Fundraising+ Connections

Resources:

• Transcript

  Miriam Wright:
  Hello, hello everyone just joining. We're going to wait a couple of minutes just so that people trickle in and then we can get started. Hello, hello to everyone joining us. We are just going to wait a couple of minutes just so that we can let people in before we start. Welcome to everyone that's joining so far. Just wait maybe one more minute and then we can kick off. Okay, brilliant. I think we should make a start.
  
  Hello everyone and welcome to the third event in this year's Philanthropy Series, Fundraising and Connections. So my name is Miriam, my pronouns are she/her. I'm a Senior Consultant Fundraising Specialist here at Spektrix, based in Manchester in the UK. And we're also going to be joined by Jake Larimer, Consultant Fundraising Specialist based out of New York, and Sara Stevens, Senior Consultant Fundraising Specialist based out of Austin, Texas.
  
  So a bit of housekeeping. We are recording today's session and we will send the recording as well as the other resources that will be mentioned by the team during the webinar by email after the session. This webinar will last approximately one hour, including time for questions at the end. And we do also have live captioning available, which you can turn on and off using the CC button at the bottom of your screen.
  
  So as the title may suggest, we will be discussing the theme of connections in today's webinar. And taking a really broad strokes view, what else is fundraising about if not building, maintaining and understanding connections? The connection between fundraiser and donor, donor and donor and donor and organization. How those relationships and connections are viewed, recorded and maintained vary across all different types of fundraising. But what we hope this webinar will really demonstrate is that interpersonal relationships are at the center. People give to people. We'll be covering why connections are important, different types of connections as well as Spektrix's functionality to record those connections, but the technology and the tools that we use are there to build a picture and inform the context of the relationships that you are building. So let's have a look at our agenda.
  
  So I'm going to begin by talking about the role of connections when it comes to individual people and donors of your organization. Sara will then expand on this specifically focusing on boards of Directors before Jake presents to us about connections within the world of institutional fundraising, all sprinkled with useful and actionable Spektrix functionality. And we'll then have time for a Q&A. Now, as a reminder, you can submit questions throughout the webinar by using the Q&A function at the bottom of your screen. Lovely.
  
  So let's begin with how connections play a role in our fundraising work with individuals. So in this section I'll begin by discussing how we record and evaluate a donor's connection with the work that we do as fundraisers and our organizations. Can we assess that connection level from a quick glance or does it require deeper analysis? And then I'll briefly discuss the importance of the connections that our donors have with other individuals.
  
  So how do we understand an individual's connection with our organization's work? And that's a big topic, one that essentially touches on everything that we do as arts workers. For a fundraiser, the connection that a donor has with our work will impact how we build and maintain relationships with them beyond just encouraging them to buy more tickets and attend more events, which of course we want them to do. But a connection might represent something like artistic interest. Is this donor a lover of classical or contemporary music? Do they prefer William Shakespeare to Carol Churchill? And how do we understand that connection?
  
  We have access to the work. Are you accurately recording if a donor has any additional access needs that allow them to connect with your work? Do you know whether they have a seat preference or that they prefer to come to a Saturday matinee rather than a Friday night? Fundraising connections, so do you have an individual in your fundraising or development team who is responsible for any one donor or another and is managing that relationship? And then of course previous asks, have you approached this person before to ask them for their support?
  
  And all of these different forms of connection many times can be understood through data stored by an individual's customer record. But consider the different ways that this type of information is made available to you by considering how different types of data is recorded. So you have customer-driven information which arrives in your system from the customer themselves. They are booking themselves tickets, they are buying memberships or donating regularly. And all of those pieces of data go into the picture of what their connection with your organization looks like.
  
  And then you have fundraiser-driven information that is entered into a system to add additional contextual information relating to the relationship or connection with that donor. And this could range from knowing that an individual also supports a similar organization in the same area or even that one of your fundraisers chatted to them at an event and they seemed really interested in a new initiative. These bits of data can't be brought into our systems without internal intervention and consideration. It's not necessarily the type of information that an individual volunteers themselves via their booking behavior, but it does provide additional layers of context with regards to how that individual may be or is already connected with your organization.
  
  Now, I'm not going to touch too much on customer-driven information as this is covered in many other resources in our support center and in our knowledge library around how we evaluate the purchasing behavior of donors via reporting and customer lists. But we can evaluate this information on an individual's basis, something like this, looking at a donor's timeline in the opportunities interface and seeing that they're attending an upcoming show like this example of our customer who's attending Aladdin soon. Or, we can evaluate this in aggregate so segmenting your donor base to find individuals with a particular loyalty level like this example of a customer list looking at big ticket spenders in a particular postcode who have donated before.
  
  And there are certain pieces of information that enhance someone's connection with your organization that may at first glance seem to be needing to be entered into the system by yourselves. You have to go in and give the system this information about a donor. But actually some of these could be customer-driven. And the examples I'm going to use are those of artistic interests and access requirements.
  
