Fundraising with Integrity: How Roger Devine Helps Communities Raise More & Stress Less #legacybuilding

Welcome to the Legacy All Stars podcast. We feature inspirational stories from people who dedicate themselves to helping others.

Here is your host, Alan Pavloski. Welcome to the Legacy All Stars podcast where we shine a light on athletes, entrepreneurs and everyday heroes building a legacy through service and innovation. I'm your host, Alan Pavloski. Today's guest, Roger Devine is the co founder of SchoolAuction.net, a game changing software platform that's helped grassroots organizations across the country raise millions. Not through VC backed blitzes, but through deeply personal community based events like school auctions, trivia nights and paddle raises. Roger's story is about impact. Whether you're running a massive gala or organizing your first fundraiser, or Roger's software and philosophy makes it accessible, equitable and effective. His work supports not just fundraising teams, but the people they serve. From public school kids and local theaters, to families in crisis and veteran support programs. He's chaired dozens of fundraisers, mentored entrepreneurs, taught at Portland State University, and lived the grassroots life that he now supports. Let's dive into this candid and inspiring interview and talk to Roger. Roger, great to see you again.

Alan, it's my pleasure to be here. Thank you so much for the invitation.

Yeah, my pleasure indeed. Let's start with your personal story. What inspired your path into service and entrepreneurship?

Service was probably baked in very, very early. As a young kid.

I was raised right by my mama. You know, that's the real answer there.

Absolutely. There you go.

And through church, through the Boy Scouts, you know, service was sort of a thing that I practiced early on and it never really, never really felt too far away from whatever I was doing. Entrepreneurship happened because, well, you know, I got recruited to work for a tech startup in the early 90s, late 80s, early 90s. And once it enters your blood, boy, it's hard to shake, I tell you.

Sure is.

And worked for a series of, you know, young nimble technology companies for quite a few years. And then it was time to, time to do my own thing. Time to take the lessons I'd learned and apply them.

Absolutely. Wonderful story. Let's talk about the story of schoolauction.net? what problem, I should say, were you trying to solve when you created the Software back in 2007?

Yeah, so back then I was PTA President at my kids school and.

We had an annual fundraising auction and it was something that was both important to the school community and it was a lot of work and there were a lot of the people, we were having problems recruiting people to work on it. And being a software and a technology guy by background, I started looking around, surely there's somebody who's built something for this. And we did find that there were solutions that were on the market at that time. And I hated the pricing models on all of them because as a software guy, I can see through the pricing models, know what's there. And although I was certainly willing to pay for a license to use software, you know, I do not believe that software companies should go uncompensated. But I didn't want to. I didn't want to get hit with the double whammy that was so common at the time of you're going to pay some large or adequate or medium sized license fee, and then they were also going to dip their finger in the payment stream and scoop out 2% of what you raised for the software company in addition to whatever the bank wanted to take. And I thought, that's too much. That's just a bridge too far here. I don't like that business model. Got introduced to a couple of guys who had built their own solution because of the same problem for a local school. We decided, hey, let's, let's make a company and let's go out there and let's do things differently. Let's zig when people are going to zag. And that was, you know, the story of our early years was a story of pursuing painful differentiators, you know, differentiators that would give us something to say, you know, why we were different, why we were better. But of course.

We were leaving a lot of money on the table as a result.

And yet, given that we all started this by being school PTA officers.

We really could understand that this message was going to work for a lot of the smaller grassroots nonprofits. Let's give you one fee. You can underwrite it, you can have somebody sponsor it, and then we can move on. Because you know what this is going to cost you?

Yeah, for sure. You know, I always love the saying necessity is the mother of invention. And I think that seems like what you did when you started the software platform. Does that sound about right?

It does. Because, you know, really up until that point, if you wanted to use good software to help you run your event, it was really only cost effective if you were raising.

35, $40,000 minimum. And we know that there are a lot of PTAs and a lot of church groups and a lot of booster clubs that will run an auction that raises $12,000 or $15,000. And with our model they were able to come in and make that, you know, get good software to help them run their event at a price that they could afford.

And so, yeah, that was the thing that was missing out there. And.

We managed to find a lot of grassroots customers that way, a lot of the little guys, which is also fun because, you know, when you're in a competitive market, the little guys are often underserved. You know, the small customers that are going to make nobody into a rich unicorn, but they're very good customers. They're very fun to work with and, you know, let's go out and hoover them up. Let's just work with the small guys, the grassroots guys. You know, we'll take on the challenges inherent therein. And there were some. But, you know, it's. It's a good market to serve and we believe in serving it well.

