interactions I may have at their events... how is my donation going to be used? How is my time going to be used? I may be drawn to the cause, but those details and the absence of those specific details about how the money is going to be used, about the kind of change that you can create, I think it's sort of the Brené Brown, the story you're telling yourself, and it's just easy to think, oh, I'm not really sure if the amount that I can give or of my time or of my financial resources is really going to make that big of a difference versus the organizations we interact with that you can actually see, gosh, if I give this amount, it's going to actually translate to this program being different, or if I spend time because this is where they actually have a gap through volunteerism.

Lori Freeman:
So this year we've really focused on launching this new solution, the nonprofit cloud to solve for, you need to have all of your information for fundraising and programs in the same place. And some organizations that's really controversial because it's like, no, we don't want to solicit the folks that are receiving our services. We want to make sure we keep these things separate. But I'm seeing a lot of folks on the chat that I've had a chance to work with in organizations I've had a chance to work with. Fundraising and program. Folks don't really spend enough time together talking. And the only way that you can actually really tell these relevant, engaging stories is if you provide specificity that actually that's relevant, right? So having everything in a single system, having everything organized and really just having an overall data strategy is really the game changer. And that's what we've been focusing on this year.

Edward Norton:
Um, I if I was ever going to ask anyone this question, I'd ask it to the Salesforce crowd. And I'm not being it sounds like a fantasy, a joke fantasy, but I'm not being facetious. Do you, do you see is there can you envision a world where organizations with the capacity to invest in AI like Salesforce... are we going to see a world in which AI, large language models / AI are able to go out, find all the available, applicable foundations that have grant parameters that meet your organization and literally find their form and write the grant for you? Are we are we going to be able to? Are we going to be able to have AI literally source and develop all available applicable grants for organizations?

Lori Freeman:
Absolutely. Yeah, there's no there's no question of whether or not the technology will do that. The thing that's getting in our way is a sector and I think that's getting in the way of progress of that is do we as a sector have our data organized and structured in a repeatable fashion? And I don't want to dork out too much on technology and different methods for doing this, but it really starts in our sector, making commitments to having a data foundation, having a strategy around it. That's true for the funders. That's true for those of us that are seeking out institutional funding once that information is structured. The tools that the commercial world is using... it's not that hard. It's not the tech... it's not the technology that's getting in our way. It's us fostering systems and collaboration with having good data standards, having good privacy. It's not a lack of technology. We'll get there. And I think what you'll see in this rush around generative intelligence is organizations getting really excited about the outcome and starting to just start in small ways through cause areas or through communities and other cause minded areas or other funders going, "I want that thing," because the technology is moving so fast. So and that's, you know, that's certainly one of the big reasons why we are so eager to work with Classy and GoFundMe is because we know so many different types of patterns are happening on your platform, so we can help better make those kinds of connections. Yeah.

Edward Norton:
So just, Robert, I want to hop to you for a second on a on the particular pain point that Zeck is trying to address, because I, I think we all felt this was a pain point that existed, that it's kind of a real punch yourself in the face, um, experience that lots of corporations but especially and especially nonprofit organizations have which is the horrendous, redundant prep time to get ready for board meetings, to create presentations on old slide formats that have zero engagement. Um, you know, the idea that I got from a nonprofit I'm involved with an 83 page PDF three days before the board meeting... the chances that I get through that are zero. Um, the, my ability to pre comment on it, all of that and I know that obviously in Zeck that's what can you talk a little bit about not just within the corporate world but within the nonprofit world specifically. Zeck already has hundreds of nonprofits using its platform for board prep, board governance solutions, et cetera. What do you think is the solve? What should you know if progress represents... what would things look like if they're actually working? What does the board meeting, prep, presentation and aftermath look like if we do away with this kind of painful, sometimes antagonistic relationship between boards and mission driven orgs and the process by which the updates and the meetings are held? What should it look like?

