DIVERSIFIED FUNDING STRATEGIES - PART 2 WEBINAR

"ASKING FOR MONEY"

DECEMBER 15, 2009



LIZ PERSAUD: Hello, and welcome everyone. This is

Liz with the Pass It On Center. So welcome. We're going

to go ahead and get started because it's just about that

time -- or it is that time, actually.

Thanks so much for being on here. We've got a

great number of folks, and we'll actually get started here

now.

And I'd first like to say thank you to Katherine

Wertheim, our guest speaker, who'll be jumping in in just a

few minutes.

Before we get started, I just want to do some

housekeeping, tips, and answers to some of y'all's

questions.

If you have any questions that you would like to

ask and you are actually using a microphone and a headset,

before you ask the question or as you're asking the

question, in order to speak, what you're going to do is

hold down the "control" key on your keyboard so you can

speak. But be sure, when you're done speaking, to actually

release the "control" key so some other folks, myself and

Katherine, can actually jump back on and finish with the

presentation.

There is a public-chat area, if you look over to

the right-hand side of your screen. We've actually had

some comments in there. Caroline Van Howe, myself, and

Katherine were just putting up some posts there.

Right under there there's a blank white box so you

can type in your questions in there or comments as we're

moving through, if you don't have a microphone, and we'll

be able to read those out loud. And Katherine or myself

can answer questions.

On behalf of Katherine, I do want to say that,

throughout the webinar, if you have any comments or

questions, feel free to go ahead and post them now or even

as the webinar is happening.

So also wanted to let y'all know that this webinar

will be recorded. I'm actually recording it right now. So

we'll have the recorded part of the webinar up -- the

PowerPoint and the audio transcript up on the website in

about three weeks. That's usually how long it takes to get

done.

So if you go to the Pass It On Center website under

the "Webinar" section, you'll be able to access this

webinar in a few weeks. And we've actually got part 1 of

this Diversified Funding Strategies webinar already up, and

some folks have been accessing that, which has been

wonderful.

So with that being said, I'm going to go ahead and

jump into the content of our webinar. And again, any

questions or anything, feel free to just jump right in or

to post questions and comments in the public-chat area.

This webinar is titled Diversified Funding

Strategies, part 2, with Katherine Wertheim. We actually

did part 1 back in November, November 17th.

And before we get started with the webinar, I

wanted to announce -- I wanted to announce that ATIA 2010

will be in Orlando, January 28th through the 30th.

And Pass It On Center will actually be at ATIA

Orlando and will be having a huge role. We're actually

planning a preconference titled "Begin With the End in

Mind, Creating and/or Improving Your AT Reuse Program."

The Pass It On Center, especially Trish Redmon on

our team, who is absolutely invaluable, has been really

working hard on building content, getting folks registered,

and really getting some information out there about the

preconference.

So if you need to gather some more tips and

solutions on working with your reuse program, improving

what you've already got or if you know of folks out there,

or if you're actually on this webinar and you're thinking

of creating your program from the ground on up, please feel

free to sign up for the preconference at ATIA in Orlando.

Get in touch with one of us at the Pass It On

Center. We'd be more than happy to share information with

y'all.

The point of the preconference is to really give

folks more of hands-on tools and resources that they can

take back with them, back to their program, back to their

staff, to really implement those tools.

So what we're planning on doing is, as we're having

guest speakers, as we're going throughout sessions

throughout the day with the preconference, folks will be

able to take home a binder or a manual, if you will, that

will give them some more of that concrete information that

they can go back and refer to.

I also wanted to let you know that Pass It On

Center is planning an AT reuse strand once again. We were

very successful last year, and we thought we need to do it

again.

We'll be covering ten sessions. And all of these

will be program building blocks and just feature a number

of different questions that have come up, comments that

have come up that folks have said in the AT reuse

community, "We'd like to know more of that information,"

or, "We want to know how we can, you know, answer some of

these questions. We really need to hear more details from

experts in the field."

I wanted to let y'all know that the registration

for Pass It On Center discounts is actually getting ready

to wrap up. The early-bird is getting to wrap up fairly

soon.

So up here on the screen is actually all the Pass

It On Center affiliation, registration discounts,

information. So you can go to ATIA.org to their

registration section.

Up until Friday, the cost is $350. And then after

that until the conference on-site, it will be $400. The

price for preconference is $275 up until this Friday,

December 18th; and after that, $300 afterwards.

So again, go to ATIA.org for more information on

how to register. And we truly encourage y'all just to go

ahead and then get on there and register and try to take

advantage of that early-bird discount.

You can also find information on registration and

what we're planning on doing at ATIA on the Pass It On

Center website.

Thank you, Caroline.

Caroline Van Howe from ATIA just left a comment,

and she said, "The hotel rate is $160 through December

24th, and after that it increases to $220." So that's a

big difference. So y'all jump on that if you're planning

on attending. Work out your travel arrangements and make

your hotel arrangements as well too.

Thank you, Caroline. We definitely appreciate

that.

So with that being said, we'd like to get started

with our webinar. The title of this webinar is "Asking For

Money." This is part 2 in a two-part series on Diversified

Funding Strategies.

Our guest speaker, Katherine Wertheim, is an expert

in the field of fund-raising, and she is going to be

speaking on asking for money.

Back in November she covered the topic of planning

events for your AT reuse program. And we wanted to do that

because we knew lots of folks would be having events, and

you know, gatherings and fund-raising opportunities focused

around the holidays and even in the beginning of the new

year as well too.

So Katherine in going to delve into some more

information. This is a topic that a lot of folks have

approached Katherine about and Pass It On Center about, is

how do we actually go in and ask our partners, our

community affiliates for money?

Katherine was our guest speaker at the National AT

Reuse Conference in September here in Atlanta. It was a

huge success. And she was just a wealth of knowledge and

was able to meet with some programs -- after doing the

general session, meet with some programs that she was able

to work with one-on-one to actually cater more to their

needs and to find out their partners in the community and

how she could assist them.

Before calling Katherine to the floor and giving

her the table, Sarah Johnnes from Lincoln, Idaho, asks,

"Would you please mention the Western States Symposium

before the webinar ends."

