Hey, it's Mike. Quick note before we get started. My company, BuildGood, publishes this podcast that you're listening to. But our core work is to actually build a multi-channel metrics-based fundraising program for nonprofits that focuses on building the long-term value of new and current donors. So we actually helped nonprofits in the US and Canada build a broad base of donors. We helped them with acquisition, with retention, with monthly giving, and with mid-level giving programs. Now, every year, we take on a few new clients. And we tend to work with international development organizations, hospital foundations, children's hospital foundations, and local poverty relief like food banks or homeless service providers, those kinds of organizations. Now, here's the thing. If you're raising at least $5 million, and you're looking for a partner to help you raise more money with your digital and direct mail programs, or if you're going into an RFP process, you can get a hold of me at
[email protected]. And someone on our team will make sure that the email gets to me, and I will personally get back to you. Alright, let's get the podcast going. [Music] Well, hello, builders of Good. Thank you for tuning in to the Build Good Fundraising podcast. Fundraising isn't easy, but it should be simple. So on this show, we take the mystery out of raising money. Now, on every episode, we coach you to build your fundraising like a flywheel. If a flywheel has five steps, number one is listening to donors. Number two is engaging them in meaningful ways. Number three is asking the right people for the right things. Number four is celebrating every single gift at every single level. And number five is reporting back in a real time and responsive way. If you master the five parts of the flywheel, your fundraising flywheel will start to spin reliably with less effort on your part. Your revenue will grow, but so will your career. Now, every week, we focus on one part of the flywheel. And this week, we are focusing on listening, listening to donors. And we're talking to Anton Lipknu, he's the president of Delv Deeper, our performance media agency that works with some of the biggest brands in a nonprofit space. These are organizations that you would have heard of. Their names will be familiar to you. Now, him and his team recently published the 2025 digital fundraising report that outlines some trends, some challenges, and some approaches to acquiring, retaining and growing individual mass donors through online advertising. Now, it's the most comprehensive report that I've seen in our sector. And that's why I've asked Anton to come on on today's conversation. We're going to get into what he calls the collapsing donor pyramid. We're going to get into one of the best ways to respond to the collapse is for nonprofits to do a better job of listening to donors. So they can personalize the donor journey and the donor experience in order to treat every donor like you might a major donor that you have a very personal relationship with. We're also getting into some of the ways Anton and his team are thinking about AI and using AI to listen to donors. It's a wide-ranging conversation. I think you're going to get a ton of value out of it. So here's my conversation with Anton Lipkhanou. Anton, thanks for making the time today. Thank you. Come on, mate. Thanks, mate. Let's get right into it in the US and in Canada, as well as Australia and UK and New Zealand and some of those markets. The trends are largely the same, like the macro trends. There's these red blinking lights on all of our dashboards that are basically saying individual giving seems to be under threat. That might sound a little alarmist, but it is happening. It might be happening slowly, but it will happen quickly at one point if we don't do something about it. Now, many organizations are sitting on donor files where donors are still being very generous, but donors are beginning to age out. Overall, philanthropic revenue is growing, but we're not growing actually the share of wallet. We're relying on fewer and fewer people to do more and more of the giving. It can be easy to look at the trends and be like, "Well, philanthropic revenue is growing." That is true, but it's fewer people doing more of the giving, which is a problem. Now, you call this the collapsing of the giving pyramid. Just to frame up our conversation today to tee it up, can you start by painting us a picture? What does the collapse of the giving pyramid look like? We're probably being too dramatic there. It's purposefully so because I've been in the nonprofit space for not that long. Delvdi was tired as a performance media agency in the fourth nonprofit world. We got into the nonprofit to an extent by accident, and we really got close to the sector. I personally got very close to the sector. I love the sector. Then we started noticing some trends. We talked about ultimately, called Cams, to the collapse of the giving pyramid. The first thing we noticed and the first stat that gave birth to the report that you were at was when I was looking at the data from one of the clients. I was looking at the age of the donor, 10 or 