Building a Data-Driven Major Gifts Pipeline 

to today's webinar, building a data driven major gifts pipeline. Before we start, I just wanna share two quick housekeeping items for today. First, we look forward to answering everybody's questions at the end of the webinar. But if you have those questions, please put them in the q and a box at the bottom, so we don't lose them. We may type in some answers for you. We may answer them live at the end, depending on how many we get. And then second, we'll also be doing a few polls today to help guide our conversation, three of them. And so thank you in advance for participating here. Okay. For those who are not familiar with Windfall, we're a data company, based out of San Francisco, and our mission is really to help nonprofit organizations more effectively engage with their constituents and their donors through accurate data and best in class propensity propensity modeling. And so we we focus specifically on identifying and understanding affluent households. And my name is Matt Stern. I've been at Windfall for seven years, and I previous database administrator for nonprofits. Love what I do, and I'm joined today by my colleague here. Here, do you wanna introduce yourself? Sure. Thanks, Matt. Hi, everyone. My name is Heesh Sheikh, and I am a customer success manager, for nonprofit customers here at Finfall. I joined about a year ago, and I work with many of our customers across the nonprofit ecosystem from really large hospitals and universities to more independent schools and other care related organizations. Alright. Thanks so much. So for today, we're gonna do a quick one follow-up review. We're gonna talk a little bit more about the current state of high net worth household giving, which is a huge impact and kind of our main candidate pool for major giving. We're gonna talk a little bit more about leveraging wealth and career data to identify major donor prospects through segmentation. We're gonna talk a little bit more about the next step around using AI modeling to predict who's most likely to make major gifts. We're also going to talk a little bit more about best practices for developing a major gift pipeline and program, using the two above steps. If we have time, we're gonna do a quick application, demo, to showcase some ways to to actually create those workflows for developing a major GIF pipeline, and we'll also handle some of that q and a at the end here as well. And so before we hop into everything, really, today, we're gonna break up the, you know, data driven playbook for major GIFs into, you know, five distinct stages. The first one is acting in the moment or acting on the moment, how to really capture and respond to real time shifts in wealth, tax, and donor data. The second one is around seeing the full donor picture. So moving past just basic data and first party data to combine wealth, career, and philanthropic signals for identification purposes. Third is gonna be prioritizing with precision. So how do we leverage artificial intelligence to really pinpoint exactly where your efforts will make the most impact for major giving? Fourth will be building around discipline, building disciplined portfolios. So really trying to make sure your gift officers have the right level of coverage, for major giving. And then finally, how do we actually activate this and take action on data? And, really, you know, how do we turn these insights into real outreach? So, again, this is our roadmap for today, and our goal is to give you a highly practical framework you can start implementing immediately. And so the first poll we have today, I said there were gonna be them, and they are here. How does your organization currently identify major giving prospects? One second. I'm gonna pull this pull up. How do you actually identify major giving prospects? Maybe we don't segment. Maybe we use the size of their past gifts. Maybe we we use net worth or gift capacity or we use modeling or some other methodology we haven't mentioned here. So I'm gonna give folks some time to answer here. We got about, you know, forty percent participation. We'd love around more than that if possible. Thank you everybody for contributing here. Give folks a few more seconds. Okay. Let's see. So it seems like a majority of folks are using kind of that key wealth indicator, be it a net worth figure or a gift capacity figure or some type of figure to really identify those for major giving. And some folks are, you know, really focusing on their past gifts, to the organization as well. These are great. Gonna stop sharing here. Okay. Alright. So, promise we do just a brief windfall overview before we get into the meat and potatoes here. And, again, windfall, you know, we are I'm gonna go back here. Sorry about that. Our vision here is to change the way that organizations understand and engage with their donors and prospects. So Windfall, at its heart, we're a data company. And since our founding, we've really hyper focused on affluent US households. So we define affluent as any household with a net worth of one million dollars or more. And so we treat net worth as a true human balance sheet. We actually do net out debts and liabilities that we can see from the public domain. And unlike other vendors in this space, we don't do scores or ranges in wealth. We provide a precise network figure. So if you have a John Smith at one two three Main Street, he can tell you that his household's worth two point three million dollars versus Jane Johnson at four five six Broadway. Her household could be worth forty nine point nine million dollars. And we have the privilege of partnering with over fifteen hundred organizations across the country. Like, said, we we support nonprofits of all shapes and sizes from the smallest mom and, you know, board led nonprofit to some of the largest fundraising institutions in the United States. Everyone deserves great data. And so we have three main use cases. That's tons of use cases, but the three main use cases for windfalls data. The first one is around identification. So you can essentially stack rank your database by net worth. Maybe you have a thousand records, ten thousand, or a hundred thousand. There's only so many hours in the day, and prioritization can help you figure out where