And, Sarah, actually, before I jump into the

webinar, and it slips my mind to do that, I will go ahead

and mention that now. And thank you, Sarah, for throwing

that out there.

The western states will be having a symposium

focused on AT reuse. This is something that has come to

the table immediately after the National AT Reuse

Conference that we had here in Atlanta.

A lot of the western states will be gathered. They

had a lot of needs that were unique to their areas, more of

the rural communities that wanted to have more of a focused

time where they could talk about strategies and solutions

involving some of the problems and the issues that have

arised particularly to their areas.

So, Sarah, again, has put up the dates. It's

March 11th through the 12th in Salt Lake City. There is

some opportunities for scholarships.

And if you would e-mail me, liz@passitoncenter.org,

I would be more than happy to send you the information.

And once we -- I know that folks are in the planning stages

and we're getting some more concrete information. But once

we do that, we'll be able to post that up on the website.

So y'all check back with Pass It On Center. Visit

our website, and we'll get some more of that information

out there.

So with that being said, I will go ahead and

give -- okay.

It is targeted towards western states, but others

are welcome. Thank you, Sarah. I did want to throw that

in there. The western symposium is targeted towards

western states, but others are welcome.

So, again, visit passitoncenter.org for more

information. You can also e-mail me,

liz@passitoncenter.org.

Okay. So with that being said, I'm going to go

ahead and pass it on to Katherine Wertheim, who is going to

talk to y'all about diversified funding strategies,

particularly asking for money.

So, Katherine, take it away.

KATHERINE WERTHEIM: Thank you, Liz.

People ask me what I do. You know, it's a common

question at cocktail parties. They'll look at me and say,

"So what do you do?"

And I say, "I ask people for money, and they give

it to me."

And someone said to me, "Does this involve a gun?"

And I said, "No. And it doesn't involve a short

skirt and high heels either."

I love fund-raising. I have the next 75 minutes to

change your life. Because once you learn how to ask people

for money, you will find that your fund-raising becomes

vastly easier.

The first time I ever asked somebody for money, I

was 17 years old. I was president of my youth group, and I

got tired of doing the car wash and the babysitting for

dollars.

And so I just went and asked people for money, and

they gave it to me. And my youth group gave me the

regional leadership award, which I still have hanging on my

wall.

And I discovered that you could spend hours, days,

weeks of your time putting on special events, and if you're

lucky, you raise 30 cents on the dollar.

Or you could just spend an hour of your time and go

and visit with someone and look them in the eye and ask

them for thousands of dollars, and they will give it to

you. So I am going today to teach you how to do that.

Liz, next slide, please.

So in our November webinar, we covered the C.A.T.E.

formula, which I developed. It's a way that you can look

at any kind of fund-raising and figure out if you should be

doing it. C.A.T.E., c-a-t-e -- which has nothing to do

with my name being Katherine Wertheim. It's just the

acronym I came up with.

C.A.T.E. stands for cost, amount, time, and effort.

And you can apply this to any kind of fund-raising,

anything that's happening now, or anything that's going to

be invented in the future with social media, and see if

it's worth your time.

So cost is whatever it costs you to do it. I think

you should include staff time, how much do you make an hour

and put that in. Amount is the gross amount. And

obviously if you take away cost from amount, you'll get the

net amount.

Time is the number of days from the day you decide

to do it until the money comes in.

And effort is how many people need to be involved

with this.

So asking money from someone in person is low cost.

It's a meeting that takes usually under an hour. And even

with an hour of prep time and an hour of travel time and an

hour when you get back to the office and you have to write

a thank you note, it still takes very little of your time

when you compare it to other fund-raising methods.

The potential is there for high results. I

personally don't think you should spend your time sitting

down with anyone who's capable of giving you less than a

thousand dollars.

It's less time from the day you decide to do it

until the day the money comes in. And you can do this with

one person, two people. You don't need a lot of people to

do it.

Now, I'm going to talk mostly about individuals

rather than corporations or foundations, although most of

these techniques you can use with corporations and

foundations.

The reason for that is that more than $300 billion

is given in the United States in a year, and 75 percent of

that comes from individuals. Another 7 percent is through

bequests in someone's will. 5 percent comes from

corporations. And 13 percent comes from foundations.

Which means that, in this country, dead people give more to

charity than corporations.

So if your fund-raising has been reliant on

foundations or corporations, when you switch over to

looking at individuals as a source for money, you'll find

there's a lot more individuals, and they can make a

decision much more quickly than a corporation or a

foundation.

And all these figures are from Giving USA, which

collects them each year. So you can look at the updated

figures.

Now, there's one thing that's missing from the

C.A.T.E. formula. I chose not to put it in. And that's

emotion.

The reason why people don't sit down with other

people and ask them for money has to do with emotion.

People are afraid of asking for money. They're afraid of

being turned down. They're afraid of being laughed at.

They afraid of rejection. They're afraid of making a

mistake.

You could have a thousand fears about asking for

money. Money is the great forbidden topic in our society.

But, as we will talk in the next few minutes, there

are ways to overcome rejection or your fears. I'm going to

try and make this process as easy for you as possible.

Next slide, please.

So when you are looking at what you want to do for

fund-raising, for asking for money from others, the first

thing that I want you to do is to get prepared.

In an ideal world, you'll have an idea of how much

you need to raise in any particular week or month or year,

how close the end of your fiscal year is. I presume you

know these things.

So the question comes up, Where are you going to

get the list of people to call?

The first thing that I would suggest you do --

well, it's the Christmas season as we talk. So if you

want, the first thing that you could do is sing that song,

"I'm making a list, checking it twice." Okay. Just a

little humor. I couldn't resist.

The first thing you want to do is make up the list.

And what I would suggest is the easiest thing to do is to

ask others to make the list with you. But this is a

low-effort operation. If you want, you can do this alone.

So you might want to go to your computer and pull

up the list of all of your individual donors. I would

suggest that you think about a list of about 100 people to

start with. And we'll get a little into this of why a

hundred people is a good thing.

A hundred people is large enough that it's going to

seem hard, but it's also small enough that you can master

it. And you can do this in about, say -- about a month,

surprisingly.

I just want to do a sound check. We had one of the

participants saying that the sound cut out. Can other

people hear me? Great. Thank you. That's what I needed

to know. Okay.

