On this episode of the RKD Group: Thinkers podcast, we’re excited to sit down with Woodrow Rosenbaum, a prominent leader in the philanthropic sector and the Data and Insights Lead for GivingTuesday. Woodrow has been instrumental in shaping the global GivingTuesday movement, leading groundbreaking research and analysis on individual giving behaviors. His insights have significantly influenced how organizations engage with donors, transforming passive participants into active ambassadors for their causes.
In this conversation, Woodrow Rosenbaum shares his unexpected journey from aspiring lawyer to a key figure in the philanthropic sector, particularly through the lens of GivingTuesday and the Data Commons initiative. He discusses the evolution of GivingTuesday, the insights gained from analyzing generosity data, and the importance of understanding donor behaviors.
Justin McCord
Woodrow, in your wildest dreams as a kid, did you think, like, was this ever on the radar, what you're doing?
Woodrow Rosenbaum
No, I was gonna be a lawyer.
Ronnie Richard
As a kid, you knew that?
Woodrow Rosenbaum
Yeah, yeah, pretty much. And I didn't do that. Yeah, no, I mean, this is not what I had ever expected to be doing. It was a total accident.
Ronnie Richard
Do you just like to argue a lot?
Justin McCord
That actually makes a lot of sense. When you launched With Intent, which is an agency, and you and I've had, like, agency conversations and speak agency to each other, did you think then, like at what point did you realize this? Like, I could maybe fall into this. How did that, how in the world did that happen? How did you get into GivingTuesday?
Woodrow Rosenbaum
I'm, I guess, ostensibly, it looks like a total departure, but I mean, when … think about what we're trying to do; we're trying to understand what messages and interventions are going to change behaviors, either of people or of professionals in an industry. And that's, I mean, that's what marketing is. And what I started as an agency was a very data- and analytics- driven organization. So in that sense, just, it made sense, and the sort of progression from one, from that sort of commercial world into this, just, you know, every step of the way, I was like, we're just doing this now. And one thing led to another, and it all made sense. So I don't feel like the job is that different from what I was doing.
Justin McCord
Does the data look different in some way, you know, working on Guinness as a client, right, versus working on giving as a client in a sense.
Woodrow Rosenbaum
Yeah. Sure, but I would say that the similarities are greater than the differences. The bigger differences are in the availability of the data. I mean, in some ways we're looking at some, you can argue that some of the behaviors and things that we're interested in are a little bit less, a little bit more difficult to quantify, right? Like certain generosity behaviors are a little less fungible than others, right? And when your KPI and your metrics are financial only, it makes it a little bit easier.
But that was never really the case anyway. Like, we cared about what people's values were. In the commercial sector, that's really important to understand the kind of whole person if you want to appeal to them, particularly the kind of stuff that I was doing, which was really very, very strategic. It was about positioning brands to deal with big challenges or opportunities that, yeah, we needed the sales data, but we―and the loyalty data, and the retention, and all of those things, and there are direct correlations between that and things like donation transactions―but we're also, we were interested in how people perceive themselves and the impact that they were interested in having in the world. It wasn't that ...
Justin McCord
Okay.
Woodrow Rosenbaum
… it's not that different.
Ronnie Richard
Woodrow, I want to jump back in the time machine a little bit. You referenced thinking that you might be a lawyer when you were younger, and you started the agency With Intent that we just were talking about. Talk us through, what was the story from, maybe, college to getting that started. How did that journey go for you?
Woodrow Rosenbaum
So, I started the agency in ’98, and the work that … and I had come out of working in the entertainment industry mostly, including, like, producing, performing arts. And the agency really started as, like, our biggest clients, what we were doing was essentially brand events, which were getting really big at the time. And we tried to differentiate ourselves by saying, look, we're not just going to put on an event that's cool. We're going to analyze what kind of interaction is going to move the needle for your brand. How do you use these things to actually get a job done? And a lot of it is like, highly nuanced, really complex.
