Leading Digital Marketing For Nonprofits with Kevin Lee of Didit
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Kevin Lee is paving the way for digital nonprofit fundraising. He has helped raise millions of dollars through his innovations. Kevin is the Executive Chairman and Co-founder of Didit, an engaging and digital marketing agency. He is currently the President for Giving Forward, the CEO of the eMarketing Association, and a C-Suite Network Executive Leader for The C-Suite Network.
Kevin is the author of four books, a speaker at national events, publishes columns in numerous marketing blogs, and has worked with the Miss America Network. He received his MBA from Yale University and continues his work in the nonprofit sector.
Here’s a glimpse of what you’ll learn:
Kevin Lee talks about how launching digital cause marketing led to the rise of successful fundraising platforms
An in-depth look into how Kevin is monetizing organizations with the goal of fundraising for nonprofits
What are some ways to run a successful philanthropic gala?
Kevin describes creating his nonprofit platform and how to increase donation size
The inspiration behind Kevin’s philanthropic fundraising
Why a solid support team is crucial for making an impact
In this episode…
How do you market and connect for long-lasting relationships and a successful fundraiser? Are there engaging ways to digitally market for-cause events and nonprofits?
Kevin has traveled down the path of digital marketing to enhance strategies and produce a more successful fundraiser. He launched a philanthropic sweepstake to captivate donors — and the outcome was outstanding. Kevin is shifting the way nonprofit is done by taking it into the digital realm. He is engaging with popular platforms to connect with donors and make a greater impact.
In this episode of Greater Returns: A Fundraising Podcast, Dennis Hoffman sits down with Kevin Lee, Executive Chairman and Co-founder of Didit, to discuss his launch of nonprofit marketing fundraisers in the e-commerce world. Kevin talks about how he created an engaging platform to attract more donors, techniques and proven strategies to boost fundraising, and why a solid team is a crucial element of success. Stay tuned!
Resources Mentioned in this episode
Email Kevin Lee: kevin@givingforward.org
Sponsor for this episode...
This episode is brought to you by Engage USA.
At Engage USA, we maximize direct mail fundraising efforts for nonprofit and charitable organizations by streamlining processes, providing obsessively accurate data, and delivering personalized and transparent expert caging and commercial lockbox services.
We pride ourselves on being quick to respond to customers. Our systems capture, verify, and balance data in real-time, allowing us to provide our clients with obsessively accurate data and deposits within 24 hours. At Engage USA, we help nonprofits, charities, and political campaigns run more successful fundraising efforts.
So what are you waiting for?
Visit engageusa.com to learn more about our work or contact us today!
Episode Transcript:
Intro 0:00
Welcome to the Greater Returns Podcast, where we talk about nonprofit fundraising, analytics, and how to get better every day. Now let's get started with the show.
Dennis Hoffman 0:16
So Dennis Hoffman here, I'm the Host of Greater Returns: A Fundraising Podcast where I talk with top nonprofit leaders about marketing, direct mail and analytics. Today I'm talking with Kevin Lee, the President of Giving Forward. Kevin is a pioneer in cause marketing. He helps nonprofits increase their social impact, and raise millions of dollars in innovative ways. This episode is brought to you by Engage USA. At Engage USA we provide expert caging and lockbox services to help organizations meet their unique fundraising needs. Our proprietary systems capture, verify and balance data in real time time, allowing us to provide our clients with obsessive highly accurate data and deposits within 24 hours. State national charities, advocacy organizations and political candidates count on Engage USA to help their fundraising campaigns become more successful. So what are you waiting for? Visit engageusa.com or email info@engageusa.com to learn more.
Kevin Lee 1:19
Thanks, Dennis. appreciate you having me.
Dennis Hoffman 1:22
Before I start, I wanna give a big shout out to John Corcoran of Rise25 Media. John introduced me to Kevin Lee, and John is the guy who has convinced me to start this podcast, you can visit John's website at rise25.com. Kevin Lee is President of Giving Forward and a pioneer in online cause marketing. His innovations in fundraising have resulted in hundreds of millions of dollars being raised by nonprofit organizations around the globe. his day job was running a marketing agency called Didit. Kevin's online cars marketing platform powers, good buzz.org and jet and Miss America network and generates revenue for nonprofits through sponsorship and advertising. He also has a philanthropic philanthropic sweepstakes site launching soon. So Kevin, before we get started, tell me about Giving Forward.
