Empowering Your Spring Appeals and Galas

First, I wanted to share our agenda. This session will provide a quick overview of windfall strategies for your spring appeals, focusing on identifying those hidden gems and using data for better segmentation and outreach. Next, we'll discuss best practices to maximize your fundraising impact for upcoming events in galas. Then we'll we'll give a live demo of our Windfall application. And finally, to close out, we'll review our key takeaways and do some q and a. As a quick introduction, hi, I'm Isabella, a data and AI specialist here at Windfall with dedicated experience working in the nonprofit sector, supporting organizations in both programming and fundraising. I'm also joined here today by Court. Court, I'll pass it over to you for a quick introduction. Hey, everyone. Yeah. My name is Court. I always say Court Captain. That's my real name. That's just that's not just some name I I gave myself. You can thank my parents for that. I'm on the nonprofit sales team here at Windfall. And prior actually to my time here, I was actually working with a few different tech companies, primarily serving the faith based nonprofit space. And I've been decade long plus volunteer with an organization mentoring youth here in Denver and previously in Seattle. I have a big heart for the nonprofit space. Amazing. Thank you, Court. And for those who may be less familiar with OneVault, we help data driven non profits more effectively engage with constituents through accurate data and best in class propensity modeling. Our database has over one hundred million U. S. Households, including twenty million affluent households, and we're proud to be trusted by over fifteen hundred customers. But just to give a quick overview, this webinar will be particularly helpful for nonprofit professionals focused on becoming more data driven and who wanna leverage AI in their spring fundraising endeavors. But before we dive in, let's review what we will and won't touch on. We will discuss Windfall's mission in high level product offerings, the value of leveraging wealth data and segmentation and outreach, best practices for planning executing high impact fundraising in events and galas, and how to use the Windfall application to automate your workflows. What you won't learn is detailed information about Windfall's dataset and how we approach wealth, our data science or modeling approach specific to your organization, and how our data could impact your constituent database or Windfall's pricing and model for your organization. But we're always happy to discuss those details with you, so feel free to send us an email after today's session. But to get us started here, we have a quick poll for you all. The question here is how are you currently prioritizing donors for spring appeals? I would love to get a sense of your current approaches. So let me go ahead and launch that poll. Okay. Amazing. So curious where this lands. Your options are past giving history, event attendance, wealth and data insights, a mix of the above, or not sure and still figuring it out. So go ahead and lock in your answers. Great, I see responses coming in. This will be really helpful context. Already, I'll give everybody about ten more seconds. Great. I am gonna go ahead and launch the results. Perfect. This is especially valuable because the strategies can vary widely. If you don't have a defined approach yet, that's perfectly fine. This will be really useful as we walk through how to build a strong strategy from the ground up. Amazing. Well, thank you all so much for participating. Court will now share a brief overview of Windfall to kick us off. Yeah. I'm excited to jump in and share. Forgot to mention this earlier, but, you know, my the organization I volunteer with, we're actually having our, spring gala tomorrow. So, you know, good timing for this conversation. But, as far as an overview of Windfall, you know, our vision here is to really change the way that organizations understand and engage their donors, especially through wealth and career data insights. And the way that we're doing this currently is we've actually built up our own proprietary dataset of over one hundred million US households through the public domain and some data partnerships that we have. We actually don't purchase or license out any third party data at all, which just allows us to have far more control over the quality of the data that we're including in our models. Through this, we're internally modeling and estimating a precise net worth figure tracked at the household level among other wealth and career related data points that we then enrich back to our customers. So the way that our customers are using this data is first, we wanna help you identify high or maybe the highest net worth individuals in your database to help prioritize, excuse me, your overall workflows there. We want to better understand your constituents and help you find hidden gems using precise net worth figures and a number of other wealth data insights. And three, we want to help you determine, you know, maybe when and also how to engage constituents. For example, maybe should a new donor receive a personal phone call, are they better suited for direct mail or email campaigns? We have three main product offerings here: wealth screening, propensity modeling, and data link. Propensity modeling is something that we do bespoke for each individual customer that we're working with, so each model is unique and built specifically for each customer. We also have a product called data link, which allows us to basically sync two databases, enabling to find duplicate records across multiple systems so we can kind of match against those to have a better understanding of where our donors are similar to