to spend your time. Like, people answered in that poll, most folks are using kind of a wealth indicator as their first pass for major giving prospects. Second second, we think about segmentation, which we like to call finding hidden gems here at Windfall. So imagine you have a ten dollar donor. Typically, you'd send them a form thank you letter and move on with your day. But if you overlay, you know, windfalls data, you might realize that this household's worth ten million or a hundred million dollars. So instead of just that thank you letter, this really calls for some deeper engagement and stewardship, an immediate phone call from an assigned prospect manager. And last is engagement. We talk about that network figure a lot. But in addition to network, we actually provide around I think it's now forty eight additional fields, which are things like, have they recently moved? Is there a recent divorce or a liquidity event? Are they on a boat or a plane? Like, have they recently been promoted or retired, or maybe they're tied to a donor advised fund. Knowing, you know, so much more context about these households can really help you further segment your population and just have back pocket information when you're going into a conversation with this household. So, this brings us to a major differentiator, how we uncover hidden gems. In this kind of traditional wealth screening model, organizations are often restricted by a credit based token system. Because of those cost barriers, teams only screen a small subset of their database here in, in Blue. That's great, but these are usually the people they already know. And they might only do this every couple of years. The problem is is that you can see on the left, you might miss out on a ton of affluent prospects who haven't caught your attention yet. So with Windfall's business model, we remove those barriers with unlimited syncs. You don't have to pick and choose. You can screen your entire database as often as you'd like to surface all of those hidden gems automatically. So we actually really recommend wealth screenings throughout the year versus wealth screenings once a year every few years because we wanna make sure that you're, surfacing those major giving prospects as often as you need to, or maybe someone comes into a windfall, you know, no pun intended, which we'll talk about here in a minute, and their network changes over time. So I wanna make sure that you have the most up to date information on your constituency. And so our platform is built with fundraising and development in mind, and there are a couple of different products that we do offer to customers. We're not gonna talk too much about those today. This is the last time we're gonna talk about them. The first is wealth screening with career intelligence. So this is where you have the ability to match match to your constituents when you send them to Windfall. And we actually append our wealth screening and career intelligence data to those constituents that we match to. This is really helpful in understanding who you wanna prioritize for a major giving program and additional context outside of their giving history. We also do provide AI propensity modeling. So this is really bespoke machine learning models that really answer the question of who's most likely to convert towards a specific major giving or strategic goal that you have. And last, we have Datalink. This is a service which unifies constituents across multiple databases. For those organizations that maybe have a separate ticketing database or a hospital that has an EMR, that is outside of kind of the donor database, but they wanna understand who's who across both datasets. You know, we work with organizations to help them understand if people are in both databases. And our business model is unique. We charge a flat annual fee. We we don't charge per record or by credit across all of our products. Really making sure that our whenever you work with Windfall, everything's unlimited. Okay. Here's a couple, here's our data dictionary. In addition to just that net worth figure that we talked about, and we have a ton of additional fields that we provide back to our customers, things around, life event changes, a recent death or a recent mover in the household, or maybe boat or plane ownership or philanthropic data as well. Maybe they're tied to a family foundation or a trust. Or even now, can see here with some fields we provide, are they tied to a donor advised fund? Do they are they are they interested in crypto? We've seen some transactions via crypto. All of these fields kind of can provide more context for your major giving programs, especially around employment as well. Things like, are these folks, you know, VP or c suite at publicly held companies? Have they recently been promoted or changed jobs? Or maybe you wanna segment some of your major donors by specific industries, executives in specific industries that are donors at your organization. Having this additional context of not just wealth, but also career is very helpful from a, you know, additional segmentation, purpose. Okay. So this slide brings everything we've discussed together by showing you how to turn raw people data that we've talked about into actual movement. So the process starts with enrichment. We take your existing records and layer in critical context for you, net worth, career history, even indicators like donor advised funds and crypto. Once we have that full picture, we actually move on to segmentation. So instead of treating your database as one large group, you can prioritize and segment your major donors based on their actual capacity and propensity to give. And last, we have that turning that insight into action. This isn't just data for the sake of data. It's, you know, we're here to help you build specific workflows, whether it's setting off autumn automated triggers when someone's net worth changes or the propensity to give increases or assigning tasks to gift officers, routing leads to the right departments, or keeping information current with constant refreshes, this system ensures you are always working on the highest value major donor opportunities. And by following this path, you really unlock better outcomes across the board. In the end, you're prioritizing the right