Strategies for Effective Nonprofit Fundraising

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Visit get VCX.com for more info. That's get VCX.com. Carefully consider the investment materials before investing, including objectives, risk, charges, and expenses. This and other information can be found in the funds prospectus at get vcx.com. This is a paid sponsorshi p. Once upon a dismal day, Bob's ice cream van looked gloomy and gray. Although he had big ambitions, his socials lacked creative vision. That bad. Maybe vampid epitaph? I have an idea. Bob launched Canva and got into gear. Create the video Make it the funniest amene. It went viral. Bob's business, I will five on. Now, imagine what your dreams can become when you put imagination to work at canva. com. Welcome to Office Hours with Prop G. This is the part of the show where we answer your questions about business, big tech, entrepreneurship, and whatever else is on your mind. If you'd like to submit a question for next time, you can send a voice recording to OfficeAurs of Proptimedia.com. Again, that's officehours of Property Media dot com or post your question on the Scott Galloway subreddit and we just might feature it in our next epis ode. Question number one. Our first question comes from Scuba Hood Doug Fisher on Threads. Interesting name. They say, Hey Prof. Resist and unsubscribe the most influential thing you've done? If not, what do you feel is or what do you hope will be your biggest impact on the planet? That's a generous question. Uh no, it isn't. Uh I wouldn't say it's not even in the top three. The impact of resistant unsubscribe since January thirtieth, over twenty-one million views across social media, about we'll probably cross about two million site visits, unique visitors to the site today to resist and unsubscribe. So, you know, the state of Maine, I don't know how many people Maine has, but a state with two million people have showed up to resist and unsubscribe. The thing I'm most proud of on the visits is that we haven't spent a single cent to drive that traffic. Uh I've been all over AI trying to figure out what I would need to spend if I from a standing start I was trying to get two million people to show up to an e-commerce site. And it's somewhere between two and seven million depending on the efficiency. Anyways, we've had thousands of new subscribers to no mercy, no malice, uh thousands of screenshots shared by you, our listeners via Instagram, email, and our subreddit. Since March one, we're seeing about I don't know somewhere between 10 and fifteen thousand site visits per day. I need to get that bu back up. It was at sixty to eighty. I like the idea of a stadium showing up to the site every day. So what I'm trying to do is we did a live event last night in Minneapolis with Governor Walls, which is called Resistant Unsubscribe. Sold out a thousand people to Pentages Theater in forty eight hours. That city is so unified right now. If you want to have a great vacation or you want to do an event, I would suggest going to Minneapolis right now. That city's just on fire. People are feeling so it's such a sense of community there right now. We raised $138,000 in the immigrant law center of Minneapolis through ticket sales and and matching. Um but yeah, anyways, it was wonderful. And trying to communicate to people that I like the idea. The most creative thing about the idea is that it's the easiest way to have a big impact with a minimal amount of consumer disruption. And that is if right now you go to resistantunsubscribe.com and unsubscribe from open AI and you post it to your social media uh a screenshot of your unsubscription confirmation from open ai, then effectively if you get three or four other people, inspire three or four other people to unsubscribe, that's about two hundred forty dollars each times four, nine hundred sixty, let's call a thousand bucks. It's trading at forty times revenue. You can take forty thousand dollars out of the market cap of OpenAI and say, guys, when you give when you're the largest donor to the Trump campaign, when you're enabling ICE, there is a downside. There is a downside. And we have a calculator where you can calculate your impact based on who you're unsubscribing from and the impact or the footprint of your social media following. And we're trying to figure out just a way to make it easy or seamless for people to do this and create two objectives. Send a signal to consumers that their economic spending is a is a more powerful weapon than any than they imagined, and to create the other side of the incentive coin, if you will, for CEOs. Anyways, enough of that. The biggest impact I've had on a cultural level, hands down, it's five years ago, six years ago, I read a story about a young man, a sophomore at Oklahoma State named Alex Kearns, who got errant emails from Robin Hood, or as I like to refer mendacious fox, uh saying that he owed sixty thousand dollars because he was trading options without his family's knowledge, very distraught, emailed dozens of times through the night, couldn't get a response back, and decided to take his own life. And I saw a picture of the kid. And when you're a dad, occasionally you see a picture of a kid, a fallen service serviceman or a kid who takes his own life, and you can't