  So what you can see here is using tag groups that you make available online, you could allow customers to self-select both of these, ensuring not only are you able to provide accessibility to customers with additional requirements to book their own tickets online, but also providing useful additional context for fundraising conversations, such as the type of work that donors prefer. And this is an example from MK Gallery in the UK where they allow customers to self-select both of these, both access requirements and interest groups when creating an account online. And certain access tags here power the ability to unlock both wheelchair and personal assistance tickets. And allowing customers to self-select the type of activity that they're interested in not only provides useful data for our prospecting work, but it could also power particular fundraising asks made at checkout and providing accurate data which informs our understanding of a donor's connection with our organization.
  
  Fundraiser-driven information represents a connection that is not necessarily produced by an individual's buying behavior, but its additional context made visible to a fundraiser. And one such example I know many organizations use is representing who in the fundraising or development team is responsible for a particular individual who is essentially the relationship manager of that donor. Customer attributes, like you can see here, allow us to record additional information on a customer record, which can then be used in segmentation and reporting functionalities.
  
  So in this example, I've logged that Sara Stevens is the assigned fundraiser of this individual. I can then use this information in a custom report so that I'm informed about a customer's behavior, like adding it into something like this, which is a donor occupancy report so that we can see where our donors are in the building. And in my last position, we were really focused on being on top of when our donors were coming into our venue and which shows they were attending and where they were sitting, especially for important or high-budget productions. And by adding further information like this, we can ensure that the right people in our team are aware of every opportunity to connect with our donors.
  
  Another example, something like a donor profile or a donor blurb. Now, I'm sure many of you will be familiar with the pink note in Spektrix, otherwise known as the fundraising note. This is a great place to pop high-level profile notes on a donor's record only visible to those in the opportunities interface such as logging their work history or other organizations that they also support.
  
  But it's worth bearing in mind as information is inputted into the system, consider how you're going to use it and how you will get it out. So this pink note is fantastic for high level information that stays relatively consistent about a donor. But, for information that is perhaps time stamped, the activity tool may be more appropriate because it's far easier to report on things like chance meetings and conversations at events via activities rather than via the pink note due to the additional information we can add such as the date of the activity, the activity type, and any attachments. And all of these different ways of logging information that represents a connection go into how we can maintain these donor relationships.
  
  However, what about when the artistic work is paused? How do we maintain those connections with individuals? And I'm sure you are all considering arguably the biggest pause in artistic work over the last five years, but I'm going to mention briefly Citizens Theatre in Glasgow and their capital campaign. So Mari Roscoe spoke to me about her experience joining Citizens Theatre in 2022 as their Director of Development. And at this point their public capital campaign had been ongoing for five years. And so understanding and maintaining the connections of individual donors to the Citizens became the biggest challenge for the fundraising team. Without a venue open or regularly scheduled, maintaining connections with existing donors and retaining their support has been central to their fundraising strategy, specifically the connections of original capital project donors and seat sponsors.
  
  As they're working towards a reopening model with the venue set to be open in 2025, they've continued with other approaches to be able to connect with those donors outside of inviting them to their venue. And those have included organizing visits to productions at other Glasgow and Edinburgh theaters alongside things like pre-theater dinners, which is a really good example of something that Sara is going to mention in a little bit around the community-centric fundraising principle of non-profit organizations being mutually supportive of each other.
  
  And in their seven-year closure, Citizens Theatre has retained approximately two thirds of its patron base and as of May of this year, they hadn't staged a production in around a year and a half, but they haven't lost any of their donors in that timeframe. Mari feels that you as a fundraiser are working from a position of knowledge. You understand how a theater works, the risks and processes of a capital campaign, and this means that you will always be in a prime position to allow for transparent conversations. And this includes conversations around progress and moving to a reopening model and the implications of opening a new venue in a significantly different economy. And Citizens Theatre will be welcoming audiences and donors back to their site in 2025.
  
  Finally, we can see individual connections as the interpersonal relationships between donors themselves and how that might impact how we interact with them as fundraisers. And this might include familial connections such as a couple that make their philanthropic contributions together as spouses or a parent/child relationship, for example. It could include working connections like two donors who work at the same company or they're on the same board together. Finally, you might just have donors that are friends with each other.
  
  And when it comes to connections between individual donors and prospects, knowing how and when to log those relationships is important for both your fundraising and your data-storing procedures. There are certain connections between individuals that are prudent to record in our system. One such example would be spousal relationships for couples who make donations together. And in my experience working in fundraising database management, we had many, many couples who engaged and connected with our organization as essentially one unit, and so it was crucial to treat them as such, but we needed to record them as individual customer records in Spektrix. So it's no surprise that I'm going to show you the relationship functionality now.
  