Kevin Lee 2:14
Sure, thanks, Dennis. Giving Forward was really a byproduct of my decade long or more than one decade long obsession with cause marketing, I just love the idea of getting marketing budgets to end up in nonprofit coffers. And cause marketing has been around for many decades, obviously, with regards to, you know, there being co branded products and things like that, but it's about 14 years ago, I had this idea of taking cause marketing digital. And I started a company called we care which was caused marketing powered commerce. And we launched with about 1000 Merchant partners, including Amazon, we generated about $8 million for nonprofits with the we care platform. And then Amazon SS do an A B split test to prove the people's behavior actually changes when their favorite nonprofit gets a piece of the action. And we did maybe split tests, we demonstrated lift in conversion rate and shopping cart size. And what happened next day, you can pretty much guess that we sort of inspired Amazon to go off on their own and launch smile. They no longer wanted to have us be the intermediary for that, that platform. And to be honest, I can sort of take karma credit for the 330 million that have been generated thus far. By smile, we've plateaued at about 8.3 million under week care. And then giving forward was really just the byproduct of the wanting to launch a nonprofit that builds a bunch of different cause marketing based fundraising platforms with cause marketing powered content events and philanthropic sweepstakes, and we'll probably get back into commerce, again, at some point soon as well.
Dennis Hoffman 4:00
So that's why people say that you're the guy who invented amazon smile.
Kevin Lee 4:04
Yeah, again, I don't have the internal discovery because it was there was no litigation. But I like to say that we inspired it right. So the reality was, it was it was a great idea. And I can't say that we could have reached 230 million if they there left us alone, right? So from a general calmer perspective, I'm okay with it. Maybe if you ask the dozen employees I have working for the company about it. They might not feel quite as charitable about the outcome as I am.
Dennis Hoffman 4:38
Absolutely. I when I will, I like to I when I was researching to begin this to figure out what what questions to ask you I looked at that, you know, looked at your old website. And I remember that I remember using that using that portal to do my online shopping. It was one extraordinary thing you came up with And he also publish good buzz.org and the Miss America channel both designed to support causes. How do they work?
Kevin Lee 5:09
Well, you know that the Epiphany I had a few years back was that when you look at the did it check that get written from the marketing budgets of our clients, as I bring my agency hat, most of the checks went to platforms where they got their content for free, and their eyeballs for free. And they had decent profit margins. Whereas some of the checks that the clients would write would go to typical publishing or broadcasting entities where they would ask to pay for content and pay for eyeballs. They called audience development and publishing. And so I said, you know, if I could figure out how to get our content for free, and our eyeballs for free, we could actually afford to give half of the ad revenue to nonprofits selected by the content creator, and the content consumer, right. Those are the two sides of a publishing or broadcasting model. And I get it because Facebook and TikTok and Twitter and Instagram, you know, the ad snap sale at LinkedIn, even on the b2b side, like they will get their content for free, we create it, and then they get to monetize it. So they get, we help drive the eyeballs. And they then turn that into ad revenues. I say that we could do that. That'd be really cool. I didn't know if it would work or not. So initially, I go went out to try to buy a bunch of defunct publishing domains, because I wanted to hit the ground running. So I'm most most famous for having tried to buy Gawker in the second round of the Gawker bankruptcy. So you know, if you Google my name, and Gawker, hit the news tab, you can see all the news about my attempts to buy Gawker and turn it into Gawker for good. So once I didn't get that, and I didn't get any of the other four domains I tried the by giving foward was formed. And then we decided to launch good buzz.org as our launch domain. Because I saw what John Krasinski was doing with some good news during the pandemic. And you know, the idea that stars could zoom with each other, right, and record these interviews, and just have them be really fun, right and and sometimes engage with their fans as well. And create great content. I'm like, wow, if I could get like 100, John Krasinski, that would be really cool. Now, of course, I don't know 100. John Krasinski is I don't even know one. I just happened to know some folks on the board of the Miss America organization. And the Miss America, folks all the way from the team contestants into the regular Miss American tests and set the state levels and national level. They're all super charismatic. And I said, you know, let me try to do a deal with them. And they've got a 501 c three, which generates 1000s of dollars in scholarship money for the contestants. So they are nonprofit. They have their two nonprofits, actually a C four and a C three. And so we did a co creation deal where they'll do the interviews of the celebrities, and then we'll monetize them. And you know, the revenue will go both for the readers choice for the viewers choice in the case video. And to the nonprofit that they're supporting, which is, of course, their own Scholarship Fund. And hopefully, you know, as they interview more and more celebrities, we'll take those celebrities and some of them will get their own channels on goodbus.org. So we're not going straight for their cat out Kardashians, I'd like to get the Kardashians and have them spin up their channels. But we are going to, you know, get there we just, we wrote our tech for the third time. Because as you build these tech platforms, you constantly have to iterate. So we're sort of in soft launch right now. And we're going to hit the gas later in q4.