And that was good for us because it meant that we were in an industry that was booming where these clients knew they were gonna be spending a lot of money. We said, great, well, you'll spend a lot of money, and we'll give you a better return. That industry kind of collapsed. And that was a period where we saw the best growth because there kind of was, in the marketing world, was like this new crop of CFOs who came in, and they started saying, look, you can't just keep throwing things against the wall and not knowing what's actually driving sales or not. The classic, “50% of my marketing is working, and I don't know which 50%.” Like, the CFOs were like, we don't have patience for that anymore. And what was a growing industry really collapsed.
Justin McCord
Right. Right.
Ronnie Richard
What time frame are we talking? Is it still?
Woodrow Rosenbaum
So, that would have been around 2005, something like that, 2006, where suddenly these brands were spending a lot less money. For us, that was a growth opportunity because we had already established that we're showing you how these things deliver a return on investment. In fact, we had a client that was so skeptical of our results that they had Deloitte audit us for two years. Deloitte came back and said, yeah. And they came back and said that the program was delivering even better than we said because they found all kinds of other kind of downstream benefit from what we were doing. That was a period of really rapid growth for us, because we were a small boutique agency. And now we had a, we were getting a …
Justin McCord
Two years? Cool.
Woodrow Rosenbaum
… bigger piece of a shrinking pie. But that pie was still way bigger than we could eat.
And so that, and then, you know, that, that was also around the time when digital marketing was becoming a part of everybody's strategy that gave us more data and more opportunities for access to good data. And we were already set up to use it. So we advised on digital strategies. Didn't execute on them very much. But we used that as a way to understand what do people care about? What do they get excited about? What is going to make a difference for them? How do we align that with these brands and design interventions around that?
The rest of that journey, I mean, what, what was interesting there is that I could tell, like, we'd grown way too much. You know, monthly payroll had 3,000 people, like it was, it would … and a lot of that work was highly commoditized. We were kind of selling, we were selling marketing events, but our real value-add was on the strategy side. And anyway, the, the short story is that when the financial crisis hit, it really, I mean, it hit our industry really hard, and we thought we'd be okay because beverage, alcohol … and it was not at all. And it really required a rethink.
And that's when it's like, you know, what, what we're actually selling here is our strategic thinking around how to deliver, not the delivery. And so, we really started to focus on that. And that's where we were when I encountered a foundation in Canada that had a mission to get Canadians to be more philanthropic and, I was doing that as kind of a side gig with The Giving 3 Foundation, which was really eye-opening look into the nonprofit sector that I knew almost nothing about at that point. And then GivingTuesday was launched, and we had been testing interventions. We were like, wow, we should test that in Canada and see how it goes. It went well.
Ronnie Richard
Pretty cool.
Justin McCord
You said you fell into it, right? I mean, when did the Data Commons idea, when did you and Asha, like, when did that start to come about as a part of the GivingTuesday movement?
Woodrow Rosenbaum
So, that would have been about, I guess, I mean, I would say 2016 was kind of the moment where we were … I was still, as a sort of side project, working with The Giving 3 Foundation, and GivingTuesday was now in its fourth year there. And I was connected to the team, then Asha and Henry, who were running GivingTuesday as a program of the Belfer Center for Innovation there, and to the other, now growing, group of global leaders who were coming on who, I think there were maybe seven at that point, something like that. And we had this challenge of like, do we measure what's going on? And how do we ... how do we get a better idea of what the online donations are in the U.S. on the day, just as some kind of benchmark for the growth of the movement? And that was when I was kind of exposed to the lack of data in the sector and that we weren't gonna be able to just go and get it somewhere. We were gonna have to build some mechanism and a collaboration in order to do it.
