EP. 018 – AI-Powered Payments for Nonprofits - Salvatore Salpietro, Fundraise Up

Welcome to episode 18 of the Payments show podcast. My name is Satwantful and today I will be speaking to Salvatore Salpietro, who is the Chief Integration Officer at Fundraise Up. Fundraise up enables nonprofits to raise donations by supplying them with an advanced AI powered payment system that removes friction from the donation process. Enjoy the episode. Hello, Salvatore, how are you? Welcome to the show.

Hey there, set. How are you? Thank you.

Very well, thanks. Trying to get through the lockdown like everybody else. Where are you in the world?

We are in Brooklyn, so originally one of the hardest hit spots in the US at least. But right now we seem to have things a bit more normalized. So it's. It's good.

Well, thankfully the world seems to be coming out of it. Maybe you guys are a month or so behind, so hopefully it'll be over soon, right?

Let's hope. Let's hope, yeah.

Well, thank you so much for coming on the show. I've been looking forward to this. There's an interesting reason why I contacted Fundraise and I'll go into that in a second. I'll introduce you for the listeners. So Salvatore Salpietro is the Chief Integration Officer at Fundraise up and as he mentioned, is based in New York. Fundraise up enables nonprofits to raise donations by supplying them with a powerful AI powered payment system that removes friction from the donation process. For those of you interested in the business side of things, they recently raised just over a million US dollars in funding in January of 2020 from their investor, Splash Capital. Congratulations for that.

Thank you.

I'm sure you've got massive plans ahead, so we'll talk about those in the show before we kick off. Would you like to introduce yourself and give us a bit of background as to how you got into payments and how you ended up where you are now? Because I can see from your career that you've had many IT roles, SAS companies. I think you've been involved with some charity ones as well. So it'd be great to understand your background to see how you ended up here.

Yeah, I'll try to fly. Over the last 20 years or so. My foray into web things started at the American University of Rome in Italy, where I was just a lowly IT guy, but I took on the project of speccing and doing the RFP and managing the build of a new university web ecosystem. This is back in 2002, 2003 or so. So that got my appetite going for the web side of things. Then from there, I guess my career Took some different jumps around. I went to London. I was there for a couple years, Web project manager in London for a digital content agency. From there came to New York, back home. So home for me is New Jersey. And came back to Manhattan and I worked at a startup called Web Collage. It was a well funded startup, well on their way. I think they were already 8, 9 years old when I joined, but that was in the e commerce space, but more around e commerce content enhancing the buyer experience. About a year and a half into that where I cut my teeth on the startup life, my old boss from London called me and said, let's start another company. That was Icebox. And Icebox was a part of my life, still is in some respects. For a number of years. We started that company. I was based in the us they were doing a lot of business from the UK and it was a content distribution platform. So nothing to do with payments. But in that e commerce for profit world at a certain point felt a little burnout. And that kind of coincided with having a daughter on the way and getting married. And I wanted something a bit more stable. But I also wanted to do something more than selling shampoo and cars, which is what ultimately we did with that. Nothing's wrong with that. Everybody needs shampoo, I hope. And I went into the nonprofit space where I was digital director for a national nonprofit called the Child Mind Institute. There is where I got my nonprofit kind of background and exposure and also realizing the struggles that nonprofits have with technology that eventually led me to fundraise up. Interestingly, I was getting squeezed by the team there. We need more online revenue. And then I kept trying to play with the tools that we had available to increase online revenue and they were paltry. They were horrible. Coming from a for profit world in E commerce where you see expedited friction free checkouts where I can get a pizza with a fingerprint on my Apple pay. But then donation forms were laborious, 20, 30 fields, unclear error messages. And I didn't know what to do to fix that problem. And then I got a cold email from the guys at fundraise up. Possibly spam. I'm not sure yet. They still won't kind of admit if it was a personal outreach or if it was a spam drip. But I responded to that email. They said, hey, we have a cool tool that we're trying to get some feedback on. Would you like to try it? I put it in play. Our revenue went up 180% online within just a couple months. Looking back, year on Year for that period. And I was sold. Gave them a lot of feedback back and forth on the product. Eventually they said, stop emailing us. Just come over and work with us. So that's how that happened and where I ended up here. Kind of a strange journey, but a fitting and appropriate one. It kind of ticked all the boxes for what I needed to do here.

