EP 97: Unlocking the Power of Donor-Advised Funds

Positioning review: This is an internal Handbid team discussion about roadmap features and most-requested capabilities. Language is naturally experiential and descriptive -- the team describes what they have built, what they plan to build, and how they approach event check-in challenges. Chick-fil-A analogy is observational. No prescriptive statements directed at the listener requiring adjustment. No outcome guarantees or professional advice detected.

Jeff: Welcome to Elevate Your Event. We have the Handbid team in here. It's an internal meeting, like a little Handbid powwow. Let's introduce ourselves first.

Elise D: I'm Elise. I'm on the service team.

Inga: I'm Inga. I'm on the sales team.

Elise N: I'm also Elise. Not on the service team -- I'm Elise on the sales team.

Jeff: We're all on the service team. We're all about service at Handbid. And I'm Jeff Porter. So what are we here to talk about? Handbid roadmap -- most requested features. All right, service team -- give me a most requested feature that we don't have.

Elise D: One that I hear a lot and I think would be super useful is having custom questions on for-sale items. For example, if you buy a t-shirt -- what size t-shirt would you like?

Jeff: There's a couple of ways we could deliver that. Inga, you're up.

Inga: Being able to pre-schedule broadcast messages.

Elise D: We get that a lot.

Elise N: Purchase add-ons when purchasing a ticket. You buy a ticket and you add on a drink ticket. Or add on a t-shirt -- with a size.

Jeff: For those that don't know, a for-sale item in Handbid speak is a fixed-priced item. I agree with all of those. What else?

Elise D: When an auction closes or someone got outbid at the last second -- a prompt that says, hey, sorry you didn't win this item, would you like to donate instead?

Jeff: We have that. It pops up on the app.

Jeff: For some of our listeners who don't know, we do custom auction software development. We have a white-label business. We build auction platforms for companies who want their own branded auction platform -- more on the commercial side than the nonprofit side, but it's kind of both.

Jeff: So let's start with custom questions on for-sale items. The way we'd probably build that is what are called sub-attributes on the for-sale items. You'd create them globally -- size, color, whatever -- then attach them. But then you have to create variations of all the products. It's not just size or color, it's red extra-large: how many of those do I have versus green mediums or blue smalls.

Elise D: We have one client who wants to start selling coffee. So it would be whole bean, ground, or K-Cup as the format, and then dark roast, light roast, medium roast.

Jeff: That's how most e-commerce platforms work. The purpose is so that when somebody's selling merchandise at their golf tournament, they only have to use one platform. Or a school client can run a school store alongside their annual auction and peer-to-peer fun run.

Elise N: Would it be possible to have an open-ended question, like what song would you like the disc jockey to play?

Jeff: We did build something for a client -- ask the auction manager a question. It's very basic. On the front end you type in a question and hit submit, and we send an email to the manager. We could add the ability to attach a question to a for-sale item purchase.

Jeff: Schedule broadcasts -- we have a customer who's asked for this. Now that we've revamped our back-end scheduling, this would be fairly simple to build. That will come out soon.

Jeff: Ticket purchase add-ons -- on our ticket modal, when you're setting up your ticket, you would just attach for-sale items as add-ons.

Elise D: Right now, people are creating different tickets that include these things, and it convolutes it. They have to create so many. It's very lengthy.

Jeff: I totally want to build multiple guest lists per event. So you could have your VIP party, your golf tournament, and your gala. Your tickets get connected to a guest list, so when you're building your ticket, you pick what guest list it's going to populate.

Elise D: That is a very popular trend. We have multiple clients running their gala the night before and their golf outing the next morning. When you go to check in, you just say I want to check in off the golf tournament guest list versus the gala guest list.

Elise N: May I expand on the ticket add-on? Being able to add multiple ticket types to a cart versus completing each purchase separately. Like if I want an individual ticket and a golf outing ticket, why can't I do that in one transaction?

Jeff: I think you can do this if they're on the same page. What you couldn't do is if they're tickets and sponsorships -- those are on separate pages because it's a checkout flow.

Jeff: Some things we've already built that we need to roll out. Custom documents -- done. You can upload PDFs or Word docs, they get hosted by us, and people can download them off the event homepage. We also built a DocuSign integration. You can require a bidder to sign a DocuSign agreement. We link that to bidder registration, and we've built the ability to add custom attributes to a bidder's registration -- company name, age, whatever. All of that gets stored on the bidder's profile and can be passed to DocuSign so forms are pre-populated.