people, you're building actionable segments faster, and you're actually triggering smarter outreach to the right major donors. Ultimately, this allows you to personalize every engagement with better context, ensuring your team is driving the strongest possible fundraising outcomes, for your mission. And as and the as one example of this is our work with the Muscular Dystrophy Association. MDA came to us during a restructuring phase because they needed a more strategic data driven way to grow their major gift pipeline. And so we actually implemented wealth and career data alongside a custom propensity to give model for major giving to help them really pinpoint exactly who to target. And in eighteen months, they quadrupled their pipeline. They surfaced twenty five thousand prospects worth over ten million dollars in net worth and grew their major gift revenue by two point six x, taking it from six hundred k to over one and a half million dollars in one point, to one and a half million dollars in eighteen months. So it really helped to revitalize their major gift fundraising program. Okay. We're gonna do polls, and we're getting into the meat and potatoes here. So what is the biggest challenge facing your organization's major giving program right now? Launching this for everybody. My answers are flooded. Our portfolios are too large. We've exhausted our known donors, and we need to expand our prospect pool. We're just standing in the program up. We don't really know who's who. Thank you, everybody, for participating. Give it a few more seconds here. Okay. Let's see. Okay. So distributed pretty well across the board, but most folks believe that they've exhausted their known major donor pool and really need to expand the major giving prospect pool here. And that's something that I think, you know, many organizations kind of deal with that donor fatigue, and being able to figure out who are their best next prospects. Maybe those that are coming into wealth or that are have, like, a trigger event, are important important and impactful. So let's actually talk about that. So as we start this playbook, we really wanna make sure we are starting at the same level. So major gifts is focused typically on the high net worth population because they're the ones that have the capacity to give these large sums. So what does the shifting dynamics of wealth across generations have to do with this economy and your major giving plans over the next eighteen to twenty four months. So let's talk a little bit more about the current state of high north household giving. So we got two graphs here. And, essentially, wealth is transferring is what we're seeing. That means for your major giving program, you need to be thinking a bit more about now and future relationships, opportunities, and holes you need to fill here. So these two graphs on the left, the first one on the left here, we see total US wealth held in a dollar figure by specific generations. But look at that huge shift, from the silent generation into the baby boomer generation now. Now the baby boomer generation, is essentially transferring that wealth into GenX and the millennial, and the millennial generations as well. On the right here, you can see this graph kind of not just absolute dollars, but as a percent of the total US wealth. As you can see, a vast majority of it is now held within the baby boomer, population, which is then being transferred into the younger generations right now. So how are you creating relationships or mining your maybe mid level, middle aged donors for future potential? We actually saw that, you know, six trillion dollars of wealth was transferred in twenty twenty five alone, and more will be transferred in twenty twenty six. So this is a what this, chart is showing you is that experts are estimating a significant transfer of wealth by twenty forty eight, and not profits really need to be building multiple channels for major donor pipeline growth. So baby boomers and Gen z give differently, because they care about different impact indicators, and they wanna be part of the, you know, the solution in different ways. So if you were to capture some of the eighteen true eighteen trillion dollars that's going to charity, how are you gonna differentiate your your outreach and donor relations to different generations? So nonprofits really need to be asking, how do we keep the relationship? How can we ensure we have the next generation in our database, and are we including them in our communications and not just going back to this you know, the consistent donors historically? Additionally, you can see here for this wealth transfer, slide that we have here that when we talk about the great wealth transfer, we're we're not just talking about a change in bank account ownership. We're talking about a fundamental shift in the philanthropic landscape. But the challenge here is that you can see as this money is being transferred, to spouses, to widows, to Gen x and millennials, or to Gen z and younger, the challenge here is that the children and grandchildren inheriting this wealth do not necessarily share the same institutional loyalty as their parents. So if your organization relies on legacy donors without engaging heirs or next of kin, you're essentially watching your future endowment walk out the door. This isn't just a financial transfer. It's a relationship transfer, that we have to start managing today. And the first in the, you know, what we wanna discuss here on this slide is, like, the first thing is it has to be focused on multigenerational engagement for major gifts now. You can't just invite the primary donor to the gala now. We suggest you actually invite the entire family or create a program that appeals to younger generations as this wealth transfer continues. Also, people are giving in different mechanisms, especially at younger generations. The wealth transfer is increasingly happening through donor advised funds and family foundations. This means wealth is essentially being parked for philanthropic use long before it actually reaches to a nonprofit. So organizations really do need to identify those staff holders and those with family foundations to see who has already committed funds to a charity, and identify them for major giving as well. And so looking