And I think that, partly, I was in the community, and I spoke corporate, so it was like, great, Woodrow can go and talk to these companies and try to get their data. And it wasn't ever intended at that point to be anything other than, we're looking to benchmark. But we ended up with a data asset on online giving that no one had ever collected before. At the time, just for a single day, but it had really high fidelity. And the Gates Foundation was interested in that. And I recognized that there was, well, I mean, Asha and I really together talking through like, what can we learn from this? We can learn more about the day than just volume. And so, the Gates Foundation gave us a grant, partnered us with DataKind to do a hackathon data dive, they call it. And they brought 300 data scientists together. We spent months preparing for this with a small team of theirs and then 300 data scientists for a weekend crunching these numbers to understand. And that was where one of the … that was the next, kind of, real turning point because one of the questions we were getting asked was, “Does Giving Tuesday just cannibalize the rest of the year?”
And that question actually came with an assumption. That was my first, like, wow, I'm really surprised. Maybe this market does operate a lot differently to the markets I'm used to, the commercial markets, because all these professionals in the sector are telling me it's not possible to get people to give more. They cannot, people will not give more. Someone gives a dollar today, they have a dollar less to give tomorrow. That is an immutable law of physics.
But the companies were telling me something different. They're like, we don't see evidence of that. And so we were like, well, look, if we're gonna analyze that, we need longitudinal data. So we went back to these data providers who'd given us a single day and said, look, we wanna answer this question. So that was useful because, A, we could validate―well, DataKind could validate: This intervention generates a lift. The lift is growing. It's not cannibalizing the rest of the year. It's a net increase, which was important for the movement. It's also really profound for a sector that believed that was impossible.
Justin McCord
Yeah. Yeah.
Woodrow Rosenbaum
So that was important, but then the rest, and this is where it started becoming a Data Commons because now we had data that didn't just tell us about a day, but it could tell you about a different day, or another trend or donor behaviors. That's where the … now that was really the point where it became, now we can understand giving at the time, even, I mean, we're still just talking about donations, but we can start looking at those patterns in a lot more depth. We partnered with the Fundraising Effectiveness Project, which we have since brought in-house. And that's where we were able to start really turning this into not just what is happening on GivingTuesday, but what is the state of giving? And then it was just new data sets, new projects, new initiatives kept getting added to that to get a broader and broader and higher and higher fidelity view of generosity holistically.
Justin McCord
It's such an interesting snowball of work, and it still sits in the shadow of a single day. How do you feel about that?
Woodrow Rosenbaum
You know, I think about a year ago―and this doesn't just apply to the Data Commons work―like, there's so much that goes on in this movement every day, thousands of people working every day. The sun never sets on GivingTuesday. They used to say that about the British Empire up until, I guess, this week, Mauritius got given back, and now the sun has finally set on the British Empire. That ... I used to worry about that, or I spent a bit of time worrying about that. I think we all did. We're like, you know, there's so much more to this. We need to think about, we need people to understand the breadth of this movement and all of the ways that people are using it to make change in communities around the world, the capacity building that we're doing, the learning, the Data Commons, all that stuff.
I'm less worried about that now. I mean, for one thing, because those things are becoming better known. And also because, at the end of the day, what we have with the day is this really clear call to action, a very simple concept to understand as the tip of the iceberg. That's a really low barrier to entry for folks. And from there, we can expose our different constituencies and stakeholders to different components of the breadth of the movement.
And there's pros and cons to that, kind of from a marketing and brand perspective. But at the end of the day, that brand is really powerful. And if we can get people in, we have the means to shepherd them through these other opportunities. So, for every time I'm like, boy, I really wish somebody knew all the stuff this Data Commons is doing, we have people using our stuff. We see our message out there all the time, carried by other people, even if they don't know that was our message. And we get this, we get to have that moment over and over and over again where people go, my God, I had no idea you were doing all of that. That is so cool.
Ronnie Richard
In all of the different ways that you've been able to dissect giving and generosity through the Data Commons, what's been the most surprising finding to you, the most unexpected thing that you've come across?