Yeah, that's like Steve Jobs saying, you can only connect the doctor looking back. Right?

That's right. That's right.

Yeah. Yeah. Well, that frustration is exactly why you're on the show. I want to explain to the listeners how I ended up contacting you guys. One of my favorite charities is Sea Shepherd. For some of the listeners that don't know they do ocean and wildlife conservation, especially around the Southern Ocean. I used to donate to them every month at work. I would get paid, and as I'm in the office and sitting in front of a desktop, I would go to their website and donate the desktop's key. Because they had so many fields that the only way you could donate is by being at a desktop. I mean, if you tried to do it on your phone, it would probably explode.

Sure.

Anyway, I left my job to start my own thing. That was April last year, 2019, and I haven't donated a single time since. The reason is because every time I remember to donate, I'm normally not at a PC. And so because I remembered what their online form was like, I thought, I just can't do that on my phone. They sent a newsletter about a week ago saying it's end of tax year, so if you want to make a donation, let's do it. I thought, all right, I'll go to my desktop and donate, because I know it's going to be a pain. And the donation thing had completely changed. And I saw this widget come up. It was really fast. And I thought, hold on, this is not how this is supposed to work. I could see that it was a new payment system. So I thought, let me now move away from my desktop and try and donate on my phone. I went through the same steps and did my fingerprint, and it paid with Apple pay. The whole thing was done in 10 seconds. I thought, right, I'm going to contact these fundraise people if it's the last thing I do and get them on the show. So that was my journey. And the experience that you had was very similar, right?

Exactly correct. I mean, I experienced it from the other side of the screen. There I was at the nonprofit side, seeing the numbers go up. But Nailed it. And that story is amazing. And it's exactly why we're doing what we're doing.

Yeah. So let's talk about that in a bit more detail. When I was looking at some of the benefits from your software, there's some amazing statistics. Let me just go through a few of them. Most charities generate twice as much revenue from the same web traffic. The conversion rate from visitors is 37% versus 18. Industry average. The time to donate is 24 seconds versus 53. I don't know which charity is doing 53 seconds because I've never seen anything like that. The fields to complete was 7 versus 15, but I think from memory, with your solution, it was even less.

If you're using mobile payment wallets, it can be reduced quite a bit.

All right, okay. Yeah, I was using Apple Pay. Some amazing statistics there. So I'd love to talk about the user experience and the customer experience side of things. They're critical for conversion, Right. There's some key industry statistics that 50% of web browsing is now done on mobile devices. And of all the shopping carts that are abandoned when it's mobile, 85% of shopping carts are abandoned. So I'd love for you to talk about how the company went about addressing the user experience and the customer experience side of things, because that's just so critical for this, right?

It is. The genesis of the platform and product comes from our CEO who was trying to make a donation, had a similar experience that you're accustomed to where it's very laborious. Every time there was an error on one of the fields, it would reset the form. Six, seven tries. He couldn't quite get through the form, et cetera. So they then did a bit of a survey of the industry. This can't be. This can't be real. This can't be how good is being done in the world. We'll bend over backwards to increase profit, but for nonprofits, we have technology that's not getting it done. So the decision in the end was burn it down and start from scratch. How does. How does a new experience look? Forget the nonprofit baseline. What is a consumer baseline? How do you bring a nonprofit experience in line with the consumer expectation? In that context, it was really just about reimagining the entire experience end to end. I mean, simple things. And I won't get into a feature ramble here, but autocomplete on an address field is something that is standard in consumer technology. Help them finish writing out their address. Why do donation forms not have that? So that kind of thing.

What are the majority of charities out there using right now?

Most of them are using whatever comes with their CRM software. So their donor management platform, every CRM has a donation form. They just have to tick the box and they develop it. They are CRM companies. They're not transactional fiscal platforms with a laser focus on, dare I say, obsessive focus, in our case on conversion rate and optimization. It's really just been an afterthought. While it's still a critical part of the operating revenue for nonprofits, it doesn't get the focus that the rest of it does. So short answer to your question, they're using whatever they're given essentially in most cases.

Let's talk about the product overview. Some of the key highlights that I read is a charity can turn every webpage into a donation page. They can put donate buttons, forms in lots of different places. I believe you call all of them elements.

That's right.

There's goal thermometers so people can see how much has been raised if it's a campaign, clear calls to actions. So there's a whole bunch of stuff. I'd love for you to give us a quick audio tour of what you offer.