  There are three overarching different types of relationships in Spektrix. We have individual to individual, like a parent to child or a spousal relationship, as I've talked about. We have individual to organization, like an employee of a business. And we have organization to organization, like a subsidiary to a parent company. And within each of these relationships, you can get as granular as you'd like to be in terms of labeling them. You can also set an importance score of one to five and include start and end dates or whether the relationship is a perpetual relationship.
  
  So in this individual to individual example, I have Jake and Victoria who are linked via a coworker relationship as indicated by the works with link. And the start date was Jake's first day at the job. And then when either Jake or Victoria leave, we can populate the end date of their relationship. And relationships are a key part of those connections that we use as fundraisers. And Jake will be covering the specific organization to individual relationships later on in the webinar.
  
  But I'm now going to pass on to Sara who will take a deep dive into some particular individuals. But as a reminder, you can submit questions as we go via the Q&A box at the bottom. So take it away, Sara.
  
  Jake Larimer:
  Thank you, Miriam. So those individual connections are so integral to your day-to-day, but there is a subset of that group that you can dive way deeper into and that is your board of Directors. Now, board expectations vary from organization to organization, but across organizations their core purpose remains the same.
  
  First and foremost, they do have a financial responsibility to your organization. And this could be in the form of a personal financial commitment like board dues, donations to a capital project or participation in fundraising events like a gala. Or perhaps your board is risk averse, meaning in the event that your organization has to cease operations, they would be held responsible for any debt accrued.
  
  They may even act in more of an advisory capacity, which could be financial advisory since your board is often the one overseeing and approving budgets, taking a look at salary reviews for folks in leadership roles, and they should have a general understanding of the money coming into your organization via earned revenue, like ticket sales subscriptions, merchandise sales, as well as contributed revenue like donations and philanthropic memberships. But taking that a step further, they may also sit on committees that focus on recruiting new board members, assisting with an audit or even looking at legal questions and contracts.
  
  I think that the thing that makes a board member the most valuable, more valuable than their expertise and their money, are the connections that they have and the potential connections that they can capitalize on. Your board members have their own networks of individuals, institutions and community connections that can benefit your organization if you know how to cultivate those connections.
  
  This is why it is so important to have a diverse board. I feel like this is one of the biggest conversations in the fundraising community right now. How do we diversify our board? But diversifying the board doesn't mean just looking at potential members from a demographic standpoint, which is still so important, but also do an audit of who makes up your board. Are there gaps in your area of expertise? Do you have people on your board that actually understand how fundraising works or what's going on in the sector outside of your organization? Do you have artists that are representatives of the work that you do in your venues? Because all of these folks have a really unique perspective and connections that can help bring recognition and financial benefits to your organization.
  
  But perhaps you want to engage folks in those realms, but you have barriers to entry like board dues. Think of creative ways that you can make your board more accessible, like creating a junior board for people who are incredibly engaged in your programming now but might not have the time or the means to commit to a board seat at the moment. You could also implement a give-get structure. This means that if somebody is responsible for bringing in a certain amount of money into your organization, they could be responsible for giving a portion of that gift personally from their own bank accounts, or they could get money by soliciting donations from their own networks or soliciting in-kind donations like goods or services from local businesses. And then the monetary value of those gifts would count towards their overall goal. And as a little teaser, I'll show you a great report in a few minutes that we have to track the success of a give-get scheme.
  
  Now, these connections that your board has access to go far and above money, because at the end of the day they are incredibly personal relationships that can become your personal relationships as you're introduced to their connections. And once that connection has been made, you can nourish them and cultivate them so that they last beyond your board members' time with your organization. So let's talk about the different types of connections that your board can have that can benefit you.
  
  Starting with the personal network that your board members have, it's where most fruitful prospects live. You should be sitting down with them regularly to dig into untapped potential. Who have they already solicited? Have they joined any new organizations lately with new people? This should always be at the forefront of their mind because they're an ambassador to your organization. They should be hyping up your mission and your work to everyone they know and you are responsible for giving them the tools and opportunities to make that happen. And some of those opportunities center around the work that you're already doing. So if you're hosting a donor cultivation night for an upcoming performance or art installment, then that's the perfect chance to encourage board members to bring people that they think are good prospects. The board member then has the chance to show off the work that you're doing and introduce them to artists and members of leadership so that they get a sense of the community that you have built. And you could even track that attendance to those events using our invitations functionality, which Jake is going to showcase in just a bit.
  
  Now, a sticking point that happened with some folks at my old organization's board is that our board members would tend to bring the same people to each event and sometimes those relationships wouldn't actually lead to anything but they wanted to hang out with their friends. So to combat this, around the time that tickets would go on sale, we would email the board with the specific dates of donor events, opening nights, all of that stuff and say, "Let us know who you would like to invite," but we'd be really explicit and say, "Don't actually invite them until you talk to us first." This way we could pull data and say, "Hey, you've actually brought this person to four events at this point and there hasn't been any sort of donation from them. Is there anybody else that you think would be a good fit to bring to this particular event?"
  