So this system is going to rely on your finding a

hundred people to sit down and ask for money. Now, if you

don't have a hundred people, we'll work with whatever you

have. You're going to have to have a mix of prospects and

donors.

You know, "prospect" is an interesting word. In

the past there were two kinds of people: prospects and

donors.

And prospects was like the idea of prospecting for

money, like a person panning for gold. They were the

prospector, and they were prospecting for money.

Now we have something we call "suspects." Suspects

are people who you think might give money. "Prospects" are

people who have given you money once. They only really

become a donor when they give multiple times.

And if you look through your own checkbook over the

years, you'll see that you've made donations once to a

number of organizations. The average American gives to

eleven organizations in a year, but eight of those are not

important. Most people can name their top three

organizations.

So the first thing you want to do is make up a list

of people who might give you money. And I would say that,

as much as possible, those should be people who have

already given you money, even once.

If you have more than a hundred donors, if you have

a thousand donors or something, what you can do is just

take your top hundred donors or so.

And, frankly, I would rank your list as people who

have donated to you in the last three years. And I would

take the people by cumulative gifts or whoever's giving you

the most money.

If you take the list and rank it by single highest

gift, you get people who have given you 500 or a thousand

dollars or more, but you might miss somebody who is giving

you $500 over the course of the year; they're just doing it

at $50 a month or something.

So rank your list by cumulative gifts over the past

three years. And then, as you look at that list, add to

it. Say, "Who is it that used to give us money but they've

kind of fallen off?" Or, "Maybe they've only given to us

once, but we believe that they have capacity to give a much

larger gift."

You could toss a few corporate donors on there if

they're -- or corporations that you should be sitting down

and thinking about. You'll find that your brainstorming

will get you to about 80 percent of where the list might

need to be.

So the next thing that I would suggest you do is

ask others for help. And it might be other staff members

where they look at the list and say, "You know, we have

some people we serve who actually have capacity to give,

and they know our work well. They've just never been

asked." Or, "There's a former staff member who retired and

inherited some money."

So it might be people who are connected with you

and have just never given. And they would be good suspects

to put on your list too.

I think that passing around this list at a board

meeting or an advisory committee meeting and asking others

would be very helpful, and you'll get some good

brainstorming from that.

And as people put names on the list, you can ask

them to put their initials beside it so you can go back and

ask them for more questions that you might have of, you

know, "Why did you put this? What can you tell me about

them?" Key question: "Would you be willing to make a call

to this person?"

So what's on the list? I like to see name,

address, phone number, spouse's name, something about their

giving history. Maybe it's only the cumulative number of

gifts.

I like to see the last date of their gift. When

did they last make a gift? Was it within the last month?

Was it 12 months ago?

And you can keep all of this on an Excel

spreadsheet. And if you go to my website, werth-it.com,

and then go to werth-it.com/seminar, you'll find that

there's a sample Excel spreadsheet of what would be on an

appointment sheet.

Another part of this is that you're going to have

to make time for these appointments. Now, I'm all about

fast fund-raising.

There's plenty of people out there who will teach

you how to develop relationships with people. If all

you've got on your list is suspects, maybe you don't want

to go in for the first appointment just to ask for money.

There might be other things that you want to do.

And we covered some of that last month in how to do small

events, how to do events in your office just to introduce

people to your work.

But if you've got people who are good donors and

prospects on your list, what I want you to do is blast

through that list.

I want you to think about doing this whole process

in about a month. This will be a very hard month, but

there's never a bad month to do this really. I want you to

think about setting aside, in about a three-week period,

nine days that you can do appointments.

And you should be able to take an appointment with

anybody anywhere from 8:00 in the morning to 5:00 at night

or 6:00 at night on one of those nine days.

Now, I coach a lot of nonprofits through this

process, and I tell them it's probably best to make the

appointments for Tuesday, Wednesday, Thursday. That way it

still gives you Monday and Friday in the office, but the

rest of the time you're going to be out there meeting with

people.

If you do this for three weeks straight, it's

tough. I'm not saying this is easy fund-raising, but I am

saying it's fast.

So what would happen, let's say you open up phone

calling on the 2nd or 3rd of the month during the first

week of the month, and you're going to have people call and

make appointments for you. And I'll explain that in a

minute. So that first week is just calling and setting

appointments.

Tuesday of the second week of the month you're

going to be going out on appointments. And you'll be doing

three days a week for the next three weeks.

So as part of this process, I want you to set aside

nine days where you can take an appointment at virtually

any time during the day.

Now, here's the trick to all of this. I don't want

you calling and making your own appointments. I want you

to draft someone else to call and make appointments for

you.

When you think of a CEO of a top corporation, do

you think that person makes their own appointments? No.

They have two assistants and a secretary who do things like

that. And nobody thinks it's strange that the head of GM

isn't calling and setting up an appointment. He has people

for that.

Well, you should have people for that too. And the

reason is is that you should off-load to other people

anything that isn't specifically unique to you.

Now, I got this idea from [a company called]

Strategic Coach. They're at strategiccoach.com. And they

do plenty of free seminars and coaching on how to do this.

You can just sign up with them, and they'll let you know

when the next call is.

What their method is is they get rid of things that

other people can do so that you only do the things that are

unique to you. And for me that's fund-raising.

If you're an executive director, and you're sitting

there and you're changing the light bulbs or you're fixing

the computer, that means you're not doing the things that

the executive director needs to do.

And every minute of your life that you waste on

things that someone else can do are minutes that are taken

away from things that only you can do.

I'll give you an example. I called up an

organization, and the director of development picked up the

phone.

And I said, "Why are you answering the phone? What

happened to the receptionist?"

"Oh, she's on vacation for three weeks, so all of

us are taking turns answering the phone."

And my reaction was, "You've got to be kidding."

If you spend even an hour picking up the phone for

the receptionist, that's an hour you're not meeting with

somebody who could give you a thousand dollars. And

frankly, you can get a temp for the three weeks that the

receptionist is gone for that thousand dollars.

So instead of your answering the phone, go out

there and ask people for money. And the first person who

says yes, that pays for the temp for three weeks, and the

rest of the money is yours.

