Double Your Success - A Petrus Development Show Episode on Matching Gifts

Andrew Robison, Petrus president, joins Rhen on this week's episode of the Petrus Development Show!  Andrew and Rhen spend their time together discussing the benefits of matching gift challenges.  They give details on how to conduct a successful matching gift campaign, and they encourage all organizations to give this important fundraising tool a try!

Show Notes:

This is nuts and bolts episode for anyone who wants to start hosting matching gift challenges.  Andrew and Rhen will walk you step-by-step through the logistics of organizing a matching gift challenge, and they offer insight to all of the creative possibilities for these challenges.  After listening to this episode, you'll certainly be ready to begin your own matching gift challenge plans!

In this episode, Andrew and Rhen answer the following questions:

• What is a matching gift challenge?
  
  
• How do you find donors who are willing to offer matching gifts?
  
  
• How do you structure your matching gift challenge and maximize results?
  
  
• Should monthly gifts be included in the challenge?  If so, how?
  
  
• What happens if we get to our deadline and and haven't met the goal of our challenge?  Or, the alternative, what happens if we hit our goal early?

As Rhen mentions at the end of the episode, Petrus is offering a free annual fund checklist for listeners.  The checklist shares several ideas (in addition to matching gift challenges!) for how you can build a more robust annual fund.  If you'd like to receive this resource, please click here for more information.    

INTERVIEW TRANSCRIPT

00:26.51
aggierobison
Well howdy everybody, welcome back to the Petrus Development Show. I am Rhen Hoehn from Petrus and I am joined today by Mr. Andrew Robinson, owner and the president of Petrus Development. How's it going, Andrew?

00:38.92
AROB
Greetings and salutations, Rhen. It's going all right.

00:44.85
aggierobison
It's the middle of summer here. We're coming up on fall. How have things been going in your house?

00:48.50
AROB
Hot, hot. Yeah, we got out of town for a while and hit the open road, which was a lot of fun. It was a lot of chaos and sometimes we were questioning our decisions.

01:05.89
AROB
But we had a good time. Saw a lot of family, saw parts of the country, and you know, made it through in one piece. 

01:23.61
AROB
How about you, Rhen? How's summer been going for you? What have you been thinking about?

01:28.86
aggierobison
Ah, good. I've been thinking a lot lately about Holy Donors. Yeah, if you follow the Holy Donors podcast, it's been a little bit quiet lately. We've had people having babies, starting new jobs, breaking their legs.

01:40.68
AROB
Oh my gosh.

01:43.13
aggierobison
Yeah, it's been hard to record. But if you watch the feed, there might be some fun new stuff coming on the Holy Donors podcast pretty soon. But our today's topic is reminding me of one of our Holy Donors, right? We're going to talk about matching gifts and one of the earliest examples we've seen of matching gift challenges.

01:53.78
AROB
Okay, okay.

02:01.62
aggierobison
It was from John Raskob actually, about in the early 1900s. He would like to raise money for causes he cared about, the parishes and schools, by saying, "Hey, go tell the parishioners that if they raise $10,000..."

02:05.13
AROB
Ah, the capitalist, right.

02:18.83
aggierobison
"I'll match that, and you know that'll cover our $20,000 project." Like, they need some skin in the game and then I'll get us most of the way there. But so he kind of used that matching gift challenge concept to motivate people to donate to different causes. And when I remember researching him and reading about that happening in the 1910s, 1920s, it's like, "Oh, this has been around for a lot longer than I thought it has."

02:42.75
AROB
Ah, we are not pioneers, Ren. Just recycling old ideas. That's okay, there you go.

02:51.15
aggierobison
Matching gifts are one of the best ways to encourage donors to give, to get them to kind of push them over the edge to make a gift. So let's talk about matching gifts today. Do you want to start by telling us what a matching gift challenge or matching gift collection is? There are a couple of different ways you can use matching gifts.