8 years ago, and the age of the donor today. What stood out to me is the age of the donor today, the average age, was 7.2 years older than it was seven years ago. It first didn't make much sense to me, but then I started to look into it more. What I realized is in seven years, the donors, the average donors of this organization, aged, faster than the time that actually passed. Men in, we acquired, not only we didn't acquire younger donors, we kept acquiring even older donors, peed in into this flywheel using your words, that I see as a snowball in the industry. I never started digging, right? We started working with our partners, we started looking at the trends, we started working with the industry, and the more with the more with that, the more I've seen the same trend over and over again. It kind of comes down to two numbers where the total revenue in the sector is going like this, and for those who's listening to us, I'm showing off trends with my hand. But the count of donors is going in the opposite direction. The count of donors is decreasing. And we as a sector look at the revenue, and oh, we're doing awesome. We're raising more money year-on-year. I want to even get into how does it look like in inflation address? It doesn't matter. What matters is we are raising more money, but we are raising more and more money from fewer and fewer donors. And when we talk about the collapse of the given, it's as simple as if I met how the strength over the next 5, 10, 15 years, at some point it comes to an end. At some point it hits a role where I don't have more money to fund the organization. I don't have more money to fund the aspirations of the organization I'm working for. And what leads to that is this recreation of what used to be the given pyramid. Now I'm asking and encouraging they are in sometimes our clients to look at this as they give an eyeful tower. Because it's not a pyramid. It's an eyeful tower today, and it's only getting worse, unless we do something about it. So for our listeners who might not be familiar with the terminology of a giving pyramid, can you quickly just walk us through what would a traditional giving pyramid look like? And then why has it become an eyeful tower? How is that imagery changing? A traditional given pyramid is what they call it in English. The right triangle, the triangle with all three sides being equal, where we have a sturdy, wide base, and at the base we have a lot of small wealthy donors. And some of the donors progress after the pyramid and they become recurring viewers, they become monthly, they become legacy donors, some of them become major donors if they're lucky enough to get a tailwind in their careers and have enough money to do that. And what happens over time is due to natural cycle, some of the major donors are living the pyramid usually due to natural causes, but more of the donors are added at the bottom and more of the donors are moving out the pyramid. And it essentially compensates for itself over time. And if I take snap shots of say, ever since I was a child,
a change of that throughout the years, that every change would be the same in a pyramid that is not improving but also not getting worse. If it was 65 years, for example, 5 years ago, it should be 65 years today. That's called a balanced giving pyramid. Now, what I call the Eiffel Tower is the pyramid where the base got narrower, just how the beautiful Eiffel Tower of the Paris looks like. The top of it is getting more squeezed, it gets longer in relation to the rest of the pyramid. The weight of the top, the relative weight of those fewer major donors is becoming so much larger compared to the rest of the pyramid. Is that a function of demographics having changed and just like the wealth gap growing anyways? There's an argument of like, well, yeah, fewer people are holding more of the wealth and so maybe it's a reflection of that. Or is there something else going on here? What's behind the collapse? Yeah, that's a great question. I wondered the same when I first started looking at the data and of course there is a part of the natural demographic change. I mean, we know that the fastest growing demographics today, at least in the North America, is the billionaire class and the ultra-well-hit. So partially, that makes sense. But one number that essentially busts that hypothesis for me is when we look at the outflow of donors by the age group that decrease in the number, percentage wise, relative decrease of younger donors is even larger than it is for older donors. In other words, two years ago, I have 50 donors total, 10 Gen Z, 10 millennials, 10 Gen X, 10 boomers, 10 talent generation. I might have lost two of the boomers and two of the silent generation since then. But I probably lost three millennials if not four and three Gen Z-erps. And that number is what scares me even more than just the relative increase of the top. The decrease of the bottom is worse than the increase in the top. So we're losing, if I'm hearing you correctly, we are relatively speaking, compared to you speaking, we're not only losing more people who are coming into organizations at a lower first gift, so lower