And a lot of nonprofits I can't convince to do

this. And so you end up wasting your time doing stuff that

somebody who makes $8 an hour could do or $10 an hour while

you could go out there and make a thousand dollars an hour

sitting down and asking somebody for money.

So draft someone else to make these calls. And

there's a couple of possibilities. One, you're an

organization that does assistive technology. Presuming you

know some people who might be at home and might look to

pick up some extra dollars making phone calls for you.

I have a woman who does this, and she's 79. She's

absolutely brilliant at it. No one's going to hang up on

an elderly person. And I pay her $10 a name for a hundred

names.

And a thousand dollars, that's a couple of weeks

worth of work, and she can schedule it any time she wants.

And she gets to go out when she wants, and she gets to make

phone calls when she wants. I'm keeping somebody elderly

employed at a level that's comfortable to her, and I'm

getting things done.

And again, instead of my spending, say, ten hours

to talk to a hundred people, I'm spending that time going

out on appointments.

But the other thing that you can do, if you want to

do this the inexpensive way, is draft multiple people to

call.

This goes back to, when you get others to make the

list with you, if you then ask them, "Will you call some of

these people?" you might find that they're willing to

divide it up and make some appointments for you.

Now, at this point, if you're going to use multiple

people, you're going to have to use technology because one

of your problems that you're going to have is not double

booking your appointments.

But there's online ways to schedule your

appointments, and you just give them the place to go to

open up your schedule book and say, "On these nine days I

will take any appointment."

And if something screws up, you are perfectly

capable of then having the person or you get back on the

phone and say, "Hey, would you mind moving the appointment

around?"

LOLAS. My particular elderly woman who helps me

calls herself a LOLAS, little old lady appointment

specialist. And I would like to see the world filled with

LOLAS because little old ladies are great at setting

appointments.

So you can hire someone to make the calls. And if

you really can't find someone locally, send me an e-mail at

katherine@werth-it.com, and I would be happy to refer you

to my LOLAS.

There's scripts on my website. Again, it's

werth-it.com/seminar. And it explains the whole system of

getting a little old lady to make your calls and also the

scripts for what does somebody say during a phone call.

And if you have questions about that, please feel free to

post it.

So next page, Liz.

So now we want to talk about calling for

appointments. Let me teach you what telemarketers know.

Early in my career in the 1980s, I ran a telemarketing

room. I ran three vendors who ran 20 telemarketing rooms.

I did about 10 weeks of telemarketing myself. And in my

20-plus years of consulting, I have never sold a nonprofit

on doing telemarketing.

But there are lessons that I learned from

telemarketing and from running telemarketing that apply to

this situation. So let me tell you what telemarketers

know.

What telemarketers know is it doesn't matter if

somebody says "yes" or "no" or "forget you" and they hang

up on you. It doesn't matter. It only matters that you

contact enough people to get the results you want.

And this goes back to calling a hundred people.

Why is the list a hundred names? Because a lot of people

have this idea that they're going to ask one person for

money, and that one person is going to come through and be

an angel for them, and it will be amazing if only they

could get that appointment with Oprah or Bill Gates or --

fill in the name of a local rich person here.

And I don't want you to do that. I want you to do

a hundred phone calls. Because out of a hundred calls,

enough people will say "yes" to you to make this

worthwhile.

So if you're sitting there and you're making your

one call, and you're waiting for the one person to call you

back, and they don't call you back, and you're lying curled

up in bed because they didn't call you back, knock it off.

That's a waste of your time.

You're going to call a hundred people. And that's

what telemarketers know, is it's just a numbers game. If

you call enough people, you'll get enough appointments, and

you'll make enough money, and you will see amazing results

from this.

So the script, the script of calling for

appointments. The person you have call will say something

like this: "My name is Kathy Wertheim, and I'm calling on

behalf of Liz Persaud at the Pass It On Center. Liz wanted

me to thank you very much for your past donations. She

actually [would like to] meet with you, and I would like to

schedule that for her. I was wondering if you have time

for tea at your home sometime next week, perhaps Tuesday or

Thursday."

And you get them to start looking at their book,

and they say Tuesday or Thursday. And you say, "Would you

prefer morning or afternoon?"

Now, you notice there's no point where I'm saying,

"Would you like to have tea with Liz?" I'm saying, "Would

Tuesday or Thursday work better for you?"

So you're offering people two options, and they

start thinking about the two options you've offered instead

of whether they want to have tea or not.

Now, surprisingly, enormous numbers of people are

flattered by this and have never met Liz before and have

been sending in their money for years and really don't know

what you're up to.

But some people ask you, "So what's this about?"

And that's where you think about what is it that you want

to say. "Liz wants to talk to you about your opinions on

our work, about the past year and what's coming up for the

next year."

Some people will ask, you know, "Is this an ask for

money?"

And you can say yeah, it is if you're going to ask

for money, if you know that each of these people are just

going to be asked for money.

However, one of the things I'd suggest is you may

not be asking everybody for money. For some it might be

relationship-building, that you need to spend an hour with

them getting to see where they're coming from and how their

interests align with yours and what aspects of your program

they're interested in. So it might be a

relationship-building meeting.

It might end up becoming asking them to put a

bequest in their will, especially if they don't have money

to give right now. There's a recession.

Bequests are amazing. The average bequest doesn't

come in for five years, but it averages over $50,000. And

in the world of planned giving, the specialty world of

fund-raising, 80 percent of planned gifts are bequests.

And it's pretty easy for somebody to say yes to a bequest

because it doesn't hurt them. They're going to be gone,

and there's no hearse with a U-Haul behind it.

So if you know for a fact you will be asking each

of these hundred people for money, and they ask, "Is this

an ask for money?" you can say that.

Or you can also have as part of your script, "Liz

is meeting with a variety of people, and with each person

it's going to be different, so I can't be quite sure. It

might be that she's looking to build a relationship with

you, ask for referrals, ask for contacts. So if it matters

to you, let me know. But she'd just like an hour of your

time, and she's not going to pressure you to give in any

case, even if it is an ask for money."

So sometimes people just need some reassurance

about what it is. And you can build that all into the

script so that you know what your caller is going to be

saying.

Now, you'll see on the PowerPoint the next thing I

say is 150 names times 65 percent, times 70 percent, times

25 percent. So I'm going to run over these numbers with

you.

