Tag Archives: board training

Nonprofit Radio for March 22, 2021: Build Your Best Better Board

My Guest:

Gene Takagi

Gene Takagi: Build Your Best Better Board
Gene Takagi returns! He’s got strategies to help you build the diverse, effective, thoughtful, appropriately-sized, well-trained board you deserve. He’s our legal contributor and managing attorney of NEO, the Nonprofit and Exempt Organizations law group.

 

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[00:01:39.64] spk_0:
Hello and welcome to tony-martignetti non profit radio big non profit ideas for the other 95%. I’m your aptly named host of your favorite abdominal podcast, and I’m glad you’re with me. I’d come down with dyskinesia if you gave me a taste of the idea that you missed this week’s show. Build your best Better board. Jeanne Takagi returns. He’s got strategies to help you build the diverse, effective, thoughtful, appropriately sized, well trained board you deserve. He’s our legal contributor and managing attorney of Neo, the nonprofit and exempt organizations law group tony State, too. Podcast pleasantries and planned giving accelerator. We’re sponsored by turn to communications, PR and content for nonprofits. Your story is their mission. Turn hyphen two dot c o. It’s my pleasure to welcome back, as it always is. Jeanne Takagi. These are legal contributor, managing attorney of Neo, the nonprofit and Exempt Organizations Law Group in San Francisco. He edits the enormously popular nonprofit law blog dot com and is a part time lecturer at Columbia University. The firm is that neo law group dot com, and he’s at G Attack Gene, welcome back to the show.

[00:01:41.84] spk_1:
Thanks, Tony. It’s great to be back. How are you?

[00:01:59.94] spk_0:
I’m doing well. Thank you. It’s always a pleasure. Many, many years. It’s a pleasure. Each time you’re you are teaching us what’s important, what we need to keep centered. What’s, uh where are ships Should all be facing in the same direction. So what direction is that? You keep us. Keep us on the straight path. I appreciate it. I know our listeners due to thank you.

[00:02:06.34] spk_1:
Thank you, Tony.

[00:02:23.84] spk_0:
Let’s get started with your building. Your best. Better board. We’re not We’re not gonna We’re not going to settle on nonprofit radio for your lackluster better board. We want your best, Better board. And I think the place to start is with board roles. So what are we expecting our board members to do?

[00:02:52.74] spk_1:
Yeah, I love this conversation, tony. It’s actually one of my favorites. And yeah, it was probably Gosh, it was early on, I think when we first talked a little bit about boards getting sort of distracted from doing the financial oversight and forgetting to do some of the other things that boards are supposed to do. Um, and, you know, part of what we talked about could have been, like 78 years ago was like, Hey, somebody should be over overseeing. You know, whether the program’s doing Are they having an impact or not? Are they really furthering your mission in the way that you want them to?

[00:03:11.94] spk_0:
You know, I have to remind you you and I did a mock board meeting one time, and either you threw me off the border. I walked out. I forget

[00:03:15.22] spk_1:
which

[00:03:30.04] spk_0:
back in the old studio was many years ago. I don’t know what we’re talking about. Something board related, obviously. But, uh, yeah, either I got booted off or I walked out and quit. I forget, uh, we’re trying to avoid that. We’re trying to avoid that in our best better board,

[00:03:32.54] spk_1:
but we’re definitely going to try to approach any of these things with extreme tact

[00:03:37.84] spk_0:
I lack, which I often lack. I probably walked out. I probably quit or something.

[00:06:01.14] spk_1:
Yeah, just just overall, the same financial diligence is great. So take a look at the financials, make sure you understand them and make sure that the organization is able to pay off its debts that they become do that you’re not sort of bleeding money and just managing your financial assets. But non profits exist more than to produce a financial bottom line, of course. So you know in the for profit world boards and probably got a different duty, maybe a little bit more. I mean, everybody has to act in the best interests of the corporation, right? That’s a fiduciary duty. But what is the best interests of the corporation for for profit? Oftentimes it’s associated, at least in large part the benefit of its owners or shareholders. But in the non profit, there are no shareholders or owners, right? It’s for the benefit of advancing the mission. And that’s what the board has got to remember, that it’s got to be purpose driven. It’s got to be, um, acting in furtherance of the mission ahead of everything else. Um, and the one caveat I’ll add to that which we may have talked a little bit about before, as well is you’ve got to add values to that statement, so their values probably baked into your mission statement but also baked into the organizational culture. So if our mission is to feed people who are experiencing homelessness or a lack of income, resources or we’re not just going to throw food out in a trough, right? You know that might be the best way or the most effective way to get as many people fed as possible. But that would be completely inconsistent with anybody’s values. Or so values and mission sort of go hand in hand, and focusing on that is really important. So not just financial oversight, the programmatic oversight the role of the board has got to look forward to. You’ve got to set the path with those values and mission for the organization’s future, not just looking behind you, but looking ahead, um, and so guiding the organization with those thoughts, acting as ambassadors, getting the feedback from the environment about what challenges and what opportunities may be out there. Those are all things the board can bring back to the executive and to the staff, sort of to help them do their best.

