#106: Live from Summit: The friction tolerance threshold and why it matters, with Salvatore Salpietro & Shital Patel

Hey, it's Mike. Quick note before we get started, my company, Buildgood publishes this podcast that you're listening to. But our core work is to actually build a multi channel metrics based fundraising program for nonprofits that focuses on building the long term value of new and current donors. So we actually help nonprofits in the US And Canada build a broad base of donors. We help them with acquisition, with retention, with monthly giving, and with mid level giving programs. Now, every year we take on a few new clients and we tend to work with international development organizations, hospital foundations, children's hospital foundations, and local poverty relief like food banks or homeless service providers, those kinds of organizations. Now here's the thing. If you're raising at least $5 million and you're looking for a partner to help you raise more money with your digital and direct mail programs, or if you're going into an RFP process, you can get a hold of me@hello, buildgood.com and someone on our team will make sure that email gets to me and I will personally get back to you. All right, let's get the podcast going. Well, hello builders of good. Thank you for tuning in to the Build Good fundraising podcast. Fundraising isn't easy, but it should be simple. So on this show, we take the mystery out of raising money. Now, on every episode, we coach you to build your fundraising like a flywheel. The flywheel has five steps. Number one is listening to donors. Number two is engaging them. Number three is asking the right people for the right things. Number four is celebrating every gift at every level. And number five is reporting back in a real time and responsive way. Way. Now, if you master the five parts of the flywheel, your fundraising flywheel will start to spin reliably. With less effort on your part, your revenue will grow and so will your career. Now, every week, we focus on one part of the flywheel. And today we're focusing on asking specifically the way that we ask for money online on our donation forms and how much friction we introduce to the process that is really harming us and not helping our cause. Today is a bit of a shorter podcast. It's another session recorded live at the Build Good Summit. And this was a format at the Build Good Summit that was like a little short, punchy session between some longer keynotes. So that's why today's podcast is a bit shorter. It is with my friend Salvatore Salpietro from Fundraise UP and Sheetal Patel from the Canadian Cancer Society, and they get into something that they've dubbed the friction tolerance threshold. So Our donors are also consumers, and they're shopping online on Amazon. They're shopping for different things online, and they're having frictionless experiences that are very much designed to facilitate online shopping. And then when they make an online gift, sometimes they are hit with an experience that feels archaic at best and maybe even prevents them from making a gift at worst. So Sal and Sheetal get into this, what you can do to improve your giving experience. It's a short one, but a punchy one. I think you're going to get lots of value out of it. So let's get right into it. Record live at the buildgood Summit the friction tolerance thresholds and why it matters.

All right, we're toward the end of the day, kind of have to be high energy because there's a lot of content to get through. I'm going to talk fast. I'm Italian. I'm from New Jersey. We're going to blast through this. Okay, I got it. Friction tolerance threshold. We're going to talk about how much is too much. Spoiler alert. Any is too much. That's me, that's Sheidel. He's going to come up after. Our agenda is first, we're going to talk about some data about the sector and digital giving and digital fundraising. We'll talk about friction tolerance and what that concept is. And then Sheeta will take us home with a case study about what happens when you do the thing that you need to do. All right, so starting with numbers, all web traffic, all the web traffic, 68% is on mobile devices, 32% is on desktop. Of all e commerce revenue, 55% comes on mobile devices and 45 on desktop. So there's a little bit of a gap there about. What is that, eight points or so? And that is because on mobile devices, we typically spend less money. We're going to buy the full big vacation package on our desktop. We'll buy one plane ticket on our phone. We'll buy one piece of furniture on Amazon, but we'll buy the whole living room on our desktop. Right. So that's what that gap is, but it's still pretty close. Nonprofits, hello, here we go. Mobile, 53%. So we drop in. How much traffic is mobile? That's because we're targeting donors typically that are not using mobile devices or as likely to use a mobile device. That is older demographics. Okay. And 47% on desktop of the Web traffic, of donation revenue. The gap between. Between revenue and traffic doubles. So what does that mean? That means we're getting the mobile Donors, but they're not converting. They're getting there to our donation form and they're going, cool, bye. Okay, and 70% of our revenue is happening on desktops. Why is that happening? Okay, here's some numbers. The Nonprofit sector, about 25% of us use Apple Pay and offer that to to our donors. 45% are offering PayPal. If we look at the E commerce space, who have got it all figured out for us already, we just need to follow their lead. 85% are offering Apple Pay and 72% are offering PayPal. There's the gap. That's one of the reasons for the that's one of the reasons for the gap. We'll have another reason for the gap. So friction tolerance threshold. How much will I as a human, not a donor, not a buyer, as a human, will I tolerate to complete a transaction? Lots of friction makes it difficult. A little bit of friction makes it easier. When I'm buying E Commerce removes all the friction. My address fills out by itself. I got all the express payment wallets. It's easy. But I do have a high tolerance for friction. What I'm buying because I'm going to get something. I'm going to get concert tickets, I'm going to get my food, I'm going to get something. So even if it's not smooth, I'm going to power through, right? And the friction level is low. This is what we all enjoy, right? One click face id. Beautiful. This is how they're getting revenue. And we all need revenue. We all need donations. This is what we're giving them, Right? This is their all day. 95% of their dollars are on those other screens and 5% of their dollars. We're trying to get them with this. This is not the Wayback Machine. These are all current from this year except for the one on the far right, which is from 2019. There has been no evolution in six years. And then we wonder, where are my younger donors? Why is there a gap? Why are they falling behind, et cetera, et cetera, et cetera, what I'm giving. And we're not going to go through all the examples of friction. You know who you are when I talk about friction. And when I say you, I mean friction elements, not you, right? No payment methods, difficult to fill out, not very mobile, responsive. So on giving, I've got a high level of friction and donors have a lower tolerance for it. Why is it lower? We'll talk about that in just a second. But because of us flipping that whole thing, we're Shooting ourselves in both feet.

