Name: From Event-Day Friction to Fundraising Momentum: How Nonprofits Can Increase Giving with Grassroots Unwired Mobile Donor Tools
Uploaded: 2026-09-22T16:30:06.717Z
Duration: 1 h 24 s
Description: From Event-Day Friction to Fundraising Momentum: How Nonprofits Can Increase Giving with Grassroots Unwired Mobile Donor Tools

Transcript for "From Event-Day Friction to Fundraising Momentum: How Nonprofits Can Increase Giving with Grassroots Unwired Mobile Donor Tools": Hi, everyone. Thanks so much for joining us for today's webinar. My name is Alisa Cordacious, and I lead payments ecosystem growth here at Blackbaud. Our webinar is titled from event day friction to fundraising momentum. Say that 10 times fast. We're gonna give just another minute for folks to trickle in, but so excited to see y'all coming from all different spaces of the world and the country. Hyde from Houston. We got Bar Harbor, Tampa Bay, Florida, Hendersonville, North Carolina, Nebraska. Good morning from Michigan. Crystal Hurtado, Tampa for twenty years. Oh, that's, Crystal, your name. Incredible. Love the bonding that's happening. This is what we wanna see in the two d world. Let's have this chat go off fire throughout the entire webinar. Russ and I would love for this to be a dynamic dialogue, so please don't be shy. Throw out the GIFs, throw out the emojis. It really keeps us going and and keeps the party happening. I'm gonna go ahead and kinda move forward into some housekeeping. But without further ado, if I know how to work this place right now. Okay. Cool. A few callouts as we get started. The webinar audio will be broadcasted through your computer speakers. So, hopefully, you can hear me now. If no one can hear me, please tell me in the chat because that's gonna be really embarrassing already in the first minute into this. But give me a little, like, high five emoji in the chat. So, thanks, Christine. You rock my world. As always, you'll receive this recording, twenty four hours after. And if you need captions, you can hover over the stage and click the CC button on the bottom of the screen to turn the captions on and off. If you encounter any audio or technical issues such as the slides or your screen freezing, usually just do a quick refresh or what I like to do, quit, come back in. Hopefully, it never fails. That should be the best way to get it working again. If not, again, rest assured, you'll get the recording twenty four hours afterwards. Please click on the q and a on the top right to submit any questions you may have from the Blackbaud team. We've got our incredible Art as production manager behind the scenes in this wonderful webinar, keeping Russ and I on track. And your questions will definitely be answered, as many as we can, at the end of the webinar. And if we're not able to get to them, of course, we'll follow-up as best we can with our thank you note and the recording. So adjust any of the settings by using the cogwheel at the bottom of the event space. And, again, don't be shy. Holler with anything in the chat. We're so glad you're here, and thank you for spending the time together. So here's where we're headed. We'll start by giving a warm welcome to our fantastic speaker, Russ Oster, CEO and founder of Grassroots Unwired. We'll have a conversation about why event day giving matters for organizations like yourselves and how mobile donor and Blackbaud integrated payments can help seamlessly increase donations in person while connecting to RE NXT reporting. We'll wrap with an exclusive offer for attendees today that you won't wanna miss. And, of course, like I said, we'll be sure to leave time for questions at the end. So to everyone, welcome. I want to keep getting a sense of who's in the virtual room, so please drop your location, drop your organization name. Let's see where we're all sitting today. Maybe a fun fact, and I'll start. So, again, I'm Alyssa Cordacious. I'm sitting in Denver, Colorado this morning. She, her pronouns. I joined the Blackbaud team coming up on almost a year now. And prior to joining, I was at Kiva on their corporate fundraising team and Meta for about six plus years on their social impact partnerships team, building a suite of fundraising tools for nonprofits across Facebook and Instagram. My career has always been grounded in working with nonprofits, in nonprofits, and building for nonprofits. And my why is truly all of you and the incredible work that you do day in and out. My favorite thing in the world is hosting baked potato bars, little potlucks. I love baked potatoes more than anything, but before and above baked potatoes are chasing my wildling toddlers and trying to keep up with them. So it's definitely utter chaos over here where I'm sitting. And with that, I would like to welcome Russ to the party. Russ, hello. How are you? Hey. I'm good. How are you? I'm good. It's so great to see you. I love spending time with you. Absolutely. Same here. And, I'm looking for that baked potato bar invite. I'm a little, You know, addicted know it. it. Yeah. It's fun. It's a good time. I promise. You come over here. Tell us where you're sitting right now and a little bit more about yourself, and also your incredible fifteen years, building for nonprofits, particularly for in person events, and maybe a fun fact we wouldn't expect. So, yeah, fifteen years, with, Grassroots and Wired building software tools for nonprofits based in Philadelphia, Pennsylvania. Grew up in New York. Lived in Florida and Washington DC where I went to school, and, just love traveling in general. And yeah. So Grassroots Unwired was, you know, kind of a brainchild of working a lot of years in the nonprofit world and knowing that there was a need for mobile tools, to do things when you were out in the field. You know, there's organizations like Blackbaud that do incredible work with online, and, we thought we would try to fill a gap with mobile and when you're out in the field and untethered from your computer. So that's kind of how Grassroots Unwired was born. And, you know, I