Getting Real about Conversation and Pro-Social Behaviour

Welcome to the first episode of the Let’s Get Real Summer Series! We have some slightly shorter episodes that you can listen to in between your Summer plans. First up, we have an episode with Leigh Sandison, the Managing Director of Real Path. 

Leigh joins Ed and Lisa to discuss the difference between data and conversation, and how treating donors as more than a single data point can further your organization. The hosts also relate this to the idea of pro-social behaviour, and how connection makes people more likely to give.

Interested in learning more about planned giving? PGgrowth's new membership space, PGcommons, is the place for you. Go to pggrowth.com/podcasts and click on the PGcommons button to access your 30-day free trial, or sign up for our free membership.

Transcript

SPEAKER_01 0:11

Welcome, and here we are, back with the Let's Get Real podcast. This is Canadian Perspectives on Fundraising as what we talk about. I'm Lisa McDonald. I'm the editor of Hillborn Charity eNews. My co-host is Ed Sluga of PG Growth. And we have a very special first-time guest in the chair today, Lee Sandison. Lee, welcome. I'm so excited to have you here and to have this discussion with you. I would just love for you to tell our listeners tuning in a little bit about yourself and how you came to be doing the work that you're doing and what it is, you know, that you're doing in philanthropy right now before we even get into your topic.

SPEAKER_02 1:03

Okay, sounds good. Thanks, Lisa. Um, and thanks Ed. And nice to meet you, Ed, five minutes ago. It's perfect. Um I'm very excited to be here. Um, so yeah, I'll just give you a little background on me. So um 20 odd years ago, I was fundraising in the UK and spent five years doing really, really cool roles like um in-memory segment manager, um, innovation strategist, like very, very cool, interesting things in the UK. And then I came back to Toronto uh in um 2011 and I couldn't find a job doing what I was doing in the UK here. It was all like extremely traditional fundraising. Um, and I was very interested in like who people were and experience design and that kind of thing. So I went onto the corporate side and worked in corporate for you know 10 plus years, um, working with very big guys like Microsoft and LCBO and L'Oreal and you know, big major players who were spending lots of money to do this work. Um, and then I was on Mat Leave through COVID with my uh my son, my first Mat Leave. And my brother said, Hey, um, he he had been in fundraising this entire time. And he said, Hey, we're doing a dollar journey mapping project, and I know you do customer journey mapping. Can you come and take a look at this? Yeah, no problem. And went over and um, and I was like, Oh, the way you guys are doing this is like how corporates were doing it 15 years ago. It's like you need to come over here and let me tell you the secret about journey mapping is that you need to actually involve the people that you are doing the mapping about in the process. Um, and it just made me realize that there was like a big gap in in what was happening in the nonprofit space in Canada where um people were talking about journey mapping, but they were really, really focused on their own internal perspective and not at all on the supporters' perspective, hearing from donors all of that, and using that to inform how they were kind of changing that experience design. So that's that's me and where I started from and kind of what I'm doing now.

SPEAKER_01 3:11

Yeah, super cool. And um, and I've now, you know, got you know, I've I've seen you in actionly, I've got to hear you speak at a couple of conferences. Um, and I know you're getting out there in in the world and and sharing some of the message of your learnings. And that's really what I wanted you to come and talk about with our audience and with Ed and I today is is uh kind of you know, again, we can only kind of get into some of the broad concepts, uh a bit of the uh ideas, but um I'd really love for you to just take us through a little bit of of what you found and and why supporter experience, for example, is is something that goes actually further, you know, than journey mapping. And and maybe is that a good place to to start with the conversation?