at Windfall's dataset internally, the wealthy are getting wealthier, and we see centralization of wealth at the top. Plotted by a millionaire population from the pandemic to today, we've actually seen a hundred and thirteen percent increase in affluent households wealth, and total wealth held by the high net worth households has increased by a hundred and sixty one percent over the past six years. So from just last fall to now, we've actually seen an increase in seventy, from seventy eight percent to seventy nine percent of all the wealth in the US being held within those that are worth over one million dollars, in wealth. And the last thing I wanna say here is, like, look at the steepness of this curve. The wealth at the top isn't just growing. It's kind of accelerating. So if your fundraising strategy is essentially a a flat consistent line while your donor's wealth is kind of going up in this vertical line, essentially, you're falling behind every single day. So being nimble isn't a buzzword. It's actually the ability to see a donor move up the wealth curve and have the courage to change your ask to match their new reality for major giving. K. Here, you wanna take it away, you want me to keep going? Keep going. Okay. Great. So as you establish your foundation of data, learning more about your constituency is the first step towards identifying major donors. So what is essentially, the first thing you wanna do is, like, what is the holistic view of your constituents or donors? How engaged are they with your organization? What is their, you know, current wealth? What are their interests? You know, what do they do for work, and how confident are you in your gift ask? Also, like, how well have you done in the past to cultivate your donors and constituents historically? Do you have groups that are the most successful? Have you asked for, you know, bigger gifts from certain, you know, mid level donors in the past, or do you have specific gift thresholds that you've defined? So understanding some of these, you know, these first party indicators, are super important for making the ask, and finding those ideal major donor candidates. And so visualizing, visualizing the donation and donation to wealth, really helps tell the story here. So another way to analyze your data is to look at aggregated donation sizes as shown here. Ideally, we would wanna see a consistent upward trend in donation sizes as wealth in as net worth increases as well. In this example, donations remain consistent between the one to five million dollar net worth range. So as a major gift officer, I'd be wondering, do any of these donors in my portfolio fall into one of these net worth buckets? If so, are they receiving the same gift to ask amount? So some some donors or hidden gems in the one to five million dollar net worth ranges may be waiting for the right ask amount to take their giving to the next level. They just haven't really been prioritized by the major giving team. And so when we think about comparing wealth and donation history to unlock major donors, let's dig into it a little bit further in a simple quadrant here. One easy way to organize these results is create quadrants starting with your lower wealth matches with various donation histories. So maybe you have a lower wealth and low donation history. Alright. These matches are strong candidates for your annual giving and stewardship teams. You know, you can continue to cultivate these relationships and monitor closely for changes in donation patterns or increases in wealth. But maybe you have those lower wealth and high donation history. One next step for this group would be to assign these to maybe, like, a leadership annual giving officer to continue to steward these donors. Okay. Let's talk about those that have a maybe high wealth and high donation history. So one next step with this group would be to assign these to a leadership or sorry. With these folks is to verify that these donors are assigned to a major gift portfolio. Right? They already have a high high wealth. They're already giving a large amount to the organization. Continue what you're doing and confirm the gift ask amount. But maybe you have those folks that have a high wealth but low donation history. So this quadrant is the hidden gem quadrant. These donors likely have the potential to increase their giving when asked, maybe coupling that with some additional fields or modeled scores. Alpha constituents would sustain engagement with the organization, but it's been giving a nominal amount like we like we saw in that previous graph, maybe primed for an increased ask amount. So I'm just gonna share this, quick little, snippet here from Hope for the Heart. So for Hope for the Heart, the team wanted to identify hidden gems within their new donor base to determine which supporters should they prioritize for deeper engagement. They kind of got this new group cohort of first time donors, and they wanted to really understand who of these should they spend, you know, more time and effort on. And so a twenty five dollar first time dinner, was identified as a high net worth. They were invited to, you know, one of the Hope for the Hearts events. The dinner actually ended up giving twenty thousand dollars on the spot and offered to connect the organization within their larger greater network. So super simple, conversion here from a, you know, first time dinner to large just by using network as, like, an indicator for major giving. And the last piece we'll cover here is around when you think about it from customizing your outreach by using fields by using some additional fields, like, maybe someone had a liquidation event of stock or maybe the company went public or the their job function is in finance at a VP level, always using additional fields coupled with net worth is an easy way to be able to, tailor your messaging for for major donors here. K. And the last piece around segmentation really focuses thinking about events based on specific attributes. So maybe you have current major donors with with major donor prospects with a philanthropic interest. Maybe you can use employment data to invite the right constituents in the right industries to the right events and really improve response rates and participation here. Alright. Thank