  Which then brings me to my final point about these personal connections and that is the aftermath of making these connections. After the event is over, after you've been introduced, it's important to touch base with the board member about what went down and what the next steps are. So did the prospect enjoy the show and have a nice time at the reception? Are they a good candidate to join our annual giving program or do they need a couple of extra touch points to feel confident about joining? Is it okay for me to send them information or would you like me to draft up an email for you to send them? Having clear action items post-event will be key to moving that prospect down your pipeline. And as Miriam highlighted earlier, activities are a great way to track this follow-up so that you can maintain the momentum of this relationship.
  
  Now, the other connections that your board may not even realize that they have is those two institutional entities like foundations and government-granting organizations. You never know if a board member knows someone who knows someone who is a program officer at a foundation or is a community leader that's making budgeting decisions. So you should be constantly communicating with board members about some of your upcoming programming or events so that they can make the connection of, "Oh, that aligns with so-and-so's foundation mission. Maybe that's a connection that I should make."
  
  Your board members should also be ambassadors at donor events to decision makers at these institutions. So we had this one donor at my last job who gave personally but was also a decision maker at a local foundation and we made sure that we were really strategic when he came to events by making sure that we sat him next to a board chair and that we made introductions between him and folks on our junior board. This allowed us to prep those board members on who he was and what he was funding so that we could make sure that we thanked him profusely and talked about the impact of the gift.
  
  And on the reverse side of it, foundations often want optics on your board. Most applications will require a list of your board members and what their job titles are and how long that they've been members on the board. And there are some granting entities that want you to be able to prove that your board is engaged with your organization and the community around you. And if you fail to provide that information, then you could potentially lose out on a good chunk of your contributed revenue line.
  
  And finally, the last institutional entity that you should be milking for all it's worth are corporate connections. So lots of large corporations usually have a budget for philanthropic giving. They may even have their own requirements that align with their corporate mission and values, so be sure to investigate if it's a match or not. But these corporate gifts can come in the form of sponsoring a program or an event or even donating through a matching gift program. So make sure that your board members know what kind of programs their own jobs offer so that they can make the most of this giving because matching gifts are really just money laying on the table waiting to be claimed.
  
  Now, when I was working in special events, a huge chunk of our revenue from our gala came from corporate sponsors, specifically in the banking and entertainment world, and we would not have made those connections without our board members making the initial introduction or even making the asks themselves. So sponsoring events like that can be incredibly beneficial to them, not just you. So having an up-to-date corporate sponsorship deck or presentation that outlines the benefits like logo placement, ad opportunities, or even speaking opportunities will really come in handy. So it's a great idea to just sit down with your board members before large events, before your season launches to see what kind of corporate connections they have that could align with the work that you're doing.
  
  And lastly, for our UK friends, I am going to go a little bit dark a second, but for those board members still working in the corporate world, they could consider you for a death and service benefit. Now, for those of you who don't know what that is, this refers to a benefits scheme in the UK that says if someone passes away while on the payroll for an organization, there are financial benefits that could be paid out to any dependents claimed and your organization could be named as a dependent.
  
  Now, the other part of their network that may be really helpful is their connection to numerous community entities. Do not sleep on potential in-kind donations, again, those goods and/or services that folks can donate to your organization while it's not direct income to your contributed budget line, that can save a huge chunk for your expense budget. So we had a former board member who owned his own printing company and even after he stepped down, he continued to give us discounts on things like our year-end letters, gala invitations and merchandise. And he was also able to connect us with a mail house who had put together those mailers for us. And while the discounts were helpful, the time is saved from a staff perspective was even greater.
  
  This could also be really helpful if you run any type of auction. So if they run a business or are close to a business owner, they may be able to help donate those goods or services to that auction. Or perhaps a board member owns a restaurant or has a family member that owns a restaurant. Perhaps they can volunteer that space to host a donor cultivation event or see if they can at least get some discounts on food and beverage. The worst that somebody can do is say no.
  
  Another great connection that they can make is between you and another non-profit. So as Miriam teased earlier, and as we highlighted in our Philanthropy Series event earlier this year on fundraising and community, there's a movement called community-centric fundraising, and they have 10 principles to re-examine every fundraising philosophy and practice that we've been taught and encourage us to engage in vigorous ongoing conversations and to explore doing fundraising in ways that reduce harm and further social justice.
  
  Now, I don't know how y'all felt back in 2020, but I had this really weird feeling of, "Why am I fundraising for the arts right now when there are bigger things happening in the world?" You may even currently feel that way or that feeling might not have ever gone away, but we still had to and have to continue on. And when the CCF principles were brought to our attention, we really focused on one that said nonprofits are generous with and mutually supportive of one another.
  