[00:06:44.34] spk_0:
And these are all very, uh, lofty. And and, um, I don’t want to say pedagogical, because that makes it sound like they’re not grounded, but But these are these are very we haven’t even talked about. You know how many board meetings you have to attend in a year. And how many subcommittees you have to serve on? You know, we haven’t gotten to that yet. You know, we’re talking about the the ambition, but it has to be centered. It’s It’s like you said. It’s the mission and values of the organization. I mean, if someone doesn’t respect those, then you’re not gonna get your best better board. You’re going to get a crappy person. Maybe it gives a lot of money, but ultimately, the ships are not sailing in the same direction with all the board members on each one.

[00:06:50.14] spk_1:
Yeah, I think that’s right. And I loved your introduction about having the best Better board. Not this lackluster,

[00:07:13.34] spk_0:
lackluster better. But yeah, that’s for other podcasts, not on the radio. We don’t tolerate lackluster mediocrity, mediocre better boards that we want to. We want the best Better board. All right, so So it really it really does start with loft and ambition around around Mission and values.

[00:07:15.74] spk_1:
I definitely think so.

[00:07:29.44] spk_0:
Yeah. Okay. Okay. So now let’s drill down. I mean, in terms of what we’re expecting the board to do, you have to be up front with what these expectations are and that that happens in recruitment, right? Not not in their first board meeting. You should be explaining the expectations while you’re talking to somebody about joining the board. Not after they have joined.

[00:07:41.54] spk_1:
Absolutely. And too often. I see tony and I don’t know if you’ve experienced this as well, but somebody tries to recruit you onto the board and they go, It’s really not that much work, you know. It’s easy. Um, well, that’s going to get you a lackluster and maybe not even a better board. So,

[00:07:59.57] spk_0:
um,

[00:08:45.54] spk_1:
yeah, so it really is about setting expectations of Hey, you really believe in this mission and you have the same values that we’re trying to move forward with. Let’s do something great with this organization. Let’s make a great impact here. This is These are the kind of things that we expect of our board. This is how often we meet. You know, this is, um, what we expected each board member in terms of attendance and in terms of maybe making a meaningful contribution. I don’t like set amounts because that can hurt diversity and inclusive inclusion. But a meaningful donation to to the organization it could be in time if not in money or in other ways. But the expectations, I think, need to be spelled out in front before you actually invite somebody onto the board.

[00:09:00.24] spk_0:
And when you’re spelling them out, I mean, do you Do you like to see a writing a document with, you know, Please take this home with you and consider consider, as we’re having our conversations about about you being on the board, consider all these things like you give them a document to read or just a conversation.

[00:09:24.64] spk_1:
I think both tony. So I I you know, it may depend upon the organization how formal they get, but if you do actually have a recruiting sort of policy or procedure or recruiting committee in place, I like to put some things down in writing just to make sure that we’re all on the same page and letting people know what the organization’s expectations are and how often boards meet. And if there is a meaningful contribution, expectations all of those things up front. So if somebody is not interested, they can right away say, you know, this isn’t for me, you know, I like what you do. But it’s not for me and another person who might say I’m really interested in doing all of those things. You know? I’d love to be a part of your board,

[00:10:11.94] spk_0:
All right? So be upfront about expectations. There’s no point in in concealing the work and the requirements, only to have the person blindsided when it comes time around, when it comes time for each board member to make their annual contribution. And and And they didn’t know that it was supposed to be a meaningful gift or they didn’t know there was a board giving requirement of any sort. You know, when it comes time to assign committee. So I didn’t know I was gonna be on a committee. I thought I just came to board member board meetings four times a year. Now we have committee meetings to I didn’t know about that, and then you set yourself up for a disaster.