Right.

They're more like the flame of generosity is more likely to be put out than buying sneakers. And I'm giving them a lot more agita things to go through to get that donation. The expectations they have, as we Talked about in our 95, 5% split of where we spend our money, their expectations are set by their consumer experiences, by all those screenshots we saw, Uber Eats, et cetera, et cetera, et cetera. And that means nonprofits have to work harder. Why do they have to work harder? Am I okay on time for a minute here? We're good. Okay. Because when I buy, I get a thing, I get service, I get an Uber ride, I get my pizza, I get my concert tickets to Taylor Swift. That's a lot of friction to get them, but I'm going to do it anyway. Right? And when I give, I get the thing when I click donate, not when I give. And when I click, I'm getting a feel good moment. I'm getting confirmation that I'm generous, I'm getting confirmation that I'm altruistic, I'm a good person. I click donate. And if that donation form sucks, that's on you, not me. I'm generous. You failed. Bye. Right. So when I click that, the thing I'm getting is that feeling about myself that I'm good. Let's zoom back out to the stats. When we're looking at nonprofits using modern AI enabled frictionless giving experiences, Apple Pay Mobile, specific experiences, AI pre filling my address for me. Like, has anybody typed their whole address in the last five years anywhere? Right. Except then you get to a donation form, you got to type it all out. Here's what happens to the gap. It cuts in half. Now we're at 53% traffic, 42% of the revenue. Now that gap mirrors E commerce. So we're getting now to parity with what we can expect instead of where are my donors, why are they not getting, etc. There's a lot more stats around that. Make a note of this pulse of the donor.com It's a, it's a benchmark report on digital fundraising only of nonprofits using AI enabled frictionless technologies. Right. And it's all first party data that we've made it, we've had available to us. And you can get a lot of stats and there's US Canada, UK and Australia in this report. So it's a full picture and compare that against either your stats or other industry benchmarks that are available to you. And now As I catch my breath, Shiloh's going to come up and tell us what happens when you do that. What are the results? Shiloh, please.