03:01.83
AROB
Sure, so you explained the concept pretty well with Raskob's example. Basically, you find an individual or a group of individuals who are willing to post a challenge, usually a set dollar amount, but it doesn't have to be, and challenge other individuals to support. And so typically, it's a scenario like that. There's a project that costs X, the donor will put up half of it, and then the charity or nonprofit is responsible for going out and finding donors to match it. And so that can be done, kind of what you're alluding to with the challenges and the collections. This can be done at a parish level or campus ministry level, you know, who has a Sunday collection. The ones that I've been part of when I was at campus ministries were matching gift collections, and so usually the collection on a given week might be, let's say, $10,000. So then we would find $20,000 in matching gifts and then challenge the congregation to give more than they would normally give. And if they get to $20,000, then the donor kicks in the match, and so then you turn a $10,000 week into a $40,000 weekend. And so that would be a collection. The challenge can also be done through direct mail, can be done online, can be done through a giving day, can be done on Giving Tuesday. The vehicle and the space can, you know, there's sort of an infinite number of possibilities. The concept is basically to find somebody who is willing to put up some of their own money to get other individuals to put money in too.

04:51.29
aggierobison
Great. So how do you find those challenge donors? Is it one person every time that you're asking? Are there multiple people? How do they go? How do you approach that process?

04:51.34
AROB
Raise more.

05:00.10
AROB
So this is a great opportunity for a nonprofit that's doing a match to engage somebody that has major gift potential who is maybe a major gift prospect and hasn't given at that major gift level yet. Because being the sponsor of a matching gift is actually a pretty exciting thing because you know that your dollars are being doubled, tripled, quadrupled by everybody else. You're engaging new people, and so your impact is being amplified significantly. And so a lot of times that's a good opportunity if you need a $20,000 match, find somebody who typically gives in the, you know, four to $5,000 range but has capacity and go ask them to post a challenge. The first matching gift collection I ever did when I was at Ohio State, I wanted to get to a $25,000 challenge, but I didn't have any prospects and I didn't know anybody at that time. I was too new. And so we ended up cobbling together $21,000 in matching gifts, donations from 5 different individuals or families. So one gave $5,000, one gave $2,000, you know, it was kind of everything in between, but we got to $21,000. And I was a little disappointed because we didn't get to 25. Well, we ended up raising like $120,000 that weekend because it was the first time we'd ever done it. People were so excited. They loved the idea, and then I can still remember telling those 5 families about the results of the weekend, and I mean, you couldn't have scripted it any better. They were so happy.

06:34.11
AROB
That they became longtime major gift donors for the organization.

06:36.71
aggierobison
Love it. I've even gone beyond that. I've done both that get one donor to put up the challenge. You have to have gotten 5 or 6 donors to put cobbled together. One year we even did, we approached a whole bunch working at a campus ministry. We approached a whole bunch of graduates from the previous year or recent grads, just recent grads in last year or two, and said, "Hey, would you guys kind of come together?" And I think we got 40 different recent graduates to put up gifts as a challenge gift, and we brought that to the rest of our list, saying, "Hey, these 18-year-olds are coming together to put up a challenge gift. Would you help us match that?" Right? And so there's lots of different ways you can approach finding that challenge gift.

07:12.65
AROB
Yeah, it's all about being creative, being agile, and knowing your end goal is to post a challenge that will inspire others to give. And sometimes you have to be creative in getting there. But if you have that goal in mind, then you can do it.

07:26.90
aggierobison
Exactly. So can you talk about kind of how you operate this challenge and how do you maximize the results of it?