other constituents. What's really great about Windfall two that we love and our customers love is that pricing is not based on the number of records or credits. We actually allow you to screen your full database at an unlimited rate without having to be charged on a per record or per cost basis there. So this relates to this next slide here, essentially. What we see is that, you know, when we're thinking about predictive AI, it's really most impactful when nonprofits are able to see everyone, not just small groups. And this is similar to windfalls while screening. Traditionally, we know that organizations may feel pressured to maybe create really specified segments just for screening before we're even submitting that to their provider based off of pricing per record, which is typically the normal model there. So maybe you think that you would only want the wealth data on, you know, previous donors or those that you might already have an indication that they could be affluent. However, this is how, you know, your team can maybe perhaps, like, miss out on some hidden gems that you maybe otherwise wouldn't have been aware of. With Windfall's unlimited model here, you can actually, you know, like as we said, screen your whole database and avoid a little bit of selection bias there and honestly analysis paralysis too because the best practice is just to go ahead and just screen everyone because it does make a difference for us based off of cost. This here is a snapshot of the triggers available in our basic wealth screening package. So in addition to net worth, we're also providing about thirty or so wealth attributions to provide a real three sixty degree view of your constituents' household to improve your one on one engagement as well as to enhance different reporting and workflows. The unhighlighted triggers are available in our Wellscreening package. And then the highlighted triggers here are added in our Wellscreening Premier offering, which I'll talk about in just this next slide. The Career Intelligence data here is is a separate dataset that we have that's updated monthly as opposed to our wealth data, which we actually update and refresh internally weekly. And here we can match to different contacts that our wealth data does not, which is really cool. So popular career triggers include things like, you know, company name, job title, LinkedIn URL, and career change to things like promotion or retirement or just changing jobs. This is really great just to support every everything from Grow, whether it's corporate sponsorships or solicitation for those things, matching gifts, planned giving, and more. One thing I talk about with my customers a lot is, hey, maybe there's someone who we have a foot in the door with that works at a company that would be great to maybe ask to see if they would sponsor a gala or an event or a banquet of some sort. And then this past fall, we actually launched a new trigger available on our Premier package called our DAF Trigger, donor advised fund, household affiliation trigger. I'm actually currently working with a customer who reviewed Windfall just a couple years ago and has since come back to purchase Windfall almost solely just for this new data point, which is really exciting that we're helping them with that. And then I also spoke to another customer yesterday who highlighted that this is helping them have a better understanding of the likelihood that a prospect might actually give to their organization. So we're we're super excited to offer this. And if you wanna discuss more with us, please please let us know in the chat or or reach out to anyone that you're working with. Amazing. Well, thank you so much, Court. Moving into our next section, we'll discuss these specific strategies your team can use for your, spring fundraising season. So the first step many organizations take after receiving wealth data is simply sorting net worth from highest to lowest, and almost immediately the same question comes up. Do I recognize the top one hundred names, the top fifty, top ten? What most teams quickly discover is that there are always a few surprises, especially when you look at wealth data alongside past donation history. That's often where organizations start to uncover what we like to call their hidden gems. When we talk about hidden gems, what we're really talking about is what changes you stop looking at wealth in isolation and start looking at it in context, specifically alongside giving history. Because wealth alone doesn't tell you who your best opportunities are, it's the relationship between wealth and past giving history that really reveals the full picture here. One of the easiest ways to visualize that relationship is by organizing donors into quadrants that compare wealth with donation history. So let's walk through them. First, we have lower wealth and low donation history. These donors are often strong candidates for your annual giving and stewardship teams. You want to continue cultivating these relationships and watch out for any changes in giving patterns or increases in wealth. Next, we have our lower wealth and high donation history. This group has already shown strong support, so it makes sense to have a leadership annual gift officer, continue stewardship, and engagement with them. Third, we have our high wealth and high donation history. These donors are obvious major gift prospects, so make sure they're assigned to a major gift portfolio. And finally, we have high wealth but low donation history, our true hidden gems here. These are affluent constituents who have been engaged with your organization but haven't yet asked at the right level. With thoughtful outreach, they're often primed to increase their giving, maybe even become a major gifter in the future. Currently, looking