Woodrow Rosenbaum
Unexpected by me or others? I mean you know, I should, I mean, stepping back and ‘cause partly this comes into how we built the thing. We did, we were pretty intentional about examining how are we going to structure this effectively? And we did an analysis of how people had tried to solve these data problems in the sector in the past. And it seemed pretty clear that there are, like, three best practices, three things that are like the right way to do it. And they always didn't work. And in looking at that, it was a bit eye-opening for me because on the one hand, I'm coming from an environment where we have really good access to data about the marketplace and the actors within it. That ecosystem is well measured. And I took it for granted. I didn't really think about why, why do we have that in the commercial sector? And in analyzing the ways it kept failing in the social sector was really kind of revelatory for me, because I was like, yeah, right, the incentives don't exist here, and they exist in this other environment. I hadn't thought about the incentives in the other environment because we just had it, we just used it. So that was certainly, I mean, I don't know about surprising, but certainly eye-opening.
I also―and this is where there are some, I mean, there are some differences in nuance between, like, commercial marketing and, and nonprofit social sector engagement, or maybe it's just, it has to do with the particular state of this industry. But I expected, you know, if you do an intervention that drives enormous acquisition, customer acquisition, in the commercial sector, by and large, on average, you're going to find that those interventions that drive a huge volume of acquisition don't have great retention numbers. It’s kind of, it's usually some kind of a trade off because your engagement is a little less deep, and you're kind of trading one for the other, but everybody wants the big acquisition opportunity. You can worry about the, you know, the retention later because you get more numbers in.
And I know, depending on what the strategy is for your brand or your product, that might alter, but that's generally the case. And so, I had expected to see the same thing with GivingTuesday. So we see GivingTuesday. I mean, it was clearly a big acquisition opportunity early by the time we were able to actually measure what that looked like. It's the biggest day. It's the biggest acquisition day in the nonprofit sector every year by quite a lot. Like, it is the best day to acquire donors or the day that acquires the most donors. So I expected to see lower retention rates, and I was surprised to see higher retention rates. And it was really, that was something, I mean, I try to interrogate the good news regardless, but that was one where it was like, is that right? Can that really be right? So that was surprising to me.
And then …
Justin McCord
Right.
Woodrow Rosenbaum
… more broadly, I think that in our work, looking not just at donations, but I know that people in the sector are surprised that we don't see signs of competition between types of recipient or types of giving opportunities; that we don't see that there is kind of a zero-sum game. There is abundance and not scarcity. So, I know that's surprising to a lot of people in the sector. We have lot more agency over our outcomes than has been believed for a long time.
Justin McCord
We tend to still act in scarcity more often than we should, even though you and others have shown that there is abundance.
Woodrow Rosenbaum
Well … and I think the problem is that when you assume scarcity and your approaches end up kind of reinforcing that outcome. And it's one of the things I think, as an intervention, GivingTuesday's really been successful at is it's kind of inspired nonprofit professionals to try something out, and to just be experimental, and just get out there and do something and sort of …
Justin McCord
Yeah.
Woodrow Rosenbaum
… and work against that inertia that we see in the sector so much. But it's not just GivingTuesday. I, we see lots of indications. The data is really clear. We're leaving donors, we're leaving supporters on the table. We're not tapping into everything that's available. And if you do assume abundance, you're going to do things differently. And we definitely need different.
Justin McCord
You, we were, we had a conversation with Sherri, and―I don't know, two months ago, somewhere in that neighborhood―I asked him something that has become, like, this ongoing dialogue that he and I have. And I want to ask you a very similar version because like, Woodrow, you travel more than a fair amount. Like, you index very high on being places and speaking and whatnot. You also have a family at home. How do you describe what you do to your fam?
Woodrow Rosenbaum
My family. I mean, my family’ll tell you that they don't really know what I do. So I apparently haven't done a great job of that. Yeah.