07:35.50
AROB
Yeah, so first, once you secure your matching donor or your matching sponsor, right? Whatever that looks like, then it's about kind of deciding on the space and time that this challenge is going to be open. So if it's at a parish or you have a parish offertory kind of component, then a weekend is a natural time, and usually we'll extend it through Monday, you know, kind of late comers. But I know that some of your matching challenges have gone for, you know, a couple of days or a week, and you have a direct mail component, so you need a large enough window that people can mail in or can go online. So first, it's about kind of deciding what's the right timeframe. Now I will caution people because I've had, you know, we've done some giving days or challenges that are, you know, two days or a couple of days, and then the organization thinks, "Well, if two days is good, then..."

08:29.70
AROB
Thirty days is better, right? And so you extend that window, and I've never seen it actually raise more money by having a larger window. It is about, there is an element of creating urgency and deadlines that inspires people to take action and give. And so by having a longer period...

08:47.99
AROB
You just sort of delay those deadlines until the end of it, and you don't actually have more people give.

08:52.10
aggierobison
Exactly. It's got to be the right balance. Like you said, the campus ministry I was at, we're in a very rural place. All of our alumni lived 8 to 10 hours away. They were never coming back to campus for like one big mass, so we did, we said, "All right, we can do a mailer, and from the time that this mailing arrives up until this cutoff date, which is roughly two weeks away, all the gifts that come in from the mail, online, at mass, anywhere, all of it counts for the matching gift up to x amount." Right? And where you'd see when you do that is you get an immediate bump when everybody gets the mailing and when they see the stuff online at the beginning. You see a bump, and then at the end is when most of the rest of the gifts come in. So if nothing comes in the middle, it feels dead, like, "Oh, this is going to be a failure." What I learned is I wanted to be more than halfway to the goal going into the last 36 hours, and then we'd see, pretty much every time, you'd see the rest of that 50% of the gifts come in in the last 24 hours, sometimes last 3-4 hours. And so it's, yeah, it's all about having a good deadline that's not too far from when you start the challenge.

10:01.97
AROB
There's also another way to maximize a challenge, and that's to include personal solicitations and major gift asks as part of the challenge. So a lot of times, you know, you might have an organization that for...

10:18.40
AROB
For a giving day or for, you know, whatever that is, they set a large challenge - $50,000, $100,000, million dollars, you know, whatever it is, large for that organization. And so it's unlikely that you're going to see that volume of gifts come through in small amounts through their website, through direct mail, that's going to get to that number. And so what they'll do is they'll set the goal, and then they'll actually identify, you know, a handful of people that they're going to go ask, "Would you make a gift to help us get to this challenge? What you give will be doubled, and it will unlock these additional matching funds." And I know I worked with an organization one time, and we set the goal. It had a donor that was willing to give $100,000. That was double what they had ever raised in this particular matching challenge. And so we identified at least double that amount in prospective gifts...

11:14.34
AROB
That we asked for before the challenge even started. And so we went into that challenge period having a pretty good idea that we were going to, we were going to meet it. And then what people gave online was actually just sort of on top of that, and that served more as a donor acquisition piece than it did for actually getting the number.

11:35.64
aggierobison
Yeah, in general I think across fundraising, you know, you hear 80% of gifts come from 20% of people. I think it's actually 80% comes from 13% of people, and that holds true in these types of challenges as well. Like there's got to be one or two big gifts usually to get you to a challenge goal.

11:52.41
AROB
Yeah, yeah.

11:53.17
aggierobison
Great. So one question that people don't necessarily always consider when they think about these matching gift challenges: should we include monthly gifts in there somehow?

12:04.96
AROB
Why would you not, Ren? There's no good answer. You don't think about it. Yeah.

12:10.20
aggierobison
I don't know why you wouldn't accept that. Most people just think of, yeah, you think of one-time gifts coming in, but including monthly gifts was probably the biggest game-changer that I found in our matching gift challenges that I've done. It gets you to the finish line faster with the challenge gift, and you bring in a lot of people that day as monthly givers for years and years and years, and it helps us build that monthly giving program. How would you set that up? How would you include that in the matching gift?