just love getting to work with organizations, just like you mentioned, that that do great work and know that we're in a small way supporting the, ability for them to raise the money that is their lifeblood ultimate ultimately. Love it. Thank you for existing, and for your commitment in that. I'm excited to dig in today in all of the things. So I think within the next fifty minutes, this is really where our conversation is gonna go. For the audience members, there's seven practical takeaways we really want you to walk away with in talking about mobile donor with Grassroots and Wired and Blackbaud integrated payments. One is reducing giving friction in the moment. Two is meeting donors payment expectations, staying operational offline because lord knows ain't nobody like a no Wi Fi zone, simplifying additional revenue streams, cutting manual reconciliation, connecting event date engagement to constituent records for stronger stewardship because that's really what it's all about. So, again, dynamic dialogue. Please don't be shy. In fact, I would love to see everybody. Please drop at least one emoji right now into the chat to know that you are either choosing a coffee, a tea, or something in the evening of your oh, yeah. Celebrate. Get it. One other note is we will be posting a couple polls throughout the conversation, because your feedback and your insight matters. And that's also the reason why we build solutions like Mobile Donor and Blackbaud Integrated Payments. So with that, let's get into it. Let's take a quick tour, on why Blackbaud Integrated Payments isn't just a processor. It's more donation revenue captured. It's less admin burden and a complete supporter picture in one system. And how? We really try to optimize at Blackbaud for the nonprofit experience. BBIP is built on nonprofit tuned logic, to recover donations that would otherwise fail at authorization, which means fewer declines and that means more dollars landing and without asking the donor to try again. We aim to simplify reconciliation and reduce administrative workload because your team's capacity matters. I know that from having been in organizations, like, everybody's capacity is the gift of how the machine continues to run. And if we can help free up more of that just with streamlined processes, that is the ultimate goal. Gifts, fees, and payouts flow back automatically, so there's less manual work for finance, development, and marketing teams alike, big and small, and staff time ships from back of office to donor relationships. Every transaction is tied to a constituent record in RE NXT, Altru, and Blackbaud CRM, and not just the payment ID. And why this matters is because it really fuels that donor stewardship and smart audience segmentation and sustainer conversion and hopefully lifetime value tracking of your supporters. So the ethos of all of this is simpler onboarding, consistent settings, permissions, reporting with one support path, one place to see the money instead of a patchwork of processors. All in all, the reason BBIP exists is to serve as one merchant relationship with a flexible ability to connect across giving online, events, memberships, in person fundraising solutions, regardless of platform. This is the piece that I think is the magic. Payments and payment processing for sure is not the sexy solution. It is the foundation in order for you to increase your donation revenue. And for it to be sound and to not have to touch it is such a gift. But also to have the ability to have choice of other types of platforms, solutions, tech stacks that you would like to try out, a la Grassroots and Wired, mobile donor, you can do that in this marriage and superpower of having it connect and integrate on top of Blackbaud payments. We really believe in you choosing your choice and what makes the most sense for you as an organization while having that bandwidth and back of office reconciliation sound stable and rocking and rolling. So with that, Russ, can you tell us a bit more about this unique kind of catalytic partnership between Grassroots Unwired and Blackbaud as a whole? Happy to. Hey, everyone. Thanks for being here today. Appreciate your time. So we've been a Blackbaud partner since 2019, and we have two apps in the Blackbaud marketplace, mobile donor and for event day. Today's focus is mobile donor, obviously, and how it connects your in person giving with your Blackbaud systems. But for background, just a little bit about for event day. It's for the day of your events. It picks up where Blackbaud online event organizing leaves off, and fills a gap in that day of the event, activities. We give you the ability to have a truly mobile way to do check-in with bar codes, register participants, track rewards, table assignments, and fundraising minimums, sell merchandise, and so much more. It's really transformed the way our clients run the day of their events, and it adds, so much efficiencies, so many efficiencies that have improved the experience for participants and volunteers and the organization, obviously. And about a year ago, we saw the amazing improvements that were being made in Blackbaud payments and realized that we could fill a similar gap on the donation capture side regardless of whether or not you needed the full four event day solution for your, for your event activities. So, whether you're hosting a gala, a luncheon, a walk, or a ride, you know, we know from experience and talking to so many organizations that you put so much effort into getting people there and inspiring them to give and participate that, when they get there, we we really wanna make sure that the donation experience helps you make the most of that effort. And so we'll, walk through some common obstacles, that we see organizations facing, how mobile donor works, and share some event examples, as we, go through the presentation. And as Alyssa said, please use the chat to tell us what you're experiencing in your own events. We'll have a couple of poll questions that will allow you to just choose some of the