We're and this will segue into this question quickly. We're doing an A B test currently with an international nonprofit with chapters all over the world, very large organization. We are seeing that they're losing 10% of their donor revenue simply because their donation forms opening in a new tab. Right. So most of the time a nonprofit will have their website and then you click the donate button, it opens a new tab and it may be on a sub domain or it may be a different domain altogether, I.e. of the CRM or software that they're using. So right out of the gate, 10% is lost. By shifting a donor from the moment of emotional trigger to that's what we tend to refer it as, to a new tab that has to load and then has a different branding or at least the URL is different and so on. So 10% out of the gate right there. So our platform, with a small piece of JavaScript in the website, you click donate, the modal pops up right there. You finish it where you felt the emotion and it pushed you to give. Don't lose the background. Don't lose that moment. Don't lose that blog article that was saying what a difference they made with their money this year. Keep them there, keep that in focus. So that's the first thing is get the donation in the moment. That it happens. As far as elements go, we have a number of them and we're releasing quite a number additional and social proof elements and so on. Little bubbles that say John Doe just gave in London five minutes ago or something to that effect. Right. So it's about increasing donor engagement. For example, our now wildly famous, at least in our heads and with our client base, is our pulsating heart donate button. We have a donate button. You just copy it from our dashboard, paste it into your website, and the word donate has a small, slightly beating heart that when you mouse over it, it beats a little faster. This has proven in our tests to get twice as many clicks, twice as many donors in the funnel with subtle donor psychology, human psychology, triggers. So our elements are designed to do that. Put them within your website, anywhere, make it part of your content, make it part of your mission, not a destination of your website. That's about a bit of a flyover of the elements and the key differentiator at first impact, not to mention the artificial intelligence and machine learning that we layer behind the scenes to really superpower this whole thing.

Yeah, that's something I definitely want to talk a bit later on, so. Sounds like you've got a few behavioral economists working behind the scenes there.

We do. We read a lot of books, we hire some consultants from time to time to inform certain decisions, and then a lot of it will be a B testing. We do micro experiments. Because of the unique structure of our platform, we are installed and monitoring donor behaviors on thousands of websites, thousands of visits to websites, and we see what works and what doesn't. We'll expose a small fraction of our audience to many experiments. For example, we have one feature with gold stars for asking the donor to cover fees. If you untick the box, you don't get the gold stars. Turns out we're hardwired from kindergarten. Get the gold stars and we see a 92% rate on average of donors covering the fees, which zeroes out all the costs for the nonprofit, which I know we'll come to later.

Yeah, that sounds great. How long does it take to get started? Somebody contacts you on the phone or on your website from that moment to getting the first donation. What kind of time span are we looking at and what are the steps along the way, the setup time, the technical difficulty? And as you mentioned earlier, cost in charity is always a catch 22 because you'll get more donations if the system was better. But there's not enough time or money to invest in making the system better.

Sure. Quick background is that the platform was originally developed for small nonprofits. Let's give small nonprofits powerful tools. Cat got out of the bag. We started being approached by many large Nonprofits where a 20, 50, 100% difference means millions of dollars, not hundreds or thousands. So we quickly had to go upscale. Right. So our platform is built and easy enough for a small nonprofit, even the back end and dashboard, but it's now evolved into being powerful enough for complex multinational nonprofit needs with very immense fiscal codes. But let's start with the small nonprofit, the small medium, we can be set up and running. And I've done demos for nonprofits where by the end of the call they're up and running. So in 15, 20 minutes we can be installed as long as they have a login to their website and we can swap out their donation system. So it's very quick. It's one piece of JavaScript and that powers our form. Obviously you can get into more details, but the core of it can be done in 15, 20 minutes a day, end to end. Really? For the nonprofits that don't have that in house expertise to do that, we do it for them. We don't charge for it.

Well, that's very compelling. I mean, if it's so fast, that's superb.

I'll also add that that's the small nonprofit, the larger nonprofits, they tend to be their own worst enemy to evolution due to cultural differences between a for profit and a nonprofit. So our flagship nonprofit took us almost a year to be up and running fully and migrated over. This is after obviously many A B tests validating AB tests. It takes a lot to convince an organization doing $20 million a year online to move their platform to you has to move the needle in a significant way for them to do that and then embark on their deeper requirements of database integrations and analytics, et cetera.