  So for our gala that was moved to a virtual space and therefore made more accessible to the masses, we decided to partner with a mental health organization and we gave a portion of our proceeds to them. In exchange, they linked us up with some of their corporate connections and were also able to spread the word about the event to their networks. And this partnership would not have happened without an introduction from a board member who had also been working with leaders at that organization. So talk to your board about what other nonprofits they work with or care about and brainstorm ways that you can partner and support one another.
  
  And lastly, your board should be making connections with your existing pool of donors. Sometimes a board can feel like a really elite club where they want to sit by their friends and only chat to other board members, but you should be encouraging them to engage with other folks at events and building relationships with your most loyal and your newest folks so that everybody feels taken care of.
  
  So we had this one prospect who had just won an auction item online, she had never come to any of our shows or anything, but we had done some donor research on her and thought she might be a good fit for the organization. So we invited her to come see a show on a donor night and we prepped our board chair and some of our members of leadership to make sure that they chatted with her. Sure enough, this prospect really hit it off with all of these folks and that relationship blossomed to be something incredibly fruitful and over a year or two, it culminated in a really large gift to our capital campaign.
  
  So now let's pivot and talk about some of the Spektrix tools that you can use to accurately track these important relationships.
  
  Now, Miriam mentioned the relationship functionality earlier, and in addition to all of the great connection tracking that it offers, it also unlocks the potential to soft credit. And soft crediting means that you can give credit to more than one customer record for a singular order. And in Spektrix you can have different soft credit types that differentiate the reasoning behind the soft credit. So common examples that we see are for spouses, donor advised funds, matching gifts and board give-get tracking. Getting this granular in labeling the reasoning for soft credits ensures that you can include or exclude from reporting and segmentation, and then you can apply a soft credit to things like donations, memberships, tickets, et cetera, which will then show up across both donors profiles for a clear picture of their giving.
  
  So this is how it'll appear on the customer record. There's a donation made on my customer record that I soft credited to a donor advised fund that it came from. Then I can see on the donor advised funds record as a soft credit from my customer record. Now a quick note, you do need to have the opportunities interface to use the full scope of relationships and soft credits. So if you don't currently have the opportunities interface and are interested in adding that to your Spektrix solution, please reach out to the support team and we can chat with you about all the benefits.
  
  Now, earlier I had teased a board give-get structure. If this is something that you have as a requirement for your board or something that you're looking to implement, we have a report that we can pop into your system to track the progress, but the report requires two things to be built out before it can work. The first is to be sure that you have a board tag of some sort and ensure that all of your board members are tagged with that tag. The second is to create a specific soft credit type used to track which gifts should be allocated towards somebody's give-get goals, so then you would be sure to soft credit any gifts that count from the original donors to the account of the board member. Then your criteria set would look something like this, which is looking for all donations made by the board member and for all donations that have been soft credited to that board member using the give-get soft credit type.
  
  And then when you run that report as a PDF or as an Excel, you'll get a lovely formatted report that will create a grouping of data per person with the board member tag. It will then pull in the name and address information for each board member as well as give you a breakdown of their latest gifts, their total personal giving, their total received from soft credits, and then that total combined giving. Then over here there's a breakdown of each order as well as the transaction information like the date, amount, fund, campaign, and if that gift was soft credited, it'll tell you who that soft credit came from. So this report will give you a really helpful at a glance of where folks are at in their give-get requirement so that you can then check in with folks and hold them accountable for their commitment. You can even set this up on a report schedule to send out to your leadership team or to the board members themselves to hold them accountable.
  
  Now if this is something that's of interest to you, please submit the report request form via our support center and we can pop this report into your system. Now, Jake is going to pivot and talk about institutions more in depth and how you can take the tools of individual connections and use them for larger entities. Take it away, Jake.
  
  Thanks, Sara. Of all the different streams of revenue that fundraisers have to manage, often the biggest single line item on the budget is revenue from institutional giving or grants. However, just like any other kind of giving, institutional giving is susceptible to changing priorities and attrition, meaning that fundraisers have to maintain and develop their connections with these institutions with as much care as with individuals or their board.
  
  For our purposes today, a granting institution is a charitable foundation, governmental entity, or a corporation that will act as a grantor to your organization. The process for engaging these kinds of institutions can range widely. Speaking from my own experience as an institutional fundraiser, working with institutions with huge rubrics or multi-step application processes can sometimes feel impersonal compared to how we might engage individual donors or a board, especially when so much of development work is relationship-building with other people.
  
  It's crucial to remember that the connections your organization has with the granting institution are still fundamentally built on dynamic two-way relationships, just like your relationships with other major donors, your partners or your patrons. Considering institutions like this can help you align their priorities with the work your organization does. And, often more than in any other avenue of fundraising, the connections you currently have with the community around you can be critical to not only submitting a strong grant application but developing a long-lasting partnership with an institution that wants to support you.
  