Yeah, absolutely. You talked about leaving money on the table. So back when you first started, you decided to offer flat rate pricing even when it meant leaving money on the table. Why was that so important to you?

Because there was nobody else out there doing it. You know, there are other companies now that have come along and decided to follow our initial model there, but there was nobody else doing that. And it meant essentially that we were locking a lot of organizations out of the opportunity to make their events more efficient and effective with software.

Not that they didn't need it. They needed it like crazy, but there wasn't really an option out there that was cost effective at that point, simply because they were charging about as much as we would charge for a license fee, plus charging 2%. I was like, you know, gosh. And that kind of almost in a way punishes an auction for getting bigger. It punishes a fundraiser for growing and becoming more successful.

And I didn't like that. And there were enough other PTA presidents and auction shares out there that agreed with us that, you know, we managed to make it work.

Yeah. Did your background running school auctions shape the platform in any way or was it just kind of a brainstorm between you and your partners?

So I was fortunate enough that I came along after.

Three very talented software engineers and dads had gotten together and written an initial release. The initial release had been used for exactly three auctions before I came along, meaning three particular events. It had been used a little bit.

But I'm the marketing guy, I'm the sales and marketing guy. And I do believe that product development needs to be informed by a sense of what the market brings to it. So in that first year, my job was as much market research as it was sales. It was going out there and understanding, like, okay, this thing that we put out there, how deficient is it and where, you know, what is it that it needs to do? And of course, you know, software is under continuous development. Usually if you're doing it right, you're always revising. And that has continued to be a big role over the years, is that our software is fairly user driven. You know, our customers are not shy about telling us what they want to see in it, and we have a pretty good track record of bringing many of those requests into the software.

Yeah, there's a lot of moving parts around, planning a successful fundraiser, more than.

So many people know.

Definitely. Let's get a little bit more granular. How does your platform simplify things in that regard?

There's a handful of different ways in which it does that. Primarily, if I'm starting out with a customer that's never used software before, you know, we're just getting them used to the idea that they're collecting usable data. You know, that as you're going through your planning process here, you're going to be able to have a database store that everybody on your team can access. They can all start putting things in together. We're making the work more efficient that, you know, simply, if nothing else, being able to allow every member of your auction team to work from their own home computers rather than driving pieces of paper around for somebody to enter into an Excel spreadsheet. That's a huge, huge advance in efficiency out there. We're bringing much more efficiency and ease of use into the mix when it comes to payment processing. Payment processing is one of those things I wish I didn't have to learn as much about as I had to learn about it. But, you know, it's kind of a nasty industry and we, we find ways to make that easier and softer for our customers to get through and get that done. Then we're going to focus after they're used to just simply like, let's have a software layer here that's going to help make you efficient. Then after that, we can talk about ways in which you can alter your fundraiser because of extended features and capacities that you may not have had before. It may not have been feasible for you to use mobile bidding before. Maybe you didn't think that you could pull that off before, but, you know, now we're going to give you some fairly simple tools for doing so, and you can bring that in and start benefiting from that. We also, you know, even Outside of capacity that the software brings, you're working with a company that's worked with thousands of other grassroots organizations doing things. You can ask us for advice, we're happy to give advice. We know the kind of tried and true ways of doing things, and we've seen a lot of wacky, wacky experiments and we're not shy about passing that information around.

Yeah, that real world experience, I'm sure, is valuable to those that are just trying to get it started.

Absolutely.

Can you walk us through a success story of a school or a nonprofit that significantly leveled up using your tools?

It's a fairly common thing. And I'm not going to single out a particular organization here, but I'll tell you a little bit about the pathway here. You know, generally in the beginning, an organization is going to come to us, and if they've never held a fundraiser before or if they've never used software before, I can simply ask them, how many people do you think you're going to be able to get to your event? And then based on where they're located, I can tell them how much money they're going to raise, you know, doing the things that they're thinking about doing. Pretty easy to predict. But then we're going to be building in some of these efficiencies. We're going to start seeing efficiencies in ticket sales right away. Year one, we're going to start seeing efficiencies in closing out the event. Year one there. And critically, I'll tell a lot of our customers, just by making the end of the evening an easier, better experience for guests, you're making it easier to sell tickets to next year's event. Because one of the things that we all have experienced at a fundraising event is like, it's 9:30. They say, all right, it's time to start wrapping things up here. If I'm still there at 11 o', clock standing in a line, waiting to write a check to somebody, I'm awfully crabby at that point.

You and me both.