you, Matt. Now let's get into the challenges of prioritizing when your database is full and you have limited staff time. So we'll now go over how getting effective propensity models with your data and goals in mind allows you to build strongest major gift team. So I wanna set the stage for how we think about data and analytics. When we talk about data science and fundraising, it's helpful to view it as an evolution, so a progression of how we interact with information to make decisions. So there's four distinct stages to this, and then move from looking backward to looking forward. So first, we have descriptive analytics. This simply answers the question, what happened? This is your standard retrospective reporting. So it's looking at your CRM at the end of the quarter and seeing that your major gift revenue was up by ten percent or that a specific direct mail campaign underperformed. So it tells you the facts of the past. Second is the diagnostic analytics, which asks why did it happen. So this is where you dig a layer deeper into the data to find cause and effect. If revenue went up, was it because you secured three massive unexpected six figure gifts? If the direct mail campaign failed, was it because of a bad list segment? So this moves you from those raw numbers to actual context. Now where things get really exciting for fundraising teams is where we cross over into those forward looking stages. So that step third stage is predictive analytics, which is what will happen. This is where data science uses historical patterns to forecast the future. So in major gift fundraising, this looks like predictive AI modeling that analyzes a donor's wealth indicators and their past giving history and past engagement touch points to say this specific group of fifty donors has a ninety percent likelihood of making a major gift if asked in the next six months. And then finally, the pinnacle is prescriptive analytics, which is how do we make it happen. So this doesn't just predict the future. It tells your team exactly what actions to take to engineer that future. So it prescribes that workflow. So for example, it might alert a gift officer and say, this donor Smith just had a significant wealth event. Call them within forty eight hours, and invite them to the upcoming gala. So it acts as an intelligent copilot for your development team. But as we talk about moving up this maturity curve, especially as we lean lean into predictive and prescriptive AI, we have to use two critical cautions. So first, AI depends heavily on your timeline. The course of your nonprofit's operations can change overnight due to external economic shifts, leadership transitions, or global events. Models that were highly accurate last year might need recalibration today because human behavior and organizational realities evolve very fluidly. Second, and perhaps more importantly, bad information or inaccurate data will always lead to bad predictive and prescriptive outcomes. You've probably heard the phrase garbage in, garbage out. So if your foundation is built on no data or bad data environments, an AI model is simply gonna it's simply going to automate and accelerate those mistakes. So it might confidently prescribe that you called the wrong donor at the wrong time for the wrong amount. So as we look to scale our programs, our goal shouldn't just be to rush to the coolest AI tool. Our goal must be to build a reliable data foundation so that when we do predict and we do prescribe actions, our gift officers are moving forward with absolute confidence. So like we said, artificial intelligence is only as good as the data it sees. Now we're gonna launch our third and final poll for today, which is do you use machine learning models as part of your major gift strategy? So how often you use it? Do you use it or not? We'd love to hear from you. Alright. We're seeing responses come in, and a majority are seeing no. And the second highest majority says not sure. So, that's really helpful, to learn. Thank you for sharing, everyone. So why does Windfall focus on helping nonprofits with AI driven propensity modeling? Because we know that wealth is the first qualification, but it's not the only factor. Machine learning can help provide sophisticated prioritization for development teams. We you know, machine learning helps with leveraging artificial intelligence for prospect research, which can radically streamline operations. If you build a model meant for your organization and your target goal, it will help you reach your goals more quickly. And then finally, marrying well screening and the propensity to give models. These machine learning models can help prioritize prospects. So here's a list of some possible use cases, models that can create for any gift threshold or outcome. For example, it could just be an annual fund participation model where you want to find anyone who will make a donation that's over a dollar or any targeted amount. Another idea is annual fund leadership, whatever that might be for you. For example, we can build a model to optimize for folks that can donate twenty five hundred dollars in an annual context. For major gifts, we could say the threshold is twenty five thousand dollars over five years, so we'll build a model specifically tuned to that goal. Grateful patients, it's same idea, focused on turning patients into donors. And we can also support plan giving to help you predict donors who will give those planned or estate gifts. And, of course, outreach and use cases for sending direct mail, scoring people on their propensity to contribute to a campaign. But, really, there's so many, like, infinite use cases for our propensity modeling. In the end, the model is going to be tailored to your specific desired outcome. And so remember the old adage, measure twice, cut once. How can you do that with old data? Wants you to target, measure, and iterate. So questions to ask, how often are you currently refreshing your scores? One, if you haven't done it in a few months, is this the right prioritization? So at Windfall, we refresh scores regularly to reflect wealth creation and destruction events and behavioral changes. Two, models should be refreshed and retained as new information becomes available. We know data is changing continually both on the