value. But we're also losing donors who are essentially below the age of 65 and younger. Is that accurate? We're both not building a larger broader base of younger people, like below 65, but also we're not building a broader base in general of people who are coming in at those lower value gifts. Right. Not only we don't drive more donors, we actually lose some. And back to the annual statistic, which was the repeated itself for the last several years, the total count of people donating to the entire sector is decreasing. Despite the revenue increase, the total count of people is decreasing. And that's especially visible for the mass donors, people who usually donate less than 10,000 donors a year. Yeah. So we framed up the problem here, nicely. And anybody listening now is going like, oh, great, things sound hopeless, but of course, they're not hopeless. There are many things that are entirely within our control. And we as a sector can probably own some of these results as well. So I want to get into that. I want to get into, I want to move into what is something we can do about it. Your research shows that to specifically engage younger audiences is leaning more heavily into personalization across the entire donor journey. So including top of funnel, not just like donors that you get to know very well and they're with you for years and years, but including top of funnel. So the broad, that broad base mass marketing advertising that we do. And that's where I want to camp out for a little bit because I think many revenue leaders listening to this podcast are completely there with you. Yes, we should personalize when I log into Netflix, my Netflix homepage is completely personalized to me. My Spotify app is completely personalized to me. It would be amazing if we could start to personalize ideally for every single person. But even if we're not thinking every single person, even if we can take some steps to where personalizing or I would love that. I have no idea how. I know it's possible. We must have the tools by now. So before we get into the how, what does personalization mean in the work that you do in fundraising at the mass level? What does personalization look like? And to your point, this one to one market in Euphoria, we're going to call it, is something the entire sector. And here I'm talking about the digital marketing sector, known as nonprofit sector. But it's something that all of us have spoken about since the early email days. And probably before that, we have the same conversations about the recommend. So it's not new. And it's a trap that many organizations go down, the rabbit hole of saying, oh, we are going to personalize our messaging for every feeling the customer, prospect, donor, subscriber, patient, whatever it might be. And I definitely don't want to say, oh, yes, what this sector needs to do, what our nonprofit sector needs to do is personalize for everybody. And that's the answer and leave it at that. There is probably already enough podcasts talking about that. And to your point, your point is like what is personalization to me? I want to tell a little story of Dr. Rital analogy here because I've been obsessed recently with this framework of Japs to be done. Right. And it's another great framework developed by our business review, no less, Becky and Summer in the 80s. And all it talks about is when I'm going to a Nike store and buying those sneakers, not because I need the best stall or a certain color or something. And I'm buying it to so called certain jack for me. My business coach, Rick, when she talks about when you're going to an orthodontist, you are not necessarily going there for even teeth. That's a mean to get something else. Maybe it's confidence, maybe it's attractive, and then it's maybe it's your definition of half an ounce, whatever that might leave for you. And it's 10x more important in sectors where there is no physical problem, where all we get back from clicking that flash and donate button is menthol reward. And telling a personal story there, most people have a cancer story. I have a cancer story. My father died of cancer, colon cancer in particular. He was 53 that much younger than you should have. And when I click that donate button on whether it's American Cancer Society or Blood Cancer ignited or then death to cancer or F cancer, which I'm a donor to all of them. But when I click that button, I'm thinking of him. I'm thinking of like the value I'm getting, the jack I'm doing when I'm clicking that button. And the jack that this organization is helping me do is I feel closer to him. And then hoping that probably my donation, especially now with the power of the eye for finding the cure, hopefully my donation will realize of somebody else from heaven to go through what I went through. And maybe it will save their father and they will have 10 years more together. I know I was about that. Now most of those cancer organizations are not talking to me about that. They're talking to me, same as they're talking to somebody who got her bit might have faced cancer themselves or knows somebody who faces cancer right now or just right about you and felt very appealing.