SPEAKER_02 4:03

Totally. Um and this is one of my favorite topics right now, so fantastic. Um and it was really interesting. So I um I think two or three weeks ago, I was speaking at a conference that was based in the UK from fundraising everywhere, and it was the Supporter Experience Conference. Like they have a whole conference just about supporter experience in the UK, and here people are barely talking about it, and um it's it's uh it's an interesting time to be here because like for me, I'm like, okay, the UK is quite far ahead of us here. We can do a lot of learning and and come very quickly to to where you know they've spent decades getting to, um, just just by kind of following suit and thinking about this. Um, but for me, so you know, we spent we've journey mapping has been like a buzzword in the industry for you know the last five years or however long it's been. Um, and it's very um sort of one-dimensional. So people talk about this is the journey map um for you know uh monthly giving. This is our journey map for like this event we're running, this is our journey for legacy giving. And what I'm trying to talk about and what like other people in supporter experience space are talking about is one level up from that. So, how what is the actual feeling that you're giving supporters and how do you embed that through all of these various journeys that you have and making sure there's consistency in that? Um, and one of the one of the sort of examples that I gave last week at um at the Canada's fundraising conference was um I um 11 years ago um did I shaved my head. Um, and for you know, people listening, I have like really big curly hair. It's like a defining feature of me. Um so shave my head is a big deal. Um and I raised over 25 grand for this organization. And um, you know, they gave me a big check, it was all like this awesome thing, it was great. I I did it off of GoFundMe. And then last year was like 10 years later from my mom passing away, and I raised another 10 grand, and there was no connection um between these two experiences, and that's where supporter experience comes in. It's like the the journeys for these two individual products were fantastic, and you know, great, great time doing this this ride and all this, but the fact that they couldn't connect those things together was like a major gap in the experience and made me feel like, oh, that they don't care about me. So, like, will I give them a legacy gift? Probably not. Um, yeah, so that's kind of the overview of of supporter experience. And and one of the things I was talking about with the supporter experience conference was like, what are the various things that that fundraisers need to do? What are what are some of the sort of skill sets they they need to have to get into this um supporter experience mindset? And like for me, the biggest one is curiosity is like, who are your supporters? And I'm saying supporters now and not donors because the experience starts earlier than when people are donors. It's like right at the beginning, before they even find out who you're who you are. It's like, how are they interested in what you're doing first? That's like the first phase, and then they're finding out about you, they're making initial judgments on who you are and what you do. Um, and you know, and then they might volunteer, they might become advocates, and then they might become a donor. And it's like you have to pull them through all of these phases and make sure that the experience is really strong and is seamless and gives them the feels that you want so that they become donors and that they stay with you and that you know they they carry on with you for you know a lifetime of giving as you know what we all want. So the first thing is being curious about who they are, what they want, the experience that you're currently having. Um, and I always I always think it's funny, it's like, okay, how do we find this stuff out? It's like just talk to them. They're people, they're people, just like we're people, just have a chat with them, find out, ask them. Um, and I always think it was funny, like in my um in my corporate world, uh I was working with the L CBO and they were talking about um labels for wine bottles, and like they're quite confusing um because it's like, okay, how many grams of sugar and all these various things that people are using to make decisions? And they're like, okay, like let's you know, send out a survey and get this information. I was like, there's a store just downstairs, like, let's just go and talk to people and ask them. Um, I think it's just it's one of these funny things. It's like data is so important now in our society, like it's so overwhelmingly prevalent that people forget that like the best way to find things out is by talking to people. Um, and I and I tote that all the time, but but being curious about what people are experiencing with you, I think is like one of the one of the biggest things. And then also for fundraising teams, it's like you are not dealing with this person in isolation. They are they are being touched by your marketing team and by your advocacy team and you know, various steps along the way. So you have to make sure that everyone is sort of like collectively treating the supporter as one person and not just being sort of like handed off um without thinking through that.

SPEAKER_01 9:36

Before I before I pull Ed into the conversation, because I'm really interested to hear, you know, he's worked in legacy giving space for so long and and um his experience with having this part of the conversation with organizations. But I I have a quick question, Lee. Do you do you get pushback um to this idea of the of the personal contact because it feels too slow and too cumbersome? You know, it it feels now a lot easier or more intuitive to just hit send on a on a survey monkey and and get people to check some boxes and give you the answer. Oh, totally. Are are people just unwilling or uninterested in in giving the time to do that?