So let's say that you have 150 names that you first

put together to look at. You might only have phone numbers

on 65 percent of them. You can obtain phone numbers on

about 65 percent of the population whether you have them or

not. You can just Google it or go to the phonebook. Or

there are matching services if you're doing this with a lot

more people.

65 percent of the population is listed in the

phonebook. The people who are listed in the phonebook tend

to be wealthier, surprisingly enough. And the reason for

that is poor people are dodging creditor calls. Wealthy

people are listed. That's just the way it works.

Now, that number may change over time as more

people are going to cell phones. And we haven't figured

out how to list cell phones in the phonebook for whatever

reason. But you should be able to find phone numbers for

about 65 percent of the people on your list if you don't

have them already.

So you start out with 150 names. You go down to a

hundred that have phone numbers. Within five phone calls

on five different days at five different times, you should

be able to get in touch with about 70 percent of the people

on your list. You're not going to get ahold of everyone.

My personal results, I find that on a first phone

call I will leave messages for about half the people on the

list. And of the people I get ahold of, maybe half will

say yes, and half will say no.

So if I personally start out with a hundred names,

I might end up with 50 percent never call me back, 25

percent said no, 25 percent said yes.

So if 25 percent of your list gives you an

appointment and you started out with 100 people that you

were calling, if you get 25 appointments, that's great.

If I'm doing calling and I'm doing appointments

over a three-week period, if I average three appointments a

day, that's 27 people that I'll see. If I average five

appointments a day -- which is hard but doable -- I'll see

45 people.

Some callers are better than others. My personal

LOLAS, she called donors for one client, and she got 26

appointments in the first 53 calls. Now, the client had

never sat down with the people before. People were excited

to meet the executive director.

Your results -- I can almost guarantee -- will

vary. She's very good. In fact, my caller is so good, the

client put a couple of ringers on their list, people that

they couldn't personally get appointments with. Which if

they told me they were doing that, I would have discouraged

them. That's just mean. But it worked. She got

appointments with both of those people.

And that particular client, in a three-month

period, they did two three-week visiting periods. And this

is in 2009 during the recession. And so in six weeks of

visits over three months, they made $350,000. So you can

make some good money from this.

And again, your purpose to calling may vary. Some

people will just be relationship-building. Some it will be

asking for money. Some it will be asking for a planned

gift.

So Liz, if we could have the next slide.

One of the things I would suggest is that you make

a plan to draft other people to help you with these visits.

When you go and talk to somebody, if there's two of you and

one of them -- or two of them; it could be a couple --

that's a dialogue.

If there's two people on your side and one on

theirs or two on theirs, now you're having more of a

dialogue. When it's just one on one, one of the pitfalls

you could have is it might be too much of a monologue.

So you could bring with you a staff member that

specializes in a program that this particular donor you

know is interested in. You can bring board members for

you.

In my experience, maybe about half your board will

be willing to do this, and each person is good for maybe

five visits. That means, if you had a board of even just

ten people and five will help you, that's 25 visits.

You want to train these people to come. And

there's a number of ways that you can do that that I would

recommend.

One is, if you are anywhere near a meeting of the

Association of Fund-raising Professionals, you will find

that you may be able to get a professional fund-raiser to

come and train your board. It will cost you some money,

but because you're using someone locally, it won't cost you

that much money.

You could ship in somebody like me, but I live in

California, and that's expensive. But I do trainings where

it's an entire day on a Saturday. And I only do 20 of

those a year. But there's people who can teach you this.

But if you'd like to do it professionally and

cheaply, one of the things I would recommend is there's a

really marvelous video, and it's called "Speaking of

Money." And it is by Board Source, which used to be the

National Center For Nonprofit Boards.

And you go to boardsource.org and just put in

"Speaking of Money." And it's a half-hour videotape. It's

very professionally produced. You see a variety of people

on it who are clearly not professional fund-raisers, and

they just go in and ask somebody for money, and they get

it.

And it's a wonderful training tape. It talks about

cultivation, solicitation, stewardship, what you do before

a meeting ... audio skip ... you put the list together,

everything.

You can show that to your board, schedule some time

to talk about it, and that will cover your training needs,

and you'll be handled. And you don't even have to bring in

somebody from the outside.

The useful thing about bringing somebody from the

outside, somebody from AFP perhaps, is because they can say

things to your board that you can't say. I mean you could

say it. You're perfectly capable of saying it. The

problem is is your board doesn't listen to you because they

know you.

It's like people -- it's like my nieces. They're

five years old. They're better behaved for the teacher

than they are for us because they know us. And so in the

same way, regrettably, your board is like a group of

toddlers, and they're going to listen to somebody else in a

way that they are regrettably not going to listen to you.

And I'm sorry to say that.

So next slide, please, Liz.

Let's talk about the appointment. What happens

during the appointment. There you are.

First, you've got to arrive on time. You should be

dressed nicely but not too nicely. You don't want to wear

clothing that's more expensive than what the donor owns.

I personally like to have a little preappointment

ritual. I think a lot of fund-raisers have this. For me

it's I floss my teeth in the morning before all of my

appointments. I know other fund-raisers have other things

that they do.

But I can tell you my dental hygienist can tell you

how many appointments I'm going on by how well I floss my

teeth. And she's got that little device that she puts in

there to tell you, you know, how deep the pits are around

your teeth. And if I'm scoring one or three, then she

knows I'm going out on more appointments. If I hit a five,

I haven't been soliciting enough people for enough money.

I'm not flossing my teeth enough.

So I have a little preappointment ritual. Mints,

mouthwash. Doesn't matter.

And so then you go out on the appointment, and

you're going to arrive on time, and you're going to leave

plenty of time.

So however long that appointment is, you want to

think of it as being divided into thirds. And the first

third and the last third are schmoozing, which is a Yiddish

word for talking. So you want to get a sense for them.

Are they the kind of person who cuts to the chase, or are

they a person who's relaxed?

So let's say you're going to somebody's home, and

the first thing they do is they put you in the formal

living room that never gets sat in. It's the one with the

white furniture. It clearly hasn't been utilized in years.

That's not the place they're really going to feel

comfortable.