constituent side and in your database. So model scores become very stale very quickly, particularly in challenging in changing economic climates. And so your target goals and initiatives will change, and so should your models. So we want to think of this as and, also, like, we want to think of this as long term strategy, not a short term one. So, here's a short customer story. We're always excited when we, do these webinars because it does force us to take a step back and reflect instead of just remaining in that go go mode. So here's an example of our customer, Susan g Coleman, who we helped build a model for them to upgrade their annual donors to mid level donors. And what we found was that within a month of implementing Windfall's propensity to give model, they upgraded five annual donors to mid level within one week. And these five donors increased our giving from seven and a half thousand to twenty nine thousand dollars, so nearly it. And, we do want to leave it leave you with some best practices for implementing a major gift program with wealth screening. But first, we do need to think about some tax changes that were that went into effect very recently. So the One Big Beautiful, Bill Act has provisions that impact tax incentives for charitable giving. It essentially reduces the tax break for the wealthiest donors and introduces a new small tax break for everyday donors. These changes went into effect earlier this year, January first. And so your major donors are the people who are going to list out their deductions, like mortgage interest, property taxes, charitable giving, rather than taking that standard deduction. And so that is who the biggest challenges also impact the biggest changes also impact for this year. So before twenty twenty six, wealthy donors who itemize their deductions could begin deducting charitable contributions from the very first dollar. In twenty twenty six, the new point five percent floor on charitable deductions weakens that tax incentive for the first few thousand dollars of giving for many wealthy donors. So as an example, if a donor earns five hundred thousand dollars, the first twenty five hundred dollars to give to all charities now is not tax deductible. For your wealthiest donors in the tops top tax bracket, starting in twenty twenty six, the tax value of their deduction is reduced from thirty seven cents to thirty five to to to to thirty five cents on a dollar. So in other words, the tax break for a hundred thousand dollar gift drops from thirty seven thousand dollars to thirty five thousand dollars. And everyone's holding their breath to see how this is gonna impact major donors. And while the twenty twenty five study of affluent philanthropy noted that eighty one percent of affluent households, so those that have a net worth of a million dollars or more or an annual income of over two hundred thousand gave an average gift of thirty three thousand dollars in twenty twenty four. Trends also show that overall participation by members of this group have dropped since twenty seventeen. So will it continue to drop as these incentives are reduced? We're yet to see. Another big change that went into effect this year is the new corporate giving floor, which means that corporations can only deduct charitable gifts that are above one percent of their taxable income. So this eliminates the tax benefit for most small to midsize corporate charitable donations because their first one percent of the gift is no longer deductible. So as an example, a small company giving a ten thousand dollar charitable donation may receive zero tax benefit, making the gift more expensive for them. So, now we're gonna talk about bunching, which is a strategy. It's a very important concept in the new tax reality for fundraisers. In simple terms, bunching means concentrating several years worth of charitable giving into a single year to ensure that the donor qualifies for a tax break in that year. So most owners are bunching multiple years of giving into one year to make their total contributions higher than the standard deduction, which is around thirty two thousand two hundred dollars for a couple. If they don't clear that bar, none of their charitable deduction giving is deductible. So for example, if a couple typically gives five thousand dollars annually, they will stay below the standard deduction every year, and they won't get a tax break. But if they bunch this five thousand dollars for four years and they give out twenty thousand dollars in one year instead, that twenty thousand dollars plus their other deductions might finally clear that standard deduction threshold, giving them a big tax break in that year. Many major donors did use this strategy in twenty twenty five, which had added benefit of getting gifts in before that point five reduction flow was put into place this year and before the top, bracket cap of, the thirty five cents on the dollar went into effect. Also, starting this year, bunching is going to help donors clear both the high standard deduction threshold, but also clear that point five percent of the AGI floor, which as we discussed before, will be two major hurdles that hold back donors from itemizing. Now there's a couple of strategies around bunching. The first strategy is to bunch several years of donation into one year, but not exceeding that adjusted gross income. So the AGI ceiling, which is sixty percent of AGI for cash gifts or thirty percent for appreciated stocks or crypto donations. The ceiling is a place to ensure that the wealthiest people can't wipe out their entire tax bill for the year. And so by calculating a multiyear gift to just stay under that AGI limit, the donor maximizes their immediate tax savings and simplifies their tax planning. Then the the donor can, tax a couple of off years, where they just take that standard deduction. And we know that donor advised funds, staffs play a big role in this strategy because donors can contribute two to three years of donations to their staff for immediate tax benefit and then still disperse those funds annually to make sure that nonprofits can date the nonprofits or the causes they support still receive a steady flow of annual gifts. And those contributions invested in DApps can also continue to grow, meaning that organizations