SPEAKER_02 10:20

Like what I think, I mean bold. I definitely think that people don't have the time. Like I would say it's it's not as much of a disinterest, it's just that they're they're on the monkey wheel and it's like I'm I'm doing it, I'm doing it, I'm doing it. Um, and so much of it is based on like what what we did last year, and we're just gonna like keep making this happen. Um, so I think time is probably or maybe not time as much as sort of the feeling of time um is like probably one of the biggest culprits. Um, but I also think it's just like we're we're just tapping our phones all the time. Like there's just so much less uh space for these like personal relationships. I'll tell you a story. I um uh one of my clients um a big university in Canada, um, they had uh a fundraiser who was sort of like having some going through some personal issues, and she was like, you know what? I'm gonna every Friday afternoon, I'm gonna um I'm gonna call donors because like I feel like I need to be more connected to people. I'm feeling a bit lonely, like this is this is what I want. That fundraiser now raises more funds than anybody else on the team. And it's like, yeah, that's like we're so fearful of it. Um, but it's like that's what's gonna drive everything forward. And if we can get more back to like, you know, the good old days, I dare say, um, then everyone feels more connected. Um, and I always think it's funny, like any of these projects that I do will say when when the organization is selecting like who they want me to interview, I'm like, be warned, I'm not asking people for donations, but these people will give more to you. So, like, you know, be thoughtful about your selections here.

SPEAKER_01 12:05

Yeah. Ed, yeah, I mean, yeah, he gave you the segue. It's it's more we need to be more like good old times. You know about good old times.

SPEAKER_00 12:13

Well, a couple of things. First and foremost, um I just want to set the stage that, you know, with 85,000 charities in Canada, you know, half of them being individual parishes, churches, synagogues, temples, that sort of thing. We get down to this other 42 and a half. Let's call it 45. That's makes more sense. Um, and then of the 45,000, about 40,000 are local charities, uh, small, under 200,000, under $500,000. And frankly, you know, all kidding aside, they're actually not mapping uh the donor journey, but they care about the donor journey because there's they have line of sight to their donors, they know who they are, they come to the events, they they volunteer, maybe uh they're a user, a family member is a user. They're they're the they just by nature of who the charity is and where they actually reside, they that that personal feeling is there. It's intuitive, they're not purposely mapping it, as you say, Lee, which is important, but they have it. It's really the 5,000 charities in Canada that are big, national, and they they almost purposely, and I think you alluded to this, want to remain arm's length. It's like there's a whole bunch of people in front of their computers who don't want to talk to anybody. You know, it's like I feel more comfortable looking at SurveyMonkey and sending that out, or looking at Instagram and engaging with the world that way, than I do going to speak to people. And by the way, there's a whole problem we have with young people coming in the fundraiser, they don't want to talk to anybody. You can't get them to call people because they're it's almost like they're afraid of the phone. Like they've gone, they've gone 150 years back when Alexander Graham made the phone, and now they're afraid of it for some reason. But but so so that's the group that I think is so so needs to get on board with what you're talking about. And we used to say this in the very shorthand, which is the moment you acquire a new annual fund donor, you also acquire a new plan giving prospect. It's the journey that gets you to them, they're gonna drop off. And by the way, a hundred percent of the new people you acquire, we might get five percent to become a donor at some point of a legacy gift, and that's a really interesting moment. So, with the notion of us acquiring a plan giving prospect when we acquire a new donor, I think it sets up this notion of a map. How do we get them there? But you know what happens for me is even though we talk about this, and I recall working with a very large organization that had 120 plus annual donors, and we did an analysis of their current donor base, and how can we, how many of them can we bring along to a legacy gift? And what's the market opportunity? And it was a really educational moment for me, even though I knew this, because the market opportunity for that 120,000 donor community was well over three billion dollars if they did their work well. And and but the CEO of the organization stopped and said, Well, we support all Canadians. What's the what's the entire opportunity in the entire country? And and we had to stop and say, hold on, let's go get the three billion dollars first. Once you get all of that, then we can focus on everybody else in the country. And it just kind of shows this notion of acquisition being king, um, donor bases being ATM machines and not partners within the the values and the mission of the organization. These are people we go to to get money so we can do our thing. And I and you know, I what I love about this journey mapping notion, and of course it's called donor journey in some places, and uh, and various groups we've worked with have tried to implement this, but they run straight into this uh siloed way of approaching uh fundraising. So, our you know, Tracy Church, a well-known prospect researcher in Canada, will talk about this. It's a basic thing. Your supporters don't think of themselves as an annual fund donor, monthly donor, you know, major donor. They don't, they just think I like this organization, it does great things, I want to provide support, but we internally decide to cut them all up, and then we decide to make sure no one gets in the way of our revenue generation uh line. Uh and it's us, we're the we're the folks that get in the way of this holistic approach. So I wanted to ask you, Lee, if you can give us an idea of what what came to the minds of our UK counterparts to say, oh no, we got to get away from this thinking because I know that thinking was there.

