Chase Russell Podcast Transcript
Chase Russell joins host Brian Thomas on The Digital Executive Podcast.
Welcome to Coruzant Technologies, Home of The Digital Executive Podcast.
Brian Thomas: Welcome to The Digital Executive. Today’s guest is Chase Russell. Chase Russell serves as the Senior Vice President of Product Strategy and Marketing at Bonterra, a social good tech company, empowering nonprofits, strategic philanthropists, and other social good organizations with software to bring about the greatest social good.
Before his work at Bonterra, Chase has held various positions focused on product marketing and product management for B2B software products. Chase attended Stanford University, graduating in 2015.
Well, good afternoon, Chase. Welcome to the show!
Chase Russell: Thank you so much. It’s good to be here!
Brian Thomas: Absolutely. I appreciate you making the time love doing these things every single day, just about Chase. I know you’re in the same time zone as me, so it makes it a lot easier. We’ve done this thing all around the world, but again, appreciate your time.
And Chase, I’m going to jump right into your first question so we can get started. Can you provide us with some background on Bonterra and what solutions you provide to nonprofit organizations?
Chase Russell: Absolutely. I’m excited to talk about Bonterra. So Bonterra formed in 2021 by the combination of a number of different software products that were all leading products in their respective industries. And all those industries relate to social good in some way, shape, or form. So, the big categories you can think about are software that helps nonprofits fundraise and attract volunteers or software that helps nonprofits deliver their services and track their outcomes.
Or on the other side of the equation software that actually helps corporate funders or foundations find nonprofits and grant nonprofits to help fund their causes. So Bonterra sees this opportunity to connect givers with doers, right? The donors, the volunteers, the funders with the nonprofits creating the impact in the world.
But if we step back a little bit and think about the why behind that, the reason Bonterra exists Is because the social good ecosystem as a whole is a little bit stuck. And I’ll explain what I mean by that. Every year in the United States, there’s about 620 billion of giving that goes on charitable giving, including volunteering that’s included in that number.
And that sounds like a lot, but it actually pales in comparison to the size of the problem. So as an example, the amount of investment it’s estimated to take to solve three problems, they’re big problems. Climate change, world hunger, U. S. Child poverty. People have done the math and it’s more like 5. 5 trillion.
So, 620 billion is actually not a lot at all. And 1 way to look at that problem is actually looking at giving as a percent of GDP of gross domestic product. So if you look at that number, the fascinating thing is we’ve been stuck at 2. 5 percent of GDP for over 50 years, even though during that time, her capital wealth has increased seven X.
So we are, we are becoming wealthier, but we are not becoming more generous. And Bonterra exists to try to solve that problem. We want to unlock generosity and impact in the social good ecosystem, which is why our mission statement, and you’ll hear me talk about this later, is 3 percent by 33, which would transform social good.
And what I mean by 3 percent by 33 is that by the year 2033, we want that giving us percent of GDP number to not be stuck at 2. 5 percent anymore, but actually move to 3%. And that would be again, transformational for the whole social good ecosystem. And our part to play in that is again, the software. So, we are in a phrase software for the greatest good.
Brian Thomas: That’s awesome. I love that where people come together to try to solve a large problem. In this case, there’s a lot of giving to be done. We see a lot going on, but there’s a lot more work that we need to do. And we appreciate you and Bonterra jumping into this and trying to make the world a better place, because that’s what we want at the end of the day.
Chase, what are the largest problems you see nonprofits face when trying to scale their organization?
Chase Russell: Yeah, it’s a great question. And the answer to that varies a little bit depending on the size of the nonprofit, but all of those differences actually still relate to three themes that are true across the board.
So, the themes that we really see are that number one, it’s getting harder and harder for nonprofits. To engage donors, volunteers and funders, they’re harder to get a hold of it’s hard to retain those donors. It’s harder to get them to come back. It’s harder to get repeat funding. That problem just continues to grow.
Number 2 is there’s increasing pressure from funders, but also from donors to demonstrate your real-world impact. How are you actually moving the needle on the cause that your nonprofit is supposed to be addressing? And then number three, which makes the first two even harder is that nonprofits are actually more resource constrained than they’ve ever been before.