Justin McCord
Alright, alright. You're amongst friends. Yes. Yes, to all of that.
Ronnie Richard
Same.
Woodrow Rosenbaum
Yeah. Yeah. So I mean, I guess the … what I really … because I tend to default to not talking about that. I talk more about like, what is the GivingTuesday Data Commons doing? What is the movement doing? What are we, right? Like, the movement is, is there to, to bring generosity as a core value and component of our how we build societies and communities. The, the Data Commons is about understanding all forms of generosity, their impacts and drivers, how people bring themselves to make change so that we can accomplish that mission. So, I mean, that's what the Data Commons does. I mean, sometimes I feel like mostly what I do is try to fundraise for the Data Commons.
Justin McCord
Alright, that's fair. That's fair. That's probably a fair answer to say to the fam, right?
Woodrow Rosenbaum
Yeah, I mean, you … when I'm traveling, I guess there's two things I'm trying to do really. Like, one is enable our vast network in this movement to be part of building data-informed systems. And partly what I'm doing is trying to instill an understanding of what we are learning and what that means about what we need to change about our practices.
Ronnie Richard
What do you do in your spare time, Woodrow? What little you have? What do you do for fun?
Woodrow Rosenbaum
Well, ironically, perhaps, I like to travel. I do a lot of travel, but I don't get to stay anywhere and really absorb a place. So we took a family vacation to Greece this summer. It was really great.
Ronnie Richard
How many countries do think you've been to?
Woodrow Rosenbaum
Good question. I have a list here, 30, 40? Let's see what my stats say. Since 2018 ...
Justin McCord
Wait, you really have data on the number of …
Ronnie Richard
He has a stat list?
Woodrow Rosenbaum
Yes, I do. Since 2018, I've been to 41 countries. So, I don't know before that, maybe some others that I hadn't … but, yeah, so ...
Ronnie Richard
Every continent but Antarctica? Have you hit them all? Wow, it's impressive. And that's just since 2018. Wow. Okay, Justin mentioned that you were nearly an Olympian, but he's given me no context whatsoever on that.
Woodrow Rosenbaum
What a jerk.
Justin McCord
I'm nearly a jerk. Just like you were nearly an Olympian, I'm nearly a jerk.
Ronnie Richard
Nearly. He's right there, but not quite. So now I need to know what that means.
Woodrow Rosenbaum
Yeah. Yeah, so what he's getting at is, I wanted to be an Olympic sailor, and there were only two things that prevented me: The class that I really wanted to compete in, I was underweight. I really needed to be at least 40 pounds heavier, and I really, I just couldn't put it on. I was a scrawny, scrawny kid.
So that was, kind of, the first obstacle. And the second obstacle was I wasn't good enough. But apart, yeah, but no, no, really. Yeah, I really wasn't at all good enough. So apart from just being too light and not having the skill, I could have made the Olympics.
Justin McCord
I don't buy that part.
Ronnie Richard
Does that just affect the balance or something, like, the weight? I didn't realize that was ...
Woodrow Rosenbaum
So yeah, so the boats, I mean the boats I was wanting to race in, needed to, yeah, they were, it was dinghy racing. You needed to be heavy enough to keep those boats flat. And the truth is, probably the second factor, the lack of skill, was probably the more important factor, and still, only two things I needed to fix.
Ronnie Richard
Do you still sail?
Justin McCord
I protest the second one. I feel, like, I do.
Woodrow Rosenbaum
No, I was definitely the worst sailor in my cohort.
Like, there's like, empirically, like, I know I have the results. I did sail with one guy, club races. I won every club race. I did always win every club race, but that was not me. That was this guy that I was his four-deck crew. I didn't sail every single race, but he sailed twice a week, club races, and they gave the trophy at the end of the year to whoever finished second after Peter because he just won every single thing all the time, and it didn't matter who was in his boat. I was basically a passenger, but in my class where I was actually training, I was, yeah, like, empirically the worst.