SPEAKER_02 17:47

And something else.

SPEAKER_00 17:49

So, what was it? Was there a moment to it? Was there did someone do this and they went out ahead of everyone else? And so everyone chased them. Uh, what what because I do know that you think the UK and your experience there is well ahead of us here in Canada around this area. What prompted that?

SPEAKER_02 18:07

Okay, I don't know what prompted it, to be totally honest. I don't know, but when I started with McMillan Cancer Support, um, it was a very product-focused, product-first kind of fundraising view. So there was like a coffee morning team, an events team, a legacy team. It was all split up like that, and donors were looked at like that. Um, and then something happened. I don't know what the catalyst was, but it was like, okay, we actually, these are people, they need to be treated like they're they're people, generally speaking, and we need to find out what what they want to be able to understand what what we're gonna be able to move them through. And like one of one of the jobs I had there was um the in-memory program manager. Um, McMillan did not have an in-memory uh setup at all. They their their reaction to in-memory gifts was not to talk to people for two years after giving a gift. And this is this is um they they were cancer nurses, that was what they were doing. So you have this wonderful personal experience with this cancer nurse. You give a donation and then they abandon you for two years, was like, this just doesn't make sense. Anyway, so after going out and talking to people, you know, we we recognized that like we needed to flip this whole thing on its head, and moreover, in memory gifts were coming from all these different places, and you can't set up product teams and have them separate. So having a consistent view meant that people could actually go through a journey in a way that made sense to them because of what their motivation was. Um, and so in memory supporters like had their own, you know, their own way of going through things versus versus other supporters, but they were sort of passed between teams very uh with with you know attention, um, which was just super important to actually have the supporter experience be high. And what was cool is that all of a sudden legacy giving was much easier to talk about because you were treating the supporter as a person and not just like you do this one thing for us. Um about what you said before, Ed, was um when you when you look at experience design, you can see these like falling off moments, and you know it's like, okay, let's say you have a hundred people start this this um journey with you. If there's a blip, then now you have 90, and there's another blip and now you have 80. Of course, legacy prospects are only two people out of that 100 because you've had all these moments that didn't meet them where they were, and if you can clean that up and smooth it out, all of a sudden you might not have a hundred, but you might have 60. Like it can be it can be thought, you know, a lot more if you just like be really thoughtful about the transitions. And I think one of the other things that I I think about a lot is my projects always have the marketing team involved as well, it's never just fundraising because the journeys don't start with become a donor, they start with who is this organization, how are you talking to me, um, you know, subscribing to newsletters, whatever it is, checking out your Instagram. That's what's gonna help people understand if they want to become a donor or not. And if the marketing team is doing one thing and fundraising is doing another, like it's it's always gonna feel like it's divided. Um, so that's that's why we're really talking about experience. Anyway, I went way adrift from your original.

SPEAKER_00 21:32

Well, look, and uh there's a couple of examples I often use, but one and one they come from various different uh experiences in our in the in the society. One of them, as much as I will often criticize some of our financial services friends, if you look at a bank and think about that journey, that that client journey mapping that they're looking at, they want to get you into a bank account early, but that bank account. Actually, it is a lost leader for them. They want you to move with along with as you grow and bring things like your mortgage, your credit cards, your investments, you bring them in. But as you start developing some of or moving into some of those services, I won't call them products, I'll call them services. Differing groups of people start talking to you. Once your paychecks start getting bigger, once your investment portfolio gets bigger, you get passed on through this client journey. Uh, and we don't do that. We try to kind of keep people over here. We don't want to lose monthly donors, my revenue will go down. And so we try to keep them sequestered over here rather than allowing them to move forward. Also, we don't like hierarchies in charities. So frankly, the major gift legacy giving team is looking into our donor pool and let's bring them up, pass them on to me. But we don't want to pass them on. I love the whole notion of the marketing team being involved because it frankly they can be our greatest allies, but they can also be the most uh staunch and objectionable barrier to us actually doing this because they want to control messaging, they don't want this hierarchical. It's too, it's too, you know, it goes against what they're trying to accomplish. Of course, it that doesn't help us, right? It should be in concert with what we're doing.

