Ettore Rossetti · Lead of Global Digital, Save the Children & Pat Duffy · Co-founder, The Giving Block | Ettore Rossetti embraces entrepreneurial strategies that make other nonprofits shake in their boots. And Pat Duffy is invested in building solutions for nonprofits that want to access today's crypto-loving donors.

Crypto isn't a new giving channel, it's a new class of donors

Today's forward-thinking nonprofit leaders are investing heavily in donation methods that normalize cryptocurrency giving. What's your take on crypto's new class of donors?

In this conversation with Ettore and Pat, you'll see that even established nonprofits like Save the Children, the world's first global charity for children, can stay ahead of the game and meet donors where they want to donate.

• Discover the questions that crypto answers (Jeopardy-style!)
• Explore what the future holds for post-pandemic fundraising
• Ensure your nonprofit appeals to both your grandchildren and your grandparents

Hello, I'm Justin Wheeler, and welcome to this episode of Nonstop Nonprofit! Today we're listening to a powerhouse partnership whose goal is to normalize cryptocurrency donations. Both Pat and Ettorre are forward-thinking nonprofit leaders who have invested heavily in updating nonprofit donation policies and procedures.

Ettorre Rossetti leads Save the Children's digital marketing, communications, and fundraising, and embraces entrepreneurial strategies that make other nonprofits shake in their boots. And Pat Duffy is one of the co-founders of The Giving Block, a solution for nonprofits that want to access today's crypto-loving donors.

I gotta say... as a lifelong nonprofiteer and a firm believer that our future lies the way of cryptocurrency and blockchain it was refreshing to hear an established nonprofit like Save the Children prioritize staying ahead of the game so they can meet donors where they want to donate.

In this conversation with Ettorre and Pat, we discover the questions that crypto answers, what the future holds for post-pandemic fundraising, and how digital giving can make sure your nonprofit appeals not just to your grandparents, but to your grandchildren as well. Let's dive in!

Justin Wheeler Hey, listener's so excited for today's podcast. Today we have Pat co-founder of The Giving Block, and Ettore, the senior advisor of marketing, digital and fundraising at Save the Children. Very excited to dive into today's topic, which we're gonna take a deeper dive on cryptocurrency and fundraising. Gentlemen, thank you so much for joining the podcast.

Pat Duffy Yeah. Thanks so much for having us.

Ettore Rossetti It's great to be here.

Justin Wheeler So, Pat, I'd love to get started with you. Tell me more about The Giving Block. I know it's a platform for nonprofits as it relates to cryptocurrency. Tell us more about your product and why crypto.

Pat Duffy Yeah, so I guess starting with why crypto, the general idea is end of 2017. There was a huge bull rung where the price of Bitcoin went to like $20,000 a unit. And over the course of a few weeks, in December 2017, we saw hundreds of millions of dollars get donated to nonprofits as people were offsetting tax burdens. So Fidelity charitable, some DAFs been taken it for a little while. Fidelity charitable did like $69M, I think, in Bitcoin donations that year. So just saw an opportunity. I was working to the Lupus Foundation at the time. For us to get set up to take crypto pretty much need to figure out how to get set up. I was trading. It is like a casual thing but figured there was a good chance to pull in some money. I just figured out there were a lot of compliance hurdles, a tactical solution. How could we automatically sell for cash? What did the donor needed for receipts? We built out a holistic solution for nonprofits to take crypto, get set up super easy and just process donations to give that about 70 million donors. Now, that tax incentive and then in terms of the actual products, like a copy and paste widget that goes in the nonprofit's site, we hook it up to an exchange account for crypto and donors can show up to your site or to our platform, and then they may crypto donations. And it's yeah, it's pretty point-blank process.

Justin Wheeler Is it, you have access to all different types of cryptos or what are the main crypto is on on a platform.

Pat Duffy Yeah. All of the core ones. We set up nonprofit's to take... We use Gemini so they're careful, they don't take any cryptos that are classified or potentially gonna be classified as securities. But I think that it's all of the top ones. And then there's, of course, a million junk coins that don't mean anything the same way a company can incorporate an issue stock that's not the same as getting something like a share for it. So all of the top ones, about 90 percent plus donations, come in Bitcoin and then Theorem and a handful of others.