at these five donors, your team might prioritize them all equally based upon a gut feeling or because they are familiar names in your database. However, by relying solely on first party history, risk spending your limited time on donors who have already reached their capacity while missing the hidden gems who have yet to be cultivated. By combining wealth data with what you already know about the donor, like past giving amounts or participation in events, you get a much clearer picture of who actually has that potential to give a lot more. Take Simon as an example. Simon made their first donation after attending last year's annual gala. Before seeing the wealth data, they may have stayed in a general nurture campaign or probably would have never been personally engaged for that major gift. But now we see that Simon has a high net worth, owns multiple properties, and is connected to a trust. That insight really shifts how we approach them. Using Windfall's data removes key question marks and helps helps your team really refine outreach strategies in a more targeted and strategic way. Another key step in covering those hidden gems is using additional data points for segmentation. One challenge many organizations face is having a high volume of promising high net worth constituents in their database, but not enough time or staff to engage each prospect individually. Segmentation could really help your team prioritize outreach at scale. Now let's look at how we can use our Windfall triggers for various segments to help individual giving strategies. Let's start with annual giving. One goal we often hear from annual giving teams participation across the constituent database. Whether that's renewing past donors or acquiring those new ones, Windfall's data helps you achieve those goals by narrowing your focus. For an annual giving segment, you could target folks who have given smaller amounts, for example, than one thousand dollars have donated to causes aligned with your mission, or have a net worth less than one million dollars And at the same time, you can exclude non ideal prospects like donors whose giving would push them to a higher level or those already assigned to an annual or major gift portfolio. Next, have our major gifts. To grow your major gift pipeline and build officer portfolios, you can create a segment that reveals donors who have given small amounts but have that high net worth, maybe let's say ten million or more. You could also include a liquidity trigger that allows you to approach these donors at times when they may have more flexibility to deepen their support to your organization. But with that said, you can also set an exclusion criteria for upcoming solicitations so that this report does not surface donors who have given ten thousand dollars or more in the last six months or even donors with no engagement. But finally, we have our planned giving segments that allow you to identify donors with assets. In this segment, you could focus on loyal donors who have given more than ten times to your organization and are also associated with trusts and who have volunteered with you. And on that note, you could also be sure to include it, exclude anyone who has already had that, planned gift with you or even just non donors with zero gift history as are less likely to make a planned gift as their first commitment. You could also leverage windfall triggers for spring event solicitations. You could create a segment based upon, philanthropic interests that align with your organization, and you could even identify small business owners within your area inside of that segment. Small business owners may have the resources to sponsor products at your event or even the venue itself. But on the flip side, you could also be sure to exclude high net worth donors with historical gifts over one thousand dollars because you'd probably want to give them more of a personalized outreach with VIP seating offerings. Next, we have targeted ask amounts. Net worth gives you the confidence to make an accurate ask, so you're neither under asking or over asking. When you layer in our liquidity triggers, you add the timing component, allowing you to reach out when a prospect is most able to give. You can also ensure that recent donors or non donors are excluded from the segment to avoid overloading with a net worth ask too early. Last but not least, creating segments with our recent life triggers. These recent life triggers allow you to create tailored outreach that speaks to your constituents' world, their lived experience, or what is going on in their minds. For example, connecting with a top donor who has recently moved. You can both congratulate them and get their updated address on file. So you're maintaining your database all while deepening your relationship with important donors. And as I mentioned, there are many ways to communicate with donors and a multichannel approach is always the most effective. I wanna speak to multichannel approach because as you plan your spring donor appeals, Winflo wants you to use all of your opportunities to communicate, create connection, and grow a relationship with that donor. Knowing that there are more ways to communicate, the more opportunity there is to convert to a major gift. With a multichannel approach, you can target specific audiences with, different strategies, therefore increasing your ability to everyone. You are increasing your ability to personalize outreach, And you can also be sure you are telling the right story to the right donor by tracking their engagement with your organization and their philanthropic engagement in Windfall. You're also getting your name, logo, mission, and stories in front of people multiple times across multiple venues, which improves brand