Thank you, Sal. Sal was going to pace through this podium, so we decided that I should stay down there. So Canadian Cancer Society our purpose is to unite and inspire all Canadians to take control of cancer. We've been the facts we've been since founded in 1938, we've been one of the largest national charitable funder. There's a typo there that's on me of cancer research and we get about 23 million visitors all across the globe to our website, corporate website which is cancer ca. I follow Dennis on LinkedIn and this is something I loved and how simple yet powerful. When someone feels moved to give, the worst thing we can do is slow them down, let them give, thank them, then show them what their gift made possible. How many of us have thought of doing this yet? Some of our donation systems have prevented us from giving that experience. A lot of times we have a donor who is motivated, who is inspired, who is ready to give and we make their 100 meter sprint into a 400 meter hurdle. How many of you have been there? And maybe I think some of the examples that Saul kind of showed us it's about giving that experience. That's what he mentioned. When you click, when the donor clicks, they are getting an experience that they can take it back and they can cherish with others. Of course we were there just back in June 2024 we were there long linear forms and God forbid if the user made an error on this. Moving forward and why am I seeing there I should be seeing here moving forward. June 2024 after doing a pilot or successfully doing the pilot we launched fundraise up donation platform. Lot of things that Sal mentioned. AI driven ask amounts AI driven cost coverage mobile first instead of mobile optimization multi currency giving. All of these features pre upsell, pre donation upsell, post donation upsell. Those are some of the things that just modernizing the whole experience that the user can get when they land on this page. Results. We have many, many metrics to share but I have kind of picked a few here today for us monthly donor file. How many of us today we are looking for that monthly donors right like this is because this is not a one time stand. We are looking for that relationship because when somebody gives you a recurring donation that is when they are looking to stay with you for long term. And we have grown our file by 25% since June of last year and not Only that that file has grown at twice the speed than the same period from previous year. Our overall monthly revenue that has increased by 33% during this time. Mobile donations, again, we were at 19% conversion or 19% conversion on mobile devices before, which has gone up to 31%, which is 55% boost. And overall the rate of completion has been 38% higher than what we had on our legacy mobile wallets. Again, if I take out some of the holiday giving and postal strikes and other kind of nuances, if we take out those outliers, that 5% would be higher. But before we had none. Since we have moved to Fundraise up and because of all these features that it can offer us, it has expanded our kind of thinking and we have started to take the Fundraise up donation checkout and apply it into the areas where we had never gone before and we had never had success. For example, as I mentioned, we have 23 million visitors coming to Cancer CA. Half of them are coming to us from outside of North America. Why? Because we offer information in French, which is a niche, which is a unique, kind of a strength of ours. However, when we look at the amount of donation we get out of North America, it has been less than 2% since bringing fundraise up. The results have been, and what we have is a micro donation, a small ask for a small amount, but it is contextual within the cancer information that we provide. So it is not. Our goal is not to take the user away from their primary purpose, but subtly ask them for a donation of $5. Guess what? We have had more than 400 donations in the last less than two months. Out of that, 22% of these donations have come from outside of North America. This was, again, as I said, less than 2% before 65% of these donations, they're happening on mobile. Our rest of the campaigns, they're bringing 31%. So that's a huge. Because people are giving us while they're looking, while they're getting the information. So this is. And the recurring donations, it is about 22% of all the donation revenue that we have generated through this, through this experiment. So again, just closing it out on this one is what Sal was mentioning. It is about giving that experience, giving that feeling to the user when they have come to make a donation so that they can take that feeling back, talk to their friends and family and also kind of remember and come back to you again with that. I'll bring Sal back.

Awesome. A round of applause for those results. So if Digital fundraising is important to you. I hope what Sheetl and what Canadian Cancer Society has done is giving you the confidence and sense of urgency to treat this with, like, the respect that it kind of deserves. If we're trying to get donors and not spin our wheels and all that. And it's not, you know, tech is the foundation. It's what determines your roi. It's not standalone, you know, things like, you know, what, what Kevin was talking about this morning about, you know, stop being generic, like, you got to layer those things on top of it. But this gives you a foundation to, to, to, to go in that direction. So technology can be used by nonprofits to reverse negative trends. And you'll see that in the Pulse of the donor.com Report and amplify positive trends that we're seeing in the overall landscape. Levering, leveling up, removing the friction. It's critical and today it's in many ways existential for nonprofits. And it's up to us as a community to understand the importance of meeting the expectations of the donor. Leveling up, removing the friction. Because they're no longer excusing us. They're no longer saying, oh, it's a nonprofit, I'll give a pass. I'm going to spend 18 minutes and fill out this donation form, right? They're saying, nice try, got to go. There's another nonprofit that's doing something that's going to be easier, right? So they're not, not excusing us anymore. And the solutions are there, they're within reach, and I ask you to look for them. You can connect me on LinkedIn. I'll get you links to the report if you need it uncharitable and other things if you like. And that's it. We're on time. We're good. Thank you.

Well, that's all for today. This has been a live recording from one of the sessions at the Build Good Summit. If you want to be part of next year's BuildGood Summit, just go to buildgoodsummit.com and hit, you know, maybe there's like a Join the waitlist button or maybe there's a, there's a pop up that comes up depending on when you're listening to this. Just enter your email there. And we're already working on it. And we're going to announce the dates very soon and we're going to do a private launch first with deeply discounted tickets for listeners of this podcast and people in the Build Good universe. So make sure you sign up for those updates so you don't miss that. As always, thank you for hanging out with us around the fundraising campfire. If you're listening to this, you're my kind of people, and your kind of people. Thank you for the work you do. I'm your host, Mike Turksen, cheering you on as you build good in the world.