Justin Wheeler Okay. And then through your platform, it has it liquidated to cash it straight away for the nonprofit or does the nonprofit hold on to it as an asset?

Pat Duffy Yeah. So the nonprofit can hold onto it as an asset. It's kind of funny. Any nonprofit has started taking crypto prior to 2017. Bitcoin has been around longer than Instagram. So people think it's super new, but it's been around awhile. Anyone who started taking it back in the day when Bitcoin was like .06 and .20 cents. And now Bitcoin is $12,000 a unit. Like all of them clutching onto it and refused to sell it. Any nonprofit started taking it after 2017 when it hit $20,000. Today it's at about $12,000. Most of those groups automatically sell. So we have a handful that'll hold onto a kind of as an endowment. The vast majority have it set to auto conversion and then that cash is FDIC insured. You move it off the platform like you would after you sold a stock on Fidelity.

Justin Wheeler Got it. Make sense. Well, how is traction, been? Or let me take one step back there, your go-to-market, cause I know as someone who's worked in nonprofit, I spent 12 years fundraising prior to starting my company Funraise and interacting with, you know, hundreds of nonprofit executives, when the word crypto comes up, everyone's kind of eyes roll back and like, what, you know, what the hell is this? So, how is traction been? How have nonprofits responded to the platform?

Pat Duffy You guys been crushing it. So like something you guys do well, it's just making it not look like chaos. So just making sure everything's clean. The process super simple from onboarding to actual implementation, how your stuff actually works. That's been most of what I've been doing over the last half a year or so now...

Justin Wheeler Nice.

Pat Duffy And then the other big thing is just some baseline adoption. My dad says nothing makes a line like a line. So Save the Children was a huge get for us, was the first major, major nonprofit who joined the platform. And then since then, just people like No Kid Hungry or International Medical Corps running active crypto fundraisers like across all platforms, that kind of stuff has been the main hurdle. Now that we have a handful of super, major nonprofits, it seems like we're starting to get the uptick and traction.

Justin Wheeler Yeah, I can imagine that definitely lends credibility to the platform. And just to the channel as a whole. Typically when larger, more credible nonprofits get behind something, it definitely creates a tailwind for other nonprofits to follow suit. And so Ettore, I would love to learn a bit more about your background. Fifteen plus years at Save the Children, lots of awards and expertize from marketing to fundraising. I would love to hear what took you to Save the Children and what you've been up to for the last fifteen years at the nonprofit.

Ettore Rossetti Yeah, sure. So for those who don't know Save the Children, has been around for now more than 100 years and I've been there for 15% of those years. Right. So there's more than 15 years. I have an identical twin brother and, you know, I study does sports. Marketing in college and then pivoted to Internet marketing, and I'm also a certified tennis teaching pro on the side. So but philanthropy means a lot to me when I became a father of two children. And I wanted to change my major to basically to give back and change my career. And hence Save the Children was the perfect organization for me. I vicariously live the mission of Save the Children through my two children. And there's a lot of kids who don't survive past age five in the developing world and my kids are both older than five. So I'm very privileged and lucky to have been born in the zip code that I have been born in. So that's what drew me to Save the Children and what keeps me there? Save the Children gives kids before, even before birth, a healthy start in life, the opportunity to learn and protection from harm every day and in times of crisis. And certainly a pandemic right now that's affecting kids both in the U.S. and around the world. So we have a lot of work to do and we have to find creative and innovative ways to keep reinventing ourselves and to find new donors. And certainly the cryptocurrency community is one representative example of A the future and B a new set of donors, a new class of donors. Those, you know, Bitcoin enthusiasts who don't hold to their coin and want to give it up over time. We hope they consider Save the Children and now it's, you know, easier than ever before to donate crypto to Save the Children, thanks to The Giving Block. So you know it is a simple would you just put the eye frame code on your website? It's safe and secure and people can donate pretty easily. And if they wish to receive a tax receipt, they certainly can use their email and their name. So we really love the partnership and thrilled to be part of the innovation. And that's part of my role. Save the Children is to think about answers to two questions which keep me up at night and get me up in the morning and that is what if and what's next? And cryptocurrency could be the answer to both those questions.