12:32.66
AROB
Yeah, so I'll go back to my example that I talked about earlier when we got $21,000 challenge for a weekend that ended up raising $120,000. Well, $54,000 of that, I can't believe that I remember these numbers. This is fifteen years ago. Like anyway, it's cracking me up here. $54,000 of that came in through new monthly gifts, and how do I calculate that $54,000? What we told people on the front end of this is there are multiple ways where you can give: you can give in the collection, you can go online, you can stop by the church office and drop a check off, or you can sign up for a new monthly gift. And if you sign up for a new monthly gift, then the first twelve months of that will count towards this challenge. So if somebody signs up for $100, then we counted that as $1,200 towards this challenge. And I thought that we would get some, but I did not think that we would generate $54,000 in new annual gifts as a result of this. And so it was a fundamental shift in just the fundraising strategy of the organization, and it reinforced in my mind that, yes, what people... Because you know when you think about it, you probably had, we probably had a lot of students and other people that would say, "All right, that's a big number, $21,000. Like I can't give anything that would even come close to helping to hit that. But if I did $20 a month, like that's $240. That's a lot more than I could give at one time. So I'll sign up for that."

14:10.50
AROB
And then, you know, studies show that over 70% of those people, and probably greater, are going to continue giving past that twelve-month period. And so, you know, it's additional dollars for the organization that started because we just made it possible for them to give that way.

14:25.78
aggierobison
Exactly. I've had matching challenges where we were pretty confident we were going to hit the goal, and so we offered maybe less of a match on monthly gifts, like the first month is matched or the first three months are matched. And other ones I felt like it was going to be a stretch, like maybe we'll match six or twelve months of the monthly gift, right? And help us get to that goal.

14:44.67
aggierobison
You definitely want to achieve that goal and so you look good to those challenge donors. What happens if you don't hit that goal though?

14:51.98
AROB
Well, I want to go back to the monthly giving question real quick because earlier I said, you know, sometimes the match is for a total amount that you want to challenge people to. But this is a way, when you do monthly gifts, this is a way to be creative. If your goal in this challenge is to generate more monthly gifts, instead of setting a, you know, finding a $20,000 donor, what you could do is you could find somebody who would challenge you to generate $1,000 a month in new monthly gifts from new people, or $2,000 a month, or $50,000 a year. Whatever that kind of, you know, you slice and dice it a lot of ways. And that's what you were talking about, that when Father approached the young alumni, that's what that was, because all of those people, those 40, they signed up for, they committed to a certain amount per month that collectively was $1,000 a month or whatever the number was. And then that became the challenge: Can we generate an additional thousand dollars per month in new monthly gifts? And so monthly giving, a great strategy if you're launching a new monthly giving program or reviving, you know, kind of reshaping one, or whatever that looks like, or just wanting to grow it. Having a challenge that's specifically designed to generate new monthly gifts is a great way to generate new monthly gifts.

16:07.48
aggierobison
Exactly. When I was at St. O's, we went from 0 to over 200 active monthly donors, and well over half of them came from a matching gift that we did. For only four new or increased monthly gifts, every spring we did one matching gift challenge that was for any gifts and one that was just for monthly gifts.

16:27.34
aggierobison
And that was a big generator of our monthly giving program. Great. So like I said, what happens if you get to your deadline and you haven't raised the full amount, you haven't met the goal for the challenge?