recognition. In this visualization, we are specifically focused on spring solicitations. There are two main groups here, lapsed major donors and also lapsed donors. Within these two groups, you can create four segments that have their own outreach methods and messaging that includes phone calls, handwritten notes, direct mail, email, and most likely social media across them all. And when you create specific segments based on previous donations amounts or targeted gift amount, you can easily bucket people into each outreach message to increase your chances of success. Alright, everyone. So we have our second and final poll of the day. I'm really curious about this one. What is your biggest challenge in preparing for spring galas and events? I'll go ahead and launch that poll now. Perfect. Okay. Amazing. So you'll see that pop up right on your screen. Please take about thirty seconds or so to make your selection. Your options are identifying the right prospects, prioritizing outreach, limited staff and resources, data quality or access, and timing coordination. Murti seeing a few come in. Really great mix so far. All right, let's give it about three more seconds. Lock in those answers. Amazing. I am going to launch the results. Great. Amazing. This will be really helpful in understanding where you're currently at today and where there may be those opportunities to optimize, which brings us perfectly into our next slide here. Perfect. One second here. Okay. Great. Now that we've discussed how to optimize your appeals, we'll shift your focus into the other major pillar, which is around those spring events. It helps to think of event fundraising in three different stages, planning, execution, and follow-up. So the first planning, this is where you can set the foundation, decide on the event type, the location, and timing, identify your invitees, and craft personalized messaging. And don't forget corporate sponsors. They can be very powerful partners in driving both funding and engagement. The second is execution. This is the live moment. Make sure everything runs smoothly, but also focus on the personal side, such as engaging those VIPs and high potential donors individually. Use the knowledge you've gained from donor screenings to guide conversations and deepen those connections. And the very last is to follow-up. Many organizations underestimate this stage, but it's very crucial. It's important to send those customized follow ups, prioritize high potential donors, and plan next steps for cultivating future engagement. This stage often turns a successful event into long term growth and stronger donor relationships. But in addition to knowing who to invite, Windfall can also guide you on how to send those invitations. We can use net worth and other data triggers to decide the most effective channel for each person because how to invite is delivered and can significantly impact whether someone actually attends your event. For example, those hidden gems, low contributing donors with high net worth might receive a phone call from a board member who shares their interest in or industry. That personal connection can build rapport before the event even happens. Other high net worth prospects might get a mailed invitation that's personally signed. Personalized mail shows that organizations truly value their presence and increase their attendance. And for ultra high net worth prospects, a fully handwritten note can make an even stronger impression here. You can also use career data to find sponsors or donors who can help offset event costs. For example, after enriching your database, you might discover a regular donor owns a restaurant and could provide a discounted catering price. Or you may see that many of your donors are VIPs, work at the same company. You can leverage those connections to explore corporate sponsorships, matching gift programs, or in kind donations. This information is also super useful when approaching potential sponsors. You could show them the level of influence or network size of your attendees. Example, you might say eighty percent of the database are direct level professionals across those industries. Sponsoring this event gives you direct access into this audience. Once your attendee RSVPs and your lists are all set, we recommend rescreening those RSVPs. Wealth and other data can change really quickly and having the latest information in hand helps you make real time decisions during the event. Windfall makes this super easy with our unlimited screenings throughout your subscription. With the finalized attendee lease, you can strategically arrange tables. For example, let's say we're a homelessness relief organization hosting our annual gala. At one table, we might see a marketing executive at a Forbes one hundred company alongside their plus one. From screening, we can also see that someone at the exact same company in a different department is attending this gala. You can place them together, creating synergy and allowing discussions about corporate donations from multiple angles. Next, we might see a volunteer from our organization next to two prospects who have contributed to other human services organizations. The donor can engage them in a conversation about their known interests, making the interaction both meaningful and strategic. To make sure your team uses their time effectively after the event, it really helps to divide your attendees into segments for tailored follow-up. Rather than sending the same message to everyone, you can actually customize your outreach for each group, making it more likely that your asks were completed and that attendees stay very engaged with your organization. Segments can be based on the type of attendance. For example, a guest list of an attendee, a volunteer, or a