Dennis Hoffman 8:56
So you kind of invented the system that Amazon raises money for charities and with and now you're taking on TikTok to Twitter, Facebook and Snapchat.
Kevin Lee 9:04
Actually, I don't see it as taking on at all I'd be, you know, obviously, eyeballs are worth money to advertisers. And, you know, what we'd love to have happen is some of the folks the biggest social media footprints in all these other social media channels, whether the influencers from music, from Sports from Hollywood, you know, if they become content creators on good buzz, right, they can then cross promote that content that's on good buzz on those other channels, right? Whether it's Twitter or Facebook, which are really those are the two platforms, which are all about, hey, look over there. There's some great content over there. You can link out really easily from those platforms. It's actually hard to get a TikToker to convince a person to leave TikTok or snap or Instagram for that matter. Those are much more Hey, stay here. Continue to, you know, consume content here, but you can occasionally get people to leave Then go to another platform. So, you know, the content will reside primarily on good buzz.org. And, you know, to the extent that the other social media platforms can drive traffic there. That's great, right? So the people who have the big social media footprint will be, you know, able to use those footprints to the benefit of their charity, the more clicks they send over, the more viewers they send over, the more money their nonprofits can make, because their nonprofit as a creator, gets 25% of the ad revenue.
Dennis Hoffman 10:31
Nice 25 this was a pretty great margin for funders. So in February, you ran a beta of a new kind of fundraising event. What was it, tell me how it worked.
Kevin Lee 10:41
So the other area that I was sort of fascinated with was the idea of events, philanthropic events have been around forever. Typically, they're run in a situation where each nonprofit ones, their gala, right, and so the, or there's some kind of a big concert, but even in the case of a big concert, whether it's in Central Park, in New York City or somewhere else, the concert tends to be sort of a one to one relationship between the events, and the nonprofit. And, you know, one of the fun things about we care is this democratization element of it. And that's also something that exists within good buzz is the idea of we should empower the consumer to pick their favorite cause. So I wanted to test some concepts around events, but no longer purely having the idea that an event was a one to one relationship between a nonprofit and and that event. So I got a did a client to sponsor this event. And it was Oregon specific, their their launch. And so they said we'd like to be philanthropic, here's $10,000. Let's let our customers and prospects decide where the $10,000 goes. So we're going to have a free comedy zoom event, online event, which is, of course, unlimited, pretty much with regards to attendees. And we'll just split up the $10,000 on a pro rata basis, letting each attendee vote. And so, you know, we ran the event, and it was it was super successful, from the perspective of the philanthropy, the corporate philanthropy because the coupon codes that were mentioned during this live zoom, got used. So the client was ecstatic because that never happened in corporate philanthropy, they never actually get to see direct response ROI. So they were ecstatic about that. But I think even more
fun was the fact that the attendees, you know, they were attending a comedy event, which was sort of in the middle of a pandemic, so they all really could use a laugh at that point. And then the comedy was was super funny, a friend of mine happens to be a comedian. And he was the emcee and that his friends to be part of it as well. But the the, the attendees loved the idea that they got to pick where the corporate philanthropy went, as opposed to just some kind of arbitrary executive C suite decision, which was done for pure PR purposes. And so we have just the most amazing engagement from the attendees, as well as some really fun scenarios, because we had a write in vote option, right? So we didn't want to just purely only have recommended charities and the registration flow. So we have the ability for people to write in their own charities and one of our top five charities we have never heard of before. And and, you know, I think they sent over like 50 registrations, like, Who the heck is the curry shoe closet Foundation, I never heard of them. They were legit. I looked them up in the IRS database. And it ends up that one of their attendee, one of their supporters had seen a Facebook ad, and realized how it works. Like the more registrations they get for the event for free, the more that nonprofit gets, and so it got posted within their community and Facebook and some of the other socials and it just took off. They were like, Oh, this is great. It's a great way for us to get donation money without having to do anything except go to a free comedy event. And so I interviewed the executive director afterwards to sort of try to figure out well, how did this even happen. And so she explained to me like how they're very tight knit community, and it's all about improving body image size women initially, but then they open it up to all genders. So that they run these, these philanthropic fashion shows where people can go out and start this stuff, even if they're not, you know, a size zero. And so it's really fun cause to end up supporting that we had no idea that we would end up supporting and the the sort of Win Win scenario made it even more fun. We also learned, of course, that events are much harder than you think they're going to be and so for the three days before the event, like nobody slept and I said, Okay, no more events this year, let's volunteer base up a little bit bigger, let's get some, some velocity and get good buzz, so that we can help put butts in seats. But but the the what we learned from the event was really just fascinating about how you could run an event from a one to many relationship. Eventually, we'd like to also have ticket prices where the person picks a nonprofit that gets the bulk of a paid ticket, in this case, tickets for free. So when we do it again, if it happens to be a paid event, maybe subsidized by a sponsor, but not entirely free, but want to give the majority of the ticket price to the nonprofit that the ticket buyer picks because we love to spread the money around Spread the Love Around.