help it, but you see your own son. And it really it just quite frankly just rattled the shit out of me. So I reached out to the Kearns family to express my sympathies and actually had a conversation with um uh Alex's unc le and started doing a a deep diveround young men. And it just led to a lot of recognition or just data I just did absolutely stunned me. Go into a morgue and there's five people who died by suicide, four men. One in three men under the age of twenty five is living at home. Only one in three um only one in three men under the age of thirty is in a relationship. Forty two percent of men eighteen to twenty four have never asked a woman out in person. One in five men under the age of thirty is still living at home. One in seven men are called neats, and that is they aren't even trying. They're not in education. They're not they're not um in in employment, they're not in training, they're literally doing uh nothing. Levels of obesity, depression, anxiety. Men aged twenty to thirty are spending less time outdoors than prison inmat es. They're just becoming we're just producing, I think through a combination of economics, social movements. We're kind of destroying the cultural and economic standing of middle class men. And also they're up against this indomitable folk called big tech, which every day is trying to figure out millions of ways to get them to spend one less second with the most important thing in life, their relationships, and more time on a screen. And so I started talking about struggling young men. And I like waiting in dangerous waters. I like going into topics that I know I'll get pushback on. Um, because if you're not if you're not getting critical feedback, you're not saying anything, and I like I like going again, waiting in dangerous waters. I think it's important, and I'm blessed with economic security and people who love me unconditionally, so you you have the luxury of speaking your mind. So I think culturally, or the things I'm I'm most proud of, is raising awareness around the struggles of young men and uh establishing a lot of kind of what I'll call parasocial relationships with single mothers who are looking for I don't know, not even guidance but empathy or to feel seen about the struggles that their sons are facing. And then on a professional level, the thing I'm most proud of is that I'd like to think I've created a lot of economic security for wonderful young people and their family. Uh I have started and sold several companies and I typically don't own more than thirty or forty percent of the company when I sell it. And uh I think it's it's not it's not having money that's great, which it is, that's great. But what's really wonderful is making it and what's amazing is making it with other people. And so uh I'm really proud I've gone through uh I I start small companies. I've never I don't have the skills to build a big company, but I've built small companies and took them to exit. And I think somewhere between twenty-seven and thirtyven-se people become millionaires uh on it on a single day because of when we sold those companies. I'm really proud of that. Uh that's the thing I'm most proud of, is creating economic security um for myself. I put myself I'm number one. I fixed my own oxygen mass before anyone else. I don't want to sound too virtuous, but it's worked out for a lot of people, and I'm proud of that. And then I think at the end of my life, the thing I'm gonna be most proud of is I think I'm raising loving, patriotic men. Uh but yeah god a lot of boasting right now. Yeah anyways but generous question. Thanks very much. Question number two comes from Instagram. Caitlin Castro asks, how do I get over the fear of life after col lege. I don' t know. Get over it. How do you get over it? I don't know. Stay focused one day at a time. Get a job. Find roommates. Get excited about making money. It is an insecure, kind of weird time. I got a job in investment banking right out of college. It was awful. The people were awful. The work was awful. Uh I hated the people. They hated me. And I thought, oh, this is life after college, doesn't this suck? Keep in mind, I just want to prepare you. Your first job's gonna suck. Uh because you're the low person on the totem pulse or you're doing all the shit work. It's not drinking beer and going to you know, brewing games. In Pasadena at the Rose Bow,l which was awesome. Which was awesome. So it's a bit of like a splash of cold water, but it's nice to start making some money. It's nice to have your own place, both of which I was doing. So it was a nice time. Was it a nice time? It wasn't. I was miserable. Also, I couldn't get arrested. I was dating like crazy in college. And then when you're twenty-two and you I moved to New York to join Morgan Stanley, you can't get fucking arrested as a young man. You can't get into clubs. No one won no doorman says, Hey, you twenty two year old dude, come on in. Um different story for twenty two year old women. Different story. And also for a thirty two year old guy who is the type of douchebag will spend eleven hundred dollars on a bottle of vodka or something. So I just c and all the women uh this is gonna like people's fair hair on fire didn't want to date twenty two year old dudes. They wanted to date thirty two year