high priority donor may each need different follow-up approaches since they are familiar with your organization and, the organization varies. But once these segments are defined, you can assign specific team members to reach out to them, just like how we, prioritize invitations when planning the event. Semi thing also really helps set up the framework to regularly refresh your wealth screening data, ensuring any new or updated donors are routed appropriately for a follow-up. Amazing. And with that, I'll pass it over to Court to discuss our Windfall application. Great. Thanks, Isabella. So we have a lot of different ways that you could feed into our engine here. You got your, you know, your CRM data with volunteers, events, donations, engagement. And then the output around this is enriching that data then back based off of your specific needs and goals. And so we're actually gonna show some examples of how you can do this in the Windfall application, especially just in regards to the way we just talked about it. So let's jump in here. I'm gonna take over and show the application. Here we go. Great. Awesome. So This is our application, guys. This is designed really to just make sure that we have eyes on the people that we want to identify. And so this discovery tab is where we can set up and run and certainly create our own segmented lists. I'll come back to this and show some examples that we've kind of pre built out in our demo environment. But I mean to actually just show how how simple and easy this is. And so yeah. First, I wanna talk about, you know, a little bit in regards to some of the things we just talked about. So for example, maybe we wanna find groups of people that we think would be really good to make sure we're including and events and invitations. Right? So one of the things that we can do is even pull in different, like, location information. So, for example, we can say like, hey, if we know the ZIP code of the area, so this is, you know, a local to Denver ZIP code here. We can say, hey. Anyone who lives in this ZIP code, we could actually even add in multiple versions of this. We could even do, maybe something a little bit more broad, like metro area here. So if we're doing a certain metro for where our certain donors live, and we want to make sure that we can segment those people in that area. Even if internally, since this is a windfall field that even if we're not we don't have that data on our own constituents, We're saying, hey, this is based off of how Windfall is tracking them. And then we can pull in things like, hey, maybe if they're from or excuse me, we can pull in that data that's being since it's the application based off of maybe some of their donor history. So for example, maybe we wanna find people who are currently flagged as an active donor, for example. Or maybe one of the things that Isabella talked about was, like, for example, lapsed donors. Like, if we wanna go after lapsed donors, we can actually define that here in the application. So let's do that. Let's maybe look at people who are specifically lapsed. And then maybe we can look at additional trigger that we talked about way earlier. Like, for example, folks who might have had a liquidity events, maybe indicating that they could be perhaps like primed to want to come to a banquet or a gala or an auction, maybe to bid on some items and maybe take advantage of that liquidity events here. We can run a list of these people to that and make sure we're able to prioritize and understand who fits in that group. I think a key one that I'm forgetting certainly is high net worth individuals. So, perhaps anyone with a net worth greater than a certain threshold depending on perhaps the target range of amounts we're looking to fundraise. But I always kind of start with maybe two point five million dollars here or so. Let's talk about a different one though, maybe separate from events. And then we talked a little bit about hidden gems. This is helpful just for as we're thinking through spring appeals. You know, I like to say like, hey, we don't need to wait to follow-up with, you know, LiveBunt donors or anyone else. We can get started on Outreach, you know, the whole whole year round. And so maybe a good one to start with here is just, you know, someone who maybe has a a net worth greater than a certain amount. So so we'll just say we'll start with, you know, someone who's a net worth greater than five million dollars. And then perhaps thinking about a hidden gem, I think typically these are people who maybe haven't necessarily given a lot to us up to this point. So maybe we can say largest gift or any dollar amount gift, we could say, you know, is is less than a certain threshold. So maybe we could say anyone who's given less than five hundred dollars. And then maybe someone who has a certain type of affinity towards our type of organization. So I wanna pull this in. So philanthropic cause, we could say, hey, maybe we're an animal rights organization. And so someone who supports animal rights organizations outside of our own, this would be a really good, like, hidden gem list run. And again, we're able to do this because this is assuming that, you know, we're screening to and matching across the the sum of the database as opposed to maybe only looking at the people that we, you know, already know, or are already in a portfolio. This is looking at, you know, specifically people who maybe we haven't perhaps identified. And then you're always able to add in any additional fields either from windfalls data, or, our actual our own nonprofit individual data here. So let's hop back to this discovery page. I just wanna talk a little bit about this, just cause it's fun. So one of the things that we're we do in here is we actually will give you AI