created to it. But the job that those people are hiring, the certain organization for, is very different from the job I'm looking for. And I know that just speaking for myself, if there was one org which sent an email and it told me exactly what I'm telling you now, help somebody else have 10 more years with their father. I probably would have goosebumps and I would have probably donated, I don't know, my entire piggy-checked wealth. That is what I'm talking about with our personalization. And by the way, I would feel awesome donate and that's entire paycheck. Now that's an extreme example. But understanding this values that I hold, understanding this values that donors hold, is what I'm talking about and I'm talking about personalization because as a sector that does not provide any physical products, as a sector that only provides this mental relief, this mental satisfaction, this mental fulfillment, lose your work, we must do a better job of doing that. And we do it really well with major donors and for a very long time, it was indeed impractical to do that for mass donors. I mean, we can't afford to attach a given officer to every donor who has a potential to give $5 or who is given $5. At the end of the day, the mission of fundraising teams is to raise the biggest boatload of money they can raise. That would be impractical. But we can do that today. We can do that and to your point, you said it five minutes ago yourself, we must have the tools right now. We do have the tools. And I see my mission as help in organizations to use the tools available to them to us today. I like how you started at the beginning to listen to donors, to listen to prospects and to identify those unique values that they want to fulfill. And how them fulfill that. Yeah, I want to get into that practical how I want to get into if giving is a story of self, if giving is autobiographical, how can we make sure that we're allowing a donor to step into that story and matching their values and creating the context and the space around that. You mentioned jobs to be done. It might be a new concept for some of our listeners. So before we get into the how we'll quickly quickly just get into jobs to be done very, very quickly. You already mentioned develop a Harvard Business Review. Famous story of the jobs to be done lore. And there's books books around this. And if any list, there just wants to Google jobs to be done. It's a fantastic framework and fundraising. Famous lore around jobs to be done is the researchers who were helping McDonald's figure out what to do about their breakfast. And they just watched customers essentially in the drive through and customers were buying milkshakes on the way to work for breakfast. And they weren't buying some of the other breakfast options that McDonald's was trying to roll out. And what they figured out is the milkshake was fulfilling a job for the customer. They needed to get enough calories and carbs into their system to feel like they had energy before showing up at work. But they were also driving. And so they couldn't eat a messy meal or sand. Like it needed to be something like the format of the milkshake ended up being just a delivery vehicle for what for the nutrition that people needed on the way to work. And so you're saying, if you look at jobs and fundraising, our donors are essentially hiring us to do a job. And I think that is a different way of thinking about this than a lot of us show up thinking about. Which is it's not about you. It's what they can do through you. And they're hiring you to do a very specific job. And that job is different for different people. For some people. For some people. I'm sure you've had the same on some people say I don't want to be thanked giving is a religious obligation for me. The left hand shouldn't know what the right hand is doing. And so that's the job. That's the job to be done. Which is hiding my 10% of my income to because my faith obligates me to do it. Sometimes it's about personal connections. Sometimes it's about values. Sometimes it's simply about in high pressure fundraising tactics. Sometimes the job to be done is I need you to go away. Get off of my doorstep. Get alleviate a feeling of guilt. You're in the job. So you're in the business. So are we of lifetime value. And that oftentimes doesn't correlate to high lifetime value. So let's talk about giving of self. This giving being a story of self and how we can listen to donors. Our donors have stories just like yours. I gave to a diabetes charity the other day because I'm a type on diabetic. It literally means every two hours I make a life in that decision. Which is do I need more insulin or do I need more carbs? If I mess up that decision, there's a real chance that I'm going to be very close to death. So I'm always balancing. So being a diabetic is an intensely like it's a job that I do. It's also like very much who I am. And so when I gave to this diabetic charity, they didn't ask me if I gave because I had diabetes or because somebody that I know had diabetes. Or they didn't they didn't ask me if I was more interested in research about diabetes or if I was more interested in and resources about how to live with diabetes. Which is the same as when you're giving experience when you gave to cancer. Do any of those organizations know why you gave to them? And some of them do because I'm very vocal about here and there. Some of them don't because they didn't ask me to your point and I love the story you shared about McDonald's. And I think it goes back for me personally and I spend the last decade in the services industry where I'm in