common things that we see at these events. So please participate. Please give us feedback, and, let's have a dialogue. So just to, talk a little bit about the partnership, it's a great example of what Blackbaud calls better together, because it allows us to bring our strengths to the same donor experience that Blackbaud has been on the forefront of for decades. Blackbaud provides the payment infrastructure and the systems where you manage your supporter relationships, and mobile donor brings that connection into the room, onto the event grounds, and directly to the person who's ready to give. Your staff can use mobile devices to look up their donors, capture information, and accept the payment through Blackbaud integrated payments. That interaction then connects directly back to your Blackbaud database so the gift and the information about the donor that you need for follow-up all stay connected. And, that's particularly important for organizations like yours because receiving the payment is only part of the job. You also need to know who gave have the information available so you can follow-up and thank them and make sure that your team can account for the gifts afterward without creating noise and, mess in your CRM, in Raiser's Edge, wherever your donor data lives. Anything else to add about the partnership, Alyssa? I know you talked about it a little bit. This is incredible. I just think it's such a amazing illustration of just the ecosystem of where there's Blackbaud, there's Grassroots, Unwired, and then the solution that is meant to be uniquely for all of these incredible organizations that are in attendance right now. So thank you again for existing, Russ. And I'm glad you fill a void in terms of what we, couldn't bring to the table on some aspects to then make the glue and the holistic, donor stewardship connection within a lot of our CSR CS CRM systems. I think. we've all got a little more coffee here. You're two. hours behind me, so you need coffee more than I do, I think. So, you know, the broader question is. why, you know, such a focus on the day of the event and and making giving easier. And, you know, we've seen over and over again that there's a direct connection between how easy you make it to give at the event and how much of that enthusiasm you're able to turn into support. So I'm gonna give you a few examples of things that we see and how the mobile donor experience can help, address them. So, you know, think about the moment where there's a compelling story being told from the stage or when someone crosses the finish line at the end of a walk or a run or a bike and feel so proud of what they've accomplished or so proud to be in the room among people sharing experiences like they are. And you've done the hard work now. You've created that connection to your mission. And, ultimately, you wanna be able to convert that, enthusiasm into, giving. And so imagine that the person, you know, that's so amped up and ready to to give, has to wander the room to find a payment table or wait in a long line to purchase some merchandise or make a a donation, or you've given them, URLs or QR codes that they have to load on their own phones. And because of connectivity, because of technical barriers, or just a lack of technical expertise on the part of the participant, that donation doesn't happen. So all these extra steps just create another opportunity for the moment to pass. So so mobile donors really built around helping your team respond exactly when the donor's ready, and we can look at where that can make a difference. So at a gala or a luncheon, you know, momentum from the stage is everything, and, you know, there's a paddle raise or someone who just decides they wanna do more, and so you want the next step to feel easy. People are used to paying everywhere else in their lives with a quick tap of their card or a digital wallet like Apple Pay, so you should absolutely have that same convenience in your fundraising events and make that experience as familiar as possible for the donors. Mobile donor gives staff and volunteers, tablets, card readers, kiosks when they're helpful to help supporters give right where they are. Could be a volunteer or a member of your staff going up to a table with a tablet, you know, set up in many places outside the room wherever it can be. And, you know, again, those QR codes sorry. QR codes can be useful, but too often, they're vulnerable to the event day environment. And some people would want the help of your organization, walking them through the donation process. And so giving them these options means you can respond to the guests without sending them a way to, have them figure it out themselves. Most importantly, we find is that you can also capture all the information about the donor. A lot of, off the shelf solutions that you might have for taking, credit cards and things like that, will take the credit card and take the payment, but they don't give you a seamless way to collect the information about the donor and get that information back into your database of record. And that really is the critical piece is the ability to continue the stewardship process after the event, and you can only do that if you have good, accurate information about the donors when they make the donation. And then drilling down a little more on on connectivity. You know, in my experience, nobody really thinks about connectivity until it doesn't work. And by then, you're in the middle of the event, and, it can happen in a hotel ballroom just as easily. It can happen at an outdoor event like a walk. You know, a venue's Wi Fi may look fine when you're testing it out, but then you have hundreds of guests show up and all fighting for the same, Wi Fi coverage signal or cell coverage, and they can't get online when you need them to. So if you're on been here, Russ, and it is the worst. As the organizer of the event and knowing it's happening and you have no control over it, it is just such a heart sync, and I'm sure others have been there as well. Yep. Yep. It