So one of the things you can do is ask for a glass

of water and then follow them to the kitchen. The kitchen

is where they're comfortable.

And then you want to react to things around them or

what they're wearing. So you see a picture on the wall,

and it's the Brooklyn Bridge. And you say, "Oh, are you

from Brooklyn? My mother was from Brooklyn." Or it's --

somebody is wearing a pin. "Oh, is that a rotary pin? Is

that a blood donor pin? I'm a blood donor." And you find

something to connect with them on. That's the schmoozing.

So let's say you only have a 20-minute appointment.

The first six minutes are going to be schmoozing. The last

six minutes are going to be schmoozing. You're just

talking to each other. The middle section -- six to eight

minutes -- is going to be where you're going to be asking

for money.

So one of the things I would recommend when you're

schmoozing is ask them how they got involved in the

organization or what is it that they think is important.

And they'll tell you. They'll say, you know, "My

mother was a wheelchair user, and my dad had this special

hospital bed, and we ended up getting them this special

van. And I learned how to drive with hand controls because

I had to drive my mother's car there towards the end."

I mean, I'm using my own personal examples, but

every donor has something like that. There's a reason why

they give to you.

They knew somebody who was affected. They knew

somebody who used technology. Maybe it's all about the

environment, and they're just green, and they give to

organizations that are green, and they perceive you as

recycling. So find out what they're interested in.

Now, here's -- the secret is, if they speak

two-thirds of the time, you will get money from them.

I had one donor, and it was -- I'm sitting across

from him, and he says "Well, I suppose you're here to ask

for money. I know you're doing this capital campaign for

this building." And he folds his arms across his chest,

and he says, "Pitch me."

And I looked at him, and I said, "Well, you've been

involved for a couple of years now. You tell me why it's

important for us to have a building."

And he looks at me, and he starts in on why he

thinks we need a building. And he ended up writing us a

check for $100,000.

That's a neat feeling when somebody gets excited

about what you're doing and talks about how you do it and

why they're engaged and involved. They light up. They

have energy around it.

So here's how to make the pitch. It's all going to

come down to this moment. You want to ask. You want to

ask for a specific amount.

If you don't know what amount to ask for, one of

the things you could do is give them three amounts. Here's

what this amount would do; here's what that amount would

do.

But if they've given to you previously, take an

amount that is five to ten times higher than their previous

single highest gift, and ask for that. So if they've been

sending you a thousand dollars through the mail, you look

them in the eye, and you say, "Today I'm here to ask you,

will you give us $10,000?"

So now you say the amount, and -- here's the

secret -- you shut up. Shut up. Because now they have to

think about what you said.

If you have a hard time shutting up, count. That's

what I do, is I sit there and I mentally count -- one

thousand and one, one thousand and two.

The longest anybody ever went up against me was 54

seconds. And so I'm sitting there counting, and finally

the guy says, "Well."

So the rule on this is, first to speak loses. So

once this guy says "well," I know he's going to write me a

check for something.

If you're the first to speak out of nerves, you

will walk out of there without a check. So if you say,

"And that's why I'm here today, to ask you for $10,000,

unless of course that's too much money, in which case we

would be happy to take any amount that you would care to

give," you're going to walk out of there without a check.

So you need to just be silent.

Now, there's a variety of answers that people will

say. A lot of times they'll say, "That's a lot of money."

If they're used to giving a thousand, and you ask for ten

thousand, they'll say, "That's a lot of money."

They're not negotiating yet. They just want some

reassurance from you. So if they say, "That's a lot of

money," now you say, "Yes, it is. And it will do a lot of

good." And let them think about it.

Now, if they say, "That's too much money," you say,

"Well, you can pay it off over time. How much time would

be good for you?" And then you get a pledge. That's

great.

If they say yes immediately, you've asked them for

too little money. There's plenty of times where I've seen

people and they've asked for maybe a third or a quarter of

what they should have been asking maybe out of fear. You

know, they asked for a multiplier that was five times

higher instead of ten times higher.

So if you've asked for too little money and they

say yes too quickly, you say, "And we would like you to

pledge that amount every year for the next five years,"

which admittedly takes -- chutzpah is the Yiddish word --

brass ovaries. It takes a lot of guts to say that.

But you should be thinking more in terms of people

supporting your work over five years. You're not going to

go out of business in five years. There's still going to

be a need for your work in five years. So you should be

thinking about having people give over five years.

If you don't want to ask for that, you could also

instead ask for them to give you their house for an evening

to have a small event where it's one hour and they invite

their friends and you ask their friends for money, or they

invite their friends and you don't ask them for money but

you acquaint them with your work and you try to get word

out about what you do in the community. So have multiple

asks available.

Now, they might say "maybe." "Maybe; I have to

check with my wife." "Maybe; I have to check with my

boss," who is also their spouse.

What you want to find out from them is, is there

some further information they need? Because sometimes

maybe is just no and they don't want to say it right then.

And frankly, I'd just rather get an answer.

But if it's a genuine maybe and they want to check

with somebody, what you do is you say, "Okay. I'm opening

up my schedule book. What day should I call you on to find

out what the answer was?" And then you're not left

hanging, wondering three weeks later should I follow up or

not.

Now, there's four ways of people saying no, and

three don't really count. And the four ways are

"not you," "not now," "not yet," or "not this." So if they

say no, you want some clarity on why no. You know, what am

I going to do with this no.

And most of the time people don't say "no." They

don't say "never." "I would never give you money." So if

they're going to say no, find out.

So they'll say, "Well, you know, I just really --

it's not -- I'm not going to give money to you."

And I actually did this to someone where she asked

me to be on her board of directors, and I said, "You know,

you're a staff member, and I really believe that a board

member should put together the board of directors. It

shouldn't be done by the staff." So that's "not you." And

she could get some clarity on this.

And in her particular case, I named the board

member who I could not turn down. And, you know, if she

sent in that board member to ask me to be on the board, I

would not have turned down that man. And she never did.

So you have to actually listen and then do it.

So "not you." That's one answer.

"Not now." If somebody says it's the recession,

say, "Okay. Can I check back with you in six months to see

if your feelings on this have changed or if your position

is better?"

Or you could say, "How about making a bequest in

your will? You won't care about whether there's a

recession or not then."