[00:10:46.54] spk_1:
Yeah, I think that’s right. And if you if you start to um, the danger of it is is you don’t want to just sort of create this list of these are the things you have to do for the organization to run. You’ve got to always again relate it back to the mission and values. This is why we love to contribute as board members to the organization. Because this is what impact we can have. And this is the direction we see ourselves going to be able to have even greater impact. So you just keep reinforcing that message to get your best board members.

[00:10:55.74] spk_0:
You let me ask you a question. Are you Are you, uh Are you by any chance, playing with a pen or or anything?

[00:11:02.14] spk_1:
I am not rocking back and forth on my chair.

[00:11:06.44] spk_0:
And I know there’s, like, a little clicking, and I’m not. I know you’re not. I know you’re not typing like you’re not writing a document while we’re talking

[00:11:13.94] spk_1:
about you’re

[00:11:14.15] spk_0:
writing a client agreement or something.

[00:11:16.51] spk_1:
Typical things you expect from a lawyer, right?

[00:11:32.14] spk_0:
Yeah. You double bill your time, right. You get $800 an hour billed to clients at $400 an hour. You’re sitting in one’s office. You’re doing the work for the other. No. Okay. No, you’re not. Your hands are free, okay? I don’t know. There’s, like, little the mice are clicking or

[00:11:33.26] spk_1:
something. Maybe I’m rocking in my chair. I will try to hold back my enthusiasm.

[00:12:18.04] spk_0:
Okay, Alright. It doesn’t It doesn’t sound like that. Okay, Well, listeners, I can’t identify the sound of the but I’ll call it out because I’m not going to keep it quiet because we all hear it, so we’ll talk about it. Well, I don’t know what it is. This little tapping, clicking my mouse sound. Let’s talk about diversity. This should be a value. You and I have talked about this. We’ve had heartfelt conversations a couple of times about white male power and using that power and sharing power. And so let’s talk about diversity as a value for your board. How does that play into what we’re talking about? Your your best. Better board?

[00:14:50.74] spk_1:
Sure. You know, for the organizations who have responded to sort of this increasing understanding and awareness that diversity is an issue in various aspects, not just on board composition, but in the way our infrastructure as a country and even as the world is designed where, um, people who are in positions of power, no matter what race or gender or whatever, whatever they are tend to create systems that keep themselves in power. And so diversity has this great benefit of saying, Let’s take other lenses and look at what we’re doing. And look at the world that we’re in, um, for nonprofits, especially the world that’s directly impacting what we’re trying to do out there for. The people were trying to do it for what is impacting it, who is being affected the most, Um, and if that’s important to to organizations and their leaders, then I think they’ve really got to embrace diversity, not just by saying it, but by actually putting action steps into what they’re doing, Whether that’s going to be building it into true board diversity with inclusion. So not making people feel, you know, like they’re they’re just a simple tokens of taking a better picture but really being able to contribute to the power of the organization to address things that other people may not have seen. So, you know, I may identify with people who I relate to, but I may have very little understanding your perspective of people who are different from me who congregate in different circles who have different ideas. Um, and we have to think about all of those things, especially for serving a classic. Beneficiaries that are board members may be far away from. So if we have a board that’s more privileged, and we are helping a lot of people who don’t have some of the privileges that the board may have in terms of representation, how will we ever see the world through their lens? How will they understand? How will we understand where services are doing from their eyes? So trying to to get that diversity in an inclusive matter for purposes of increasing equity, I think, is a value that non profit should strive for.

[00:16:11.94] spk_0:
It’s time for a break turn to communications relationships. They’ve got the relationships with the media outlets so that when you need to be in the news, when there’s a news item that you need to comment on, your voice needs to be heard. Turn to has the relationships to get you heard. It’s not cold calling. They have the existing relationships. They give it like gifts. You get a lot of gifts from cold calls. Do you get any gifts from cold calls? You get your best gifts from cold calls. If you’re doing cold call fundraising. No, you don’t. Of course, it’s the same with media. The relationships are in place. So when you want to be heard, turn to picks up the phones and leverages those relationships That way you’re gonna get heard. Turn to communications. Turn hyphen. Two dot c o. Now back to build your best. Better board. Diversity has to be centered. Um, but And you wanted to go deeper than just like the board should reflect the community or the board should reflect those we serve. You mean you’re looking for something deeper than just reflecting an environment?