SPEAKER_02 23:30

And I think that's uh it's also so fun for me to do my projects because um, you know, the the first real like big meeting that we have after talking to people is this inside share out. And all of a sudden, both the marketing team and the fundraising team have to respect what the supporter is saying. Um, and you know, for most for most teams, they haven't had that before. And then it's going like, okay, if that's what it is, where do we go from here together as one?

SPEAKER_00 23:58

Yes. Yeah, absolutely.

SPEAKER_02 24:00

Yeah.

SPEAKER_01 24:01

I think um part of that, the the takeaway from the first part of this conversation that I I really hope that our listeners take away, especially those who are working in philanthropy right now, is is it truly this is an us problem, not a them problem. And I I we talk about you know a siloed approach to fundraising and and the issues with that. And I think I think this is um one of those hidden kind of consequences of of taking a siloed approach. And I and I hope that people are kind of tuning into that fact. But there's another aspect, um Lee, that I've heard you speak on that I'd I'd like to just take a few minutes and talk about, and it's about assumptions. The assumptions that are are often made um within our programs that um taking a different perspective as as you kind of are describing it or framing it, um, how that can really lead to some breakthrough kind of accomplishments for an organization. And I I think you even have like a couple of um examples that you could give to illustrate this uh idea.

SPEAKER_02 25:09

Yeah, I've got loads of examples. Assumptions, uh proving or disproving assumptions, like my favorite thing to do. Um but essentially um it is natural um to all have assumptions. We just live in assumptions every day. That's that's what makes people people. Um but what gets really tricky with fundraising is when we base our strategies on assumptions. And very often these assumptions are things that we've had around the organization for decades. Um, like we our donors want this. Uh you know, we can't give them that. We tried this once, it didn't work like all of these things. And um what we really want to do is like live in now, right now, what what are our supporters actually saying and finding out whether those things are true, especially the things that were are like sort of linchpins of our strategies. Um, because if you find out that something is not right, um, you need to change that. Um, so I'll yeah, one of I'm trying to decide which example is my favorite to talk about. I'll talk about the UBC example. Um, so um the the issue was um women's uh alumni sports are not giving nearly enough as men, and like this is this is like standard across any university um, you know, varsity programs. And um the assumption is okay, uh women like to give to uh hospitals, women like to give to food banks, they're like that's just what it is. We can't really affect it. And when we went and did discover and actually talked to people, what it was is that the way that they were speaking to both men's and women's programs was exactly the same. And it was all about um give to give to this team today, give to these, you know, 25 players, and this coach give to these scholarships. And like the women would be like, Well, I didn't get a scholarship when I played, or like that girl had a scholarship and she wasn't even that good, or I didn't even like my coach, like there's all of that. But what they actually wanted was um to be reconnected with the people that they played with and get the feeling of you know, these like good old happy days of how good it felt to play with their friends. And so it was like, okay, now we can adjust the communication, we can adjust even who it's coming from, um, and and build the program. So, like the um the ask was just done in a completely different way than the men's teams, and the results of this was phenomenal, was like, you know, six times as much money for monthly donors. Um, it um the highest gift ever was given. The first endowed fund was created, like just based on on this piece. Um, and it was just it was just, you know, this assumption that it's like, well, we can't do anything about this, or like this is this is the way everyone should be taught to. Um another example I have is just because it's so it's so like uh free to implement. Um it's working with the Green Party leadership race and um working with Anime Paul, there were nine nine candidates like to be elected or in the election. And um what we found is that the people who were most likely to support her were people who were very new to politics, and those people had no idea why uh politicians needed money. So when the callers made the asks, um, and this was during COVID, so it was just over-the-phone ask, they they really didn't understand what it was. So after we had that insight, we all we did was we created uh little change in the talk track at the very beginning and said, like, are you new to politics or are you you know a seasoned veteran? I can't remember the language, but if they said they were new, you give them a little spiel about why politicians need money and then carry on with the rest of it. And she was the highest, so in the from the 12 months that they were funded raising prior to implementing this, four weeks later, they had triple, they had doubled donations and they had tripled the number of donors. She was the highest funded candidate, and then she won the election. And it's like this very, very simple insight that you don't have to, you know, we talked to like 25 people. You didn't, you don't have to do a survey that a thousand people respond to to get this kind of this level of insight.

