Ep 310 | Tips for Event Fundraising in 2025 with Roger Devine

Are you looking to boost your nonprofit's fundraising efforts and connect with more donors? In this episode, I sit down with Roger Devine, co-founder of SchoolAuction.net, to explore the power of event fundraising in 2025 and beyond.

Roger shares his wealth of experience in helping organizations create successful fundraising events, from galas to golf tournaments. We discuss why events are becoming increasingly important for nonprofits of all sizes, especially in an uncertain funding landscape.

Crafting Events That Resonate

Discover practical strategies for:

• Tailoring your event to your specific audience
• Balancing cost-effectiveness with donor expectations
• Leveraging technology to streamline your auction process

Maximizing Impact Without Breaking the Bank

Roger offers insights on:

• Creative alternatives to traditional galas
• Engaging donors through interactive experiences
• Using data to inform your event planning decisions

Building Long-Term Fundraising Success

Learn how to:

• Create a sustainable event strategy that grows with your organization
• Use software to build institutional memory and improve year-over-year results
• Balance the needs of different stakeholders in your event planning process

Whether you're a seasoned fundraiser or new to event planning, this conversation offers valuable insights to help you create memorable experiences that inspire generosity and build lasting relationships with your supporters.

Want to Skip Ahead? Here are Some Key Takeaways:

05:40 Tailoring Events to Your Audience Learn how to research and design events that resonate with your specific donor base.

12:15 Leveraging Technology for Better Results Discover how software can help you track data, improve decision-making, and streamline your event processes.

19:30 Creative Fundraising Ideas Explore unique event concepts that can energize your supporters and set you apart from traditional galas.

26:45 Building a Sustainable Event Strategy Understand how to create an event program that grows with your organization and adapts to changing donor needs.

Full Transcript

[Sami Bedell-Mulhern] Getting gifts from individuals is one of the most important things we can be doing in fundraising in 2025. We know that individual gifts are what make up the vast majority of donations these days, and it's only getting bigger. So how do we get in front of new individuals? How do we grow that base? How do we share our mission? Well, events are a great way to do that. And so that's what we're talking about today, is what we need to know about events fundraising in 2025 and how we can make the most of it as we move through our fundraising goals to really make the most of the rest of this year to get us prepped and ready for year end fundraising. Because yes, it's coming up fast and how we can make the most of our events long term. My guest today is Roger Devine. Roger has led a life based on service, communication, education and entrepreneurship. As the co founder of SchoolAuction.net, he has spent the past 20 years assisting and advising local and national nonprofit organizations and charities on how to grow their programs and ensure financial stability through fundraising events such as gala auctions, golf tournaments and trivia nights. In addition to assisting organizations across the country, Roger has personally chaired dozens of fundraising events for his kids, schools, his Rotary Club, and Pacific Northwest nonprofits focused on causes such as building schools in rural communities, Massachusetts, matching US Military veterans with service dogs, and pandemic relief. Now, I love his take on this because again, it doesn't have to be big, huge, fancy, over the top types of things, right? We can really get grassroots with it, we can really have fun with it, and most importantly, get the right people in the room for you to have conversation with so that you can grow your base, get more donations in the door, continue to nurture, grow and build relationships. So I hope you will tune in to this episode because it's a good one. Before we get into it, this episode is brought to you by Dogood University. This is a community built for small to medium sized nonprofit leaders, executive directors, development teams. If you're a team of one or a team of five, we're here for you to help you with everything that you need, from board governance to grant writing to marketing to fundraising, even events, and walk you through all of the things that you need to hit the goals that you have for your organization. We have resources that you can access at any time on your own and myself and Patrick Kirby go live every single week to talk to you about whatever it is you're stuck to help you move through the things that you need help with We've been having conversations about messaging to donors and how to create better stories, how to build a retreat for your team to set goals, how to manage your tasks, what to prioritize, you know, website updates and copywriting. We cover it all. Whatever it is that you're stuck on, we have a resource for you and. We can help you move through it. You can also just learn by hearing from what other nonprofit leaders are struggling with as well. And if you want to pop in chat, try it out for free for two weeks. You can do that. You can grab the link thefirstclick.net/dgu the letter U Learn more from Patrick, who founded DoGoodYOUniversity, and hear why community is so important for us as nonprofit leaders. Especially right now, we're having lots of conversation about the trends and things that are shifting and changing what's happening with some of these bills and how that's going to affect your fundraising moving forward. We keep our fingers on the pulse of all of these things so that you don't have to. You can come here, be in our community and learn alongside us. So again, get two weeks free at thefirstclick.net/dgu I hope that you check it out and I look forward to seeing you on a future live Q and A call. Let's get into the episode.

