Episode 97: Unlocking the Power of Donor-Advised Funds

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 and then we can talk about something Handbid-related.

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. What team am I on? It depends on the day and the time.

Elise D: You're on the Handbid team.

Jeff: I'm on the Handbid team. So what are we here to talk about? Handbid roadmap -- most requested features. You know who is probably the best source of the most requested features? The service team. Our clients. Followed by the sales team. 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: I think this is a great one. Being able to pre-schedule broadcast messages.

Elise D: We get that a lot.

Jeff: It's a great one. What about you, Elise?

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: The other one I hear is when an auction closes or when somebody 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. I think it does on the website too.

Elise D: I've never seen it on the web.

Jeff: What the heck do I know? I've just been here the longest.

Elise N: At least it's a new feature. It was released last night. You didn't see it.

Elise D: I guess I need to go do some playing. Maybe I don't know because I clearly always just win everything.

Jeff: Were they using mobile bidding at that event you went to on Saturday?

Elise D: They were using mobile bidding, but because it was so clunky to use, I actually couldn't figure out how to place a bid. Clearly it wasn't Handbid.

Jeff: I'll talk about some of the things we actually did build. 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 to have their own branded auction platform -- more on the commercial side than the nonprofit side, but it's kind of both. When we talk roadmap and feature requests, we can start to build in what's absolutely going to be in the roadmap versus what we've already built but haven't necessarily exposed to the general Handbid universe.

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. When you're creating a for-sale item, you would attach a sub-attribute -- size, color, whatever. You'd create them globally, then attach them. But then you have to take it a step further -- 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 of the request is to have more e-commerce so that when somebody's selling merchandise at their golf tournament, they only have to use one platform. Or maybe you have a school client running their annual auction and their peer-to-peer fun run -- now they can just run a school store too.

Elise N: Taking it one step further, would it be possible to have an open-ended question, like what song would you like the disc jockey to play? Like a vote or a pay-to-play type thing?

Jeff: We did build something for a client that we will expose soon -- ask the auction manager a question. It's very basic. On the front end, you can type in a question and hit submit, and we send an email to the manager. We could add the ability to attach a question so as soon as you buy a for-sale item and put it in your cart, it would allow you to ask the question.

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

Jeff: Ticket purchase add-ons -- why not? On our ticket modal, when you're setting up your ticket, you would just attach for-sale items as add-ons that could be offered.

Elise D: Right now, people are creating different tickets that include these things, and it just 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 to purchase an individual ticket but also 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. People ask why we put pay-later tickets on a separate page. It's because it's a checkout flow.

Jeff: Some things we've already built that we need to roll out. The ability to ask the auction manager a question -- done. 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'll roll that out soon.

Jeff: We also built a DocuSign integration. Once we get that up and running, you can require a bidder to sign a DocuSign agreement. You build your agreement in DocuSign with templates and variables. We link that to bidder registration. We've also built the ability to add custom attributes to a bidder's registration -- things like company name, age, or whatever else you want to capture. All that gets stored on the bidder's profile and can be passed to DocuSign so the form is pre-populated.

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

Jeff: Yeah, why not? You have to use DocuSign, but 100%.

Jeff: We're also working on an integration with Stripe Identity. We have a lot of clients trying to do 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, it goes to Stripe, Stripe validates it, and they come back and tell us the person has been verified. Then we can increase their spending limit.

Jeff: We've also set up a very basic white label -- no web interface, no custom apps -- but we can build all the custom email templates you want, and they come from your domain. That email looks like it came from your domain, all of your branding, 100%.

Jeff: Another one that came up -- a client wants us to take our broadcast messaging and build an email option.

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

Jeff: It would actually be really easy to do. Our system is built with SMS by default, but the back end can handle email too. What's the use case?

Inga: He doesn't want to text all of his people for every single thing. He wants to send out a status update. Think non-charity -- the auction is going on for two and a half weeks. He just needs to send an update like, hey, we're going to close Friday, we've made some changes, check this thing out.

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. They have different use cases. In the room, physical event, you're probably using SMS. But not in the room, email might be an easier way.

Jeff: When's that going to be done? Next Tuesday. I'll put it in the queue.

Jeff: Now, we've been asked to build an AI image resizer. We do have some technology that will do it. 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 cruise ship is sailing with the Hawaiian Islands behind it. We told the AI to expand to our aspect ratio and fill in the background, and it did a fantastic job -- more ocean, more islands, looked really good.

