Mallory Erickson  02:08

Welcome, everyone, I am so excited to be here today with Gauri Manglik. Gauri, welcome to What The Fundraising. 

Gauri Manglik  02:14

Cool. Nice to be here. 

Mallory Erickson  02:16

I’m so excited to be having this conversation with you today. Why don’t we just kick it off with you telling everyone a little bit about your story? And what brings you to your current work?

Gauri Manglik  02:26

Yeah. So I came to the nonprofit Tech world for more of the product and Tech world. My two co-founders, Angela and Catherine, they were the nonprofit domain experts. And they saw this initial problem, the problems that we ended up tackling, but I had a privilege to work at Airbnb and I previously had my own Tech startup before that, that was not at all in the nonprofit space. But I got really into building really great easy to use products in general. And when I saw the landscape of Tech products that were out there, especially in the areas in which Angela and Kat were working in the role of grants, I was underwhelmed, and I thought we could definitely do better. And so I come more from that lens.

Mallory Erickson  03:05

Can we talk a little bit about lack overall of female leadership in the nonprofit Tech space in general, but you are some of the only female founders in the Tech space in the nonprofit sector as well. What have you noticed in terms of that element of it?

Gauri Manglik  03:23

Yeah, it’s been interesting. I mean, like you said, it’s in the nonprofit Tech space, it’s in the for profit Tech space, I would say it’s just in the Tech space. I think there’s a lot of reasons potentially for it. And I think I see it as an opportunity to hopefully have other people join me and build companies in the space and build companies in Tech in general. And most of our company is actually female. I think once you establish a culture of inclusivity, a lot of people will say it’s hard to hire women and things like that but I’ve not found that to be the case. I’m almost trying to like diversify and hire more men, because like, it’s kind of unbalanced in that way. But I think one of the big struggles that people tend to have as being a leader is fundraising, whether it’s potentially nonprofit or for profit, I definitely think that’s true. And I opted out of that. I was like, I’m going to build a profitable company that’s sustainable. I don’t need to play that game. Because I think the internet is now big enough, this market is big enough for us to just focus on growing sustainably. So that was another kind of approach I took.

Mallory Erickson  04:15

I love that. And you know, it’s interesting, of course, as I was saying it, I was like, well, female leadership in Tech, in general, is the same as what we’re seeing here. I think why it feels so starkly different in the nonprofit sector is because there’s so much female leadership in the sector, like 75% of the sector is women. And then you see all the sort of Tech that’s supporting the sector, which is primarily men, and it feels like this very sort of weird, dynamic. So anyways, it’s just something that I love about your company as well. But why don’t you tell everyone a little bit about Instrumentl?

Gauri Manglik  04:49

So Instrumentl is a platform that works with nonprofits as well as grant writing, consultants that work with nonprofits, helping them with everything end to end grants. So prospecting, research, tracking integrating your grant calendar, collaborating with your team and reporting and can all be done in one easy to use platform. And our overall goal is to help you be generally more successful with grants. And so what that looks like for us is we are able to get our customers to use or to send out almost 70% more applications while actually having them save time each week. I like to say that your life will just be easier as a person working in grants if you use Instrumental.

Mallory Erickson  05:22

That’s awesome. And I’m curious coming from the for profit world and then into the nonprofit sector. What have been some of your sort of biggest surprises in terms of challenges that you’ve seen in the sector, whether it be like adoption of new Tech, or just what’s some of the things that you’ve noticed, looking at those things in comparison to one another?

Gauri Manglik  05:43

One of the biggest things that I think is super interesting, or was super interesting for me, it was about a like previous iteration of Instrumentl, it was a big learning. And then we had to kind of change directions, because it was such a big learning. And that was, we initially thought why can’t we connect nonprofits and funders directly grant seekers and grant makers directly? 

Now it’s obvious in retrospect, maybe you’re like, oh, yeah, that’s definitely not going to work as someone in the space. But we were like, why is this happening? Like this whole grants process is super inefficient. We just connect them on a platform, nonprofits, like tell us about your projects. And then funder can actually just go and say, this is what I want to fund. That model has worked in a lot of other spaces. A lot of marketplaces have come out of that. And we were like going after this, we actually, this was the initial idea that we went through. Y Combinator with, which was a startup accelerator. We even got money for this, everybody in the for profit world was like, Yeah, that sounds like a great idea. And then we interviewed tons of funders, all different kinds of funders, and they’ve gone from zero to one like a couple of times. And the big part of that is customer validation, making sure that you’re working on something that truly is helpful. And I’ve never had such a negative reaction from customers, when you like, pitch them something like sometimes they’ll just be like, oh, like maybe, and then you take that as a No. But like, in this case, we would like pitch, this kind of marketplace idea to funders, and they were like, no I really wouldn’t use that. And I was like, Okay, well, why is that? What I learned was that this is like a philanthropic environment. Normally, when two people are in a marketplace, somebody’s making money. And the funders case, it’s what’s kind of different in this market is that a funder is giving away money. And so from an accountability perspective, and an incentive perspective, there’s really not much motivation for them to give money in like a better way or a more efficient way or more effective way.   