Justin Wheeler Very interesting. Yeah, I mean, it's with being in an organization for 15 years and having influence over the organization's fundraising, I'm sure you've seen a lot and experienced a lot of different sort of methods and channels, some that have worked them, some that haven't. I'm curious as to how you've approached Crypto as a channel for the organization. And if it was originally difficult to get buy-In from the team. I'd love if, you could paint a little color around some of the origin story of getting involved in the channel.

Ettore Rossetti Yes, happy to. So it was the day before Thanksgiving in 2013, and we received a phone call from the Bitcoin Give Foundation saying, we would like you to participate in the first Bitcoin Black Friday as a nonprofit because our community would like to support Typhoon Haiyan, which just hit the Philippines and Save the Children, was one of the organizations responding. So this is the day before Thanksgiving. So, you know, I knew what Bitcoin was. I think it's value in USD at the time was about $600. So quickly we scrambled to figure out how we might be able to accept it. And, you know, and half a business day and me being sort entrepreneurial and, you know, innovative, you know, I sort of push the envelope internally and so quickly met with our legal department, our Communication Department of Finance Department, to find out all the reasons why we couldn't accept a Bitcoin donation and tried to overcome each one of those. And we ended up accepting that contribution under basically one condition or two conditions, number one, that we can provide a tax receipt. And number two, that the big gift foundation would essentially take the donation are our behalf and then and give us the U.S. dollar. So it was like a workaround way of doing it. It was somewhat manual, of course, through the giving block. That process is entirely automated and a lot faster than it was back then. I look back at our records and the U.S. dollar, some at the time was I think $4,850, which in today's valuation would have been about $97,000 in U.S. dollars if we had hallowed it, but there's no, you know...

Justin Wheeler Hindsight, right?

Ettore Rossetti I'd say retailers remorse there at all. And I will say, though, that our philosophy at Save the Children at least right now is that we don't view cryptocurrency as an investment instrument, we look at it as an alternative way to attract new donors and new dollars from new donors, even if they're crypto dollars. So that's our philosophy right now. We, of course, given the origin story of Bitcoin itself, of course, there's a lot of myths to debunk and to overcome. Of course, there is an appeal to be anonymous. So we have evolved our gift acceptance policy to have provisions around and guardrails around anonymous giving so that we're compliant with AML and know your customer, right? you know, and that's why working with The Giving Block and Gemini, you know, we happened to already be set up with Gemini, so for us, it was a natural transition to go with The Giving Block, especially since it provides the ability to provide an automated tax receipt. It provides the ability to convert into U.S. dollars, which is our strategy right now, automatically. And so that's our origin story has been a bumpy road ever since then. We almost we're a beneficiary of the Pineapple Fund. You may have heard of that...

Justin Wheeler Yep, oh yeah.

Ettore Rossetti ... fund and lots of lessons learned and insights working for a large organization such as Save the Children. And those valuable lessons hopefully will take us forward and pay dividends, no pun intended now.

Justin Wheeler Absolutely. So since, what would you say if you can share, since 2013, how much would you say you've raised through crypto? Do you have you know that off top of your head or is it something you're able to share?

Ettore Rossetti Yeah. So hundreds of thousands of dollars. We hope that it will become millions of dollars. But to your point earlier, if you don't accept cryptocurrency as an organization, then you will receive zero.

Justin Wheeler Yeah. No, that's exactly what I was...

Ettore Rossetti So the sum is no larger than zero. The processing fees of course behind it but just with any type of currency, credit card or otherwise, there are processing fees. So it's we treated it as a, essentially a cash gift, but almost like a, you know, intangible asset, like a stock. And we do accept stock gifts also. Some of those donors prefer to remain anonymous, but for those who would like to reveal themselves, we would gladly collect their information and keep their information secure in private. So I think for us, you know, the lessons learned around the Pineapple Fund, regulations change with regularity. And there's both federal and state regulations governing cryptocurrency in the United States. I'm a marketer, not a lawyer. But what I can tell you is that the state of Connecticut requires a money transmitter license if you're going to accept cryptocurrency. And so we formerly were with BitPay. But during that pineapple fund, a year-end gift, we realized that we were no longer able to accept donations from BitPay because they weren't licensed in the state of Connecticut at the time. So we had this gap of a few months where we couldn't accept cryptocurrency and it happened to be the same timeframe...