Dennis Hoffman 15:50
So cool. So So Kevin, when I talk about you people talk about switch for cause Tell me, but I know that's not live yet. What is it going to be tell me what to expect.
Kevin Lee 16:02
So again, democratization of the consumers choice around nonprofits is sort of a common theme here, whether it's good buzz, whether it's the events platform, which is also under good buzz, or whether it sleeps for a cause. Now, I've been watching amaze and priser pretty carefully over the last several years. And they were these philanthropic sweepstakes as for profit company, so prize as part of the charity network, and mazes independent other sort of philanthropic sweepstakes company, they've actually raised a lot of venture money. Tickets have led to over 120 million if I'm remembering correctly, although I'd have to look at crunchbase so they've, they've raised a ton of money and they as investor money, but they've also raised a ton of money for nonprofits in the hundreds of millions of dollars by running philanthropic sweepstakes, and you know, the, the the concept behind it is sort of cool. Like, it's not, it's not a requirement that you donate in order to enter the sweepstakes, but it is sort of the most frictionless way for you to enter the sweepstakes is to make a donation. And I just love the idea that, you know, it sort of takes the person and pushes them off the fence into the Yes, column for donating. But what I always felt was a missed opportunity with a maze was they would run their sweepstakes on a one to one basis. So I asked my tech team, like, couldn't we build an Omega clone, but where we let the consumer pick, which nonprofit got a piece of the adopted donation as a result of getting the sweepstakes and fees? Again, it's not a required donation, you can just go the free route as well. And so my tech team was like, yeah, we could, we could do that, you know, we could even set it up so that if the nonprofit wanted send over people, then it wasn't their choice, like because a nonprofit would never promote a sweepstakes if, if the person changed their mind. But we would have the flexibility to sort of have two different blob by flows or if the person comes in over the transom. They could pick whichever their favorite nonprofit wasn't. Our hypothesis, which you'll have to ask me in a couple of months is that that will increase the conversion rate because people get to pick their favorite nonprofit. And it'll increase the average donation size, because again, it's their favorite nonprofit that's benefiting, you know, we'll take some money off the top, giving forward, obviously, we have to provide the prize and we have costs ourselves. But we want the vast majority of the money to go to the nonprofits, that the individual entrance or to or the donor selects. So we're really excited about it. The developers are working on it furiously. At the moment, I'm expecting an end of October launch, but it is technology. So it could be it could be into November, I will put the ultimate pressure on the team to get it done before Giving Tuesday because I think we could run some really fun stuff around Giving Tuesday, where you can sort of simultaneously be selfish and altruistic, right as you enter to try to win some something for yourself for the cause. Also always include for the big prizes in particular where when you whoever the winner is also has picked the nonprofit and the nonprofit will get sort of some cash as well. We're going to launch with the share the pie, sweepstakes pie, as in paper, 1416 whatever it is, and we'll run it through Pi Day in March, right so on March 15, that will be the last day of the of the sweepstakes. And so 1000 of that $3,114 will go to the nonprofit that the individual selected and then the other 2100 will will go to the to the winner so it'll be sharing the pie. That's just the smallest expects to get things cooking. Once, once we're launched, we've got all the bugs out, we'll actually go out to businesses, and we'll get businesses to donate prizes. And obviously, the business will get all the positive PR around it. And we may be able to structure things where we can do co registration with the email lists for them as well, for those entrants, who also want to be on the email list of the prize providers. So we think we can we can run it very efficiently as a nonprofit, and generate a lot of donation revenue with just that little extra push. We won't be starting off with Ferraris. I know they just switched off Shelley's thrones, Ferrari is amazing. We won't be able to start with a Ferrari unless Ferrari wants to step up, step up and donate a Ferrari. If they would like to donate a Ferrari, we'd be happy to sleep it
Dennis Hoffman 20:53
Ferrari if you're watching. Exactly, exactly. And so Kevin, you're the CEO of Didit. But which is a, an advertising agency with a bunch of employees. A lot of work a lot of big clients. But you spent a lot of your time in philanthropy. What inspires you? You know, I
Kevin Lee 21:15
mean, philanthropy is a lot of fun, especially when you can convert marketing dollars into donations for nonprofits. So I live in the marketing world in both cases, you know, did it stewards marketing budgets for clients, typically, sort of their few big ones, but they tend to be medium size companies, some b2b, some b2c, we do all the channels now. So we do everything digital, but we do direct mail as well, including how to digitize direct mail and some fun ways. So the reason I spend so much time on the philanthropic element of what I do is, is primarily because it's cause marketing, as opposed to straight philanthropy. And because we've got a lot, we've got several nonprofit clients, especially on the direct mail, side, direct mail, when you look categorically at who the biggest mailers are, you've got you know, financial services, obviously, in a bunch of other big categories. But nonprofit companies, organizations still rely very heavily on direct mail. So we ended up just sort of having a bunch of nonprofit clients in that category as well. So anything we can do to make them more efficient, is a win for you.