  The individuals who make up these institutions are the ones who evaluate your application, decide on who gets what amount of funding, and are as responsible for stewarding relationships with their grantee organizations as you are for stewarding relationship with them as a grantor. For many foundations and government institutions, your primary point of contact will be your grant administrator, sometimes called a grants coordinator or a program officer. These contacts are an extremely useful resource to reach out to who can help with everything from determining whether your organization would be a good fit for the grant opportunity, all the way down to helping with technical issues with an application portal. If there are important updates to an institution's giving, you'll also usually hear it from grants administrators. It's a good idea to always know who this is at a given institution because of how much easier the entire process can be from pre-application to the awarding and reporting phases.
  
  In the case of government granting agencies, local politicians sometimes can have a direct impact on certain projects you want to fund. When I was looking to raise funds for a capital campaign to update the theater equipment of a previous arts organization I worked at, I was able to get on a call with our city council member to talk about our upcoming application to the city government.
  
  By doing this, he not only was able to vet our project ahead of the application, but he was also interested in allocating additional funding in his discretionary budget toward it as well. And remember that other arts professionals in the greater community may one day sit on foundation boards or make up artistic panels of experts that evaluate the applications you submit. We all know how small the arts nonprofit world can be, so having a network of connections with colleagues in the field who understand what your organization does can go a long way.
  
  As a CRM, Spektrix is designed with this at the forefront of how it treats organizations and the individuals associated with them. Instead of having the built-in email address field that individual records do, organizational records have a field called primary contact instead. You'll be able to select any individual with an existing relationship to the organization to be in this primary contact role. This is particularly helpful for organizations that may have several individuals you are in contact with to sort out who needs to receive the most important mailings, documents or other communications on behalf of the organization.
  
  This is also the idea behind having facilitators for gifts or individuals connected with that organization that helped make a gift on behalf of it. By having the organization's gift tied to an individual record, it centers the importance of reaching out to that specific individual to manage the gift and further steward the relationship. In this example, Mike Geller was our program officer or grants administrator who managed our award from the Spektrix Foundation last year, and he is listed here as the facilitator for that gift. This can be output in all sorts of reporting to ensure that you both have an accurate record of an institution's giving history with you, but also can keep track of who on behalf of that institution made sure you got that gift.
  
  Also, as Miriam mentioned earlier, it's great practice to use the start and end date functionality for these kinds of relationships. Keeping these up to date with individuals that work at an organization can come in very handy so you aren't, for example, attempting to invite the old program officer of a foundation to an event instead of the new one.
  
  Building on our previous example, we can see that because we know the end date of Mike Geller being the program officer of the Spektrix Foundation, he's grayed out, and we know that Sam Bagwell is the new one. Because we can see that she has started so recently, we can even take the extra step of being proactive by welcoming her to an event and congratulating her on her new role. Also, a handy tip when communicating with contacts at institutions, you can BCC any emails you send against both an individual and an organization to automatically create an activity within Spektrix as long as the email is linked on the relationship itself.
  
  On top of considering the importance of individual contacts at an institution, each institution as a whole is unique, having its own purpose it means to serve in the nonprofit sector. The granting process is largely about finding institutions whose purpose aligns with the work your organization already does or plans to do, and this will affect everything from the kind of information they may prioritize in your applications to the actual structure of how you apply. Three broad lenses through which we can view these institutions are community-driven institutions, mission-driven institutions and relationship-driven institutions. These categories describe what a particular institution might care about most in terms of the grantees it wants to support and what you might bring to them to develop a meaningful connection.
  
  The eligibility offered by community-driven institutions is in part already decided by location, but these kinds of institutions often think about their grants as investments in their community. They tend to want to see that the arts organizations they fund are having a measurable impact on their community and that they're run sustainably so that they can continue delivering to that community over time.
  
  When applying to these kinds of granting institutions, it's useful to focus on what statistics or trends in your audiences, artists, education programs or other forms of community engagement you might do that you can provide as hard evidence of how your work as an organization affects the community around you. Are there ways to communicate who your work is reaching and who it might be able to reach with additional funding from that institution? If, for example, a community-driven institution wants to know about youth engagement at your organization, Spektrix can segment on pieces of patron information in a customer list to provide evidence of that engagement.
  
  In this case, we make a rule to look for customers who are under 30, link that with 'and' logic to a rule looking for customers who live in our state, Oregon in this example, and a segment for patrons who attended at least one show in our last season. If we want just account, you don't even need to output a full customer list or run this through any reports, you can just look at the top right of the customer list workspace to see how many people this applies to. Not only can this save us a lot of time to report this to a community-driven institution, we can then use this customer list to power things like discounts or invite lists to youth nights to really walk the walk of our engagement with this part of our community.
  