16:38.84
AROB
Okay, so this is gonna be a scary time because you're thinking, "Oh my god, no, I don't think we're gonna make it." So there's a couple of things you can do here. One, you can change the parameters of the timeline, right? Reset the deadline. So, you know, like I mentioned, our matching collections, they used to close at 5:00 PM on Monday. Well, this may be an opportunity for you to say, "We've had so much interest, we're going to extend the deadline until 5 PM on Friday." So you kind of give yourself a little bit more time, you reset the deadline, and you just sort of make it, or you know, "We're going to go an additional 12 hours," or whatever that looks like. So that's one way. The other solution for that is that you start making calls and you start, you know, really leaning into that urgency and those monthly giving prospects and/or major giving prospects, and you start asking people to help you get to that goal. I know that we did that a number of times when I worked at St. Mary's at A&M. You know, we might have a challenge and it was going to be close, and so Greg, that's what he would do. He would spend all Monday morning picking up the phone and calling people, "Hey, I know that you maybe didn't know that we had this challenge. It ends tonight. I saw that you haven't given yet. Is this something that you'd like to support with a gift of X or whatever amount you feel called to?" And you know, a lot of people say, "Yeah, I didn't even know it was happening. I'd love to support. Happy to do it." And so those are two strategies to help you get to that point where you hit your goal in a way that still makes you successful.

18:25.21
aggierobison
Yeah, I think it's important to be willing to push hard on that last twenty-four hours because, like I said, every time that I've done one, I felt like we weren't going to make it. In the last twenty-four hours is when the magic happens, but you've got to push harder than maybe it feels comfortable. It might take 3 or 4 emails on that last day, which...

18:44.37
aggierobison
You know, is a lot. You're going to get some unsubscribes if you do that. But you know, an email at 8 am that says "12 hours left" or whatever the number is, "8 hours left and $5,000 left to go," and you know, another hour, another email's "4 hours left and $3,000 left to go." Like, that's the magic formula I found for those headlines.

19:01.69
aggierobison
People like, "Oh, time's running out. There's urgency and this is what they need." I can contribute. And I learned, when I first started these, I'd set the deadline at midnight. Such a terrible idea because I'd be up at 9 pm sending the email, 10:30 pm sending the email. It worked, man. There's...

19:13.37
AROB
Who else is giving at midnight anyway? Yeah, oh yeah.

19:20.60
aggierobison
Big gifts came in, but I was up there sending those emails like "1 hour left, we still have $800 left to go." And so we'd get past the goal, but because I pushed hard, I was up until the middle of the night. Like, man, just set it for 5 pm. Better for everybody, so much better.

19:34.12
AROB
So, one final point I want to make on this though is, it reinforces the idea that you can't decide, "We're going to have a challenge. Go find a challenge donor," and then say the rest is out of my control. Whatever comes in, comes in.

19:54.70
AROB
Like, you have to develop an intentional strategy. You have to put together a communication plan. It includes your prospects that you're gonna call or you're gonna visit and ask for those gifts. It includes, you know, multiple ways that people can give, giving options. One of my organizations, they got a stock gift as part of a challenge from somebody who, you know, they never would have thought, and it ended up being a $25,000 stock gift because they wanted to help meet the challenge. But they were intentional. They were doing their part. They were putting forth the work and they were pushing. They...

20:30.99
AROB
Like the way you said that, kind of pushing beyond the point where it feels comfortable. And that is, if you're going to succeed in fundraising, if you're going to succeed in challenge fundraising like this, you have to be willing to go all in when the time calls for you to go all in. And when you have a deadline that you don't want to delay or you've already delayed or whatever that looks like, then it's on you to push and call in, you know, call people that you haven't called before, get other people on your team to help make those calls. Whatever it takes, you want to get to that magic number.

21:04.22
aggierobison
Yeah, and this question just came to mind as a result of that. Okay, so on the flip side here, what if you hit your goal early? Do you just stop and say, "Hey, we're good," or how do you approach that?

21:17.34
AROB
Yeah, so think about Kickstarter, right? So Kickstarter really got big by saying, you know, "We want to raise $10,000 to launch this new board game." And if that's all Kickstarter ever did, you'd have some funded programs, but it wouldn't be as exciting. What they do really well, and they train the people that launch Kickstarters to do, is to go into it saying, "If we exceed this, here's the next thing, here's our next goal." And you sort of have these step-up challenges, right? So you can go in if you think you're going to hit a goal of $20,000, then you say, "All right, our next goal is going to be $25,000," and then after that, "Our next goal is going to be $28,000," and you sort of keep ratcheting up those goals to keep people's interest.