recommended segments based off of a number of different factors, like what is the actual data you're getting from windfall, what is the system seen from what's being sent to the application? For example, all sorts of things. So things like, you know, here's one high net worth donor in an executive role. These are all you know, even if you're not using Windfall, this is something that I would highly recommend you guys do as far as segmentation is some of these types of segments. Right? Looping in, again, that first party data with the third party data. I wanna click into some of these just to show just some examples of what they might look like. So here's, you know, an example of a of a hidden gem report. I'm gonna come in here and just look at to show you what this was built based off of. So real really simple. Someone whose lifetime donation amount is less than or equal to a hundred dollars, but someone who has a net worth greater than five million dollars. So this is pre setup and I'm not gonna make any changes to our demo environment. But I will show you what some of the insights look like. Some cool stuff is we'll show a heat map. So, you know, whether or not you're a national organization or not, we can definitely, you know, look at some of this where there might be trends for where some of our our donors are or where folks are in in terms of the specific segment. Some different insights in terms of the net worth density across the group. What is the average and median net worth? And then what are even some of the top philanthropic triggers here? A helpful way to think about too specifically of like, hey, maybe maybe for a national organization, maybe we could use a gift officer, you know, in the in in Arizona, in this Maricopa County here, right? Or in South Beach, wherever we want. Maybe if we're seeing a certain heat map or a portion of the heat map here, but that isn't getting addressed by our current staffing. And then lastly, I'm not gonna get into this today, but also we do provide the ability to have a profile of every single person in your database if you want some really clean, you know, windfall specific examples of what the data looks like. And we even it will give you the ability to generate a certain number of AI generated dossiers on your constituents. I'm not gonna get into this now today, but wanted to show just explain that that was available to you. So please reach out to us if you're interested in learning more about that. But I'm gonna go back to the slides here. Actually, Isabel, would you go ahead and go back to sharing the slides? Yes. Will do. Let me pull up the slides. Okay. Great. Are you able to see that okay? Yeah. Go ahead and and and here, I'll build it out here. So this Ronald McDonald House that we've worked with had a robust event schedule across the community and needed help prioritizing donor cultivation, specifically at events to grow their major gift program. And what they're able to see is they they screened all their constituents attending their annual golf tournament and and found a constituent who'd previously only given about five thousand dollars through a telephone actually, but was not a consistent year over year donor. But they were worth actually over twenty five million dollars and had never even met anyone on the team. And so the executive director specifically sought this donor out to thank them during the tournament, then he was able to they doubled their donation on the spot, which is which is huge. So just some key takeaways that we want to discuss and recap with you guys is yeah, like we said earlier, just, you know, don't wait until end of year or not. We think that spring is a great time to really uncover hidden gems and start to develop relationships. We have found just through being able to screen as many records as you're able to without having to kind of create different silos of screening it through wealth data, you're able to leverage this information through multiple use cases like Isabelle talked about, you know, events, annual giving, planned giving, as well as maybe some of the more traditional use cases. And being able to leverage third party wealth data along with things like giving history helps to prioritize and also diversify event outreach ahead of time. And then also being able to look at wealth insights can really help inform and maybe make our time post event a little bit more efficient in regards to our strategy. And then lastly, just being able to tie this to our specific mission statement is, through this model here, hope that it does impact and help us to understand our donors and maybe a new way that we previously haven't been able to and hopefully for the best impact for our organization. If you like what you guys heard today and if you're interested in learning more, please check out our customer support site windfall dot com to explore many of the same learnings that we share on this webinar. And we will get these slides out to you guys afterwards. Also as a bonus for attending, we invite you to get fill out a free wealth analytics report form. We'll be able to show a top down view kind of on the the total potential opportunity in your dataset based off of a lot of the things that we talked about today to see perhaps where are there some hidden gems in your database that weren't previously on our radar. This report also goes to our current customers, and it gets updated every time customers screen their data and visually showcase insights into your database's potential, including things like donation trends, insights, and database potential. You can get started on this right away by heading to specifically the Resources tab on our website and selecting Wealth Analytics Report on the dropdown. It'll be on the bottom right hand side.