Yeah, I'm awfully crappy. And I may go home and be like, that was not something I want to do again next year. Right. But what we can get a lot of our customers to in that first year is a place where their guests are kind of looking around at 9:45 going like, oh, we're done. We can go home. Yay. And the auction team looking around at 10 o' clock and saying like, is that it? Are we over? And it's like, yeah, that's it, you're over now. Cool. That's year one. Year two. Now we're starting to do advanced ticket sales techniques, and maybe we're going to be able to increase the number of attendees at their auction by 10 to 12%. That's a real big goal starting in year two. Just get more bodies into the room here. Right. Introduce them to what's going on, or if you're doing things wholly online, figure out an outreach strategy so we get more bidders registered for you. Past that, we're going to start suggesting that they implement items of a successful fundraiser that they have maybe haven't done before. I will tell all of my customers that before you think about spending money on auction software like mine, really the first. The first thing you can spend money on that will make your event more successful is a dedicated auctioneer, somebody who knows what they're doing. So if you're not working with one of those, go out and find one. And then that opens up the ability to do special appeals, and that opens up the. To play certain games on the night of your event. We introduced a few years ago a feature that's been amazing for so many of our customers, which is the ability to take recurring donations during a paddle raise. It's been fun, it's been great. And it keeps their account buzzing all year long. It keeps money coming in throughout the years, and it's a strategy that builds over time. It's one of those things where in year one, it's good, in year two, it's better, in year three, it's great. So there's a lot of stuff like that that builds in here. But I'm going to be looking at what the organization actually does and has done in the past. And then, you know, you can't do all of the improvements in year one. So we're going to kind of suggest a schedule for your year two, your year three, your year four, and usually by year four or year five, if you've got a community of reasonable size, you, you know, we can probably get you to the point where you're raising $50,000. Even if you never thought you would be able to do that. If you did, maybe you're raising $100,000. So. Right.

You know, this all comes in and comes to a head here with the concept that you've talked about, which is being an advocate for equity and fundraising.

Yeah.

The fact that you share intellectual property and the fact that you share best practices with your customers is powerful. And any smart company would do that, but not everybody does what does that look like in practice in terms of creating equity, especially for schools and smaller nonprofits?

Equity is one of my favorite topics to talk about. We could eat up the rest of our conversation here. I'll try to be respectful of everybody's time. I think equity comes in in several parts. Part of it is on the organization themselves, especially if this is a. A small, tight community like either a school or a church or something like that that's got a catchment and brings people together. You got to find a way to bring everybody together. Auctions can feel awfully elitist, but you can address that, and you can address that in a couple of different ways, both with a strategy around ticket sales, a strategy around item procurement, and a strategy for how you conduct the. The fundraising in the auction itself. Those are all tips and tricks that we're starting. We feed people.

When they're talking to us in the beginning about using our software, every time they're coming and asking questions about how to use it. And we do debriefings after every year. So we're working on those kind of pieces throughout there. I'm always peppering people with. Think about the guy who's got 25 bucks in his pocket. Seriously, he's out there. He wants to help. He wants to be part of the solution. He wants to be part of the community. If everything's biddable in your event, 25 bucks isn't going to go very far. So there are other techniques to make sure that at the end of the evening, this guy leaves with an empty pocket. We got the 25 bucks out of it, and he's leaving with his head held high. He's part of the solution. He was not just there to applaud, you know, and that's equity. Equity comes in with regards to how we price our software. We could charge a lot more than we do. We touched on this earlier here, but I tend to think that would lock us out of working with certain organizations. And, you know, a concept that I believe in very strongly down to my core. Alan, and we spoke about this briefly, you know, a week ago, is the concept of enough. You know, I'm in the software business. I've been in the software business for a while. The world has a vision of software business owners that we all want to be, you know, Mark Zuckerberg or something like that. And we all want. And there's no amount of money that could possibly ever be enough for us. That's not true, at least not in our case. We're in this for. We're in this to make a good living. And we want to. We want to make a living. We want to pay our bills. So we are going to charge for our software. But I know when enough is enough, and especially if you're going to sell to nonprofits and potentially naive buyers, you have to be an advocate for the buyer as well. That's part of equity from our standpoint, is that we have to be fair about providing a solution that any charity or nonprofit can use.

Yeah, you know, we talked about this earlier, but not in the episode. But I've talked to you about this before during COVID and now in uncertain funding times. Your approach has helped organizations adapt. What lessons still apply today based on those circumstances?

So.

Right now, nonprofits and charities out there.

That have professional fundraising talent on their staffs.

