Non Profit Foundation

Source: https://www.podbean.com/eau/pb-tzjwz-127b9c5 Interview with Soraya Alexander, COO of Classy. We discuss the Classy State of Modern Philanthropy and dig through the data. Get the report: https://donationtrends.classy.org/ Rough Transcript [00:00:00] George Voice Dub: I have known about this particular fundraising platform for quite some time. I'm excited to have none other than Soraya Alexander, the chief operating officer, the COO of classy. How's it going for you today ? [00:00:14] Soraya: It's going great. Thanks for having me. I'm so happy to be. Yes. [00:00:19] George: Yeah, you pop up, you know, as a definite provider of services, but also a lot of content. I see a lot of educational resources being churned out, which I, as a, as a consumer and creator myself deeply appreciate. And always I'm more interested generally in platforms that can look at their own data. [00:00:40] And so you've recently created this report, but before we get into there, how do you describe in your words, uh, what class he. [00:00:47] Soraya: We've got, um, a fancy brand proposition, but at the most basic level, we do digital fundraising for nonprofits. So the whole suite of, you know, main donation forms to events, to peer, to peer, um, anything that your donors, wherever your donors are going online, we're [00:01:03] George: It's such a competitive landscape. I, when I, you know, 12 years ago I started whole whale. I was like one thing I will never, ever do donation platforms. It just strikes me as like an impossible field to, to kind of grow in. So how has, how has it been over at classy? [00:01:19] Soraya: Oh, it's been great. So I've been a classy for four years. And I think where we get really excited is that, you know, we've got several thousand customers and they are honestly, the sector is made up of the most innovative, ambitious people. And generally. They're totally under resourced to match their ambition, right? [00:01:38] Like that is the definition of the sector. They don't have the resources. I don't know how many, how many, you know, the resources you would need to solve the world's greatest problems, but the sector definitely doesn't have them. And so we really see a lot of promise in technology overcoming that gap. [00:01:52] Like how can technology accelerate your efforts, amplify your efforts, get more fun, city, more good. Um, and so we're really not cynical about, you know, what we, what we do. We see. How technology can transform the work of the sector. So I, I completely love it. The, the pace of innovation, um, the way that we engage with donors, um, has been changing a lot. [00:02:15] So it is competitive, but that also just means we have to be better. And I think the sector deserves that. Um, so I really, it's been a lot of fun. [00:02:22] George: You know, it it's good to hear. And certainly like under resourced is the, is the sad mantra of what's going on and great that you're able to provide the sort of frictionless way to get more money into more good hands. You have come out with the state of modern philanthropy. I was hoping maybe you could pull out what that is first [00:02:45] Soraya: Yeah. Yeah. [00:02:46] George: what do, what do what's the state? [00:02:48] Are we [00:02:48] Soraya: , I don't know that I have an answer. I think, uh, optimistic is probably the one word answer. So the state of modern philanthropy is an annual report. We do it's the, the fifth year we've published it. And we would just kind of glean all of this information from all of the campaigns on the platform. [00:03:05] We would collect all of these insights around donor trends, behaviors, campaign trends, payment trends, uh, and it was just too much too much information to not share it out with the sector. We thought it could be really valuable. So, you know, this past year we saw over a billion dollars of donations. Uh, it was 12 million individual transaction events, 54,000 campaigns. [00:03:27] And so from that, you can start seeing kind of what's working. What's not how are things progressing? Um, so yeah, really happy to publish it. And it. Kind of goes hand in hand. We do several consumer surveys throughout the year as well. And so you marry up what are people saying about how they wanna give and then what actually happens on the platform and, um, you find some interesting, interesting insights. [00:03:47] So yeah, excited to kind of share some of those today, but, um, please do you know if anybody's interested, go, go through there's there's way too many insights to, to talk through. It ends up being, you know, feeling tedious, but we think that we've packaged it in a way that could be really helpful. [00:04:01] George: Yeah. And just so folks know, we'll have the link in the show notes, but I, I found it by going to donation trends dot class e.org. So that's, I think where we can find this, the looking at your executive summary, which I always appreciate. The quick summary. Tell me what I ne