  While generally all granting institutions have a mission that drives their giving, in this case, we'll define a mission-driven institution as one that has grant opportunities that aim to serve a specific actionable goal in the sector. This could be a grant opportunity that sponsors captioning services for run-up performances or underwrites original works by up-and-coming artists who haven't had wide-scale exposure before.
  
  Because the fit of your organization to their mission is especially important for mission-driven institutions, this is a great opportunity to leverage the connections your organization already has to help make your case. When someone can vouch for the work your organization does through something like a letter of recommendation for example, it gives you very real credibility that can provide these kinds of institutions a clearer picture of your goals and motivations than raw data alone.
  
  Spektrix can help you with this via activities, which are a great place to attach useful documents like a letter of recommendation. You can use other features of the activities such as the date to set a due date for when you need the letter by, and this can be updated or kept as a way of documenting when it was received by you after the fact. Additionally, this activity should be linked to the opportunity for the granting organization you're seeking funding from, but you can at the same time link this activity to an individual or organizational record that wrote the letter as well, who in this example is Miriam, this will allow you to see at a glance in the system that they have written a letter rec for you, and it makes it easy to identify them later as an advocate of your organization or even to send a thank you for the recommendation itself.
  
  The last category is the relationship-driven institution. These are often organizations like private foundations that manage the estate of an individual or institutions with invite-only grant opportunities that prioritize the relationships they have with grantees as a major aspect of how they allocate funding. In these cases, cultivation will look the most similar to how you would cultivate individual donors. Here, the individual connections you have within the institution itself most directly impact having a relationship with the institution as a whole.
  
  When I was the institutional giving manager at my previous organization, there was a major granting foundation that was cutting its funding across the board. However, they sustained their level of giving to us because the founder and namesake of that foundation was a lifelong friend of the founder of our organization. Additionally, one of our major theater spaces was named for their foundation because of this relationship. Even posthumously, the relationship forged there had an impact on funding decisions decades later, but by regularly engaging our contacts at that foundation for years since we were able to keep the relationships between us and the individuals at that foundation alive and well each year.
  
  When thinking about how Spektrix can help you involve these key individuals with your organization, invitations can record engagement and attendance of these contacts at cultivation events. A useful feature of invitations for institutional contacts in particular is this 'On behalf of' section here. While only individuals can receive an invitation to an event, this is a way for us to record any institution they're representing. Here we can see that the program officer of the Spektrix Foundation is planning to attend our upcoming cultivation night, and we've recorded the guest she's bringing as well. It will be good practice now to create relationships with those gifts and the program officer if they aren't already there so that we have as full a picture of this network as possible.
  
  Now, most granting institutions in reality are some combination of all three of these categories, meaning that understanding your connections with them will require tailoring all of these considerations and tools to each institution you cultivate. From data that shows your connections with your community to leveraging your existing connections to developing the connections you have with key individuals at each of those institutions.
  
  Miriam Wright:
  Thank you. Sorry, Jake struggling with my video a little bit. Thank you so much Jake for that. And we now have a little less than 10 minutes for some questions. As a reminder, they can still be submitted via the Q&A tool at the bottom of your screen. I also want to remind you that if you did join a little bit late, don't worry because we've recorded the session, we'll be sending out the recording of the session by email afterwards.
  
  So in terms of the questions, we're going to do our best to answer as many as possible, but if we don't get to yours, we are going to reach out directly to you via email or a support ticket if you've provided your information. So I'm just going to stop sharing my screen so you can see all of our faces. So let's start us off.
  
  So we have a question, yes, let's kick off from Otterly, "Could you clarify what soft credit means? I've not come across this before." Yes, absolutely. So a soft credit essentially means that you can have one order on your Spektrix system, so you could have an order of tickets or an order of donations, but you can assign that order to one or more connected customer records other than the main individual or organization that actually made the order without double counting income from that order. So I would say some of the most common ways that this is used is things like spousal gifts where actually we want to see that Mr. Smith's spouse is connected with a particular gift, even though we only want to record this once in the system, obviously for accounting purposes. Brilliant, lovely. Hope that answers the question.
  
  Next one we have here from Jenna at Powerhouse, and I think this was going to be one for Sara because it's with regards to the give-get report and they've asked, "Can the give-get report be customized to help show what board members give-get for an auction specifically?" So yeah, Sara, I'll pass over to you for that one.
  
  Sara Stevens:
  Yeah, I definitely would want to have a conversation with you a little bit more about how you're tracking that option. But in theory, you could create an auction soft credit type and pull both into the give-get report so that you can see what is auction, what is not auction. So yeah, submit that report request form and we can dive a little bit deeper into your specific requests, but there is a little bit of wiggle-room for customization there.
  