[Intro] You're listening to the Digital Marketing Therapy podcast. I'm your host, Sami Bedell Mulhern. Each month we dive deep into a digital marketing or fundraising strategy that you can implement in your organization. Each week you'll hear from guest experts, nonprofits and myself on best practices, tips and resources to help you raise more money online and reach your organizational goals.

[Sami Bedell-Mulhern] Hey friends, please join me in welcoming Roger Devine to the podcast. Roger, thanks for being here.

[Roger Devine] Thank you very much. Appreciate it.

[Sami Bedell-Mulhern] Okay, so we're talking about event fundraising, which is something we haven't really talked about in a minute on the podcast. So I'm really excited for this conversation. But before we kind of jump into some strategies and why now? Why event fundraising? Why is that something that you are passionate about and something you love to teach on?

[Roger Devine] I I first of all, I in my career, I'm on plan D or E or F. You know, we're fairly far down the line here, but got into event fundraising really because I was a PTA president and when my kid was in second grade, I was PTA president for a couple of years and we had a fundraising auction we would do at the school. When I got there, it was all done manually with spiral notebooks and little knuckle busters to process credit card payments and thought there had to be a better way. And there was some software out there that was available to help run fundraising events. It's not like it was a brand new idea to the world. Although the business model of most of the, most of the companies that were providing this software was a business model I did not want to participate in as a PTA president. I did not want to give away a portion of what we were raising on that night. I understand that software costs money, I'm willing to pay a cost, but I wanted to know what it was going to be and I wanted it so, so that I could make a fiscally responsible decision, etc. And so started looking around and managed to find a couple of guys who were thinking about starting a company and had written some software for their kids school here in the same district to do the same kind of events. I got to them and said, hey, why don't you give me your software for free? And they're like, okay, why don't you join our company? And I was like, all right. And that was 20 years ago. And it's a, it's a real niche in that most people, even though even the people who are really involved with grassroots nonprofit fundraising really don't want to think about fundraising events any more than they absolutely have to. You know, they tend to be things that we consider to be, I don't know, we would call them a necessary evil, but they're, you know, they're less fun than some of the other kind of things you can do in fundraising. But we're at a point now where, you know, I feel like the lessons that schools and churches and small locally focused nonprofits have to teach about fundraising events are worth teaching at this moment. There's a whole lot of charities, a lot of nonprofits that have not necessarily relied on events in the past or turned up their nose at them or thought that they weren't cost effective. But we're living in a place where fundraising is uncertain. We're in an environment where many federal grants are being pulled or reviewed or paused. It has a knock on effect to private foundations who are expected to pick up some of that slack and all the way on down the line. So bringing events back into the fundraising mix for a given organization seems like a pretty reasonable thing to consider at this point. And there are ways to do these things in a cost effective, efficient manner. It's just those methods are ones that if you're thinking about putting on the kind of fundraising auction that you see on a TV show, you know, you're not. Those are events that break even at best, you know, with the doing them at the Ritz and everybody's in tuxes and you've spent a zillion dollars on the decorations. Schools and PTAs and booster clubs know how to do these things in a cost efficient way. And so I think it's time that we kind of take that out there and talk about it a little bit more.