Robert Wolfe:
I thin it's interesting because so much of what we've been talking about is: storytelling, relationships, engagement. And it's not dissimilar from the board process. So at the end of the day, if you are not leveraging your board to help you with decision making, you're wasting everyone's time. And I think that's what the experience has been to date and it's dreadful. The idea, to your point of getting into the boardroom and literally taking three boards and everyone is just rereading the content that they presumably already read is a monumental waste of time. So the idea to that, Zeck can create an entirely different model and transform the process. So not only is it easier for the leadership team to create that content, but more importantly for the board to engage with it. So by the time the board meeting starts, you're not just regurgitating content, you're actually bantering and making decisions. I think that is a must. And if organizations aren't being on their board to make that happen, it's a fail. But you have to have the right tools because you can't just believe in magic. It's not going to happen if you don't have the technology to help you embrace it.

Edward Norton:
And then obviously...

Soraya Alexander:
I just saw, I just think that's really cool what you're trying to do with Zeck. I read this HBR article - Harvard Business Review article like a while ago, and it talked about really being intentional, about giving your board a job, like understand what their purpose is. So they were assigned what is it that you need from them? And I actually think what you've built is allowing you to think about what's their job and then giving them the pathways to do that job. Because a lot of the time what comes is this is the state of our organization and here's a bunch of unhelpful feedback that now is actually a distraction for an already strapped team. And so really kind of curating that relationship I think is just really powerful. So thanks for putting this out into the universe. As someone who deals with it.

Robert Wolfe:
Yeah, no, thank you. Yeah, I'll give one example. I mean, the amount of time I have spent in live board meetings talking about votes that should take three seconds to solve prior to the board meeting is just archaic. So the idea that on Zeck you can do that all before the board meeting starts, so instead of instead of wasting time on that, you can actually talk about strategies that will impact your organization can be game changing. It's just again a matter of embracing the technology to make it happen.

Edward Norton:
Well and I know Robert, you know, on the corporate side, we obviously see special levels of efficiency because so much time is wasted in board meetings with employee stock option pool approvals. But nonprofits don't have that. But they do have, you know, the governance stuff that's just a drag...approving of minutes, approving of you know, just stuff that that should be able to be handled essentially offline in an iterative way beforehand. Um is the other major time efficiency thing you think that that we're seeing on the non profit side... is it just that by being an "always on" iterative cloud based platform, the prep time is just much, much quicker?

Robert Wolfe:
Yeah, I think that's right. And it's not saving you 15% of your time. It's saving 70% of your time. So it's a massive difference. And I'll say this: I have never been to a nonprofit board meeting where the very first question asked wasn't, "did we approve the minutes from the last board meeting?" And then you spend seven minutes looking for the minutes and then wondering who approved them and who didn't? Again, just a waste of time. And just the idea of creating better content, better storytelling. You're able to read it on your phone so that your board can engage and help your organization instead of waste time is again, should be incredibly helpful to your organization.

Edward Norton:
Yeah. And I think and to leave on this, one of the things I've heard you say in the feedback from the nonprofits using Zeck is that there is the quantitative efficiency that people appreciate, but that actually the qualitative, the qualitative shift in the conversation, the quality of the conversation and the quality of the outcomes from the meetings has improved as a result. Is that fair?

Robert Wolfe:
Yes, I think first, the... and I don't want to get too into the weeds... but the idea that the leadership team now knows not only whether or not their board has opened the presentation, but where they're spending the time in the presentation prior to the meeting allows you to never be flat footed. Walking into that meeting, and I'll give another example, just because it was in a board meeting last week and this is this company, this nonprofits third time using. So they're sort of used to it. But the the executive director started going through her 'CEO Summary' and one of the board members said, "hey, we already all read this - let's just get to the comments." And the rest of the board meeting was just going back and forth about the comments. This is a big board. There's 37 board members that the board members left in advance. So it was all back and forth and it was clearly the best board meeting we've ever had.