really puts a damper on on the process and the enthusiasm that people feel at the moment. So we have built what's called store and forward technology into the app, which gives your team a way to keep capturing information even when there's no connectivity. We queue all the information up on the devices, store them locally in a secure folder. And then as soon as the app detects connectivity, whether that's during the event, if it happens to find it or after the event when kind of things clear up, everything syncs back up to the servers, retains all the time stamps of when everything actually happened, and nothing is lost at that point. That's incredible. When did you start to build that piece out, and, when was it added on into the whole comprehensive solution? Yeah. That's kind of been a hallmark of our solution since the beginning because we did a lot of, you know, door to door fundraising and field based fundraising, and it was definitely at a time where cell coverage was was worse than it is now. But still, you know, even if it's 3% of the time to 5% of the time, which is what we find is generally, you know, the amount of time that things happen offline. You know, if you have a thousand people at the event, that's 30 to 50 donations that you might lose, you know, at the moment because you don't have connectivity. So, you know, it's not a problem until it is a problem, and it's a great insurance policy to have just in case. And there's so many use cases of that in terms of organizations that work either in heavily populated urban settings or more remote rural settings or are on the move consistently with, like, a door to door circumstance as opposed to a stationary event. So I could not agree more with how valuable this value proposition is that you bring to the table. Yep. To that end, before we carry on to the next, use case, our friend Amanda. Hi, Amanda. Kinda has a really great question and something that they're grappling with is where a lot of their supporters, their donors, don't necessarily like actually doing the the mobile donation, either on the terminal or on a phone. So can you tell us a little more about some other opportunities or solutions that Grassroots is cooking up, a la kiosks perhaps, Yeah. stationary, Yeah. or other? I think, yeah, I think Amanda might have hacked my computer and got the slides because that's the next slide. So that's awesome. So, you know, I mean, the use case here is is kinda like a merchandise table, or a table at a gala and, you know, where people are bidding. It could be, you know, a a an a live auction. It could be, paddle raises. What we do is, a couple things. One is we equip the paddles with QR codes, and the QR codes are for staff so that when somebody makes a a pledge or wins, an auction item, a staff person will have a tablet. Obviously, they're mobile. They'll go up to that person, scan their QR code, which pulls in all their information, and then just have them tap their card or use a card on file to, make the donation for whatever they just earned. So, you know, that's a that's a big way, that we kinda streamline that process without putting the onus on the donor to have to do that through their own device or through an app, that they have to download or, you know, pull up on their phone. So, you know, again, it's it it does rely on having staff there and volunteers there to be able to respond, And, you know, that is a huge, added value when it comes to solving, you know, the problems that Amanda is talking about. I think, hopefully, that answered the question. I think that's great. And also, even opting out of one versus the other based off the donors, kind of preferred experience dependent upon the use case or the environment. The other thing I thought was so cool about this is exactly what you said, the the merchandise aspect. You could use them together and, synergetically wow. I hate that word. I can't believe I just said it. But where you're at a, music festival that also does grants for, nonprofit organizations working with music youth programs. So you have the free entry, but then donation based. So people going around bucket brigading to a degree, with your mobile donor terminals. And then there's always, like, the swag station, and then people round up and purchase. And so this whole streamlined revenue experience, from the day event, whatever that may be, is really cool to think about and comprehensive for organizations to, you know, showcase their supporters' support monetarily. Yep. But Yeah. Jake Jacob has a great question too. But. what there. I got that. Yeah. And this show you know, in terms of the kiosk, so that that's for more of a self-service model. We load the same software onto the kiosk. People can come and, scan. If if you do, want us to, provide barcodes to these participant to help with the check-in process at the event, that same barcode could be scanned at a kiosk, so their information is pulled up, and then they can go through a shopping cart to to select items that they wanna purchase or put a straight donation in or or pay for a a, you know, auction item and things like that. So, you know, again, for people who who are comfortable, you know, with technology, wouldn't mind the self-service process, but don't wanna use their own device for something like that, we do have kiosks that can be provided. As far as capturing the names of the people making donations, the that's really the, you know, the the underlying credit cards themselves are really the barrier there. We get whatever information that the credit card, issuer will allow us to get automatically, but it's also a great reason to have mobile donor on your devices because we can also sync to your, CRM so that you can do a last name lookup of the person standing in front of you If they've ever given to your organization before or if they've registered for the event and they're in the system, you can pull in all their contact information just by searching on their last name and clicking on their name, and then you have