The Rise of Technology and Fundraising Education

We’re talking about multiple new audiences out there. A very aware and focused generation that learned from early age that doing well and good is part of the DNA — not an add-on to their résumé — is emerging. So there is this incredible energy coming in the nonprofit sector both in terms of new types of donors but also in terms of new fundraisers. The conversations are very dynamic. The bottom line here is that right now in our history, whether it’s philanthropy or business or the arts, there are four or five different generations in the workplace and about four or five different main places where people communicate.

Social media is a new language, a new platform for communications. The one thing all institutions need to keep in mind and need to strive for is how to go to where conversations are happening, not keep expecting people to come to them. That’s true of all organizations. Social media moves a lot of power outside of the organization into the hands of a lot of people who want to do well and good too. So we’re seeing the role of the nonprofit sector changing as well — where they’re not just the standard middlemen who are collecting money and then distributing it, but mostly looking at new pools of supporters and seeing their job now as helping these new pools to collectively work for a cause and find a way to create measurable impact. Everyone’s upping their game now as more people enter the sector and more tools now can be used to affect change.

FS: What are some of the new fundraising technology fundamentals you teach?
MS: “A lot of stuff” is the short answer. One thing I focus on is incorporating the visual — visual literacy — particularly video. Video so much is the medium of the moment, and increasingly visual storytelling using images more than words is taking over digital content. We see that in the statistic that tells us what percentage of bandwidth on the Internet is video — it’s now something like 57 percent. It’s really amazing. Now more than half of everything carried on the Internet is video. Who’s watching? Everyone everywhere and all the time. The scale of video is really incredible — 72 hours or more of video is uploaded to YouTube every minute, and the raw quantity there is just staggering.