Yeah. Is that why you have these things called sub accounts? So I noticed on your site that you have the ability for customers to set up local national, international sub accounts and decide the autonomy of each. One more thing. Bank accounts and chapter accounts. I've never come across chapter accounts before. What's that?

So what we mean by that is you might take an spca, for example, where you'll have the headquarter chapter, and then each individual local chapter would have their own bank. Okay. So on our side, we allow you to create a parent child structure of accounts where HQ can see everything below, while the individual chapters have access and autonomy to manage their own donation forms, revenue, et cetera, as far as the bank accounts versus chapter accounts. We then allow them to further choose if they want the chapter to use the parent account bank for depositing their funds or to use their own chapter bank account. So it's a flexibility both in accounts on our side as well as where the funds need to route and go to. We work with Stripe as far as our payment processor, top tier, you know, great product. So we integrate with that. And then we also build on top of Stripe and leverage a lot of their functionality in our platform.

Use Stripe Radar, which I believe is their AI for detecting fraud. You can eliminate high risk countries. There's a whole bunch of benefits there for customers. You also protect against something I only found out about last week, bin fraud, where scammers can generate their own credit cards now, which are derived from a genuine credit card number out there in the world somewhere. That was quite an eye opener for me.

We've seen a lot of tricky mechanisms used by folks. Nonprofits are particularly vulnerable because they don't have the technical expertise to defend against it, A B their checkout is wide open out there for anyone without having to log in and C these malicious figures can do these transactions as many as they like very quickly with small amounts that don't really trigger radars that often. So on top of the Stripe radar, etc, etc, we also have our own level of anti fraud built on top of it. Stripe is beautiful, but they can only detect fraud after the transaction. So transaction happens or at least after it's attempted and then they'll issue an early fraud warning or a dispute, etc. We go a step further and build a layer that is AI enabled on top of that pre transaction. So because we are installed on the website and we know the donor's behavior from the moment they arrive on the site until they leave, donation or not, we are able to look at things like keystroke speed, how fresh is their IP address, are they refreshing their IP address many times in the context of their Mac address, so on and so forth. So we put a layer on top of that and then what we do is we essentially dead the form so that the malicious figure feels like they're still trying, but we don't tell them that nothing's gonna happen. So our nonprofits have seen something around 70, 80% reduction in even any kind of fraud attempts, including the stripe anti fraud.

I'm trying to picture here why there's so much fraud. What are the crooks trying to do? Because they don't want to donate, right? I mean they gained nothing out of that what are they doing? They're trying to steal the credit card numbers that people are trying to donate with. Is that right?

They're typically using it to test credit cards and see if they're valid. So then they take, you know, a five dollar donation goes through and then they say this is a good card, let me take this and go ahead and do a shopping spree. So. So that's typically what the attempts are, right?

I would never have thought of that. Thank you for explaining that.

It's a fully exposed live credit card testing model. And that's any nonprofit on any donation form.

Now that you've explained it, that's the worst type of organization to be on the receiving end because they don't have the technical expertise to fix it.

That's right. Yeah, that's right.

You also have integrations to things like Salesforce and Zapier. If charities are using these popular so software systems, then you, you integrate with APIs, I'm guessing.

That's right. We have a native integration with Salesforce, a few other nonprofit specific CRMs like Bloomerang, Kindful with a few other ones rolling out this year. Zapier, native integration, Google Analytics, native Facebook, Pixel for marketing for those that are ambitious in their marketing. All of that is out of the box. But giving tools to the nonprofits, if they use them or not, to really expand their reach and maximize their mission.

I'd like to move on to the data analytics part of your solution. You mentioned a B testing. What are some other features on the data analytics side? Because it looked quite comprehensive when I was looking at it earlier.