professional services, which means I am in service of organizations that I serve. And nonprofits are in a way in service of their mission in service of the recipients of their program service. But they're also in service of the donors and to your point some organizations making most organizations. I don't know the exact numbers. I guess it's the most based my experience. But let's leave it at some some organizations can do a better job in yes, simply paying attention asking is one way to do it. Paying attention to what is the job that our donors want us to do. What is the service that we can provide to them? It's a you just outlined the two-sided business model. So nonprofits have one set of customers, which is the people they're serving, where they're delivering clean water filters to or doing field clinics or whatever they do. And then they have a second set of customers, which is the donors that make a lot of that work happen. And sometimes they have three or four or five sets of customers because the donors are private people like you and I sometimes there's there's like government funding sometimes there's different grantees. And so in my experience organizations already know how to listen very well to stakeholders. It's just oftentimes those are the people that are serving in the field. They do research that a qualitative analysis they interview people they're serving they're improving their services that they're providing to the end user all the time. And I think what you and I maybe are advocating for here is adapting that same mindset when it comes to your donors and recognizing that donors to our asset of customers just like the end user is. So I remember I used to say that nonprofit organizations start to an extent match makers between the donors and the causes this donors care about and the people who would benefit from that cause. It's a it's a platform that enable that connection and it serves everybody in the process that provide exceptional value to everybody in that process. And I'm at one where you want to take it next is well, okay, how do we do that? What are some practical examples and I'm not going to grab like I'm not going to break the ground by saying it usually starts from asking. And it starts from asking different sources of data that we have. The simplest thing is just ask the current donors.
especially the mass donors. And the question I would ask our listeners to contemplate for themselves is, when was the last time that I, my team, have spoken to our mass donors? But that's usually not enough. That's usually just a starting point. Because the donors, just as me, just as you, they leave traces, they leave breadcrumbs and their digital lives that express this interest. Simple example is what do they react to? And I know the best way to see what I care about, or somebody who doesn't know me, is to see which content I'm interacting with, versus which content I'm not interacting with. For example, most of the organizations that we're dealing with, and I'll bring it back to the point where I think now we have the tools to do it historically, we didn't have to, we didn't use to happen. For example, most organizations have long histories of direct male programs, and usually email programs too. And those programs, they leave soundware in our CRM, we usually have PDFs of all the direct male assets that we send to our donors. And they leave maybe in a table and develop a database, and we have some connection to who opened it, to who clicked on it, and what ended up in the nation. And at the time, we also likely looked at metrics such as average open rate, which campaign would better, average, a nation rate, average donation value, average drop-off rate from those cents, etc. All of that data is what we can use today to reverse engineer into the values, the JAPs to be done, that the donors already hire our organizations for. One simple use case I'm talking to the organization I'm working with is Paken, as much of that as possible, Paken all those PDFs, uploading them into any IP platform of your choice, whether it's charging PT, what, some profit, whatever it might be, and asking it to categorize all these assets and attach labels to them based on the emotional buttons that they were pushing. Because they were pushing different buttons, some of them were pushing urgency, some of them were pushing and research, some of them were pushing, and familial connection, whatever those might have been. Just use it in label it. And then once you have all those labels, go back and now look at which donors, which of those ABC 1 to 3, deeper, sonalized rows in the CRM, consistently responded to all the direct mail assets that were labeled as familial connection or labeled as urgency. That is the best indicator of not only the JAP they would hire the organization for, but the JAP they already hired the organization for. And we practically couldn't have done it five years ago. It wasn't possible. It would take a team of ring turns to sift through every one of those historic PDFs and label it and probably also make a lot of manual mistakes in the process. We could not have done it. We can do it today. We could not have looked at all the pages that they are clicking on the website and make those little connections between, oh, they spent seven seconds on this page, but 37 seconds on this page. We couldn't do that at every dollar scale. It was impractical. Now we can. We couldn't use tools such as tracker, TRAKAR or profound to analyze which prompts our organization is showing up for. Because not only that's what we are showing up for, but that's also what our donors