[Sami Bedell-Mulhern] I love that. Well, let's talk about. Because the power of an event is the way that you kind of engage with your audience. So I love that you kind of started with like, it doesn't have to be the gala, it doesn't have to be the big thing, you know, with the lobster dinner. So kind of how do we start to craft? Like maybe you've been doing an event for a while, it hasn't been doing that great, or you're just kind of starting to do an event or like, how do you kind of think about what you want that event to look like and how much does your audience, cause and creativity kind of play into that? Like, I think you can kind of do whatever you want with regards to what a quote unquote event, fundraising event looks like.

[Roger Devine] So I think that the key thing here is always know your audience, know who your supporter base is, know and, and it's a segment of your supporter base. It's not everybody, but the segment of your supporter base that you think really wants to participate more in the life of the organization. They want to be present, they want to show up, they want to talk to the people who are working on the mission. They want to talk to the people who are running the organization. They want to rub elbows with other donors of like minds for those organizations. That segment of your supporter base out there is worth doing a little bit of research on. You know, sit down, talk to them, tell them, you know, hey, these are, these are things we want to do here and what's important to you? And I think that if you come out and you say, you know, is it really important that we have, you know, phenomenal high end decoration? You're going to find that many of your guests who are, and let's face it, these are not necessarily the part of the user base that's going to write the six figure checks or the five figure checks. This is the one where you think you're going to get four figure checks out of them, right? Maybe the occasional small five. But these are people who are probably going to turn around and say, no, don't spend my money on that. Yeah, don't spend my money on an ice sculpture. It's not necessary. It really isn't. One of the things that is a thing we go back and forth with when we're talking to organizations about putting on an event is, can you get away with a buffet? You know, can you get away with a buffet? Instead of offering three different plated dinner options where you have to collect that all in advance if you do need to. And some organizations will put on an event that requires that kind of structure to it. And if you do need to, you know, great. There's methods for doing that and you can do that in a cost effective way too. But there's all sorts of ways to say, let's not throw the gala you might think of for the American Cancer Society. Let's have a barn raising here. Let's get together. I'm not aiming for one guy to give me a $50,000 check. I'm aiming for 50 guys to give me $1,000 check. And let's get them together, figure out what that community is most going to respond to and what they're not going to respond to. Many of these fundraising events will include things like an auction. Most of them that we work with do. And our software is designed to support that kind of functionality. And one of the key tips I'll always give people about, you know, one of the things that's difficult to do if you're going to have an auction is getting items for the auction, especially the kind of things that you might have an auctioneer sell from the stage in a live auction format. Those want to be big trips and they want to be kind of things with higher value, et cetera. And getting those donated can be rough. So I'll tell people ahead of time, you convene your 10 favorite wallets who are going to be at the room. And that's a little insensitive to me. I know I should refer to them as people, but I think of them as wallets. First we're going to get them in the room, we're going to feed them some wine and cheese, and we're going to have a brainstorming session where we ask them what they've seen at prior auctions that made them excited. What was, you know, what tips do you guys, as auction goers have for me, the auction team, when it comes to our live auction? And what you're really asking, without using these words, is something like, what do you want to buy when you get there, you know, so you can focus your effort on getting the kinds of things that your audience is going to respond to. There are a bunch of other choices you can make and how you're going to structure everything. But I tend to come back to the same answer. What is your audience going to respond to?

[Sami Bedell-Mulhern] No, I think that's so good. And I think that it also simplifies the process because when we get in our own heads, I mean, I've been on so many different committees, you know, event committees and whatnot, where everybody's like, okay, go out and get silent auction items and like, just go do it. And that is so hard creatively to be like, okay, well, you know, who do I talk to? Where do I go? But when you know, okay, you know, this person really likes golf experiences and this person really wants to go to, like, exotic safari, whatever. When you know those things. Now you have a much more targeted approach for where you're going and who you're making connections to. And I find, and maybe, you know, you might have this experience too, that the creativity flows so much more when, you know, like, okay, these are the types of things that we can target for these specific people.