all their information there. So there's not data entry that has to happen. If there is data entry, you can scan the back of a barcode on a driver's license, and that'll prefill in all their contact information also. So, we do as much as we can to get you to streamline that data. Plus, you know, you wanna make sure the data is as close to what's in the CRM as possible so you're not creating duplicate records inadvertently. And, anything that's done in the field can then be just used to augment the existing donor record in RE NXT or the CRM or wherever it is. So, yeah, that's not necessarily on the vendor. That's not allowing you to get the names back. But, again, it's how you account for that and build in all the, ability to collect that information regardless. And that speaks volumes to kind of that that catalytic secret magic sauce of grassroots unwired, mobile donor through BBIP to RNXT or BBCRM or what have you. Because the goal is to have all of that and the donor stewardship have the right touch points and matching so then you can, as an organization, take that and prosper after the event Yep. itself. Love. So, the last pain point and the one that I'm sure most of you will feel most acutely is everything that happens after the event. It's not really over just because the guest leave and you leave the the site. You know, we see our clients show up with spreadsheets and handwritten notes and and payment reports, and someone has to reconcile them all and make them all agree. And it certainly doesn't tell you everything you need to know about the donor. Are they already in the system? Do you have the right contact information? Can you read somebody's handwriting on a piece of paper where they wrote down their email address? And how does it all connect back to your database? Yeah. No one would be able to read my handwriting these days. Ridiculous. Yep. So, you know, when you have those details coming from different places, the staff has to basically recon reconstruct the interactions afterward, and it takes a lot of time. It introduces opportunities for mistakes, and it delays stewardship after the event. So, again, using the donor lookup, you know, and capturing data with the driver's license scan and putting the payment information all into the same workflow and syncing it all back to your database, you know, through the API, you eliminate all of that post event work. And we have, you know, clients who have saved significant in the hundreds of hours of, staff time just reconciling all that stuff for one event. So, you know, you have the records in the database. You can spend more of the time, after the event thanking people, following up with people who were there, and ultimately just building on the stewardship that started at the event itself. And that's why, you know, again, that partnership and that relationship between mobile donor and BBIP is so integral because, you know, otherwise, your payments will live in BBIP, and your donor data will at some point get back to wherever it lives. We bring everything together in one place. Russ, you know what's interesting? I was just reflecting as well from the first use case, to this post event admin. Even training up your volunteers or, staff that will be utilizing mobile donor, it seems very streamlined and counter not counterintuitive. Very streamlined and intuitive. So not only is there, you know, eradicating post event admin with the reconciliation aspect, but there also feels like there's a bit of a ease of training and and a pre event, sorta, you know, increase of capacity. But, is that fair to state, would you say? Yeah. Absolutely. You know, the the the volunteers and, you know, staff will generally appreciate anything that makes their lives easier. It's an extremely stressful, you know, all the work crammed into a four or five hour event with the first hour being everybody showing up. Oh, And, you know, that frontline of people can certainly feel like, you know, they're they're you know, the world's falling in on them as as the people start to pour in. So, No. you know, anything you can do to make their experience, you know, more streamlined, you know, is is definitely welcome. And a lot of what we feedback we get, and I think, you know, in a couple of the customer examples we we'll have in a minute, you'll see that a big part of their after the fact assessment of, you know, the software is the the positive impact it had on volunteers and staff. Amazing. That's that's huge. That's absolutely. huge. I'd. love to ask the chat. So, you know, who's been there in terms of all of these types of circumstances, raised your hand in the room. Also curious to know of folks in the room and the organizations that you represent and work for day in and out, what is your event use case? Like, what are you working on or tours or have you, hosted in the past? We'd love to hear that. And, Art, if you could launch the poll, we'd like to get your expertise team, of attendees on which challenges does your organization face on the day of your events. This type of information is really helpful for for both Russ and for myself just to learn from the mouths of babes, as they say. Yes. Amazing. Yep. It's always surprising to see, you know, where the pain is. You know, I learned a long time ago, don't assume, ever assume, you know, everybody's got their own unique set of challenges and, so it's great. It's great to hear where everybody kind of lands on that. Yeah. Wow. This is incredible. Oh, I love the live action on this poll right now. Yeah. Moving around. Yep. That that second one is the one that always, you know, we did a webinar last week for TeamRacer users, and that was the number one there as well. And, you know, again, it's it's great to hear directly from the user base because, you know, you don't really realize that necessarily. Yeah. This is great. Yep. Well, will that that poll still be available on the right side there, and we can keep moving, through the Awesome. So let's move in, Russ, to a few key actual customer