Dennis Hoffman 22:32
So you're doing remarkable things for nonprofits. Who else when you look around, who do you think is just doing amazing things?
Kevin Lee 22:42
I think, you know, obviously, Facebook gets a bad rap recently. And they went down today, earlier today as it happens, but and there was 60 minutes recently that showed that they're not, you know, there are some issues that they need to address. But they've actually done some pretty cool stuff. I mean, last year, I don't think the number was big enough to be perfectly honest, it should have had an extra couple of decimal places on it. But they ran a really cool, promo event I'm Giving Tuesday, where they they match, they did sort of, you know, millions of dollars of match money into folks who donated on Facebook, around fundraisers, or donated on Facebook on Giving Tuesday, I don't think I've seen any reference yet to whether they're doing it again this year. So we'll have to sort of watch to see if they do it, they certainly have some PR issues. Those millions and or billions around a little bit more, I think they only did about 8 million last year, I'll have to look it up. But they you know, I thought it was really cool the way they did that, again, by empowering their members to choose where they where they donate, and by matching it and empowering the consumers to make the choice. That was that was pretty cool. I do like what the philanthropic organization, the philanthropic sweepstakes companies are doing as well, I think that's a way of sort of adding a new layer, and I have to say, smile is executed pretty well. And taking the ball and run with it, you know, but they've even gone international with smile, which is something that I don't think we could have ever done on the weekend. Because validating the international nonprofits are legit, is actually really tough to do. Right in the United States. The IRS has a lot of guidelines with regards to whether you're a 501 c three, or a 501 c four and, you know, making sure that everything's legit with regards to nonprofits. That's not to say that there aren't abuses but apparently abuses overseas are much more prevalent that I think Amazon's done a good job sort of internationalizing their cause marketing platform of smile. So there's a lot of great stuff going on across the ecosystem.
Dennis Hoffman 25:00
Okay, so, so pretend you're at an awards banquet, you've just won something like the Oscars or the Emmys for fundraising. And you're the, who would you thank were the people that you would talk about the friends, the mentors, business partners, peers? Who would you acknowledge,
Kevin Lee 25:22
hey, I mean, everything from from, you know, family, you know, my wife, my wife, always been very supportive of my passion for cause marketing and philanthropy and starting, We-Care and essentially giving myself an additional job. And same thing with Giving Forward Now. But there have been a lot of really great folks on the We Care team, which, you know, really sort of demonstrated how powerful cause marketing was, to me, I think, you know, whether it was my general managers or VPS, all along the way, you know, Bryan Cockerham and Gina Navani were two early participants in that, in that launch with me, and pretty much all the employees could have worked elsewhere for greater salaries than what they made under we care. And I think, you know, it was really rewarding for me to see that, you know, they could help us guarantee our own success by being willing to work for a little bit less for a film for a company, that sort of remaking philanthropy, and is sort of reinvigorated my, my passion for the whole category, and sort of faith in humanity, right, that there are these people who really are so driven by social impact and social good, and philanthropy, that sort of it drives their behavior that drives your life choices.
Dennis Hoffman 26:56
Fantastic. Kevin, thank you very much. I've been talking with Kevin Lee. Kevin has changed the face of nonprofit fundraising by inventing amazon smile, and has helped raise hundreds of millions of dollars. Kevin, how can you get in touch with you to learn more?
Kevin Lee 27:13
Thanks, Dennis. You know, LinkedIn is the easiest place to find me. People can can connect on me they connect with me there. Also Kevin@givingforward is an easy way to reach me. You can just shoot me an email as well if you're not a big LinkedIn enthusiast.
Dennis Hoffman 27:31
Thank you.
Outro 27:34
Thanks for listening to the Greater Returns Podcast. We'll see you again next time. And be sure to click subscribe to get future episodes.