old dudes that could take them to St. Bart's or the Hamptons. So you literally no game, no dating, working 12 fucking hours a day for assholes. And I miss my mom. I miss being alone or I didn't like being alone in New York. It was just it wasn't a great time. What I can tell you is it's where you start workshopping, you make some interesting friends, you start figuring out what you want to do with your life. It's really nice to start making some money. It's nice to start zeroing in on what you want to do with your life. So I think it's a nice it's an interesting time in your life. And also coming out of college right now, and distinct to what everyone says about all the catastrophizing about AI, so they're going to raise more fucking money pretending they're more important than they are. You know, it's there's twenty-two-year-olds right now actually, I think, have a lot of agency. They have a lot of opportunities to do things, different things professionally. There it seems like there were a lot of options when I was twenty two. You either went at UCLA, you either went to work for Arthur Anderson or got a job in finance or in brand management. That was a big one. Clorox. People go manage you know, the Swiffer, you know. Uh uh or also the CIA recruited at UCLA. I thought that was really interesting. I tried to interview but I didn't speak another language so they weren't interested in speaking to Anyway, uh I think now entrepreneurship is a huge option. 150,000 people applied for small business applications in 2000. Now it's about half a million. Young people are much more bold, take much more risk, and also they have access to capital. You can raise money in nineteen ninety seven, eighty seven, when I graduated from college. And now if you have an idea and you're a junior about to drop out from Harvard or Carnegie Mellon, there's probably like six different meetups and Angel Angels of Pittsburgh where they potentially will invest. You could raise a half a million or a million bucks. So one of the things I I'm not that sympathetic to is young people bitching about how hard it is. You actually have a decent amount of agency right now. I think it's a pr probably a pretty interesting time. Uh and yeah, uh AI is kind of I don't know, stilted or put hiring you hiring into stasis, but they're still hiring people. So look at the pride side. Look at the pride side. And also before you start work, when you graduate, just to ease into the work world, get a backpack and go to Europe for eight weeks, which is what I did with my buddies Lee Lotus and David Kingsdale. And that was just uh just such an incredible that's something I'll remember the rest of my life. I budgeted myself fifty five dollars a day and lived like a king. Didn't even stay in hostel, stayed at two-star hotels where they would turn the air conditioning off between 1 a.m. and 4 a.m. and just had the best time. Oh my God, that was such a wonderful tri p. And uh anyway, so a lot to look forward to. It's time to be an adult. If you're scared about going into the work world or leaving college, it means you might have a decent amount of anxiety and you may want to see someone about it. Or, or you just had such an amazing time in college, uh, you're worried about leaving a worried it won't be as good. And uh spoiler alert, it's not as good. But it's not as probably bad as you might think. And if it is bad, that's a learning because you realize this isn't a life I want and you pivot as I did to something else and find find another way to make a living and something where you can think you can be. Let me put it this way. I have an incredible life. I would think hard about switching places with you. If I could take my kids with me and my friends, eh, I could probably leave a few of my friends behind. But if I could take the majority of my relationships back with me, uh and give up all my money, I'd probably I'd think about it. So a lot of people want to be you. Thanks for the question. We'll be right back after a quick break. Support for the show comes from LinkedIn Ads. 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Spend $250 in your first campaign on LinkedIn ads and get a two hundred fifty dollar credit for the next one just go to LinkedIn.com slash Scott that's LinkedIn.com slash Scott Terms and Conditions app ly for the show comes from VCX, the public ticker for private tech. For generations, American companies have moved the world forward through their ingenuity and determination. And for generations, everyday Americans could be part of that journey through perhaps the greatest innovation of all., the U.S stock market. It didn't matter whether you were a factory worker in Detroit or a farmer in Omaha. Anyone could own a piece of the great American companies. But now that's changed. Today, our most innovative companies are staying private rather than going public. The result is that everyday Americans are excluded from investing and getting left further behind, while a select few reap all the benefits until now. 