SPEAKER_01 29:32

And it's it's what I just find it so fascinating because having worked frontline in charities myself, um, I understand what it's like to get those inherited beliefs or those inherited values when you join an organization, and that so often we are sheep-like in just accepting them as they are put forward to us. That whole idea, you're right, we tried that, it didn't work. When did you try it? Who tried it? What were the practices? How was it tried? What could you know what I mean? Like we're just kind of trained to go, okay, so that's off the table. And um, and I just love that, you know, that female donors aren't gonna give to sport because they're more focused on X, Y, Z. No, in fact, they were athletes, they will give to sport, but you just need to look at how you're asking. Like, I just it's it's communication and it's and it's curiosity again. You you mentioned curiosity earlier, and and it's it's just really trying to understand, you know, what that engagement can look like and and where people are coming from. And it seems fundamental, and yet I think it's just like people hurdle over it and and go to step two or step three before asking some of those.

SPEAKER_00 30:48

Well, I if I could, I mean, this is all I love all this stuff. And one of the things that we often talk about with new people into the role of legacy giving professional within an organization. Now, sometimes they're they're experienced and they've worked in legacy giving elsewhere, plan giving. I prefer plan giving for professionals here. We call it plan giving. Legacy giving is a marketing position, but anyway, uh, we say, you know, uh, or you're they're brand new to plan giving. Either way, go phone if you if there is a list of people who have identified themselves as having a gift in their will or some other planned gift for the organization, phone them, phone them and ask them why they did that. Like what drew you know led them to creating a gift, and they're really magical conversations, and they'll what you learn in that moment is why do donors give, not what's the marketing position of the organization, what's the pitch, what's the what's the you know, ask it is why didn't they do it? And that's really interesting. The other interesting thing we find, though, is that sometimes that information comes back and the priorities of the organization don't actually align with the priorities of the donors, like the general concept of the organization is aligned, but what the organization has decided its charitable priorities are, the donors don't actually care about, and so the organization doesn't actually want to hear what the donors have to say about this because they have determined what the priorities are, and they're gonna spend actually more time trying to convince donors to come along with their priorities rather than embracing what these other priorities are that the donors bring to it, which is really um, and we often say, look, plan giving donors are your partners, you have to listen to partners, whether they're partners in life, whether they're partners in business. If you don't listen, they get angry or you won't find any new partners. And for some reason they'll do it in plan giving, but for the rest of it, they try to articulate out what's important rather than listening to what their donors are saying. And I think you're saying, Lee, we have to we have to listen to those people and we have to get them to have inputs because those inputs will will turn them around and provide you know communication out that aligns with the values of those people who are our supporters.

SPEAKER_02 33:26

Yeah, totally. And I um just hearing you talk makes me think about the community-centric fundraising approach and um, you know, how some some people might think like, oh, this is uh this doesn't align with community-centric fundraising. And um one of the things that I think about is like as an organization, you need to have your I call them red lines, like your I will not go. This is this is what the organization does, these are our values, this is where it is. Everything else other than that is on the table.

SPEAKER_00 34:01

And um I will say this though, that I don't think you know, uh, I don't think I've ever heard of a donor coming into an organization, let's say uh an environmental organization, and say, I'm gonna give you a million dollars to help build a pipeline. Like that doesn't happen, right? I mean, the person comes in knowing pretty well what the organization does, it's a shade of difference, it's not uh a perpendicular or 180 degree turn away from the charitable mission of the organization. That rarely happens. Um, I don't and I would suggest that it's if it does happen, it would be something that Lisa would want to highlight. Donor, don't are asked, you know, donor asks nature conservancy to sell sell land for high-rise apartments. Like, you know, Lisa would be all over it. That's just not what goes on. People come to the organization, understand, like they might ask for things the organization doesn't do. For example, we do work with environmental charities that do not accept gifts of real estate if they have to hold them. They'll take them that they can sell them, but they will not hold them. But the donor and the organization are still aligned with they want to protect the environment. It's just the the articulation of it is very, very different. Um, so anyway, it's um and it's also like pretty easy to draw, I suppose.