organization case. studies, those in real life and see mobile donor in action. Yep. So, yeah, I'll just run through real quick, you know, a, kind of the end to end process for, you know, the the synergy between mobile donor and and BBIP. And so, you know, before the event, we connect the data needed for your setup whether wherever that data lives. We pull in, participant information, their giving history, their contact details. And so then the staff and volunteers have that information at their fingertips. They can look up an existing supporter and have a more informed conversation. We have clients who put in things like, the birth date of the if they have it of the participant so that if it happens to be around their birthday, they can wish them a happy birthday when they check-in, and people are blown away that they know that about them. So just, you know, whatever information you have can be put in front of staff for that initial interaction to make that, you know, even, stronger. And then, for we keep fundraising totals up to date so that, you have visibility into how much they've raised up to that moment. Again, we provide tablets, kiosks if you need them, and the card readers. And, you can create shopping carts for all the merchandise that you have so purchases can be handled within our overall event workflow. We also give you the ability to send real time receipts from our back end. But, again, you'll have that all that information back in your, CRM in real time. So if you wanna do the thank yous from your end, that can work as well. We also, integrate with BBIP's complete cover, option, which is great. And Alyssa is much more qualified to talk about it than I am, but it's become very popular as a way to cover the costs of, credit card fees, of software fees, things like that. And when you're in the moment standing in front of somebody, it's pretty it's it's a it's a I think I've I've heard from your end that something around 70% of the people will agree to do it when they're asked in person. So that's tremendous and and definitely allows more of what you raised to go back to the cause and not, you know, paying credit card fees. Again oh, go ahead. Oh, I was just gonna say Russ too. It's it's interesting because even with donor behavior over the past couple of years and even across the industry, it becomes a little bit of more standard operating procedure too. So, yes, agreed with you. That that high percentage of folks that do decide to cover is, such a win for the organization. Yeah. Absolutely. And during the event, as you pull in data, and, obviously, after the event, all the existing records are updated, you can create new records on our end, which can then create new records on the Blackbaud side for people who, either are registering on-site or, weren't previously in your system. And then, tracking those fundraising totals will give you visibility into the progress. We can set up thermometers and stuff like that that tracks the money coming in in real time. And all that donor information, all the donation information, again, goes back to your database to make reconciliation a really simple approach. And, ultimately, you know, the goal is continuity, that the information you capture during the interactions with a supporter are available to the people who need it for follow-up, for reporting, and to steward the ongoing relationship. And then like we've mentioned, we've got a couple of case studies. We will share, some examples of organizations who faced some of the challenges we're talking about and use mobile donor and for event day in some cases to address them. Hello? The first is the Dartmouth Hitchcock Hospital, that runs an event called the Prouty. I had the opportunity to talk with Emily Manning from their organization last week, and record that. So, Art is going to share that now. Family, how are you doing? I'm good. How are you? Good. Thanks. So you are the communications and database manager at Dartmouth Health, and one of your responsibilities is around the peer to peer events that the hospital runs. Today, I'd like to talk a little bit about the Prouty, one of those events and probably your signature event. So could you tell me a little bit more about the Prouty? So as you said, the Prouty is one of the our signature events. It is Northern New England's largest fundraising event that benefits Dartmouth Cancer Center. And at its core, the priority is a cycling event. However, we've seen an increased number of walkers, throughout the years. There are a few satellite events that, flow into the Proty, and there's the opportunity to participate virtually. But the majority of Proty participation takes place on a single day. And this year, at the forty fifth annual Proty, we saw over 4,700 participants and raised over $12,000,000. So you've been using our ForEvent Day platform for a few years for your events to handle a lot of the aspects of the day of the events. But until this year, you collected donations outside of our platform on the day of your event. So I was hoping you could just talk a little bit about how you handle capturing donations and registration fees and stuff like that prior to this year. Yes. My first year with the organization, we actually used laptops to collect donations. So So we'd have the event registration or the event website up at check-in, and people would enter their credit card information manually. After it wasn't very successful. There was a lot of connectivity issues. There it was very slow. So after that, we moved on from the laptops, and we started using the Blackbaud mobile pay terminal app on the on iPads that we, that my organization owned. It was an improvement because we had credit card readers, but we still had to manually add contact information. And there's not a lot of fields in that app for all the necessary information such as which participant should be credited, email address, contact information for a street address. So it it made it very difficult. It felt like we were only getting kind of a piece of the