I’d like to say that probably no one’s gonna get fired at a funder if they give away their money ineffectively like that’s just like kind of not a concept, because we’re giving it out. So I think that those kinds of market dynamics were interesting to learn. And then the other thing I would say on the in terms of what we do today, which is offer a SaaS platform for one side of that the nonprofit’s that we see have a hair on fire problem that we can actually solve. There’s just like a higher bar of making sure your product is useful because a nonprofit doesn’t have the benefit of being able to like take a bet on you as a tool. So you actually have to meet a certain bar of usefulness and value. I think once you achieve that the nonprofit space is a great space to like build Technology for. But on the for profit side, if you’re like a sales leader at a Tech company, you’re kind of like hungry, looking for new tools to try to see if you can like optimize something or make something better. And I think that hunger that drive to like, potentially invest in something new is not quite there in the nonprofit sector.       

Mallory Erickson  08:11

Interesting. Okay, the piece you said about the other iteration of the Technology, I think that’s actually one of the most important stories. It’s really sad to me, because I think it is a really inefficiency in the sector, what you’re proposing to do, would make everyone’s money go so much farther, because all of these nonprofits would spend so much less time dealing with all of the different types of grant application processes and questions, and it would just make alignment so much easier so that people could find each other and it would probably actually increase some of the equity work if it was more of like an open source connector. So I’m not surprised, unfortunately but I think it also illuminates even when there is a solution available, sort of how sad it is that we don’t opt into it, when it ultimately increase the impact of our work in so many ways. I’m overwhelmed. I want that version too.

Gauri Manglik  09:12

Yeah, I think it’s really a matter of incentives. And like, maybe they’re changing, I think with more recent times with like COVID, needing to give away money more quickly. And the Black Lives Matter movement where there was more scrutiny on giving away more equitably. If there’s like kind of a public understanding of like how to hold funders accountable, or like at least be more aware of it, then that could be an incentive for a funder to say like, oh, I actually need to like opt into a platform like this. But incentive I feel like beyond just altruism, I feel like altruism is great, but if you’re actually getting someone to like adopt your platform, and maybe even buy something you need to have there be something else.

Mallory Erickson  09:43

Yeah. But it’s confusing. That’s sort of a confusing dynamic, in an activity that is positioned as being altruistic, the giving of money away. We’re trying to incentivize how to do that more efficiently, but it feels a little bit confusing because that activity was supposed to be altruistic. 

Gauri Manglik  10:05

But I guess that because it’s altruistic, then you have the funders that are just able to make up their own rules, because it’s kind of like, well, I’m giving it away so I get to decide.

Mallory Erickson  10:14

I think you’re bringing up a really interesting point, because I think maybe a lot of people would make the assumption that funders would want to give away their money in a way that was as easy as possible for nonprofits to plug in. And the fact that that isn’t true, I think is actually really an important conversation to have within the sector, because that has the opportunity to really change things, like having a platform like that. And I didn’t know that about the previous version of the software. And it’s something I’ve thought a lot about, too. I do a lot in corporate partnerships. And I’ve long thought about what would it look like for there to be sort of a SaaS platform that allowed companies to sort of put in what they’re looking for in terms of cross sector partnerships, nonprofits to put in the assets they sort of had available, where they were aligned on different things, and then let the system match you up. But I think what you’re telling me is there’s no market for it.

Gauri Manglik  11:08

Yeah. We released, there wasn’t in the way that we were thinking, this was a while ago, this was like in 2016, you know, so things have changed since then. And it’s always on our radar, because I feel like that would be such a great value to the space. It’s not even like, what’s the grants process? It’s like, you just cut it out. Like if you have all the information you need about the nonprofits programme, and like that can be like kind of publicly updated. And maybe you need some more additional pieces of information, but it feels like it could be like way more streamlined than to have starting from scratch with like every single proposal thing like totally new.