SPEAKER_02 35:33

Yeah, you have your red lines, you have your policies. Like if they're you know, um I don't work in major gifts, I never have, so I don't know what those kinds of conversations are like, but I I can imagine if you have if you have this thing that's already set in stone, there's not going to be um a whole lot of pushback on that. Um I don't know.

SPEAKER_00 35:56

Fair enough.

SPEAKER_01 35:57

Well, Lee Sandison, Real Path, thank you for sharing some of your um really kind of insightful kind of understandings about our donors and and how we can learn and connect with them in a in a more fulsome way. I I find the whole thing fascinating. I'm not, I would never portray myself as a a data geek, I you know, but I I don't know if you consider yourself a data geek or if this is just a whole kind of different space. I guess it is kind of. It's not really about data, is it?

SPEAKER_02 36:30

Well, we we start with the big data. That's where we and then we go, okay, what is it telling us? What's what it's telling us is what is happening, what it's not telling us is why or what people are feeling while that's happening. Um, and the other the other thing I would say on data is data gives you like these these various points. It doesn't give you these moments in between, and we need to talk to people to find out the moments in between.

SPEAKER_01 36:56

So I love that. All right, thank you very much. Uh uh be back with uh our next topic um very, very soon. You are back with uh let's get real, Canadian Perspectives on Fundraising. We're having a really great discussion here. Uh I'm Lisa McDonald, editor of Hillborn Charity e News. We've got Lee Sandison in the guest chair with Ed Sluga of PG Growth. Sorry, Lee is with Real Path, if if you haven't had occasion to meet her. Um I have uh I have something I want to talk to you guys about. Um it's an article that came to me this past week courtesy of uh Give Three, the organization, and John Holward, who's the president of Give Three. And they they recently done um a study about Canadians' pro-social behavior. And what is that? Pro-social behaviors include such things as giving and volunteering, uh voting, donating blood, all of these things. So these pro-social behaviors are considered to help hold society together. Um their top line on their study, um, I've you know really captured my attention because the idea is um and how it relates to our conversation, is honestly that generosity, which is a term that comes up often in relation to philanthropy, is socially engineered. And okay, so again, maybe this doesn't seem like um a news flash, uh but uh let let's just I'm gonna just give you a little quick overview of of a couple of the uh key points that came out of this study. So, first of all, Canadians who are more connected tend to have higher well-being and much stronger pro-social behavior. Well, well connected. What does that mean? So these are people who are involved in groups and organizations, maybe in their neighborhoods, their faith communities, in clubs, things like that. These people are much more likely to give, to volunteer, and to help others. So um they conclude that in this sense, connected uh connectedness uh is much less a private feeling and more like a social infrastructure. Okay, so that's that's interesting. And then uh they also talk about well-being. So, as we know, unfortunately, uh there are many Canadians who are not doing equally well. So there's a wide variation in our society in terms of happiness and loneliness, financial security, just overall a sense of control over life. So stronger well-being is also associated with stronger connectedness and stronger pro-social behavior. So they go on to say that the study suggests that uh connectedness uh is the more direct bridge to generosity and civic action, but uh that uh the two the the tie is is strong and it matters strategically in kind of how we approach that. I think I I want to like uh pause there for a second because I feel like those are some kind of pretty big uh uh social constructs that we're talking about and uh and and their connection to generosity. And uh and Ed, you know, over the last well, since we've been doing this COD, we've talked about a fact that there has been a lot of conversation uh in philanthropy, in fundraising circles, specifically uh data showing or discussing that generosity is declining and and you know more can fewer Canadians are giving more, but uh but that generosity as a whole is declining. This is why I'm interested in this idea. Is it declining? Is it some of our connectedness is declining that's showing numbers? Or is there a red herring here and and really you know this is not apples to apples. We're we're talking about different things. And um, Ed, I I know you're gonna have a lot to say on this, so I'm gonna throw to Lee first because Lee's new to the hot seat, new to this discussion, and I'd just love to hear what her kind of knee-jerk reaction is to that.