So "not now" you can put it off -- you can either

put off their gift or their pledge, or you can check back

later and then actually follow up.

I can't tell you the number of people where

somebody said, you know, check back with me in six months,

and no one ever got back to them.

So there's "not you," "not now."

Then there's "not yet." And that's really saying,

"I don't feel that I know the organization well enough," in

which case that's just a request to get them better

involved. Get them better involved; ask them again.

Invite them down to your office, have them see your

work, have them maybe get involved in a committee where

they give advice but not money. Get them involved.

"Not this" is really the only time that "no" is a

"no." Where somebody looks at you and says, "You know, I

completely appreciate the idea of assistive technology.

I'm more interested in job training," or, "I'm more

interested in giving money to Cuba."

And you look around, and you say, "Thank you for

your time." And you can ask them for referrals. "Do you

know anyone else who might be more interested?" But I

would say "not this" is a real "not this."

Now, I have had donors who came to me and said,

"You know, this isn't my first love, and I've given you

money, but really I'd rather give money to somebody else.

Do you know anyone else who's working on this other issue?"

And I refer them, and they've come back later and

given me more money because they felt comfortable and safe

with me, that I actually referred them somewhere else and I

wasn't trying to keep them to myself. So it is even

possible to convert that final no. But that's the one I

would take seriously.

So whatever answer you got -- yes, no, maybe,

never -- doesn't matter. You spend your final minutes

schmoozing with them. And it could just be you ask for

referrals to other people. You thank them for their time.

You comment on something in their office or home. And you

leave.

Now, as soon as you get out to the car, you have

got to write down what was said.

Liz, can you transfer to the next slide, please?

If you do not write down what was said, I promise

you, by the end of the day, your mind is garbage, and you

don't remember a thing that happened. You can't even name

all the people that you saw.

It's appalling, but trust me. If you go through

nine straight days of this over three weeks, your mind will

be mush.

So the moment you get in the car, you write down a

note or you call back to the office or you leave a

voicemail for yourself. Whatever you have to do to remind

yourself of this is what the person said, and this is what

I said, and here's the follow-up.

And you always want to write a follow-up letter. I

like a little follow-up handwritten note just thanking them

for their time.

But you can also have a letter than confirms what

was said. "You've made a pledge of $5,000 a year for the

next five years." Whatever it was, confirm what was said.

"You're going to send us a check by the end of next month."

And always, always, always thank them for their

time.

Let me skip for a moment just to the seven thank

yous, and I'll come back to the 25 most important people.

It's been said that you should thank a donor seven

times. But I don't think most people know what would seven

thank yous even look like. So let me give you a little

hint here.

You can have a board member call to say thank you

for their gift. I got one of these recently for -- I made

a gift for $500, and a board member personally called me

and then personally sent a little handwritten note. I

think they do it at board meetings.

I was very impressed. I had never had that before.

And I had given larger sums to other organizations. I'm

more likely to give to them again.

A letter from the office, certainly for any gift

over $25 you're required to. It is allowed to do that

through e-mail. The IRS will allow e-mail thank yous.

Personally, I'm old fashioned. I believe a note on your

stationery, a letter from the office confirming their

gift -- it's gracious, and I think you should be doing

that. You could also do the personal note as well.

You should, I think, post your list of donors on

your website, preferably with the amount that they give.

People Google themselves. They want to see themselves

listed on your website. People can opt out if they want or

ask to be listed as anonymous. But, frankly, fewer than 1

percent of people do, in my experience. List them in your

newsletter. List them in the annual report.

And then the final thing I like to do to thank

people is in January I send a summary document to everybody

who's given over the past year listing the cumulative

amount of all their donations.

It reminds them of you in January when a lot of

people are thinking, "Gee, I should have been more

charitable last year." It reminds them again in April when

they're doing their taxes, "Gee, I could have taken more

deductions if I'd given more money." It puts you in front

of them a couple of times.

So that's seven different ways to thank your

donors.

Now, there's an idea that's promoted actually a lot

in business that each month you should have contact with

the 25 people who are the most important people to your

organization. And these contacts are with the idea of

relationship-building.

So you can make a list of how am I going to touch

base with the 25 most important people each month. And in

February it might be a Valentine's Day card. And in

November it might be a holiday card.

It could be a little personal handwritten note on a

holiday card that you're sending anyway: their name, your

name, some little memory that you have of them over the

past year so they know that you're not just sending out a

thousand of these.

If you're in the newspaper, you can get 25 copies

of the newspaper and sit there with pinking sheers and cut

out the copy and -- not a Xerox. Like an actual piece of

the newspaper with a little Post-It note handwritten

saying, "In case you missed this."

So you can come up with a list of a dozen things to

do throughout the year just to connect with those 25 most

important people. Sometimes pick up the phone and call

them. Just make a note, once a day every day for a month

you're going to call one of these 25 people.

The 25 most important people don't necessarily need

to be the people who give you the most money. It could be

the people who refer you to the most donors. So it might

be some of your board members or volunteers or past staff

members where you call them up and just remind them you're

there, and they say, "Oh, you know, I was just thinking of

you. You should talk to so and so. Why don't I call them

and let them know you'll be calling them." So people who

do referrals are good too.

Another thing that you can do with somebody who's

giving you money is ask for advice. So that you call them

up, and you say, "I'm not here to ask for money. I want to

set a time that would be good for you to talk. I'd like to

talk to you for about half an hour and ask for your

advice."

And pick something that you genuinely need advice

on: a governance issue; you need to find more board

members, and you want to go out into the community; or

they're Muslim, and you need to know when their high

holidays are and how you can work more with members of the

Islamic faith.

It doesn't matter what advice you're asking for.

It should be real advice. What I find is a lot of people

start advisory boards, and they put their most prestigious

people on it, and then they're never in contact with them.

So that's one of the things that you can do to connect with

people.

And then finally there's the question of what is it

that you want to do today or this week? You can do

fund-raising any time during the year, but there's some

things that I think that are particularly important that

you should be doing.

One is is that you should have a plan for

fund-raising so that you don't feel like you're lurching

around.

Like, for example, it used to be that foundations

had deadlines. Some still do. Certainly all the

government grants do. But for the most part, they stopped

doing deadlines.