puzzle. If you could talk a little bit more about what the process looked like this year, compared to those previous scenarios you talked about. Yeah. So this year, we used the grassroots tablets to take payment. And because of that, every registrar had a tablet, so every registrar could take payment. As I mentioned before, we used the iPads, and we had a very limited number of iPads. We had a funnel of participants who wanted to make a credit card payment to a specific registrar, and that really caused a bottleneck. Also, the grassroots tablets use mobile data, so we didn't have all that Wi Fi connectivity issues we had had in the past. And personally, what I found to be the best benefit of using the grassroots tablets or one of the best was the the participant information's already on the Grassroot tablet. So there was no need to retype all that information in again. We had a complete donor profile that we weren't doing making in a rush as they were checking in when we had thousands of participants, you know, entering and leaving the check-in area. Right. Right. And, just in terms of of the option to then also take, you know, mobile wallets, Apple Pay, Google Pay, were there was there a kind of gravitation towards that once you had that ability? It was definitely more pop like, it was definitely more popular with the younger participants. Some of them don't even carry their credit cards. All they have on them is their phone. So it wasn't a benefit I mean, it wasn't a deterrent to making a donation. Right. Right. And how about usability in terms of, you know, the volunteers and the staff? Did you get any feedback from them in terms of how it was using mobile donor? I did, actually. One of our, I would say one of our most important registrars is actually our top fundraiser for the event. She's been doing it year after year. She's gone through the iPad. She's gone through the laptop. She's gone through every, device we've used to collect donations. And she came up to me and said this was the smoothest process yet, and she raved about it. We also one of the registrars came up to me and said a participant, had come up to her and said that he does a lot of these kind of peer to peer fundraising events, and this was the best process as far as check-in that he's ever seen. We should actually train other events on how we did our check-in process. So that really meant a lot to me. Any, you know, in general benefits that you noticed went from switching that maybe we didn't talk about yet? Yeah. So a major benefit is definitely, like, the reconciliation after the event. So, you know, it's it's all well and good to get through the check-in process. But if you're just left with all this data that doesn't really make any sense after the event, you know, you're gonna run into some trouble. And Grassroots gets that information into Luminate, so we're not entering gifts one by one into Luminate after the fact. It's just a really seamless process. Yeah. Awesome. Well, I really appreciate your time. I mean, it's been such a change being able to use the mobile payment just this last year, such an improvement and just the, you know, using Grassroots in general to check participants in. I I couldn't imagine, you know, going back to the old days of paper and pen. It's just not possible at once you've kinda seen the other side of it. There There we. are. We're There. we go. Yep. Yeah. I really appreciate Emily doing that. And just quickly, because we're getting up and we wanna talk about the, promotion that Alyssa's gonna talk about. But I just did wanna mention one other case study, and that is with Stanford Health. They have a an event called Paint the Town Pink. It has 540 guests, very small space, no reliable Internet access. Prior to using us last year, they had a paper based checking process and QR codes for payments that just created long lines, bottlenecks at at the initial point of entry. We gave the staff tablets and kiosks. They had all their, participant data in the system, and, the tap to pay, obviously, which continued to work offline. The staff could take the tablets and circulate among the crowd to check them in, so it didn't rely on everybody queuing up. They got guests checked in faster. They were able to monitor attendance live, so they knew when to start the program based on how many people were there. In the past, it was just basically guessing because it was. just a. series of spreadsheets with check. marks. That's rich. smoother arrival experience, and they started the program on time. They have their next event coming up next month, and we're looking forward to working with them on that. Incredible. And just to wrap up my little piece, I will, just say that, if you do wanna learn more, obviously, our apps are in the marketplace, and there's some information there. Happy to if you wanna reach out to me directly, Alisa, and, you know, we will answer questions. We will give you a demo, talk about pricing. There's a lot of different ways we can approach pricing that work to work within your budget. And, yeah, just, looking forward to questions in a little bit. But I'll turn it over to Lisa to talk about the exclusive offer. Alright. The drum roll for 10 lucky webinar attendees. We're really excited, as Russ mentioned, just to get in the nitty gritty with each of you, those that are interested, and come up with a incredible solution for your next event that hopefully is a testimonial like Emily had, at Dartmouth. So, if you are interested in a free consultation and an opportunity to qualify for a $500 matching grant from Blackbaud and Grassroots Unwired, we would love to talk to you. If you have events that are coming up between now and the end of the year, we would really love to talk to you, as well. So please, if you're interested, select yes in the poll, and our team, will contact you, to have a discussion. As Russ mentioned too, no matter what, even with the ability to have sort of access to mobile donor, and for event day in Blackbaud's marketplace, please dig