[Roger Devine] We all need a little bit, a little bit of limitation, a little bit of a boundary condition there that we can kind of push against. Right. Like, okay, I can put my feet here and then I can, you know, move forward from that point and it's a lot, lot easier, like you say. And, you know, this is this idea, though, that, that for when you're, when you're going to be planning an event, plan the event that your supporter base wants you to plan for them.

[Sami Bedell-Mulhern] Yeah.

[Roger Devine] That they want you to throw. There have been, you know, there have been technological advancements during the 20 plus years we've been doing this. Things, you know, inevitably move online. Silent auctions now, really one of the most interesting trends we've seen in the last two or three years. So notably post lockdowns. Yeah, one of the most interesting trends we've seen is organizations that are saying, like, okay, I'm going to have an event, and at the event we're going to have a live auction and maybe we'll sell some raffle tickets and maybe we'll do some other things. But the silent auction portion, I'm just going to put that online for a week ahead of time and close it so I can just wrap that part of it up before the event begins. Really kind of an interesting way to restructure that. It Allows you to, of course, extend your reach, et cetera, et cetera. Mobile bidding was a thing that happened, what, 10 years ago in advancement. And, you know, we'll still support organizations that want to run their auctions without mobile bidding. That's fine. You know, it's going to be an appropriate choice for some communities. And, you know, is it? Is it. The trend has flipped now they're more mobile bidding than not. But, you know, we're going to always offer a plan that will fit the event you need to design for your community to respond.

[Sami Bedell-Mulhern] Yeah, well, I want to back up a little bit because I. Yes, tailoring the event to the people that are going to be there with the caveat of don't let the one loud board member in the room derail your entire planning process, which we can talk to a little bit about maybe later, but backing it up even before that is like really being rooted in what are the goals that we're trying to achieve with this event? Because it can be varied. It can be, hey, we just want to have 100 new people that we can talk to. If we can raise a little bit of money, that's great. But like, this is the goal or like all of those things, I think we tend to get lost in. The whole goal is just to raise money. And that's not always the case with an event. And also paying attention to, like, what are the average gift sizes that we want? Or, like, what is our trend of people giving additional gifts throughout the year? Like, how do we kind of measure the success of an event? So kind of, what advice might you have on kind of that data piece first, so that we can make sure that we're tailoring the event to the right people and not just the one loud board member that's in the room that wants to try to dictate everything that isn't necessarily representative of the whole big picture.

[Roger Devine] This is really where. And I've avoided being a marketing guy up until now, but this is really where software shines. This is where committing to a piece of software that you're going to use year over year, building your institutional memory of how those events worked into a database that you can access later on is a really, really productive thing to do. And when we're talking to prospective customers that maybe have not done a gala or an auction before, we're going to, you know, we generally tell them, like, okay, you tell me how many guests you think you can get there, and I'll tell you how much money you're going to raise. Because it's pretty easy to do when they're just starting out, we've seen a lot, etc. But we'll tell them it's like, yeah, but you're going to grow over the next three or four years. And the reasons you're going to grow are going to be a. We're going to share with you a whole lot of things that other groups do that are, you know, we're going to, we're going to be a connective tissue here. That, and make sure that you're, you're constantly getting new ideas. And two, you're going to be building this database. You're going to be building this database of what sold, who spent, what levels did they spend at, et cetera. And then you've got the ability to go back and look at what happened last time. Out of the people that were my top 20 spenders, maybe 17 of them are still connected to the organization. Great. I'm going to identify those as my VIP list and, you know, to outweigh the board member. To get back to the loud board member. If the loud board member is just a board member with a, with a, with an opinion, great. They're a board member. You need their opinion. You weighted a certain amount. If they were also one of the top three spenders at last year's event, maybe you give it a little bit more weight.

[Sami Bedell-Mulhern] Totally different.