They just don’t have the resources, the people to tackle these problems. So, it’s, it’s a, it’s a hard combination of all those three things. Now, in terms of how that plays out in different parts of the market on the small side, so emerging growing grassroots nonprofits really where their biggest problems are and where they can be helped most is, is the insight.
And support to help them actually become sustainable. So, questions like, how do I actually fundraise? I don’t have fundraising staff. What’s a good campaign idea? Should I do it? Should I write a newsletter? What is my fundraising strategy? Who can help me with that? So, it’s a lot of coaching so that they can become scale enough to become sustainable to have their maximum impact.
Then if you get to the mid-market. It changes a little bit where the complexity is growing. So, you might have a lot of different fundraising programs that you’re doing and it becomes, how do I continue to deliver a great donor experience, volunteer experience across all these channels. And as things get more complex.
Or as I’m delivering my services, I might need to move out of spreadsheets or archaic systems to a real case management tool. And then how do I track and report my impact and the way that the funder wants to hear about it? So, complexity becomes the problem in the mid-market. And then when you get to the enterprise, It becomes a little bit more about how do I tap into technical solutions that drive this step function, ROI improvement for what I’m doing, right?
Because of the enterprise level, you can see all those macro trends. You can see that donor retention is in decline. You can see that donor engagement; volunteer engagement are in decline. These things are getting harder. So, you’re looking for what levers can I pull? How can I turn my volunteers into donors and vice versa?
How can we personalize more at scale across all these systems? Or how can I maybe aggregate all of my impact data across all of our locations and affiliate networks? These are big, complex problems that enterprises are dealing with.
Brian Thomas: Thank you. Very complex. And I’m glad you broke that down for us. There was a lot to impact there, but, you know, having worked in a nonprofit once as well, I got to see close up how that all works.
And so, it totally makes sense. But bringing this all together, there’s a marketing piece. There’s obviously repeat annual fundraisers and how do you get donors back in and forth? It is very complex. So, I appreciate all the hard work you’re doing and the platform that you use to do this. Chase, how do you see enterprise grade solutions playing a role within non-profit operations?
Chase Russell: Yeah, this is actually, in my mind, one of the most interesting aspects of the problem as well as the solution to a lot of these problems. The core opportunity, especially at the enterprise side of things, is it’s an opportunity around matching. It’s less of a problem of there’s not enough resources or desire to give to solve these problems, and it’s more a problem of not connecting the resources and the desire to give to the opportunity.
Let me give you a couple of examples. The first example is that it’s estimated that every year 4 to 7 billion of matching funds goes unmatched. So, what this means is corporations will have a set aside budget for matching their employees contributions to their nonprofit of choice. And that money is sitting there ready to be sent to nonprofits, but every year, 4 to 7 billion goes unmatched unused, right?
So, it’s latent potential. Similarly, there’s studies that have shown that donors, 64 percent of donors actually want to give more than they give. So, they’re looking for opportunities to give. So, there’s latent giving potential in the system. So, the real opportunity for enterprise grade solutions is about making that match happen.
And there’s some really cool ways you can do this. So, one example is actually detecting matching opportunities on donation forms. So instead of the corporation being responsible for making sure that you remember to tell them to match their gift to a nonprofit, what if on the donation form, when they’re filling it out and donating, there was something that detected, Hey, by the way, we see that you are part of an organization that has a matching program.
We will notify them for you so that they actually match your gift. That’s one example. There’s many more, right? So, there’s how do you automatically match nonprofits. To the grant opportunities that they are best suited for so that they win those grants. How do you ask for the right amount of money on a donation form?
So, there’s now we have AI models that will make sure that when a donor that has already donated to you comes to your website to donate. The amount of money that they get to choose from those little boxes that say 5, 10, 25 is actually personalized to exactly that individual based on their history, right?
So, you’re now matching their potential to give to the actual need that the nonprofit has. And the results from those kinds of things are astounding. So, it really is a matching problem. And that’s where enterprise grade solutions really have an opportunity to have an impact. And you can see that all of this.