Justin Wheeler Oh no!

Ettore Rossetti Of the Pineapple Fund. So we scrambled to find a source and we landed with Gemini Trust Exchange out of New York. The Winklevoss twins and I'm an identical twin. So this is some good karma there as well. And they used row and Southport and we were based in Westport, so these, these are the guys, right? This is the firm. Yeah. So we went with them, but one of the challenges we experienced is we, our finance team had to go in and do the exchanging themselves and be equivalent to accepting a stock gift and then having to sell it and having that sort of expertize in house and the agility to be able to respond to that for us wasn't a long term viable solution. So you manually did it for a while ourselves, but then were approached by The Giving Block, and for us it was the perfect solution because essentially we could just use our same Gemini account and yet on the front end of this great widget, which sort of automatically made the transfers and the exchanges, and now it's grown to more than just Bitcoin. There's a handful of cryptos that it accepts. So that kind of a middle process and also the consultative services around it, as far as tax advice and so forth, that sometimes donors have questions. It's really helpful to have allies in your corner as you're trying to be what I call an intrapreneur at a rather large organization.

Justin Wheeler So speaking of tax, Pat, what are the benefits for an individual donating with crypto? Are they the same as an individual donating with any other currency, or are there other differences that are either advantages or disadvantages?

Pat Duffy Yeah. So that's one of the main points of confusion we get from nonprofits. They often think that there is no clarity from the IRS on crypto. They're like, we want to take it, but not so far from the IRS. So for years now, the IRS has classified it as property. So it's in the exact same tax bracket as stocks or any other for property you get to a nonprofit. So systematically, like on paper, the tax incentive is the same as stocks or anything else. The difference is it's the most volatile. So it's the best appreciating asset class the last five years. Crypto is the best appreciating asset class last 10 years. So there are less people using crypto than stocks. There's 70 million users, which is more than most people think, but it's still as big as the stock market. The difference is it's easy to transfer. And because of market volatility, there is always a significant pool of people that are more incentivized to give crypto than their stocks. There's just a larger appreciation area. So you're not taking gain cap gaintacks on the crypto that you donate to a nonprofit and you're not paying the cap gains tax burden that you've accumulated. So if you owe $200,000 to the IRS from other trades throughout the year, could be stocks, could be selling a house, whatever it is, you donate crypto first, because that's the largest offset for your tax bottom line.

Justin Wheeler Back in. And what was it like late February when the pandemic hit the U.S. and markets went crazy? How did crypto respond? What was, what did the volatility look like, if any, at all?

Pat Duffy Yeah, it's there's a lot of really interesting metrics when it comes to market volatility. So people ask me all the time for investment advice, which I obviously actually can't give people. I'm also not a good investor. People assume that myself, and my co-founder did well trading crypto. He does fantastically well. He's smart guy. Me not so much. I bought at the top and rode into the dirt, but common question, people are like, OK. So if the dollar is being printed, this is a, you know, a safe haven, anti-inflationary asset class, that is true 100% on paper. It seems like more people are picking up on that so that at its low this year Bitcoin was at $3,500 today, it's like $12,000 a unit. So really, really, really good year. But if you know the economy bottoms out, who knows what's going to happen. What's funny, though, is in terms of how that affects donations when it goes up and that it tapers off a little bit, that's when the gifts because people are moving out of positions. If the market just keeps going up and up and up, it wasn't until end of 2017 where things started to break just a little bit and then come back up. That's what all the donations happened. So there's been great appreciation. Market's been consistently going up when it's hedged a bit. We've seen waves of donations and then going into end of year, we'll keep trying to move out of positions. That's probably the hottest time forgetting for sure.

Justin Wheeler Awesome. Yeah, looking forward to see what happens in Q4 with the crypto donors. And, you know, both of you talked about this and I think this is a really important point for nonprofits to understand, is, you know, crypto is not just a new channel for fundraising, but it's a new class of donors. Right. When we're thinking about trying to grow and scale a nonprofit, a lot of times we look at our same donor pool. We say, can we get 5%, 10%, 20% more from this donor year over year? And eventually that leads to donor fatigue and donors start to lose donors and so forth. But crypto is you're not cutting into the pie that you're already sort of cultivating nurturing, instead, you're you're increasing the pie. And so Ettore I'd love to hear how the process of since, you know, giving through crypto for the most part, I assume, and through The Giving Block it's 100% anonymous unless I don't know if the donor is allowed to reveal themselves or not if they want to. So how is your team gone about the process of cultivating these types of donors and what is the strategy been to continue to grow crypto giving or crypto fundraising?