into that. But there's nothing better than actually having a discussion, with real live humans and to get strategic and in the weeds. So, with that, we have about ten minutes left. We appreciate your attention and all of the dynamic questions along the way. It makes it so much more fun. I hope that they've been answered. But to that end, let's open it up for for some more. So let them rip in the chat, in the q and a piece. I would welcome Russ to start with one question I have, which is, what are some creative waves waves? Hello. Waves. I do need more coffee, Russ. This is rough. What are some creative ways that you've seen mobile donor use for Giving Tuesday beyond some of the traditional in person run, walk, ride events, knowing even that season is coming to a close likely the end of this month. Yep. Yeah. Giving Tuesday is actually a interesting use case where, a lot of organizations will be allowed to go into, you know, corporate offices to raise money from, people working for the for that company who are using this organization as their target to support Forgiving Tuesday. And a lot of times, what it ends up being is them either handing out paper with QR codes or telling them to go to, a link on a, you know, on a website to to make a donation. And there's really no closing of the loop to say, okay. We know that person made the donation. It was here, and this person took it. So what we've done in a couple of scenarios is given, the tablets and card readers to the organization to use inside the offices and wherever they're doing their Giving Tuesday fundraising to be able to take it on the spot from the the donor, collect all their information right there through our through our app, and then obviously take the payments with the tap to pay and mobile pay and all and all that kind of stuff. So, it's really unique, a little niche, and, works quite well, you know, in terms of of generating a little more on that day of the fundraising effort. Amazing. Excellent. Any. questions from the crew? Oh, yes. Okay. I see. Now we are in the q and a. I see. So there's a question about support model, and, yes, we do have on-site availability. Typically, we will, be on-site for your first event. Just, you know, if if it's if it's desired and, you know, we can we can help, you know, make the process, the transition to our technology smoother. But, otherwise, you know, we always have, support people available, both via text. Sometimes we have people set up a a laptop on the table with a Zoom, and we're basically floating head at the event to answer questions if they come up. But, yeah, no shortage of ways that we can support you on the day of the event itself. Love that. Looks like, Jacob's question, I feel like you answered earlier on. Amanda's question also about post event reporting with, attendee versus non attendee. Yep. Did you did notice somebody in the chat mentioned they use Square, you know, as a as a payment option. And, you know, to me, that's if if you're if you're in Blackbaud's ecosystem and you have a, you know, a payments account, to me, that's the, you know, the the biggest, you know, no brainer in terms of use cases because, you know, Square is not built for nonprofits like Blackbaud is. I can almost guarantee your pricing is gonna be better with Blackbaud than it is with Square. And, you know, again, you're looking at disconnected, payment models that have no relation to your Blackbaud environment. So there is a very manual reconciliation process that has to happen. Also, Square doesn't allow you to collect payments offline. So, you know, don't mean to trash Square, but I think there's, you know, very, very compelling reasons to, one, use BBIP, and two, combine it with mobile donor to give you, you know, that full end to end coverage. Russ, you were like my Emily testimonial. Thank you for that. Was it excellent? Thank you. Yeah. I you know? Russ, you had that slide that showed kind of the end to end in terms of integration. What's that typical time frame, to get from, you know, interest to actual inaction event use for. you and your team? mean, to to implement mobile donor, you know, we can ultimately have it up and running in twenty four hours. We'd love to have a couple weeks just to be able to make sure you and your staff are fully trained on how everything works. And we get all the details of your shopping carts and stuff like that and and get it make sure everything's set. But, those are those are really fast turnarounds and implementations. We need a few days to ship you tablets and card readers and kiosks and stuff like that. But, otherwise, you know, it's a pretty straightforward onboarding process. Very little needed from, the organization's end from a technical standpoint to get integrated and set up. Fabulous. Okay. Unless there's any more questions, I'm looking in the QA, and I think everything has been spoken to. Melissa says a tricky reconciliation point for us has been someone paying for someone else's fee, a la husband giving me a credit card for a wives paddle or vice versa. Yes. That's it. I hear you on that. Interesting. Yep. Yep. So we have we have a couple ways to address that. One is with a split payment where you can actually, assign, the payment to two different people. We call it a, you know, a parent and child kinda record. So if you have one person paying with one credit card, but, you know, half of it should go to one spouse and half to the other spouse, we have the ability to separate that out and then make that, look right on the on the Blackbaud side. And then, yeah, the other issue is just, you know, creating new records and things like that. So there are ways to, you know, make that happen. Amazing. I see our countdown. We're wrapping in five seconds. We so appreciate all of you. Thank you so much. Keep an eye out for the recording. And for those that did, express interest in our consultation, you will be hearing from Russ and I very soon. So have a lovely rest of your day. Thanks. Thanks, Alyssa. Thanks, Russ. Bye, everyone. Bye.