[Roger Devine] You absolutely give it a little bit more weight. But I'm going to say that you, you start out, you take a look at everybody that spent over a certain threshold last year, and if you are running your auction here as primarily a fundraiser, and I am going to be one of those people who's primarily looking at as a fundraising event, if you're doing that, then you treat those people as your VIPs, you sit them down ahead of time and you go through the conversation about what have you seen? What's out there, what's exciting to you, what's. What do you think about mobile bidding? Does that make sense for us as an organization? You know, you involve those people in the planning process and you're giving their opinions more weight than the guy who just came and bought a ticket and ate dinner and cheered, you know, and those people are important. You gotta have them there, too. This is, these events are full philanthropy as spectator sports. So you have to have an audience. But the, you're going to, you're going to start building up with your database of past results, some hierarchy that you can use to help make decisions. Not everybody's opinion should carry the same amount of weight. And truthfully, if a board member is going to suggest large changes to your event, you know, that is absolutely a time where you should go to that board member and say, okay, can you help us bring in people who are going to respond to this type of event? It's not what we've done before. Can I count on you to sell at least two tables worth or three tables worth of guests? You know, I love turning around to the people who are making my life difficult and giving them stuff to do.

[Sami Bedell-Mulhern] You know, basically here, oh my gosh, you're speaking my language. And that is so true. And I think what I love is the data points to back you up. I think a lot of times nonprofits make decisions, especially with events, on emotion.

[Roger Devine] And like how they feel the event went or how they feel about the comments they got from the guests that they brought. And so I think taking it back to, okay, but here's how we did. This is the percentage of people that donated this year versus last year were up. This is yada, yada, yada. Now you're also arming your board and your table host or like whomever that's kind of your stakeholders, your cheerleaders for the event to say pro and con, like, hey, okay, I understand that this didn't go the way you wanted, but here's how we actually did overall. So using the data to kind of support you in those growing pains, nothing is going to go perfectly. You're not going to make everybody happy. But being able to say, yes, we hear you, we understand, and this is what we did, I think is a beautiful thing. And having software to help you kind of navigate through that and pick those top VIPs. I love the way that you framed that. Look year over year and see who's consistently spending. I think there's a lot of good stuff in that that we don't pay attention to. And so like when you're working with clients on their events, like, what does that kind of post event debrief look like? What types of things are you asking or are you wanting to gather so that you can make better decisions moving forward so that you can your fundraising events even better and better and better.

So in our debriefing calls, we're primarily focused on making sure. Do you know how to pull reports? Yeah, you know, do you know how to get the data out of here? And, and we got a recommendation for five or six different data polls that, that we, we really recommend that people pull down. We're also debriefing constantly on how the guest response was to whatever bits of technology we added this year. So if we add a feature, we added a feature last year that allows the organization to ask for tips at the end of the night to help cover expenses. And we're doing this in a slightly different way than most companies do it. But we introduced this feature. We encourage people to use it. And I'm getting feedback on what was the guest response. We are allowing our customers to customize those little pitches, the language that's going to be used when you ask for a tip. So we're going to ask them, what was your language? How might you change that next year, et cetera. We're constantly looking for all of that kind of feedback to make, not only make the software better, which is of course a primary goal, but also to fish for those tips that we could then tell other organizations about. You know, we really do see that one of our core missions here is to understand that especially one of our target markets is schools and school groups, K12 groups. PTA is booster clubs, Young life chapters, that kind of thing. We do know that those are almost always completely run by volunteers. And the thing to know about volunteers is that they're not going to be around forever. I mean, staff won't either, but, you know, volunteers are a little more voluntary.

[Sami Bedell-Mulhern] You have a new president. You have a new president of the PTA every year.