Justin McCord
I don't know why, Woodrow, just like, I think I learned about that while we were sitting someplace watching some of the Olympics this past summer. And it just adds this dimension to Woodrow that is ...
Woodrow Rosenbaum
Mm-hmm.
Justin McCord
Totally not surprising. I don't know, it's like, yeah, yeah, I can buy that. I can absolutely see ...
Woodrow Rosenbaum
That I was the worst. Yeah. I mean, I, yeah. I, I really enjoy sailing. I don't get to sail very often anymore. It's a time-consuming hobby. But yeah, every once in while I get out on the water. I love it.
Justin McCord
About that, you were nearly the worst and nearly an Olympian.
Ronnie Richard
You …
Justin McCord
So where are you off to next in your May travels? Like, what is the last, this is a crazy time of year for GivingTuesday. What does this look like in terms of the last two and a half months?
Woodrow Rosenbaum
So we're, well, tomorrow I head to Nairobi. We are convening our African leaders for a summit just outside the city. And so that's, that is gonna take most of next week. And then when I'm back, there isn't a lot left of travel. I mean, there's a couple of trips to D.C. and there's things to do here or there, but it will, the travel will actually slow down a bit until the new year. I mean, for me, I will still have going places, you know, I'll still be out there, and, well, I'll be in New York a couple of times, but it's all sort of short trips like that.
Justin McCord
Yeah. What is the actual day? What does GivingTuesday look like in Woodrow's world?
Woodrow Rosenbaum
So, the day is pretty quiet. The day itself, you know, kind of tracking what's going on on the day. You want to make sure that our tech stack is still there and operating. But the fact is, like, it's the day after that it really gets hectic because we're trying to get some sense of how many people did how much stuff the day before. And that requires a lot of data collection, and every year there are scrambles and challenges and―usually on provider ends―that we have to help navigate or deal with broken data. And we get it, sometimes, very ... in a really nice, clean format. And sometimes it's a mess, and there's a lot of spending time on the phone, and it's all our whole team. And then, also, we have to do the QA and the deduplication. And so that day is the worst day of the year.
Justin McCord
Day after.
Woodrow Rosenbaum
The day after GivingTuesday is terrible. Yeah, exactly. It's pretty rough. And we do get better at it, but if it’s like every year, it is additional challenges. So we'll see.
Justin McCord
Terrible Wednesday. Yeah.
Well, I think it goes without saying that we're looking for an awesome end of the year and for all of the nonprofits that we work with and, obviously, all of the community leaders. And you know, you may have fallen into this, but let me tell you that we are such a better sector because of you and the work of you and your team. And so, we're just so appreciative of you, and of our collaboration together, and all those things. So, just want you to hear that, especially as you prepare for a long plane ride, to know that you are appreciated, even though you didn't make the Olympics.
Woodrow Rosenbaum
Yeah. Well, thanks, Justin. I mean, that really does mean a lot, coming from you, in particular. We really respect your work, and I'm really fortunate that my team is exceptional. We made an intentional decision to engage people not just for their skill set, but for their curiosity. You know, its that Wednesday after GivingTuesday is a nightmare, but it is so much better that it was before we built this team, and it does get a little better every year, and partly because we've got really, really smart, interesting and interested people working for this, working on the Data Commons now. I can't tell you how inspiring that is every day. The, we ship a lot, and that's because of them. I'm just the guy who's like, can we ship some more, please? They're the ones that have to figure it out.
Justin McCord
Awesome. Well, safe travels, friend, and we can't wait to talk to you again soon.
Woodrow Rosenbaum
Yeah, pleasure. I look forward to running into you in person again. Thanks guys.
Group Thinkers is a production of RKD Group. For more information, including how you can partner with RKD to accelerate growth for your fundraising and nonprofit marketing needs, visit rkdgroup.com.