Mallory Erickson  11:34

Yes, it’s like a little bit Common App ish. And like with a SaaS component to it. I love it. What are some of the things that excite you the most about in terms of the nonprofits that are using Instrumentl? What do you guys consider, I mean, that 78% increase is obviously huge, but what are some of the other wins that get you excited about what you all are doing?

Gauri Manglik  11:55

I come from, like a product background. And the best thing for me is when people are really raving about your product, and what’s funny is we’re in the b2b space, or the nonprofit space, right? And these are tools that you need for work. So like, there’s kind of like a limit to like, how excited you can be about like a tool that you’re using for work. But we see people post reviews that are like, I’m obsessed with Instrumentl.  I’m like, really, you’re obsessed with your grant tool? That’s awesome. I can’t believe we built that. There’s all of the quantitative stuff that’s like really exciting. And we have great like promoter scores when people say they’ll refer us and that’s really great. It’s the emotiveness when people talk about Instrumentl that is really inspiring to me. Where if somebody asked you for a referral for a grant tool, you could say, well, yeah, here are the things that I evaluated. And here’s the pros and cons of both. That’s different than saying like use Instrumentl I love it, it’s awesome. Like, it totally saved me so much time. And there’s actually emotion to it. That’s the kind of bar that I think we hold ourselves to. I think is also from a business standpoint, that’s really important. Because when you build a tool that’s that useful or easy to use, you get like natural word of mouth, people are kind of spontaneously like, hey, let’s check this thing out. We’re doing that in Institutional fundraising space, I feel so much for us to build, we’re just really scratching the surface, I feel we are kind of really focused on the pre award world, we want to do more on the post award world. And then I think beyond grants in general, there’s a lot of opportunity, and also other customer segments that do grants beyond nonprofits that we don’t currently focus on like government agencies and schools. And so there’s a lot of other ways I want to bring our product and kind of customer focus to. 

Mallory Erickson  13:23

I’m curious, and I don’t even know the right way to ask this question. But how much time does someone who’s like a grant manager who’s using Instrumentl, how much are they inside the software, or what amount of time inside the software tells you like, they’re really using this to sort of optimize their whole workflow?

Gauri Manglik  13:41

Ideally, you’re using it every day. That’s like how we know that we’re truly like adding value, especially if you’re a dedicated person that’s doing grants, like you’re going to be looking at your grant calendar every single day, making updates, like that’s what you’re doing day in and day out. And so that’s our goal. And we do see people doing that. And those will be obviously the longer term customers that are actually like have integrated into their day to day.

Mallory Erickson  14:01

Yeah, I’m curious like now that you’re inside this market, inside the nonprofit market. What are some things that you’re excited to be seeing in this market as they relate to Instrumentl, Tech or just maybe even in a bigger way that you’ve noticed, even over the last five years?

Gauri Manglik  14:19

I remember when we first started, and we were looking at the tracking space. So this was 2015, 2016. There were like a couple of players. And we were like, it seems like there’s not a lot of people using a software tool to like track their grants. And initially, we were like, maybe that’s not that big of a problem, because we just didn’t see a lot of Technology options and a lot of nonprofits using that. It is a problem. And we just haven’t like gotten there yet from a Technology offering standpoint in the market. And so now I see people where they come to instrumental more and more and their own primary need is actually to use Technology to stay organized and streamlined. So I think that just speaks to like just more Technology being leveraged to help nonprofits save time. Especially at the beginning of Instrumentl, we would talk to people who would like show me their like physical grant calendar. They’d be like, here’s my whiteboard, here’s how I’m keeping track of things like all the time, and that still happens. If you’re the one person like maybe that’s okay and like we do see that happening less and less. The other thing that I see, in terms of trends that’s exciting is I feel like overall, there’s just has continued to be an increase in foundation funding and like overall institutional funding. So it seems like there’s a lot of promise here for nonprofits that haven’t tried this or interested in doubling down the opportunities out there. Even though funders are not necessarily like adopting this magical marketplace that we’ve built. I do see the conversation starting to move in terms of more of a having a more transparent process, in terms of simplified application forms, this idea of like, trust based philanthropy, I think is definitely way more prevalent than it was even five years ago. So that’s been a cool change.

Mallory Erickson  15:46

Yeah, I agree. I double click on all those things. What’s the average size of a nonprofit that uses Instrumentl or do you see a big range because you occupy a pretty unique space?