[Roger Devine] Every year. Exactly. And a new fundraising chair. And the person who did last year's auction is like, hey, I did my part. Thank you. I've served proudly. I can go off, be in the audience now. So, you know, part of where all of that institutional should be in order to pass it from one team to the next team to the next team is in the data in the software. Part of that's going to be in Let us build the lore. Let us build the guides for not how to use the software, but how to run a fundraising auction. Here are some things that are out there that are amazing games you can play, planning approaches. You know, I brought up the thing a couple of minutes ago about how we saw the trend of people taking their silent auction and not divorcing it from their event, but not bringing it to the event, just doing it online ahead of time when. When that started happening and we could see that, you know, I start recommending this to groups that are, you know, telling me about their struggles at an event. You know, we did. We had too small a room this year. We didn't have enough. Enough room for people to Move around. Well, here's something you can do next year. You can take your silent auction completely out of the room, reclaim some of that space. So in our debriefing calls, we're fishing for those kinds of tips and tricks because it's really, really creative out there, you know, especially volunteer driven groups. Sometimes it can be like, you know, not to mischaracterize anybody, but sometimes some of us, men or women, will get stuck at home for extended periods of time where we're either caretaking. I take care of my mom, the last five years she was alive, et cetera. You can go a little stir crazy. Where do you want us? Like, put your creative brain, okay, you got this volunteer job. Let's go nuts. You know, sometimes good ideas come out of going nuts like that.

[Sami Bedell-Mulhern] Yeah, no, that's so good. So kind of one of the things that I love you're saying is like building in that professionalism in the data tracking, but then also having a partner that is working with multiple organizations that can kind of help you say, okay, like, this is what you're doing, this is what your goal is. This is what you've seen. These are some creative ideas and like, help you brainstorm with that. So with that in mind, like before we kind of close this out, like, what are you seeing, like, that's kind of fun and exciting or what are some creative ideas that you've seen organizations do that are maybe kind of out there, wacky, off the wall, but like, you kind of found excitement in as you've worked with clients.

[Roger Devine] One of my favorite, favorite, funny, not terribly commonly used tactics, but I wish it were more commonly used. Replace your live auction with a talent show. Oh, have your own Dancing with the Stars going on. Recruit six to 12 couples to get up and dance or sing or, you know, whatever you can make the town, kind of whatever you want to implement mobile bidding as a way for everybody in the audience to buy votes for their favorite candidates and buy them early and often and repeatedly. And we've built in a little leaderboard for these kind of events so you can see the voting happen in real time with the idea being like, oh, no, I got to keep buying more votes for my guy, you know, And I think that that's such a fun moment. And I will recommend that, especially if an organization is nearing the end of the productive relationship with their auctioneer, it's good to keep the same auctioneer for three or four or five years. Generally after five years, your audience tends to know them a little too well and they Tend to know your audience a little too well and then you kind of got to switch it up a little bit. And if you're going to try and do something new in an in between year, take a break and do a talent show, see how that goes, you know, put it up there. I similarly have this idea that I have not run with for an organization that I have supported for a long time. We've thought about doing this as a fundraiser and calling it the not so Talented show. And in fact taking corporations, having corporations sponsor or business, local businesses sponsor somebody from their company to compete against other companies. So now you have corporate sponsors baked into the competition as well as like. Like, you know, if you get two or three banks and they want to compete against each other and they want to be the top bank. So now it's not just, hey, I know Roger and I'm gonna support him, but hey, I also know my co worker and I don't want that bank to win or I don't want that other competing business to win. So we're, you know, so I love that. But with using just regular people with stupid hidden talents like, you know, I can do the washboard really well or I can play spoons. So I haven't done it yet. If I ever do it, I'll let you know how it goes. But it's something that I've been considering for a performing arts nonprofit that I support. But I've gotta, I've got all the infrastructure for you if you need it.

[Sami Bedell-Mulhern] Yeah. Okay, so let's go there because as we wrap this up, I would love for you, Roger, to share a little bit about your company, what you do and how you support organizations and all of the amazing things that we've been talking about today.