Edward Norton:
That's great. So, Maia, I want to, um. You know, we could go on, but I do want to make sure we give robust time for the community to feed in questions. I know people are feeding in questions to you. I've kind of hit on a lot of the highlights that I wanted to touch on, but I'm sure the actual operators of many orgs have specific questions for these folks and we start fielding some of them in.

Maia Rose:
Absolutely. Yes. It's been very busy on the back end. So excited. If we don't get to your questions, please feel free to email. You can either email webinars@classy.org for us to follow up or LinkedIn any of our lovely panelists. I'm sure they'd be happy to reach out, but I'll try to hit as many as we can. So, um, the first one here is about AI. So does the panel have any opinions on which AI tools are the best for nonprofits right now to start using and start testing?

Soraya Alexander:
I'm going to pass this to Lori because I think she's going to have the most experience. But can I just say one thing? If you do not have a fully baked out, robust AI strategy already implemented, you are not behind. Focus on the basics first. If you are thinking about personalization, segmentation, automation, and you're still working through that, that is fine and build the foundational layers from which you can build quite a bit more exciting... you know, there's a lot more exciting opportunities, but I think that there's also a lot of sense of "I'm already left behind," and you are not. And so in terms of the tactical, you know, the ask, I'll pass it to Lori. We've got thoughts, but you've got more, I'm sure.

Lori Freeman:
And I'm going to start from I see Beth Kanter in the comments there saying 'everything starts from ethical and responsible use' and so sayeth the shepherd so sayeth at the floor couldn't agree more, Beth. First thing I would offer is just when you're going out and experimenting with various tools. Be very, very cautious. There are a lot of those tools out there right now that the information that you put in, they're going to use to feed into their model. So at Salesforce, we're taking a pretty strong stand on this. And we're starting from really four pillars of how we think about artificial intelligence. We start with trust. We want to make sure it's relevant. We want to make sure that we're providing a space where we're treating your data in a secure fashion and that we're also creating space to be able to work with different models that are coming out. So I know some of the folks on the phone will get a chance to attend Dreamforce. Some of you will not get that chance. So I will just tease out a little bit. We have some announcements coming around our product in the fall around some of the tools that will be integrated inside of Salesforce to be able to help you create these things, whether it's things for a major giving proposal or for things that you're doing directly with the donor. We're certainly hard at work on this and have things coming out almost every month right now. So, lots of great tools out there, but I would just err on the side of caution. If you're out there experimenting with the tools that are out there and work directly with a technology provider like Salesforce.

Soraya Alexander:
I'll do a plus one on that. That's Classy's approach too we've got some things in kind of beta right now that we're working on in terms of developing campaigns, but we're moving very slowly because there's so much still to understand and learn. And to Beth's point, you know, you don't want to jump in to feet first without really understanding what we're getting into. So echo all of that.

Robert Wolfe:
Same for Zeck because it's board material. Obviously cannot have this live. So we're actually building our own set because the security is table stakes.

Maia Rose:
Great, great points. Thank you. Um, we have another one here. Aside from tapping the technology tools: Classy, GoFundMe, etc. - what do you recommend for nonprofits to stand out, among others, when we don't have that immediate representative or recognition?

Soraya Alexander:
I can take a stab at this one. I think there's really... it's really understanding who are the right constituencies for you and spending the time to help them see themselves in your organization. So we talked a little bit about storytelling. I think really leaning in there... you find your few kind of passionate people wherever they are. There are communities within your organization that exist and it's your... it's incumbent upon you to find them and help cultivate them and give them the tools to then tell your story and take it forward. So there's an important role you are playing in society, finding those communities and understanding how you become the biggest story in their lives and in their these moments. And it's not waiting for some, you know, opportunity to ... like that's not appropriate for, you know, the vast majority of nonprofits. That's not that's definitely not a fundraising strategy you're going to build your base on. It's actually finding those small, consistent donors and making them feel important enough that they're going to commit. And that commitment begets trust and that trust begets engagement and it keeps feeding upon itself. So spend the time on the fundamentals with those those core constituencies.