may see greater gifts than they would have otherwise. And the second, strategy is to exceed that AGI ceiling. And so the maximum amount of donor, amount a donor can deduct for charitable contributions into a single tax year. So this is usually reserved for a donor who has a specific massive liquidity event, like selling a business or simply someone who has too much cash or appreciated assets to contribute in one year without exceeding that annual limit. So if a donor's charitable contributions exceed the AGI limit in the year the gift is made, the unused deduction is not lost. Instead, the IRS allows the donor to carry over that unused portion and apply it as a deduction in the next tax year for up to five subsequent years. And DAFs can also be important for this strategy. A donor may decide to liquidate a large block of highly appreciated stock or crypto and contribute the entire proceeds to a DAF, and this provides a massive capital gains tax avoidance benefit today. So even if the gift gift exceeds that thirty percent AGI limit for appreciated assets, the donor gets the immediate full tax benefit of avoiding the capital gains, and the income tax deduction is simply based out over five years via the carryover. In twenty twenty four, sixty seven percent of the contributions to a major DAF sponsor were in the form of noncash assets, like appreciated stocks, real estate, or crypto. Now let's think about specific workflows that you're gonna need to build. And when you build them well, they will pay dividends over a long term. So we'll talk about portfolios and maximizing staff capacity. So digging deeper into portfolio segmentations and conversations that we have, we've created this quadrant system that we've seen work with many of our PTG, so the propensity to give model users. So the access of PTG score and assignment to Portfolio Gift Officer can be used for portfolio reassignment conversations as well as larger conversations about what you wanna do with people that are either being removed from a portfolio because of a low score for readiness to give at that specific level or being reviewed for a different type of portfolio or holding portfolio when no space is available. For example, email only campaigns for low PTG scores and unassigned constituents or increasing the caller personal outreach for those high scores, who are currently unassigned constituents. Now we see that the most successful propensity to give users create data driven rules to guide prospect management for the research and on the fly designations. So questions to consider are how many prospects can your team handle right now in a or in a year? Are you gonna be taking apart portfolios or simply remaking them? What rules can you put into place for top prospects? So whatever you decide that cutoff is gonna be when they're not assigned. So can that group be put in a holding portfolio to be monitored by the team for future assignment, or can that group get more event invitations or special emails that look more personalized but are not time intensive? So creating rules for your frontline team can make it easier for them to take action immediately when someone makes a gift. It's not assigned to their portfolio or is researched for an event. So for example, a prospect researcher sees someone is in the top two percent of scores but hasn't given in five years, they can immediately be placed in cultivation pool and tagged within over the business rule if they make a gift for further review. Or someone makes their first gift over a thousand dollars, and we see they are in the top one percent of PTG scores, amazing, We immediately wanna assign them to a portfolio and send them a quick e have the gift officer send a quick email to sort of, you know, help build and create that quick stewardship and qualification opportunity. And then on the other end of the spectrum, if someone was previously a principal gift donor but is now in the top fifteenth percentile, they're not ready for another ask just yet. So they should continue to stay where they are and be given time to build up to a larger gift while still receiving all of your content and appreciation for their previous given giving. And so some final takeaways and questions. We wanna start now. Things are never gonna be perfect. And especially with the tax changes this year, people are thinking about those larger gifts. Predictive and AI modeling is going to help you streamline a lot of your manual efforts and boost productivity. We want to set realistic goals and identify the low hanging fruits. So set goals for ROI to drive accountability and outcomes and measure results and celebrate your wins. Right. Now I'm gonna hand over to Matt for a little walk through of our application. Good. Thanks to you. So, really, we built out an application for major giving and plan giving in mind, specifically to help organizations get beyond just the identification and kind of segmentation, but actually start to build workflows with precision. And so, really, the purpose is to help conduct portfolio analysis, really help major giving teams segment their portfolios for stewardship, versus soliciting, and really start to engage other types of cohorts as well or things like last year, but not this year donors or some year, but not this year major donors, you know, by getting win backs or prioritizing by, by using windfalls data and historical giving that an organization has. Really, building out segments, which we'll show, allows your major giving teams to really hone in on the right prospects, maybe in the right market or maybe is distributed across the US or for gift officer travel planning or for event planning or for there's so many use cases for understanding your cohorts across the US and being able to visualize that and build workflows off of those. Additionally, like, when organizations work with Windfall, oftentimes, we can recommend where to start. So if you if an organization sends us a bunch of first party data, we can actually provide recommended segments, that we can build off of. Like, maybe who are the high net worth constituents who recently were promoted. So who are your high net worth donors that recently got promoted? And you can put those into a quick email campaign for or solicitation for a congratulatory