We have a big data warehouse that has more data that even we know what to do with at this stage of the company. Billions and billions of events, everything from, as I was saying, their IP, their location, their device, etc. Really general analytics, basically we're able to see anything that Google Analytics would see, but we take that and we have to extrapolate what is useful for nonprofits. Right. So you have a Google Analytics looking about what you're buying and we're looking about how do we get them to give more. So a B tests out of the gate. Obviously we do those for our larger nonprofits. They're quite laborious, can be quite complex. But simply testing your donation form against ours, and then there's a lot of variables in there. Things like I was mentioning before, click to donate, conversion rate versus View checkout to donate. This is unique to the nonprofit space. Right? Because any other for profit entity would say, well, obviously if they Click. We're going to make absolutely sure they see the checkout. Whereas in the nonprofit space, we see over and over 10 to 15% lost because of the process that's being imposed. So data like that helps us make really informed decisions. Some other things that we're able to do that is again unique to us because we're installed on every page of that website instead of the donation page. Right? Donation page. You know the conversion rate on that page or you may not even know that if it's a subdomain or owned by somebody else. Many donation platforms will not disclose the conversion rates or allow you to put Google Analytics on it. But we're able to see which pages of your website are generating the most revenue for your organization. How many page views before they donate, what's the average gift size for somebody that visits once versus somebody that visits 10 times? Or we even pull in data around household incomes based on postal or zip code. So we'll look at somebody from Upper west side Manhattan and say, well, we think that they could do for a hundred dollar donation, while somebody in Topeka, Kansas may have that adjusted down to a $60 recommendation. So a lot of the AI modeling, which is what we were talking briefly about, is around learning donor trends, behaviors and making the right ask without leaving money on the table.

That's great. So the bronze, silver, gold options that you give can be different depending on the postcode.

They almost always are. And not only the postcode, there's hundreds of data points that go into that near payday. We'll nudge the numbers a little higher.

That's when I used to donate every payday.

There you go. So you're going to be getting asked for a little more than if you did, maybe a little further from payday around holidays. We'll nudge the numbers a little higher. We even look at per organization, which is very important when you look at it in the context of faith based nonprofits. We'll see they always give on Sunday or Friday or you know, 60% of your revenue comes on a weekend. We're going to nudge the numbers around that time. Basically, you know what the for profit world does for demand pricing. Airlines, hotels, etc. They're looking at how many times you check the price. We all know that, you know, you refresh the page three times, the ticket price goes up a bit. We're just taking the same exact thing and applying it for social good.

Yeah, and stripping out all the cost from them having to do it all themselves.

Almost impossible.

That's super impressive. I'd love to understand what your biggest challenges are right now. Maybe mix that in with your plans for what's coming up, new services or things like that in the future.

Sure. Our biggest challenge over and over is trying to distill a business mindset to a nonprofit audience for us. Often we get a lot of pushback on things such as a transaction fee, asking donors to cover fees, or just basically major paradigm shifts than what nonprofits are used to. For however many years the Internet has been around, it has been click donate, go to a new page where there's a donation form and we're saying, that's gone, you don't need to do that anymore. It's actually hurting you getting them to understand business concepts. And I'll say this very clearly, our platform will cost more than anything else that is doing this. But you would be sacrificing 2% of your revenue to get a 50, 60, 80, 100, 200% increase in revenue. While for any businessman that makes perfect sense. That's the first thing you're going to buy. That's the best investment you could make. But a nonprofit sees, why would I give you 2% of my donations without understanding the rest of the business underlying concepts? So that is our hands down biggest challenge. And it's an education that we have to do in this space. We get a lot of the nonprofits that are switched on and they get it and they come to us and they say, absolutely makes sense. While some of them will struggle with.

The concept, there's no challenge with the tech in your company. Your tech's amazing. From what I've heard so far and what I've seen and how I've used it, I would imagine that the biggest challenge you face from charities that don't take you up and complain about all the fees, they're also the people that probably think money is evil. That's kind of in their psychology, perhaps. So you've almost got a psychological resistance to it.

We have case study numbers that would make any for profit company leap for joy. But that's also padding pockets of those that stand to benefit more than others, wherein nonprofits, your beneficiary is really the mission. And the people, we do get emails regularly from nonprofits that say, guys, we're so happy we switched to you. We were able to give 10,000 children in Africa water that we weren't able to because you've generated more donations for us. That's the kind of stuff that keeps us excited. Those are the nonprofits that get it? Those are our ambassadors and that base is growing larger.

Fantastic. Following on from that, if you could give some case studies, some customer successes that you are allowed to talk about in public, or if not, where you see success, what are the traits of those customers?

Sure. I heard from Sea shepherd they had actually implemented us shortly before you made your donation. And I believe it was for that specific campaign as well. But they did come back to us after they got their results and they said, holy wow, we did 3x over last year. What we did with the same initiative using Fundraise up. I believe they were also testing another platform at the same time. So you were lucky you got the AB test with ours. But even being an a B test, There was a 3x over the year prior for the same initiative. This is the stuff that gets us excited here. Right. We love that.