[Roger Devine] So we have a software product and it is designed to help you put on fundraising events, whether they are online or in person. Our pricing model is different than many in our industry. It was unique when we started the company in that we would charge a flat fee and no performance fee, no percentage of what you were raising. It's like let all of the upside belong to the organization. We're going to give you tips to make your event bigger, but we don't need to participate in that Delta, you know, between where you are now and where we're going to get you, that should be your upside. That should be the benefit of working with us. We have added over the, over the years we have added an entry level subscription that does work a little bit differently, but that's for organizations and we will tell them, you know, either you're likely to raise too much money for this to work out for you, or you really will have a more cost effective experience over here. And the other, the other element that we decided to embody really, really early on was to embrace an appetite for the volunteer led organization. It is much easier to sell to organizations that have an office and have people who have titles and they have email addresses that you can find and all of that. But that end of the market is actually pretty well covered, you know, and it is pretty competitive. And when we started out as the kind of scrappy, bootstrapped, tiny little software company, we decided the only shot we've got is to do things differently. So part of that was saying like, okay, yeah, it's harder to support a volunteer led organization that's going to forget everything you told them this year by the time they come back next year. But that's who we were when we needed auction software. And we realized there's a market of those people out there. Let's embrace that. Let's, let's work with that. I am of course, happy to work with big national nonprofits, but I don't spend my money targeting them. I really don't. My, my marketing budget does not go to trying to win the American Red crossover. It just doesn't. There's, there's, there's, there's, there's more out there that I can go out and cultivate and we can have that be kind of our niche, our target here.

[Sami Bedell-Mulhern] Love that. Well, what's the name of your company you haven't even shared?

[Roger Devine] I haven't even shared. It's called schoolauction.net and that is also the website. It is notably. It's plural. Or sorry, it's singular, not plural. School Auction. No s. And it's a.net and not a dot com.

[Sami Bedell-Mulhern] But I'm a net too. I'm with you.

[Roger Devine] After 12 years, we did get the dot com finally and we just decided not to switch. It was just like, everybody knows this is a net. It's fine.

[Sami Bedell-Mulhern] I love it.

[Roger Devine] Schoolauction.net is out there. If you want to get in touch with me directly, you can email me roger@choolauction.net Roger has no D in it.

[Sami Bedell-Mulhern] I love it. We'll link everything up in the show notes at thefirstclick.net/310 so you can connect with Roger there. If you're working on a nonprofit fundraising event and just want to kind of see what option is out There. I love it. I'm a huge fan of digital fundraising and online auctions. If, if there's kind of any last words of wisdom or trends that you're seeing or inspiration you want to leave our nonprofits, like, what would you say to them?

[Roger Devine] I, you know, my primary message would be that if you are an organization that has decided you don't want to do fundraising events in the past, this is a year to reconsider that maybe it's not going to be as efficient as hunting the great white whales that are out there, but some of those whales are feeling the pinch right now and this is a way to at least mitigate the current situation somewhat.

[Sami Bedell-Mulhern] Yeah, I love that. I'm a huge fan of multiple streams of income for every organization. So, Roger, thank you so much for sharing your wisdom and your organization with us. I really appreciate your time.

[Roger Devine] It was a lot of fun. Thanks.

[Sami Bedell-Mulhern] Big, big thank you to Roger for sharing all of his wisdom and insights. I love that his platform is really built for grassroots campaigns and people that aren't super techy or have a lot of experience or just a lot of turnover. His strategies are just so helpful for anybody at any stage, any level of experience. And so I hope that his ideas can help spark something for how you can use an event to help spark your fundraising and grow your audience. You can find the show notes and additional resources at thefirstclick.net/310. I really hope that you will sit subscribe wherever you're listening. And if you're watching us on YouTube, leave a comment below with your biggest takeaway. What's something that you're really excited to implement today? Do it now before you forget. You just listen to the episode and I'm sure there's something fresh in your mind. For now thank you so much for listening. Share this episode with someone else that you think might use some help in their event planning, and I can't wait to see you in the next episode.