And the reason why they stopped is one word:

FedEx. When FedEx came around, people started sending

their grant proposals by FedEx, and the foundations were

enormously annoyed by this. They were spending $13, $16,

$20 or more to tell them how much you needed money.

They still have deadlines. They just won't tell

you what they are. So now foundations will tell you things

like they have rolling deadlines or internal deadlines or,

"No, we don't have deadlines."

They still have deadlines. They still know when

they're sending out proposals to be read and when it's

going to the board of directors and when it will be voted

on. They just won't tell you anymore.

Because it doesn't matter to them if you wait four

months until the next deadline. It only matters to you.

But they just didn't want to see any more FedExed

proposals.

The way around this, especially for the foundations

that still have grants, is to create a yearly plan. And

it's a calendar, and it's written in so that you know on

this date you are going to mail this grant, and it's going

to be a week early. Or you know that this is the date when

your letter to donors has to go to the printer.

And if you create a plan like that, then you will

find that you're no longer just lurching around from one

deadline to the next. The year has rhythm to it.

And you put in that plan when you're going to take

vacation and take it. You know, and you can feel confident

everything's going on without you.

Part of the plan should be when are you going to

have this three weeks of nine days of appointments? And

how are you going to run the rest of your office while

you're doing it?

In the plan should be newsletter communications;

and when you're sending out e-mails; and the annual report,

when that's due; and when your audit is due. So you're not

feeling like you're always overworked.

But another thing that I would do today, just

because it's the end of the year, is plan on dropping maybe

either one more postcard or one more e-mail where you ask

people for money. And for an e-mail, put something quick

in the subject line, five words maybe, but don't have it

be, you know, "Why you should support us." They're going

to just hit "delete."

One of my favorite e-mail subject lines is "quick

question." Quick question. People will open that up.

It's quick. It's a question. Maybe it's a question I can

answer.

And the quick question could be, you know, "Would

you go to our website and make a donation in any amount?

Just do it right now. You know, if you've been thinking of

us and intending to get a check in the mail, please send it

now." That's it. That's something quick.

You could also just go to a place like

VistaPrint.com or your local printer, just make up 500

postcards, drop them in the mail. A lot of people think,

"Oh, no. If we weren't in the mail with our holiday letter

by Thanksgiving, we're dead."

No. Most people are sitting around the week

between Christmas and New Year's, and they are looking at

their mail thinking, "Oh, I should give more money because

otherwise I'm not going to have the tax deduction."

After Christmas nothing happens until New Year's.

A lot of people have that week off anyway. So if they get

an e-mail from you or if they get a postcard and it prompts

them to think of you, that's a perfectly good use of your

time in the next week.

But mainly I would think about what are you going

to do to make next year much stronger in terms of your

fund-raising.

I think that, if you know that you're doing special

events that aren't working for you, I think that you should

go to a website called Benevon.com. And I'll type this

into the webinar so you can see it.

Benevon.com does an excellent video. It's 17

minutes. And it's how to completely change around your

event fund-raising. We talked about it a little bit last

month.

But I think that, you know, you should take this

time of year and sit down and say what didn't work last

year and what can we replace it with.

And if you're doing the golf tournament or the

silent auction, and the catering costs and the staff costs

eat up 80 percent of what you raise, it's time to replace

it with another event. Events get tired.

So that's pretty much what I wanted to say for

today.

We can go to the last slide, Liz.

There's a couple of ways to contact me. I have a

blog at werth-it.com, and you can go to that and post a

question there. Or you can write me directly at

katherine@werth-it.com.

I don't disappear just because you've heard the

webinar and it ends. I'm still a human being, and I'm

sitting in California reading my e-mail. So you're welcome

to e-mail me a technical question.

As we said before, all of the handouts are at

werth-it.com/seminar. It's a secret place on my website

for people who have attended my seminars, and you'll find

that there's a variety of materials on this and on other

things.

But I would really encourage you to write me and

ask your questions. Because a lot of times what might take

you an hour of research is something that I could easily

answer.

And now I'll shut off the mic, and if anybody has a

question, I would be happy to answer it.

Thank you very much for inviting me to do this.

And special thanks to Liz. I always really enjoy working

with you. And since many people in my family have used

assistive technology, I'm grateful for the opportunity to

give back. So thank you.

And now we'll open it for questions.

LIZ PERSAUD: Thank you, Katherine. Again, we

always appreciate your time and your expertise on this

subject.

Does anyone out there have a question for

Katherine? We do have a few extra minutes, so we could

certainly use that time for some Q and A.

All right. Well, again, if there are any

questions, comments, Katherine and I will hang out a little

bit on the webinar.

We do have a question. "What is the secret

website? Can you repeat it?"

The website -- Katherine's secret website -- and

again, Katherine, we appreciate you sharing your secret

website with us. It's werth-it.com/seminar. And Katherine

just posted it up there.

Again, that has all of her handouts for anyone who

has listened to the webinars that we had today, last month,

and also at the conference. Feel free to jump on there and

grab some of her handouts. It has a wealth of knowledge

and things that you can apply to your program.

So again, do we have any questions or comments for

Katherine while we're on here?

All right. Well, again, Katherine, we appreciate

your time. Thank you so much for your expertise, for your

knowledge, for attending the conference, and for putting on

these webinars for us.

Folks out there, I just wanted to let y'all know

that one of our partnering programs in Georgia, after

Katherine presented to us in Atlanta in September, three

weeks later they took her advice, they asked a community

partner for funding assistance, and they were able to get

$50,000.

So Katherine doesn't lie. She tells the truth.

Her tips and solutions and techniques do work. So if any

of y'all ever implement anything that you've heard from

Katherine at the webinar, at the conferences a few months

ago, please e-mail us. E-mail Katherine. E-mail me,

liz@passitoncenter or anyone on the Pass It On Center team.

We'd love to hear how that's worked for you.

So again, Katherine, thank you for your time.

Y'all let us know how we can assist you. Again,

jump on the ATIA website, Pass It On Center website,

register for ATIA. Hopefully we see y'all in January.

Happy holidays to everyone. Let us know how we can

assist you. And we look forward to talking to you in the

new year.


Thank you and take care.