Elise D: Do you think that could be added to peer-to-peer for like a 5K?

Jeff: Yeah, 100%. You have to use DocuSign.

Jeff: We're also working on a Stripe Identity integration for KYC -- Know Your Customer. You can set a threshold on how much people can bid, and beyond that they have to verify their identity. They upload a driver's license, Stripe validates it, and we can increase their spending limit.

Jeff: We've also set up a basic white label where we can build custom email templates that come from your domain. That email looks like it came from you -- all your branding, 100%.

Jeff: Another one that came up -- a client wants broadcast messaging with an email option.

Elise D: The open rate on email is like 4% as opposed to like 84% on a text message.

Inga: The use case is a client who doesn't want to text people for every single thing. The auction is running for two and a half weeks. He just needs to send an update like, hey, we're closing Friday, we've made some changes.

Elise N: If it's not that hard to add an email choice, who cares how they want to use it? A lot of clients would enjoy having that. Different use cases for different situations.

Jeff: We've been asked to build an AI image resizer. There's AI tools that can expand an image to a specific aspect ratio and fill in the background. We tried it for a cruise line client -- the AI expanded the image and filled in more ocean and islands. It did a fantastic job.

Jeff: For the mass image uploader with the zip file -- I took a client's 270 items, resized the images in 30 seconds with a bulk resizer, cleaned up the spreadsheet, and uploaded everything in under 20 minutes. 270 items with images, ready to roll.

Jeff: Tip of the day: on a Mac, highlight your images, not the folder. Right-click. Say compress. It creates your zip file.

Jeff: We're making cosmetic UI upgrades to the web interfaces. The max bid is becoming an "auto bid for me" option instead of a separate button. We're pulling filters back out to the left-hand column -- it's going to look more like Amazon. You can filter by custom attributes -- square footage for real estate, price range with sliders, or things like "hot buys."

Elise D: I would like to see us finish air codes.

Jeff: Most bidding systems don't differentiate between a guest and a bidder. When you don't, you can't streamline the check-in process. Our goal is to drive guests to check themselves in -- get rid of the lines and the laptops. Air codes came from large festivals with 2,000 to 4,000 people. Say Pepsi sponsors for $20,000 and gets 50 tickets. They're never going to know who all 50 people are. So we print 50 badges -- each badge is a guest slot. We scan them, assign them to Pepsi, and mail them. Those people download the app, scan their badge, enter their info, and they're in the door.

Jeff: I was thinking about the Chick-fil-A drive-through story. They were once rated one of the worst performing drive-throughs. The biggest constraint was the menu board. People sit in line for 20 minutes and then read the menu when they reach the board. Everyone behind them waits.

Jeff: Think about how charity events worked. You add more check-in lines, but the constraint is still getting all the guest's information. So we started telling clients to move parking validation, coat check, and name tags somewhere else. Eliminate packets. Digitize.

Jeff: Chick-fil-A put people out with iPads taking orders. We do the same thing -- put the check-in agent on an iPhone, push them out into the audience. Can I have 15 check-in agents instead of five? I give someone check-in rights and a stack of paddles. With tap-to-pay on iPhones and Android, they don't need a credit card reader.

Jeff: People are less frustrated when they feel like they're making progress. Chick-fil-A has 40 cars in line, but every three seconds you move 10 feet. The amount of cars per hour they move is like 5x the industry.

Inga: We'll spend 30 minutes longer taking a detour just to not be stopped on the highway.

Jeff: When you remove the laptop constraint and push check-in out, the constraint shifts to what information is in the guest list. Why can't the guest populate it themselves? The next stage is self-check-in. What if the app was your paddle number? Or if you hold your phone over your head, we know you're paddle-raising.

Elise N: All types of businesses in every industry are recognizing the constraint and addressing it through technology.

Jeff: Not all of it is features. A lot of times the solution is a process change, not a software change. We were at AFP and announced tap-to-pay. Someone can pull up their Apple wallet, touch my phone, and I capture their credit card information. No reader, no swiper, no Bluetooth thing.

Elise D: It worked great for the cruise ship event. People forgot their credit cards on excursions and we just used digital tap-to-pay.

Jeff: Maybe we do a quarterly roadmap conversation. If you're listening and have suggestions on features we should be adding, let our service team know.

Elise D: Call us anytime.

Jeff: Until next time, happy fundraising.