Helps nonprofits do more with less and it helps increase donor and funder engagement, getting back to those core problems that nonprofits are facing.
Brian Thomas: I really love it. You know, this platform is getting more and more advanced when it comes to, you know, that donation industry where people are impacted through nonprofits through this process.
And like I said, working with some of the software in the past, it’s not been that advanced. And I know you’re probably all leveraging a little bit of AI in there now, but this is awesome to hear that you can kind of tie those loose ends. So that we kind of take the human equation out of it, because as you know, when there’s a human involved, love them to death, but things can sometimes fall through the cracks.
It’s just our human nature. So, I appreciate you sharing that. Chase, where do you see these solutions providing the greatest impact for nonprofits? More donations, more volunteers, all the
Chase Russell: above? It is for sure more donations and more volunteers and I can give some examples of that so the AI models that predict that right ask amount on those forms that we’re talking about as an example there when you turn those on what we see in our customer base is that actually increases the amount of money you get per form load by two hundred and twenty eight percent so there’s big improvements you can have in places like that or another example is customers who use our volunteer management product Because we have such a large network of nonprofits using this product that creates a network of volunteers.
They actually find that 45 percent of their shifts actually get filled directly from that volunteer network rather than volunteers. They have to go bind. But outside of just more donors, more volunteers, at the end of the day, what we’re looking for is that the outcome is impact is more change in the world.
And in fact, it’s more donations, more grants, more volunteers, which create more impact. Which in turn attract more donors, grants, and volunteers. And that cycle continues. So we’re seeing lots of examples in the past of negative versions of that cycle, where if you can’t prove your impact, maybe donor attrition starts, but we exist to create the positive version of that cycle.
And that is what we really think is going to start changing things in this ecosystem.
Brian Thomas: Amazing. And I appreciate that. Again, you’ve talked through various aspects of the donor platform and how this ecosystem comes together. And you’ve just sounds like you have solutions for everything. We just need to get everybody involved and get excited about this.
I really do appreciate that. And chase last question of the day. You mentioned increasing giving to 3 percent of US GDP by 2033. What will it take to reach that goal?
Chase Russell: Yeah, it’s a great question. So, I think I’d actually start with that. It’s going to take more than just step by step improvement and each of these categories in this ecosystem.
So, what I mean is we can keep adding features to fundraising software to marketing technology to try to make it easier and easier to engage your donors while continuing to make incremental improvements and all the other categories. That is not going to be what gets us there. It’s going to take connecting the different sides of this ecosystem in a way that really ignites generosity and ignites impact, right?
Because it’s when you start to connect these things together that this really starts to work. So said another way, it’s going to take a world where individuals who want to engage are automatically provided with the most compelling opportunities to give and volunteer. Where nonprofits are automatically connected to funders that care about their cause and where the nonprofit’s real-world impact is aggregated and reported in such a way that it can go back to those funders and donors and again compel them to give and to be invested.
And the last thing I’d say about this is that at its core, this is ultimately a question of trust. So, when you make these matches, when you facilitate these connections, and that’s what we’re really trying to use the most advanced technology to do. That’s where we want to apply AI. What happens is you create trust.
So, to get to 3 percent of GDP by 2033, we have to create the connections that build trust across all these different sides of the social good ecosystem. And we believe that’s, what’s going to unlock latent potential and really transform the whole ecosystem.
Brian Thomas: Thank you. You’re absolutely right. It’s going to take all of us to be in this to start to build that level of trust, which is foundational across different brands, different companies and nonprofits.
It’s kind of like change. org is an example that comes to mind right away is, you know, that there’s a cause that everybody wants to fund and we need to build that eagerness to jump in and help make the world better place. So, thank you again for sharing that information. Chase, it was such a pleasure having you on today and I look forward to speaking with you real soon.
Chase Russell: Thank you so much. It was a pleasure to be here.
Brian Thomas: Bye for now.
Chase Russell Podcast Transcript. Listen to the audio on the guest’s podcast page.