Gauri Manglik  15:57

It’s pretty broad. And I think it just kind of mirrors the distribution of nonprofits that actually exist. We have folks that are a couple 100,000k in budget that are really just getting started with grants and it kind of make sense for them. And then we have universities and hospital systems with billion dollar budgets also using Instrumentl. We don’t work the teeniest tiniest nonprofits and if they’re regularly applying for grants, we will be happy to help them. But we find that sometimes, in the past, when we didn’t have that restriction, we’d have people that actually weren’t quite ready, Grant ready. And they’re almost like wasting money on Instrumentl and we’re like, don’t even use us right now. There’s actually potentially other channels that will help you be more successful.

Mallory Erickson  16:31

I love that. I really love that. I mean, I think optimizing making sure that the folks who come in are ready to be using it and at the right phase is really great and a really unique thing to hear in this space. I talk a lot to fundraisers about how not All money is created equal. And you don’t want to take even funding that isn’t aligned with what you’re trying to do, or whether your mission or value aligned, because it ultimately it usually ends up costing you a lot more than just not having taken the money in the first place. And I think you’re speaking to some of that same piece, which is just that the alignment and the readiness really matters so that everyone ultimately has a good experience, whether it’s inside a Tech platform or sponsoring of fundraisers Gala, and just being able to say this is a fit and this isn’t a fit. Even hearing, this isn’t a fit yet helps people know when they are ready, which is such a gift, I think to give people and something we don’t see enough in the Tech space because folks want to get people on their software and then it wasn’t the right fit. And it wasted a lot of the nonprofits time, energy money. And it certainly increases the hurdle each and every time they go to adopt a new Tech because they got their board all excited about this thing that wasn’t necessarily right, that they got sold really well on it. And then it didn’t work out. And then it creates a new hurdle for every adoption. So I really appreciate that piece of how you guys frame things up for folks.

Gauri Manglik  18:05

Yeah, I think it’s important for us. And it should be I think important for everybody selling anything to anybody is that the people that use your product or service are going to actually see that you meet their desired outcome. And if they’re just not going to be able to no matter how great your Technology is, then you’re actually not really serving them.

Mallory Erickson  18:21

Yeah, do you have any sort of advice for new grant writers or fundraisers in general, based on what you see across the landscape?

Gauri Manglik  18:30

In terms of advice, just broadly, with folks that maybe are getting started with grants is that who I’m talking to. So first, make sure you’re grant ready, obviously, get your 501c -3 status and all that. That’s kind of like a baseline, but you actually want to go a step further into having some sort of way that you can demonstrate some sort of track record of success. The reason is, you’re not going after individuals, right, you’re going after institutions who are giving away larger dollar amounts, which naturally makes them a bit more risk averse. You’ll want to invest that time upfront to saying I’m able to show some sort of success with my programs, some initial traction before wasting your precious time on like pursuing these larger funders. I think the other thing that I would say is again, to like make sure that you’re gonna go after grants, when you are going to be able to come from a place of really understanding that the ROI can be longer term. 

And that’s the other reason that like the teeniest of nonprofits, they maybe can like submit a grant or two, but like, you really need a process, I’d like to say you want to give it at least two years with the understanding that you are like ready and like you have some, you want to get to a place where you feel like you’re a no brainer for funders to fund you. You still want to give yourself some time to like submit applications, get feedback, learn, continue to apply, build relationships. And so for that reason until you get to that point, it may not be, grants might not make sense, right? You might want to invest in like that gala or some other sort of thing that caters to individuals because we get a faster feedback cycle, faster ROI. The last thing I’d say is my tip for fundraising in general and that’s just about more of like a mindset thing. There’s a lot of reasons that nonprofits are in this position, and it’s not nonprofits fault, it’s the system, its funders, it’s a lot of things. But it can be easy to fall into this trap of feeling this like power dynamic with the funder, and really is this unequal power dynamic. But as much as possible, you can see if you can, like flip that to realize that there are hundreds of billions of dollars going away from funders and donors, and like you’re actually solving a problem for them, they’re not going to be the ones like actually working at your nonprofit, they’re not doing that. So they’re choosing you to like actually have the outcome happen that they want to see in the world. And they’re going to give their money to the organization that they think is like actually solving an important issue and able to tell their story well, but if you can meet those things, then you’re actually solving a problem as opposed to feeling like you need to request or like beg or whatever.

Mallory Erickson  20:43

I love that. That is totally how we talk about fundraising here. So I really, I really appreciate that. What’s a question that I haven’t asked you that you wish I would ask?