note as a way to, you know, continue to steward them. And for most major giving teams, everyone wants to understand a little bit more context on those potential major donors. Do they have a high net worth? What's that context with their historical giving to our organization? Do they have any other attributes that are of interest to us? And how likely are they to actually make a major gift? Maybe we can even print out a full, you know, one or two page dossier on them that we can have in our back pocket, before we actually go into a a conversation or a solicitation ask with this household. So being able to kind of build out those workflows from, you know, taking your entire database, putting into meaningful chunks that you can then take action on, and from there, even looking at specific profiles and dossiers on those major donors to take action on. So, I'm going to share my screen. You may have to click, Matt's screen at the top of the Zoom here, to see it. But, you should be able to, see my screen. Give me one second. I'm gonna go full screen here. Okay. And so I wanna move beyond kind of the the home screen here, for the for the sake of this demo and talk a little bit more about building segments. So segments are essentially groups of constituents that are of interest to you and your team. So from a major giving perspective, maybe you wanna build a group of people that have, you know, some of Windfall's attributes. So maybe it's net worth. Maybe their net worth is you want it to be greater than five million dollars. Right? So that's kind of the floor for that a leading indicator as part of our poll. Maybe you also wanna understand, you know, maybe they're within certain metro areas. So, you know, maybe we focus specifically, you know, in major markets like, New York. We'll do includes. Right? So you don't have to do this exact Chicago, and we'll also do San Francisco. How about that? You also maybe wanna understand, like, okay. Historically, we wanna make sure that they're tied to a trust, which is another key indicator for us. But then you wanna maybe understand some of your historical data. So things like, alright. Maybe their largest gift amount is less than a thousand dollars. Like, who are those folks historically that are wealthy within these certain MSAs that are tied to a trust that have given us money in or donations in the past, but, you know, maybe less than, our major gift dollar amount. And so, essentially, you can come here and create these segments of people in your database that you can then take action on. For the sake of time, I'm actually just gonna go back to one of the one of these that we've already made. How about we look at these maybe this major or let's do this hidden hidden gems super simple segment. Who has a net worth of over ten million dollars in a database with a lifetime donation amount of less than a hundred dollars, but more than zero dollars? So super, you know, super affluent population, but historical giving is low. Right? You may see here that, like, we actually have, you know, eighty eight hundred seventy five constituents across the US broken out by county. You can see some of them are in South Florida, you know, in Greater Boston, along the West Coast as well, you know, also in Chicago as well. You can see a little bit more about the distribution of wealth of this population, which is great. But these eight hundred and seventy five people, you wanna be able to take action on them. So you can either get these, you know, put directly into your inbox for major gift officer stewardship. You could even filter by who's assigned and who isn't. Right? So who are the unassigned high net worth households within your CRM and push these out to you. If you're on an integrated solution, maybe like Salesforce, you could even push this out into Salesforce campaigns as well. But even from here cool. As you understand about there's there's so many people in here. Like, maybe you wanna see some of these people that are within this, you know, specific cohort. You could just sort by net worth. Oops. I did it the opposite way. You can sort by net worth. You could sort by total donations. You can see there's some super affluent populations, maybe like Sunny in here. Historical donations to the org are are are limited. We wanna be able to learn a little bit more about Sunny here. So give it a second to load. Maybe I'll pick someone else. Let's pick this person. Yeah. William Wibble. So you can see here maybe as William has a high net worth, multi property owner, philanthropic to other organizations, but the historical transactions to organization and donations is just less than a hundred dollars cumulatively. Like, what is the connection here to to William? What are the signals here that we see? He's pretty philanthropic to other organizations. And as a managing director, this is a great person. Maybe we wanna generate a dossier to learn a little bit more context on William. So on the fly, you can really start to review philanthropic causes, net worth, some of the historical giving metrics, any other kind of first party data tied to to William that you have and third party data that Windfall has as well to be able to understand on the fly, a bit more about William here. So I'll give it a second to build. And as you can see here, you know, William has a high net worth. You can tie directly to his LinkedIn profile. You can see super high capacity prospects, but is a low level donor as you can tell. As you can see, we can even provide recommended recommendations for average for your major gift officers or team. Know? Again, the goal here, I think, for William in this example is is to qualify interest and discover why he has been giving so limited to date and build from there. But as an example, you know, these dossiers, you can send the link to, or you can even print a PDF in a super, easy format. So, again, this is just a workflow. Right? Building a group of people that are of interest, maybe those, you know, net worth households with historical low giving to the organization, click into specific people that fall into this segment, and then actually come out and generate these these profiles and dossiers that you can then leverage in your outreach when you reach out to Will. That's a super simple workflow.