Maia Rose:
Perfect. And how do we bring aging donor pools, board members and execs, folks that maybe aren't too tech savvy on board with necessary tech advancement?

Soraya Alexander:
Can I... can I offer one thing? I've been talking too much. So. Robert or Laura, if you're about Edward, if you're about. I have one thing that's been like sitting with me, but I, like, mentioned this when we were prepping for this panel, but I was in Trader Joe's and like, I go to Trader Joe's every weekend, that's where I go to buy groceries. And we were talking about like, okay, what is Trader Joe's in the business of doing? They're in the business of selling me chocolate covered almonds, the sugar ones. Like that's what they are there to do. But if you ask me like, what is Trader Joe's? It's not the revenue from chocolate covered almonds. It is the storefront. It's the fact that they've preselected everything. It's the fact that they wear Hawaiian shirts and they give stickers to my kids and it's like the whole experience And I think tech helping people understand that your mission doesn't start and stop in this one place. And then tech is this other thing that stands disconnected. Tech is how the whole mission comes together. It's how your teams are operating. It's how you're telling your story.

Soraya Alexander:
It's how you're leveraging your board effectively. It's how you're able to build community. Like there isn't a start and stop moment. The same way there isn't with any other brand you're interacting with. There's no such thing as like the core brand and everything that comes around it. The more you can bring your board along to understand that, the more you can bring your constituencies along to see that journey, I think you can really build a lot of power. And as you're thinking about, you know, again, like how do you leverage Zeck actually doing tech information sessions like we come along all the time to to help educate board members and constituencies, whatever that looks like. I think the, the the changing dynamic helps. The other thing I'll say is I think I saw 80% of Gen Z last year gave online like understanding this is fundamentals now like this is table stakes this isn't some speculative like I heard the internet's going to be big like the year beyond that and so helping people understand that is going to be really critical.

Edward Norton:
I'm going to offer one maybe possibly controversial statement, but I think organizations need to recruit younger boards. I think people organizations have a tendency to look for, if not emeritus board members, obviously, people look for donor capacity within their board members, right? They bring board members on from the organizations that fund them or because they see them as having larger capacity. I think many organizations fail to recruit down the age ladder on to their boards. And you see a greater degree of friction in adopting the tools and getting support for the budgetary allocations for those tools. When your board skew, you know, older, which is not to say that there aren't you know, there's a lot of it's a balance. But I think I think that I think it is a truism in my own experience that that that boards don't recruit enough young people. And think of how exciting it is for people at an earlier stage of their career to get invited into that conversation and into that role. Um, so that's just, that's just a personal perspective I have from years of being on boards.

Maia Rose:
Great. I think we have time for one more question. Maybe two I can squeeze in. But for a small organization trying to become more efficient by learning about and utilizing other integrations, where's a good place to start? It's overwhelming. There's a lot of tech out there.

Lori Freeman:
Great question. I think all of us on the phone probably have a variety of different kinds of resources that can help organizations get started. I know at least on the Salesforce front, we encourage folks to join the Trailblazer community, which is free and open to everyone. You don't have to be a customer to join that. You can join that. And we're really proud. The response time for most questions is I think it's something like 95% inside of 24 hours. And I know I learned from our Trailblazer community every day, and I'm sure you would have that same experience.

Soraya Alexander:
We've got a lot of resources at class. Please check us out. We host these twice a month. I think we issue a lot of reports. We've got a Classy academy, so reach out. We will support you. We're all here for you.

Maia Rose:
Amazing. And that concludes our time with this wonderful panel and our amazing moderator. Thank you all so much. If we didn't get to your questions, like I said, please email webinars@classy. Everyone would love to be LinkedIn. I saw some people asking to connect with Soraya. She will take it. I'll just say yes for her. Um, but again, we will be sending out the recording of this, so look for that in your email inbox. And again, thank you all so much. This was really interesting and we appreciate you all for your time.

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