Ettore Rossetti Key point is you have to be in the game. And so we're in the game and we accept it. The second is, you know, besides the utility of The Giving Block, there's also promotional consideration and marketing around the service. Well, a great example is our launch collaboration together us with a handful of other early mover nonprofits, was Bitcoin Tuesday last Giving Tuesday? And so that was a sort of a sheer marketing event for the crypto community, people engaging in social media. And then we thought leaders like Alex and Pat and others at The Giving Block. They have expertize they have relationships. And so we have credibility, we have 100 years of trust, we have efficiency, we have scale. What we don't have is cryptocurrency right? So it's a way to not only be your grandmother's charity, but also be your grandchild's charity. And, you know, that applies to the next generation of donors, fundraisers and philanthropists. You know, I love that, you know, Funraise you have in your name there, and and that's because fundraising should be fun. So and that's one thing also that I've noticed, there's a sort of a humorous edge to The Giving Block's marketing campaigns, oftentimes, with memes, on social and such. And so if you're inside the joke, you get it. You might laugh, but then also you you build trust in that way. And that's something that, you know, a legacy organization, a veteran one like Save the Children through partnerships and through affinity, we gain trust over time and because we are an early mover not only with The Giving Block but even with Bitcoin directly, you know, we have that credibility of of being in early and often. And we hope that it grows exponentially. We hope that our philanthropic giving in the space, the decimal place moves over and lifts up not only Save the Children and expands our mission, but also all the nonprofits who are willing to accept cryptocurrency because it changes every day though you have to be agile and we try to do that.

Justin Wheeler That's awesome. Pat, let's go back to these 70 million users. I think this is a super Interesting, obviously, market. What, do we have an understanding of what the value that these 70 million users hold in crypto today.

Pat Duffy Yeah. So there's hundreds of billions of dollars in the asset class in total. So across the different cryptos, I mean, in general, there's tens of thousands of millionaires created by cryptocurrency, but the overlap with the tech community is super significant. I think it's more important to think of it in terms of scale against other industries. So, like Coinbase, for example, is the biggest crypto exchange in the US. We don't use them as our back end because they're not as nonprofit friendly, but they're great for individual users versus institutions. They've got thirty five million users, so maybe it's closer to 40, but that's a larger user base than Charles Schwab, Fidelity, E-Trade. So when you think about the size, the industry they're like 40 million users on Venmo. Nonprofits are used to a lot of different payment rails that are significantly less popular than cryptocurrency. And then the fact there's an asset class baked in kind of like stocks where people are actually investing in it and they've got additional capital gains tax return on top of the payment rail, like you would have with a credit card or PayPal or whatever else it might be, makes it uniquely attractive as a mode of donation. And I guess one other point of clarity is because I know you and Ettore went back on this, for anonymous donations the fact that we allow non-anonymous donations and accommodate that with the system is actually a unique value prop. So we definitely don't only allow anonymous our anonymous donor rate is the same as Facebook fundraising. So we do get a lot of donors putting in their info, but we've done that while maintaining a fully anonymous option if donors want to go through our cart that way, which is what's expected from the crypto community. So it's a good balance. And then one last thing. Sorry. But, Gemini uses Nasdaq market surveillance the same as any other financial institution. They're under the same regulations. So it's anonymous to you as a nonprofit, but it's certainly not anonymous to regulators.

Justin Wheeler Got it. That makes sense. I think you maybe mentioned this earlier to make sure we got it. Do you have any idea how much was donated through crypto in 2019 or whenever it was last recorded?

Pat Duffy Yeah. So there's no perfect numbers on it. Like there's no reporting the breaks it out that way. What I do know is, in that two to three week period in 2017 where it really went off. That was like the four million dollar donation on Ellen from Ashton Kutcher, the Pineapple Fund was I read then it was supposed be like $86M out of being $60M dollars worth of Bitcoin. $69M for Fidelity Charitable. There were hundreds of millions of dollars donated just that window. So we think it's probably reasonable to estimate, like in a good market year based on the market size, the user base is growing at about one and a half times, or it's doubling every one 1/2 years, rather. Right now, we'd say, you know, somewhere between 100 million to 300 million, probably year to year.