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Question number three. Hello, Professor Galloway. This is Stephanie from Sacramento. My question is regarding asking rich people for mone y. I'm on the board of a local community theater nonprofit, and the board has been tasked this year with helping to boost our fundraising. We've tried lots of types of fundraising events and have tried bringing on local businesses as sponsors, but it usually ends up being a lot of work for not very much payout. And many of our local small businesses are just trying to stay alive right now and can't dedicate funds towards sponsoring . We found one possibly effective solution is to bring on donors, patrons, who are willing to write one or two checks per ye ar. We've had two people related to members of our organization donate fairly sizable amounts once, but I'm at a loss as to how to approach other affluent potential patrons. Most of the foundations that I've researched have really specific criteria for what organizations they donate to and really lengthy and complicated applications. And the same goes for most of the grants that we apply for. So how do we find high net worth individuals who might be interested in supporting local community theater? But more importantly, how do we approach them to make the ask. This whole asking for money thing is pretty uncomfortable for me, but I'm willing to do what I need to to support this amazing organization. And honestly, I just want to use my time as efficiently as possible. Thank you. Uh thanks for the question. I'm not sure I'm an expert here. I've been I I've asked for a lot of money, but I asked for money for my businesses. I've probably d one six or eight hundred meetings where I've asked people for money, but it's usually asking them to sponsor my latest crazy startup. Uh and it's hard. And the reason why the most overcompensated people relative to their talent and their IQ are the salespeople. Why? Because ninety-eight percent of people aren't willing to ask people for money. That's what sales is. You're calling them saying, hey, yeah, will you give me a hundred dollars a month and I'll give you a site license or a seat for this software that will that will figure out what snacks you need and order them for you. And uh asking for money. The highest paid people or the second highest paid person typically at a university, the highest paid is the chancellor, and the second highest paid, or usually it's some professor in the medical school. Uh but the second highest paid person is usually the director of development, the money woman or the money man. I get asked for money a lot. Public school or public education is kind of my philanthropy, if you will. Um, let me virtue signal. I think I give money to about a dozen public universities. Public universities changed my life. So it's sort of just a payback. But typically the ask is, uh would I'm in town, you know, hi, I'm the head of development for the University of Wisconsin-Madison. And I'm in town and the the place you start, quite frankly, is previous donors. And they say we want to update you. So you start with the previous donor, we I want to update you on your program where you gave money and you generally find out I'll give you an example. UW Madison, there's a penitentiary program where professors teach at a local penitentiary and give uh the inmates who are scheduled for release in the next several years, opportunity to earn credit such that they can hopefully have some motivation to get their AA or their bachelor's once they're once they're uh after release. And I just love this program. And the guy is really smart that runs it there, he'll reach out to me and say I'm in New York or he'll come to an event and I like him and they'll tell me about the program and I get inspired and I write a chat. So the first place you want to go is your existing donors and talk to them about your plans for community theater. You might want to start cultivat ing it's a relationship. It's very hard to just call people and ask people for money. Uh you may want to have some sort of upper tier where people get access to uh uh tickets or meet and greet with the actors and the producers and start calling or identifying a pool of people who are passionate about community theater. Uh finding out who are the donors, the biggest donors, and there's these lists now everywhere, in your area and then asking to have coffee with them. It talks about community theater. Uh the wealthy parents of interns. But your basically your job is to be very social, go out a lot, meet people, ask for a coffee to talk to them about community theater, get them excited about it. I'm not sure, you know, talk to someone who's successful, and then do you do the ask on the first? I don't, I think you invite them. You have an interesting product to sell that people can get kind of emotionally engaged in, and then figure out badging, like the uh you know if you're in Milwaukee, the Milwaukee Arts Circle, where for a certain amount of money they get invited to a dinner every year or they get listed uh recognition. You know, we are we are going to be naming components of the theater, whether it's the you know, the the a stage or, you know, one of the one of the, you know, one of the rooms or the hall of the conference room where there's some naming opportunities we'd like to talk to you about. People love recognition by the local community. But this is a fairly mature industry . And there are classes you can take at Wharton and Columbia and Berkeley online on nonprofit fundraising.