Since I left my job last year, so they would have lost $600 because I just couldn't deal with that form anymore.

Sure, sure. I mean it happens a lot. And like I said, that's how this was born. This, this whole company from a CEO that couldn't deal with that form anymore. And that form being all of them. I won't mention the specific name as they don't have any kind of legal guidance on that, but an international nonprofit, their U.S. chapter, they have maybe 50, 60, 70,000 monthly donors. We were able to acquire them monthly donors three times faster than they were previously. And that is due to some of our AI upsell technology. We know when to ask them to switch to monthly or not from a one time gift. So those are two examples. The traits that our nonprofits share. Forward thinking, open to innovation, looking to improve. There's an old adage in the nonprofit spaces. Your target for next year is to do at least 90% of what you did the year before, meaning just enough to keep the job and not really have any long term damage. Whereas obviously in a for profit world, it's we need to do 110 every year, we need to grow. So our nonprofits that use us, they are of that business mindset, they get it much more readily. Let's beat our goals, let's improve, let's give donors a better experience. And the benefits are just, you know, full circle all the way around.

That's really good to hear. Have you noticed any changes with the coronavirus situation? Has it had an impact?

It did. We saw in the first month of this about a 5x increase in volume of account requests. Since then we've probably grown about 10x if not more in overall giving volume. People are still generous even though the world is hurting. So it's good to see that. I believe a lot of this is due to offline events not being possible anymore. Those fundraiser dinners, the charity comedy shows, things like that, they're not possible now. So it all has to move online. And. And those that are dependent and forward thinking enough are looking to improve that donor experience and maximize on it. So that's the impact that this has had on us. It's right there in line with the thinking that coronavirus has accelerated certain trends that would have happened otherwise. And I think we've fallen there.

Yeah. Although the situation is bad, I think a lot of good will come of this. A lot of projects that were just. I've worked in cloud computing for a number of years and you see a lot of people trying to protect their roles, but they don't think if I deliver more value I'd enjoy my job more and actually could earn more because I'm doing higher value stuff. So it's a similar mindset.

That's right. Yeah, that's right. That's what's happening.

Excellent. What's coming up in terms of new services or features, Any plans for crypto donations? I'm a big crypto fan, big crypto.

And I saw that in some of the podcast previous episodes there.

I try not to let my biases get in the way, but hey, I'll tell you this.

Once Stripe works with crypto, we will. Right now I believe they used to have it and they think, I think they pulled it off the platform at some point. That is to say that a number of our nonprofits will have a page dedicated to crypto that we see that's going outside of our user experience, but still has a place for sure. As far as what's up on our roadmap coming up 2021 is when we'll start internationalization. So fully and officially supporting Australia, uk, other international territories right now. We do allow them to work with us, but we don't have official platform support for localized payment methods, etc. That's the biggest thing then peer to peer fundraising, which those that know will know exactly what that would be. That is coming up as well, either this year or early next year.

What's that? Can you not talk about that?

I sure can. Peer to peer fundraising is where similar to that kind of GoFundMe model where you start your own campaign and get your friends to give. So we would essentially allow John Doe to visit a nonprofit, make his Donation and then start his own donation campaign with his own preset goal that he can share to his network and fundraise on behalf of the nonprofit.

Okay, that's interesting. I didn't think of that. I would have thought in my mind that it's so hard to raise money as a charity anyway, that doing yourself would be even harder. But clearly you're getting demand for it, right?

100%. In fact, some of our nonprofits, I'd say probably a third, will say they do more in peer to peer fundraising than they do in direct gifts. They'll activate their base and say raise funds for us. Similar to that, the cookie sale or whatever it might be where you're raising funds for a cause. This is just a digital version of that.

Essentially, now that I think about it, it kind of makes sense because one of the reasons I love donating to Sea shepherd is they take action. When you donate money. You can see them ramming the whaling ships. You can see where your money is being spent. The peer to peer makes sense because I was feeling many years ago, before I started donating to them, that the business of charities was just to collect money, to hire more people, to collect more money. I never actually saw any results.