Jeff: If we're looking at ways to improve the auction manager experience, guests don't see any of that stuff. They see the image. But it's a pain point for our direct customer. Any of our clients listening -- we are not ignoring you. We run our own events. We get it. We want to focus on guest pain points way before we focus on our pain points because we can tolerate a lot more. What features are going to ultimately lead to your ROI?

Jeff: For the mass image uploader with the zip file -- I took a client's 270 items with images, resized them all in 30 seconds with a bulk resizer, cleaned up the spreadsheet, uploaded all 270 items in about 10 minutes, and the images in about two minutes. Under 20 minutes, 270 items loaded with images, ready to roll.

Elise D: Resizing images is a big pain point for a lot of organizations.

Jeff: As long as your item code matches your file name, it works. There's a tip -- on a Mac, highlight your images, not the folder, right-click, say compress, and it creates your zip file. Apple doesn't call it "zip" -- they call it "compress."

Jeff: We're making cosmetic UI upgrades and changes to the web interfaces. The bidding controls are changing -- the max bid will become an option you turn on that says "auto bid for me" instead of a separate button. We're pulling the filters back out to the left-hand column instead of hiding them behind a button. It's going to look more like Amazon. You can filter by custom attributes -- square footage for real estate, price range with sliders, or a custom attribute like "hot buys."

Jeff: We're making performance improvements too. Always trying to make Handbid faster.

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

Jeff: So the way we built our guest list is every slot -- once you understand the concept of a guest in Handbid versus a bidder, you understand the power behind that. Most bidding systems don't differentiate. When you don't, you can't streamline the check-in process. Our goal is to drive your guests to check themselves in -- to get rid of the lines and the laptops.

Jeff: Air codes came from fairly large festivals where you had 2,000 to 4,000 people going. Not everybody is going to bid, but they're trying to get people in the door quickly. Say you're Pepsi and you sponsor for $20,000 and get 50 tickets. You're never going to know who your 50 people are. So we print 50 name badges -- every badge is a guest slot in our guest list. We scan them with our iPhone app, tell Handbid those slots belong to Pepsi, put them in the Pepsi box, and mail them. Those people download the Handbid app, scan their badge, put in their name, email, phone number, and they're in the door.

Jeff: I was thinking about the Chick-fil-A drive-through story. At some point in the past, they were rated one of the worst performing drive-throughs. They sat down and said, where is the biggest constraint? It was the menu board. People sit in line for 20 minutes and then read the menu when they get to the board. If someone spends an extra minute and a half reading, everybody behind them gets delayed by that amount.

Jeff: Think about how charity events used to work. You add more check-in lines, but the constraint is still getting all the guest's information -- phone number, fumbling for a credit card, coat checking, validating parking, finding packets. So what we started doing was tell clients to move parking validation over there, coat check somewhere else, name tags over there. Digitize or eliminate packets.

Jeff: Chick-fil-A's solution was to put people out with iPads taking orders. They did the same thing we do -- push the check-in agent out on an iPhone, away from the desk, as far into the audience as possible. Can I have 15 check-in agents instead of five? I could take a bidder in my auction, give them check-in rights and a stack of paddles, and with tap-to-pay on iPhones and Android, they don't need a credit card reader.

Jeff: We did an event a few years ago where the customer was not used to this. She's like, why is nobody sitting behind the table? I said, the table's in the way. Those guests were walking in the door and we were talking to them. We implemented Chick-fil-A check-in. The amount of cars per hour Chick-fil-A moves is like 5x the industry. People are less frustrated when they feel like they're making progress. You might see 40 cars in line, but every three seconds you're going up 10 feet.

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

Jeff: Same philosophy. When you remove the laptop constraint and push check-in out, the constraint shifts to what information is in the guest list. Why does the charity have to pre-populate that? Why can't the guest do it? Starbucks struggled with complicated orders. Now look at the Starbucks app -- you can do it all and save it.

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

Jeff: You know you've solved it when the constraint moves. The next stage is self-check-in. What if I made your app a paddle number? We could turn the app sideways and it shows 102. Or if you hold your phone over your head, we know you're paddle-raising.

Jeff: Not all of it is features. A lot of times people come to us asking when we're going to build something, and our point is -- what are you actually trying to solve? Sometimes a feature is warranted. Sometimes it's a process change. We were at AFP and announced tap-to-pay. A lot of people came up like, tell me what this is. Someone can pull up their Apple wallet, touch my phone, and I pull their credit card information and put it on their bidder profile. No reader, no swiper, no Bluetooth thing needed.

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.

Inga: That would actually be really great.

Jeff: Well, we better have some of this stuff built by the next quarter. Good luck on all of your fundraising out there. 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.