Gauri Manglik  20:54

I guess it just goes back to like other advice. I guess, like one other thing I could share around like concentrating your efforts. I think that one of the other things that I don’t see as much of in this space is rigor in terms of really understanding your metrics, and like being able to work backwards from them. And this applies to like individuals as well as, you know, institutional fundraising, like if your goal is to raise $500,000, from grants over the next two years. I want to just start from the beginning, think about like making some assumptions about what your success rates might look like, based on that, how many applications you might want to write, how long would that take, and then work the actual work plan out for the next two years to actually get there. And then I think similarly, if your goal is just to raise more from individuals, what does that actually mean? Can you break that down into like an almost like a business formula, where it might be like, leads in your CRM times outreach times conversion to donate at a very high level. And then if you look at all of those conversion, and then maybe multiplied by, like the amount that people donate. And if you look at all of that, okay, this is like what actually causes my revenue to grow, like this formula. How have these levers changed over time? Which of these levers do I actually think I have some ideas for how to move, and then I’m just going to like focus on that. Maybe it’s all about taking the current funnel and just focusing on increasing the donation amount, or maybe it’s all about just getting more leads into the database. Or maybe it’s like a combination, but I feel like kind of working backwards and like by focusing on the KPIs is something that I would love to see more nonprofits do.

Mallory Erickson  22:21

I love this, and people who are inside my programme are going to think that I planted you to that exact thing, which I did not you guys, but we do this thing inside power partners called Funder Mapping, which ultimately essentially builds them kind of an Excel sheet with a number of different formulas that does a lot of exactly what you just said, which I think is so true. Like, I will have organizations come to me and saying, here’s my goal for the year, I’ve no idea how I’m gonna get there. And once they start to fill this out, it’s like not that far away. How could you tweak a few of these things to reach that goal? And it’s just like, Oh, I totally, totally agree. It’s a huge missing piece of the puzzle. So tell everyone where they can learn more about Instrumentl, where they should head, what their next steps should be, if they’re interested in finding out more for their organization. 

Gauri Manglik  23:11

Yeah, we have a 14 day free trial. So you can head to our website, it’s www.instrumentl.com spelled instrument, and then the letter l.com. And we have a 14 day trial. So you can try us totally for free, no credit card required. So at the very least, you’ll come away with some juicy grant opportunities to potentially pursue but best case scenario, you’ll think it’s worthwhile for like a long term, and you can kind of invest in that platform to make that positive ROI and feature. We do have a discount code for your listeners, Mallory50. So if you do choose to subscribe on a monthly or annual basis, you can have a little coupon.

Mallory Erickson  23:42

Awesome. Thank you. And thank you so much for this conversation today. It was wonderful talking to you and getting to know you and learn more about your incredible platform.

Gauri Manglik  23:51

Cool. Thanks for having me.

Mallory Erickson  23:58

I really love this conversation with Gauri. I found it very interesting and frustrating to learn about the journey their company had when they were trying to build Tech that would connect funders with nonprofits more easily. 

I hope times have changed here and there might be a greater opportunity for this in the future. But what an incredible lesson in listening, pivoting and staying committed to providing something of value inside the sector. Here’s some of my other takeaways from this episode. Number one, there is missed potential in our sector because of the resistance to creating a streamlined marketplace space for nonprofits to promote their assets requirements, and track record, a place where funders could shop for partners that would make a good match with their philanthropic goals. 

Number two, fundraising tools are a fantastic way to optimize, but not if your organization isn’t quite ready to ramp up or is unclear about which funders are in alignment with your goals. I loved hearing the way that Gauri wants to help nonprofits know when Instrumentl is right for them and when it’s not. Number three metrics aren’t robust enough in the nonprofit space. And we need to figure this out because leveraging a more data driven approach can yield payoffs in terms of conversion rates and help us identify the levers to pull for impact. 

Okay, there are so many more takeaways and tips inside this episode, and recommendations for references that Gauri has provided for our show notes as well. So head on over to www.malloryerickson.com/podcast to grab the full show notes and tons of resources now, you’ll also find more information there about Gauri and instrumental. Thank you for spending this time with us today. If you enjoyed this episode, we would love it if you would give it a rating and review and share it with a friend. I am so grateful for all of my listeners and the good hard work you’re doing to make our world a better place. And if you miss me between episodes, stop by and say hello on Instagram, under @whatthefundraising_. 

Have a great day and I’ll see you next week.