Justin Wheeler Okay. Which is obviously not insignificant. And Ettore I love when, you know, essentially it's you have to be in the game. You have to have the tools to be in the game. You can't just wait for someone to say I want to dante crypto but you don't accept it. This was actually my experience when I was at Liberty In North Korea. We started accepting crypto. And within a matter of weeks, we had a $50,000 Bitcoin donation come through. And you know something that I'm confident if we didn't have the ability to accept it, it wouldn't have happened. And so I love that you guys have been innovative and, you know, something that I see ring true in so many nonprofits is they get stuck with their own internal policies. But I love that you have innovated on top of them to the point where you've gone in and changed the gift acceptance policy. Can't imagine how difficult that might have been. But the fact that you've continued to leverage innovation shows a lot about just the value that Save the Children puts on technology and how we can actually help accelerate its mission and its goals. So very, very encouraging to see that. I'd love to from both you on this. What's the future of crypto fundraising? Where do we see it going? How much do we see, how much more of the market do we see it becoming? As it relates to nonprofits. Any thoughts around kind of the future of crypto?

Pat Duffy The one big thing that I'm sure a lot of even folks outside of the crypto space are paying attention, that sort of thing. They're called stable coins but you've probably heard of like Facebook cryptocurrency or China's cryptocurrency, wells Fargo, JP Morgan Chase, like folks are developing what are called stable coins, and they already exist kind of in the crypto space. But if an institutional stakeholder invented one with something like Facebook, like the distribution would be insane. The fact that you can reconcile transactions it's just cheaper and faster and more efficient. The record-keeping can be screwed with. All of the standard value propositions that get people to invest in crypto in the first place, minus the market volatility, where if you buy something in 2010 for six cents, it can be at twenty thousand one day and twelve thousand a couple years later, even though that is stabilizing more. But stable and adoption is going to make crypto giving closer to credit cards than it would stocks. So in the same way that you talked about the $50,000 gift, we had $140,000 donor in the last week. You get folks coming through and offsetting these enormous cap gains tax burdens. The people are really big stakeholders in this space like are more incentivized to really think about their taxes. Micro gifts happened through a platform and there's still people doing what we call a high five gift, whether giving crypto just because you take it when crypto becomes more like money and less like the stock market, then when it comes to peer-to-peer fundraising and everything throughout the system, it's going to become another form of money versus another form of capital gains offset major gifts and corporate partnership strategies.

Justin Wheeler Yeah. The way I think about crypto and how I've looked at. I think it's not to compare it necessary to digital wallet because that's more of obviously a facilitator of a crypto donation or payment, so forth. I do see it being more of a common currency and taking over stock donations. And the reason for this, I think, is because as well, there's several factors, but as sort of the economy continues to be more volatile, as we are in another recession, it's becoming a and then also with all of the transparency, privacy breaches of major sort of tech companies, I see crypto/Blockchain all of this becoming much more of the framework of the Internet and something that will have to adapt to. So very interesting to kind of hear how it how it's evolved. Nonprofits are listening to this. Obviously, that's the majority of people. How do they get in touch with The Giving Block? How do they start accepting crypto? What does that process look like?

Pat Duffy So so thankfully, we're still small enough where the vast majority of people who sign up with us, like we actually get on a phone call with them first. So we would just show up to our site, the giving block, dot com. There's buttons for except crypto where you can book a demo or just submit a contact form. We just jump on a call. We go through all the classic questions. They're like, OK, what about the price changes? Like auto sales? OK. Well how do we get them a tax receipt. That's automated. Where's the account. Gemini. Is that OK? Yes, it's regulated like a bank. We just go through all of the traditional questions and we'll demo kind of the way's different nonprofits are using it, talk about their outcomes. And yea h, in terms of actually getting set up, like once we have that conversation, you just open a financial account with Gemini. Same thing you would with like a Fidelity account. And then that account is what we hook up. We built all the code on top to automate all of the processes and then the vast majority of our work. Once you're set up as active fundraising. So we built the company with nonprofits who already took crypto. So that was our whole market at the beginning was not for newbies who knew nothing about crypto and get paid consulting fee because some folks can't Google it. It was folks like Save the Children, The Water Project, folks who've been taking crypto since 2014 and knew about ways to take crypto and then needed to switch to a solution that could actually bring donations. And we focus on running active fundraisers, coordinating with crypto media outlets, all of the apps where people check crypto prices. We have ads running on those, the  browsers they use, the crypto tax software providers. We work with them to make sure that we're omnipresent and we give people the option to give through us to our charities. And they run active campaigns on social to pull those donors. And so that's the vast majority of our work after it. And we do all the heavy lifting on the actual marketing and fundraising side as well.