Have probably pursued a particular orientation with regards to their fundraising. Like, let's do things in the most efficient way possible. The most efficient way is to find somebody who's got a fat wallet and not terribly long to live and ask them to write a really big check to us. You know, really efficient. If you can find that, if you can do that, go do that. That's a good thing to do. But, you know, some of those sources are drying up. You know, certainly things like government grants are under review or they're being pulled or they're being reallocated.

And that removes a pillar of sort of standard fundraising best practices.

Private foundations are great, but they're being asked to pick up the slack from government foundations. In times like these, I think you absolutely have got to have a significant part of your fundraising mix that is broadly based, that is about not asking for one guy for $50,000, but is rather about finding 50 guys who can give you $1,000. You know, and this is one of the reasons we really like working with community based nonprofits. I like to think that the most successful of these kind of events have the feel of a community effort. To them, it's kind of a barn raising. You know, we're going to all get together. We see the issue in front of us at this school, we have to replace the football field, we have to replace the roof over the shop or whatever it is. You know, we're going to get together and fix our problem here. And that is a type of fundraising that is much less volatile. It's much less volatile to economic conditions. It's much less volatile to the whims of funding sources, larger funding sources out there. Are events sexy? Not to anybody who's got professional fundraising or development Training, you know, they're. They're seen at best in some organizations as a necessary evil. We want to just break even on it. It's a way to get our donors some recognition. But you know what?

I'll tell you, there's a whole category of nonprofits out there that have figured out that they can be effective fundraisers as well. They can make you money, they know how to do it, and they're sustainable, long term elements of a solid fundraising mix. And those organizations are the grassroots ones. They're the ones that, you know, may have a staff of three and may serve people within a given city or a given neighborhood. And they know how to be lean and mean and efficient and these things work for them.

You know, Roger, it strikes me in this conversation that, you know, if there's anything that could come from exposing your software to people that don't even know it exists, is that some of the people that might hear this message don't really even know that this is available to the general small, community based nonprofit. They think that auctions and techniques like auctions are probably too big for them. I hope that people are inspired to take action on this. I'm not promoting a particular product. That's not what I do here. But I think your message is very clear that if people seize the moment and take advantage of the tools that are available, they could clearly generate more cash for their nonprofit venture and make more impact. Everything is not impact here, for sure.

Absolutely. And you know, I do want to reinforce a bit of what you just said there. If you're thinking of a fundraising auction, because you saw one on TV that was held down at the Ritz and everybody was in tuxedos and there was an ice sculpture and there was. They don't have to be like that. They really don't. You don't have to spend $200,000 to put on a fundraising event there. You can do it on another scale and they can be very, very effective. And yeah, you know, I would put this out there a lots, lots and lots of school PTAs and churches will understand what I'm saying here though. But a lot of the community grassroots nonprofits may still need to hear the message. May still need to hear the message that, you know, this is, this is not necessarily something that is beneath your organization to do. It is something that is an effective technique that, that works, I think, especially well within the grassroots.

Yeah, I mean, there's a reason the big players do auctions too, is because they're effective at raising, oh and hey.

And if the American Cancer Society wants to call me, I'll sell my software to them too. That's totally fine. I tend not to chase that end of the market because there's a lot of people chasing that end of the market. Right. And at the end of the day, I'm perfectly happy to work with the local pta. You know, I get jazzed by that.

So, looking ahead, let's ask this, what's next for you and for school auction.net.

There'S some pretty interesting things coming up with regards to the development pipeline here. I think that we're going to continue to be responding to how the events are evolving, and events are definitely evolving. You know, there are things that you would do years ago that you don't even consider now. One of the biggest changes that's out there right now is that. That I could use to illustrate this is that groups are breaking up their fundraising auction and only doing the live auction part in person and doing the silent auction all completely online and closing it a week ahead of time. Did that come out of us and what we were thinking and how a software company thought the it should evolve? No, no, no. It all came out of what's actually happening out there and we're responding to it. And there's a bunch of fun stuff on the horizon that has come out of suggestions like that we think that events are going to get a little more modular. We're going to have to evolve our software to deal with things like that. But we're in it to stay. And I personally don't ever want to work for anybody ever again.

Yep. Roger, your story is a reminder that we don't need to chase unicorn status to make a meaningful impact. You've built something that works and that puts the tools of empowerment directly into the hands of schools, volunteers and everyday heroes. I appreciate that. This show is all about impact and legacy building. And clearly you've thought very hard and very thoughtfully about how to leave a legacy and build impact. So I appreciate that. I'm Alan Pavloski signing off for Legacy All Stars. I hope you enjoyed this interview with Roger Devine. Really appreciate your time, Roger. Thank you.

Thank you, Alan.