SPEAKER_02 41:44

Yeah, so overall I would say that I have talked with lots and lots of people over the last few years in the role that I have about um kind of their their giving habits as well as um, you know, interest in in generosity at large. And I think it's really tough because the world we're in right now has so much fear and everyone is terrified of like the unknown. Um, so even for myself, I live in this constant like, you know, what what will happen with the world? Will will I have enough money to pay this mortgage and all of these things? Um like I personally don't think that's because society at large is less generous. I think that we need to give people more opportunities to be more generous, and I think that um generosity is not just in terms of money. Um, and like one, I'll just give you this example. I had this conversation with this um this young person, um, they were probably like you know, low 20s, had gone through depression super eco-anxious, um, very, very worried about the state of the world. And this person found advocacy and all of a sudden started learning much more about it, being an advocate for a few different organizations, really feeling involved and useful, and all of a sudden they were no longer in this depression that like there was so much good that came out of it, and I think like for me personally, it's like, okay, what are all the different ways that organizations can um and individuals within organizations can can pull people in um so that there are more opportunities to demonstrate generosity outside of just donating, and the donations will come.

SPEAKER_00 43:33

So yeah, I I I agree with so I'm gonna start off by saying this that years ago I was helping to publish a um uh periodical that came out of the University of Toronto Faculty of Medicine. And I remember the editor coming and saying to me, You'll be interested in this, Lisa, because of your journalistic background. The editor said, Oh, there's a new study out of Denmark that says that a Glass of red wine a night was heart healthy and it was recommended. It was a study that came out, and she was very eager to publish this. And I was very eager for it to be true.

unknown 44:11

Thank God.

SPEAKER_00 44:14

But I did take my journalistic background in them in that moment. I said, okay, that's great, but just find out who funded the study. That's all I want to know. I'm not throwing into question the scientists at the university in Denmark that did it. I'm not throwing into disrepute Denmark itself. Just tell me who funded it. And of course, it was the French wine industry. When you pulled it away, so what's the genesis of the information? And I do think that, and Lee, I think you're saying this right now, there's a lot of things that are coming out, which my eyes are telling me are not correct, right? Um, you know, the andor that there's conflicting information. And I I think giving is a social contract, uh, is so is a lot of things, right? And there's lots of really wonderful debate going on about why we're good people, why do we try to be good people, why do we fail in being good people? And some people try to tie it to one thing or another, religion, and you know, um, you know, or or or just the nature of being a human being. Um, and what we end up with, I think, is a lot of um confusion around it. Um I think uh for me it's always, and this is a common thing we come back to, Lisa, and this we gotta come, there's just so much more we need to learn about the way Canadians interact with generosity, which we don't know about. And and in the absence of that information, a lot of people can uh do a little bit of half-measure information gathering or can fill those spaces up with some conjecture, some mythology, some half-truths. Uh, and I just find I for me, it's just brings me to ask more questions and suggest, as we have multiple times in this in the series of podcasts this year, we just need somebody to kind of grab research by the by the scruff of the neck here and and bring some good data to us because I think that it's it's lacking right now. And uh, I just don't know what to make of of a lot of that information because of it.

SPEAKER_01 46:42

Yeah, I I think that's a fair point. And you know, this might be just one of these quick hit topics that we uh we give a little uh brush by and and stowed away as as good information for future discussion, but because I I do find now I'm flagged whenever I see anything that talks about generosity, it it really does kind of pique my interest. And I'm I am interested to to see what the discussion is and and what the context is. And that's the case with this report. And as again, we'll provide a link to uh to it um so that anyone who would like to dive in and and learn a little bit more about the findings and the context and the whys and wherefores of it, uh it was a sector three insights report. And um I I appreciate both your comments and I I really love that idea of giving more options for generosity. I I believe that this is not a scarcity um problem. And um, you know, as a as a sector, uh as individual charities, we are often battling a scarcity mindset just uh across the board. And I and I feel again that that there is again that fear, that underpinning of fear beneath it that um there just isn't enough to go around. And I think maybe we have to reframe it and and ask some different questions, which is again, Ed, what you're talking about is be curious um about the source, ask questions and and Lee, you know, go go to the people, right? Go to the people and and really get the answers and then and then make some decisions. So thank you for your uh input, both of you. Um again, this is we're getting real about Canadian perspectives on fundraising. And uh we appreciate uh the listeners listening in and would love to hear uh their thoughts back too on on this idea of generosity and where it comes from and where it's going when it comes to Canadian philanthropy.