22:04.96
AROB
The other thing that you can do, like I said with this organization, we made a lot of asks before the event even happened. We went into the weekend knowing that we had a 99% chance of hitting the goal because we already had so many people committed before we even launched it. And so what we did was we started out the two-day challenge by increasing the goal already. So it changed it. You know, the rule is that you make the rules, right? And if you're willing, not in a deceptive kind of way, but in a "we can be agile and we can change the parameters based on what is happening in real time" way.

22:53.99
aggierobison
Right, like the challenge donor isn't obligated to give you more than what they committed to originally, but you can still set a goal beyond what that original challenge gift was. Anyway, I've seen this so many times now, it isn't logical, but when you pass that goal amount, people don't stop giving at that moment.

23:11.81
aggierobison
They keep giving. The first matching gift challenge I ever did was $10,000, and we raised $30,000 toward that. People saw for days that we had passed that goal, and they kept giving even though the matching gift had fully been earned. It doesn't make sense necessarily.

23:30.81
aggierobison
But I've seen that a bunch of times now where people just keep giving. So yeah, don't be afraid to keep asking even if you've hit the goal or passed the goal.

23:39.50
AROB
Yeah, I mean this example probably doesn't pertain to most of the listeners, but after Hurricane Harvey, JJ Watt, who's a football player, played for the Houston Texans at the time. He went on, I don't know if it was Kickstarter or YouGiving or whatever, one of these crowdfunding sites, and he posted a $100,000 challenge to raise money over like a four-day period. They ended up raising $22 million, and it was not, you know, they didn't increase the challenge. They just, people started giving and then it kind of gained traction and then more people started giving, and it was just like, "How big can we make this?" Not "We've already hit our goal, so now we're going to stop giving." People got really excited and wanted to increase the giving even beyond, and it's a similar, you know, it's a similar type of mentality. Yeah, smaller numbers, but for charities, for charities that are listening to this, is you know, people kind of get into it and they think, "How much can we exceed it if we just keep going?" And so you, as the fundraiser, can have an opportunity to lean into that and really inspire people to get excited.

25:44.89
aggierobison
Perfect, great. Well, I think the moral of the story here is think about doing a matching gift challenge for your ministry. If you want to do it in the fall, I would start approaching your challenge donor prospects right now and making the ask, and maybe you'll get some set up and can implement a matching gift at your ministry or organization. Great, and like I mentioned at the beginning of the episode, we had the John Raskob season of Holy Donors, which is season 2 of Holy Donors. You can go check that out and hear how he used matching gifts to raise money for a bunch of different initiatives.

26:04.68
AROB
There you go.

26:22.48
aggierobison
And he was an interesting guy who built the Empire State Building, managed the presidential campaign for Al Smith, who was the first Catholic candidate for the presidency, helped build DuPont and General Motors. A super interesting guy that a lot of people haven't heard his name, so go hear more about him and his giving and his Catholic life.

26:35.31
AROB
Done.

26:42.33
aggierobison
Interesting guy, and watch the Holy Donor feed for some more interesting Catholic generous philanthropists and their stories.

26:50.52
AROB
Yeah, and for people that are listening to this podcast, obviously you like podcasts. So we've got 15 plus episodes, seasons out of Holy Donors. But for those people that would prefer to read about Holy Donors, you can also go on Amazon or I think on our website, and you can buy a copy of the first Holy Donor that we ever profiled, Danny Thomas, in "A Hopeful Cause." Did I get that right?

27:23.51
aggierobison
Yep, yep, our first Holy Donors book, "A Hopeful Cause: Danny Thomas' Story." Excellent. Well, thanks for joining us today, Andrew, and we'll see you again in a couple weeks.

27:33.38
AROB
Thanks, Rhen. This was fun.