are looking for. Now we can. We couldn't connect to a social listening system and analyze their Facebook behavior. Now we can. We couldn't interview back to my first square. We couldn't interview and 15, 20, a manageable number of our donors. Following the jobs to go down question and framework. I'll close the toilet one place and extrapolate the insights. We couldn't have done it. Now we can. We've done that for another of our clients recently. The insights that it's given me and the accuracy of me now being able to use that to a test the messaging is blowing up my mind. All of those things that work historically reserve just for major donors because it took a human to do it on a one to one basis. We now can do on a one to 100 basis with the help of AI in the twin. Yeah, the first time we did a jobs to be done interview was three or four years ago and it was to launch this this product called the fundraising academy so I talked a bunch of fundraisers to jobs to be done for I used air table and then. I had the at the time was like a D script transcript or something from the conversation but then manually created air tag like tags in air table for different conversation and the different sentiments and I thought it was like this is amazing I can use air table and I can categorize everything. Now that seems incredibly archaic and that was only three years ago so now it would be a matter of having 15 30 40 50 conversations with donors just having fathom or another recorder record the conversation. Transcribe it and then already do all the sentiment analysis for you look at insights. It's an incredible assistant that we've all been given largely for free in what other ways are you listening to donors to then inform the advertising work that you do not even ask in the biggest and I like how you're asking the question the biggest and is listen in to what they're already doing right it's analyzing their interactions with the organization. And also analyze and their interactions outside of the organization will live in a beautiful age and believe in a scary where all this data is available my credit card history is available my Amazon purchase history is available my Google search history is available all of this is out there which sometimes scares me as a person. So still makes me excited as a marketer because I believe in marketing for the greater good of the recipients of this marketing and good example is we use Amazon DSP with our nonprofit clients all the time. I remember the first couple times we've done it always raise the eyebrows and it always raise the question of it's the DSP for retail clients to see whether somebody is buying a yellow or pink case for their ear. Why would I use it for my nonprofit. Here is a slainter I'm seeing that question still with much lesser because not only it talks about that case for the ear folks but it also talks about which book am I buying. It talks about which posters I'm buying for my room. It talks about with brands and choosing versus which brands I'm not choosing. It also elevates and leads to the values that I hold. So this breath crowds there there and I look point back to the question because it's not about asking it's about listening to what's already being done. And then another portion which matters vastly here because we started this conversation by talking about personalization but the second important piece is the feedback look of and then testing this and seeing if I was actually right. I find categorizing my somebody who seems to care about the urgency and and on somebody who seems to care about value on research. Oh, why don't I end a serious message about urgency to my and the value of research to end them and actually validate that this is working better. I'm not know that I'll do it that but that feedback loop of asking you extrapolate and to me and listen into many. Then for sonalizing and then validate in my insights that that's what we see all the time and I guess where I'll leave it.
is it doesn't necessarily take tech. Tech isn't the biggest thing here, but it takes the discipline. It takes the process discipline that we as marketers, we know what it takes. We've done it in direct mail, we've done it in email for decades. It takes consistent test and control cells in your marketing plan and the cadence of estimate week over week and month over month. And yes, maybe it's not the fastest, most exciting or what you said at the beginning. Easy route, but it's simple. Yeah, Anton, thank you very much for spending some time with us today. If people want to download the report or if they just want to learn more about Delph or you, where can they find you? Oh, please. Yes, go to delve deeper d-e-l-v-e-d-e-e-p-e-r.com or connect with Nell Lincoln or reach out to Mike because my phone number. Sounds good. Well, that's all for today. Thank you very much for listening to the build, good fundraising podcast. If you are interested in these sorts of insights, you can come to the build, good summit live. Next May 13th to 14th and downtown Toronto at the build, good summit this year. Anton's team came to the summit. They also presented some of their findings. So if you're more interested in doing this, being part of these sorts of conversations live, go to build, good summit.com. We'd love to have you there. As always, thank you for hanging us out with us around the fundraising campfire. If you're listening to this, you're my kind of people. I'm your kind of people. Thanks for the work you do. I'm your host Mike Dirksen, cheering you on as you, the good in the world.
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