Sure. I mean, it's becoming increasingly about building a relationship with the donor and giving them ways to express and share their affinity for that organization. I mean, Sea Shepherd's fantastic. Right. They're essentially good pirates. We have some, some T shirts in the mail coming from them that they said they would send over. I can't wait to wear it. I mean, it's one of those organizations you can really be proud and be a fan of. I think that's important and growing in importance in the nonprofit sector.

Yeah. The transparency, I think is going to be really critical moving ahead because for sure, people are in a stress financial situation now. So if they're going to donate, they want to see results.

That's right. We call that dollar to impact. What is my $50 getting me? That's getting me the emotional payoff that X number of people will have a meal this month. That's what you want to know. And if you don't make that clear, you will be in trouble in your efforts.

One of the final questions was to expand a little bit more on AI. I know you mentioned some snippets that you have some cool stuff into preventing fraudulent transactions. Give us a bit of a landscape of your AI operation and what you're working on.

Sure. So like I said, we have more data than we know what to do with and we're looking for ways to apply it. But we use AI in a number of places. Without giving too much of the secret sauce away, I can say that we use it and we leverage hundreds of data points for making the recommended donation amounts in an A B test recently that has now been running for about six weeks. The first week and a half or so we were losing the test and that's, that's expected because our AI was in learning mode and basically it's throwing anything at the wall that sticks. Then once it figured out what people are responding to the chart, the line graph just divided, they went in two directions. Needless to say, we're well ahead in that AB test. So AI is a fickle beast. You have to let it learn. You have to take those learnings and apply it in the right places. You have to know what question to ask. Right. That's a big part of it. And like I said, we use it in determining how much we ask a donor to give in. Those typical six buttons that you see on a screen will even go as far as filling in the box where you enter your own amount with a number and that will be AI generated as well. Then applying this as well to when and when not to upsell a donor from a one time gift to a monthly gift based on retention risk analysis, how long will they remain a monthly donor, what's the median and average gift sizes for a monthly donor, and so on. Then finally in the payment methods, so you, when you made your gift, you saw Apple Pay and it was the top option prioritized. Those will dynamically be ordered based on your device, based on your profile, are you on Chrome, is Apple Pay activated, etc. Etc. Really just kind of removing all of the obstacles for the consumer donor.

Yeah, the digital wallet, now that you mention it, I did a social media post the other day on the digital wallet wars are on. I believe right now we've got Google Pay, Apple Pay, Samsung Pay, all that stuff. But now we're also starting to see click to pay from the actual credit card industry starting to roll out. I know it's in the states right now.

We're about halfway through development on that, so we'll be, we'll be offering that. Yeah, yeah, I mean we'll see how the market adopts and so on. You have also other ones that have come and gone or useful in very specific niches. I don't see Amazon Pay around the Internet as a payment option everywhere like you would an Apple Pay and so on. But we'll see. We'll see for sure.

Yeah. As long as the goal is to get rid of the form filling, because that's a security risk in itself. As soon as you have to enter information, that's a battle.

Sure. 100%. Yeah.

Excellent. Well, that's all I had. Unless there was anything else you think you wanted to mention. I would love to ask where listeners can find out about you guys, your website, social media, or if they want a demo of your solution. What are the next steps?

Sure. So fundraiseup.com is, is where you can learn all about it. See testimonials, read reviews, request a demo. Anybody's welcome. This is the other thing. We took one other thing and blew the norm out of the water. Typically in this space you're going to have contracts and monthly fees and annual fees and a setup fee and an implementation fee and a project manager fee and so on. We've removed all of that. There's no contract, no lock in. We've never lost a customer, never lost a nonprofit from using us, despite the fact not one of them is obligated for any time period. So all of that to say, if you'd like a demo, we're happy to share it. There's no obligations. Even if we choose to give you a dashboard in an account, use it or don't use it. Really, the ball's in your court. So yeah, that's where you can find more about us. Fundraise up, Google it. Find us.

That's fantastic. Well, that's the ultimate test. If you don't need a retention plan and nobody leaves, why do you need retention plans for? Really?

Honestly, our CEO often says he wants it to be like a relationship of young lovers, not a marriage you can't get out of.

Yeah, I like that.

It works.

Maybe not put that as a slogan on your site, but it works.

I don't think so. I don't think so.

Excellent. Well, thank you so much. That was really insightful and wish you and the team all the best success. I know you're a young company, would love to have you back again in the future to see how you progress in a few years time.

Beautiful set. Thank you.

Thank you so much. Enjoy the rest of your day.

Likewise.

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