  Miriam Wright:
  Brilliant. Thanks so much, Sara. We have another one on this soft credit example, "In the soft credit example, you put a donor advised fund gift on the individual's account," and they've said, "We tend to put it on the donor advised funds account. Is there a reason why you did it that way?"
  
  Sara Stevens:
  Yeah, I think this kind of varies from organization to organization and is just dependent on how you want to view things and how you want to report on things. So I personally did it that way because I tend to think that the gift is still coming from the individual and especially if you have an opportunity on that individual's record or a pledge on that individual's record and you don't know that it's coming from their donor advised fund, then it's easier to still apply it to the individual and their existing features like that opportunity or pledge, whereas you can't cross those things between an individual and organization and you would have to recreate that opportunity and pledge on that organization account. So again, if you want to reevaluate the practice that you have going on and see what's working, maybe what's not working, submit a support ticket and we'll be happy to kind of dissect that with you.
  
  Miriam Wright:
  Lovely. Thanks very much, Sara. Let's have a quick look. Ah yes, this one is for Jake, "Can you expand on when you said that you can BCC to both an organization and individual record at the same time, how do I make that happen?"
  
  Jake Larimer:
  Yeah, so this is referencing a very neat feature that Spektrix is able to do where every user has their own unique BCC email address. So whenever you use Outlook or Gmail, if you put that in the BCC line and at the same time the email you're sending to matches an existing email with Spektrix, it will automatically write back to your system and create an activity that logs a copy of that entire email thread. This is expanding on top of that. Basically if the email address for an individual record that is connected to an organization by a relationship match is on that organizational individual record, it will also write that activity to the organization, basically just allowing you additional automation if you have long email threads that you're wanting to record within Spektrix.
  
  Miriam Wright:
  Thanks so much, Jake. And yeah, I think particularly good for grant giving relationships, that's such a useful feature, especially when grant administrators might then leave and you've got a new contact, you can keep all of that on the organization record as well. Lovely, okie doke. Think we've got time for one more question. So we've got another one for Sara around boards, "Do you have a recommendation on how track people who have attended things with board members and what their giving has been?"
  
  Sara Stevens:
  Oh yes, I love this question. So it all depends on how you're tracking this in the system. If you're using that invitations functionality that Jake highlighted, you can mark those people as attendees and then use that as segmentation criteria so that you could create a customer list of who has attended these events and then you can run that through something like the donor giving history report, which shows you somebody these cumulative giving, average gift, latest gift, largest gift, all of that good stuff.
  
  And then also, if you don't want to do that in bulk, you just want to say, "I want to look at this one person in particular," there is the donor profile report that exists on the customer record in the opportunities interface that gives you kind of a full picture of that timeline that Miriam showed just in a more consolidated format. And I found those really helpful when trying to give that data to board members to be like, "You've invited this person 17 times and they've never given us money," so you can have that data to back-up your choices and reasoning behind things.
  
  Miriam Wright:
  Fantastic, brilliant. So let me just share again. Unfortunately, it looks like that's all the time that we have today for questions. If we didn't get to your question, we will be following up whether an email or a ticket if you provided your information. We will also be sending the recording of today's webinar along with a list of additional resources so that you'll have a chance to review today's content and share it with any team members who are unable to join us today. And please check out the Philanthropy Series webpage to register for the final Philanthropy Series of the year, Fundraising and Culture, which takes place on Wednesday the 30th of October. And you do not want to miss it, it's going to be fantastic.
  
  And if you just can't wait to see us until the next Philanthropy Series, we do have plenty for you in the meantime because it's Spektrix Hubs season. And we were so thrilled to meet and collaborate with so many representatives of UK organizations in June of this year in London, Glasgow and Manchester. And North America, we're coming to you next. So in September and October we will be in New York, Cincinnati, San Francisco and Houston, and we hope that you'll join us for the opportunity to connect in person with your fellow Spektrix community members and the Spektrix team. You'll find more information about the hubs by heading to spektrix.com and clicking on events.
  
  And finally, when you leave this webinar today, you will see a Zoom web page with a super, super short survey. As we mentioned earlier, these sessions are designed for you and to support your teams, and we do our best to action your feedback so please do take a second to tell us what you thought so that these sessions provide you with the most value possible. And that's it from us. Thank you so much everyone, and have a great rest of your day. 
  
  

• Resources

  • Customers and Relationships in Spektrix
    

  • Soft Crediting Orders

  • Introduction to Activities and Activity Types
    

  • Creating and Managing Activities

  • Invitation Management

  • Introduction to Opportunities and Opportunity Stages
    

  • Creating Opportunities
    

  • Managing and Closing Opportunities

  • Online Access Booking - Making Wheelchair Accessible Seats Available Online

  • How to Request Help with Reports

  • Community-Centric Fundraising Principles

• Slide Deck

  Download the side deck.