Justin Wheeler So you're not just providing a tool for nonprofits to accept. You take somewhat of an active role in helping promote the charities through the platform, through various channels. That's, that's really cool. And a value add that I'm sure makes you guys quite unique in the market.

Pat Duffy Yeah. Yeah. 100%, were the only ones doing that part three.

Justin Wheeler Ettore, so as you think about fundraising and this could be crypto or not. What do you see as, I've been asking this question as of lately, as every nonprofit has had to kind of rethink their fundraising strategy, what does that look like for Save the Children as you think through the next couple of years? How has this pandemic changed or is going to change the way you guys fundraise and use technology to to raise more funds?

Ettore Rossetti So a lot will be done more remotely. Right. So some of our activities, we're in person. Those may come back, but they might evolve. I think even when we all return to work, I'm still working remotely from home, for example. So it affects the way we work and also the way we meet new donors and interact with them. So I think the fact that digital is up, virtual is up, whether it be events or in giving, it just doubles down on the value of digital donations, no matter what digital wallet or what cryptocurrency one's giving at. So I think the world has changed and it's not going to go back and it's up to organizations to figure out what that means for them and then adapt to that. And, you know, our donors, you know, I find it, you know, my pretty gregarious person in real life, I like to meet with people in person. I hope that that comes back soon. But in the interim, technologies like Zoom enable us to connect face to face in a virtual way and I think, you know, the power and the promise of cryptocurrency is not so much the currency itself, but some of the principles upon which it was built. So you mentioned Blockchain, a decentralized ledger and, you know, imagine a world where your donation was liquid in minutes, not days or weeks. Imagine a world where you could see the entire supply chain of the donation to the beneficiary, transparently online. And imagine a world where that didn't just apply to currency, but it applied to emergency relief work where you have inventory in a warehouse and you do rapidly distributed, like responding now to Hurricane Laura. Those are examples and use cases that the Blockchain and the principles on which a cryptocurrency is based can really help nonprofits scale and be more efficient organizations. And we hope that that's a future that we can usher in together.

Justin Wheeler No, that's a really great point. Just the broader sort of context that this framework can have for innovation in the nonprofit community. I think back to eight years ago when I was at Liberty In North Korea, and we would run rescue operations so we would help North Korean refugees basically escape from the border of North Korea and China all the way to Southeast Asia as a three thousand mile long journey through a modern-day underground railroad. And it was the only way an individual from North Korea could actually obtain freedom. They couldn't go directly to the South. And so the way that we paid our partners on the ground was very difficult, it was very challenging. And today, they are now use cases that I've seen in humanitarian aid work where Blockchain has actually helped facilitate payments quickly and securely and so forth. So I'm excited to see the impact that has on the broader community and I think that nonprofits are already doing such innovative work as it relates to social good and to see how that's going to couple with more powerful technology in the coming years is very exciting. And I think the pandemic is something that is forcing nonprofits to basically grab technology by the horns and really ensure that they make it a part of their overall strategy as they move forward. Gentlemen, it has been a pleasure speaking with both of you. Thank you so much for joining the podcast and sharing your expertize and wisdom. Excited to get this out to the community and share it and look forward to following both of you along your journeys, your respective organizations. Thanks for being a part of the conversation today.

Pat Duffy Yeah, Thanks for having us.

Ettore Rossetti Thank you Justin.

This podcast is brought to you by your friends at Funraise. Nonprofit fundraising software, built by nonprofit people. Don't forget to get your next episode the second it hits the internets. Go to nonstopnonprofitpodcast.com and sign up for email notifications today. See you next time!

‍