[00:18:17.04] spk_1:
I think so. So it is reflecting different perspectives as well. So I think traditionally, we thought of it as a skills based diversity. Like we need a lawyer. We need an accountant. We need a financial manager, a fundraiser on our board. And then we became all a little bit more woke and we said, Hey, we need racial diversity in our organizations. Um, but we didn’t say why that was or many of us didn’t say, why do we need racial diversity in our organizations? Is it simply to make it look like we embrace diversity and we take the better picture? Or is it because we want a true understanding from somebody else with a different lens and perspective? Who could tell us if there are gaps in our services for their communities? If there are gaps in the laws that are creating inequities that affect our mission as well? So the more we get these other perspectives, whether it be from a racial diversity angle from a disability angle, which I think is increasingly a really important thing to look at as we are facing an older population where disabilities are highly, you know, they make up a great percentage of our organizations and they’re kind of sort of the the unseen Group in many ways, um, we’re just getting started on addressing some of those concerns. But, um, the way we serve people can really miss many of those that are impacted, that that would be true beneficiaries of our service if they could access our services. But if we don’t make it accessible to them, then we just missed them, and that may be completely unintentional. But if we don’t have people who can identify and spot those things because they live it, um that would be, you know, short a shortfall in leadership. And that’s where we have to sort of address, Um, taking a look with a much broader lens and not just in our boards, but in our programming, in our staffing and just getting more awareness and bringing more lenses to what we’re doing.

[00:18:55.54] spk_0:
Let’s talk about bringing someone new to the board because we’re gonna be recruiting our new board members that are going to be part of our best better board. So now if we’ve recruited the right people, we need to socialize them to the organization. It’s more than I think. It’s more than just formal training. You know, the the organization has a culture. The board has a culture. Hopefully, they’re healthy. Let’s assume, but let’s take that. Let’s assume that these are healthy. Culture is not. Not. Cultures were trying to reverse, uh, you know, like intolerance or something. But healthy cultures. There’s a formal training and an informal training.

[00:20:26.74] spk_1:
I absolutely agree with you, so you know orientations can start even at recruitment. But once you decide that you want to elect somebody onto the board and they want to be part of the board and you elect them. I think it really is important now for them to be ingrained in what the organizations and the board culture is, what the priorities are getting a better sense of what the programs are. I’ll confess. I’ve been part of boards where I may not have a very good understanding of some of the programs. I get lost in some of, you know, again, the financial reports and maybe one program officer. You know, a year shows up and describes their program well, that that’s not really giving me a full sense of what the organization is doing. So more of that, um, is really going to be beneficial. Um, it will also help in sort of preventing there from being this wall between who the board is and who the staff and who are. The people that are actually implementing the program are other than the executive director, so boards often just meet with the executive director. But in an orientation or training, I think more deeply getting ingrained and that’s a board staff retreat. Joint retreats are good things. Board buddies and maybe a board staff buddy system could also

[00:20:31.34] spk_0:
is that like is that a mentoring board board buddy?

[00:20:53.34] spk_1:
Yeah, I think it could be partly mentoring, but I think the relationship really extends both ways, right? We can get more information from an outsider’s perspective to help the organization, and when they have fresh eyes, they may see different things. So instead of just saying, I know more than you, I’m going to mentor you. We can be buddies and learn from each other.

[00:20:56.64] spk_0:
And then you mentioned staff buddies, too.

[00:21:21.34] spk_1:
Yeah, I I don’t think it’s a bad idea for boards again to get more involved with their staff. We don’t want to micromanage. So there is this fine line there. But just getting an understanding from the staff about what they see in the organization, I think is important other than the executive director who may be the one who attends every board meeting. But if we just see one other staff member once a year, that really isn’t giving a sense of what is going on and what the organizational culture is. We might know what the board culture is, but do we really know what the organizational culture is?

[00:22:10.34] spk_0:
If it’s a staff buddy, it’s not only micromanagement, from the board member down. But then you also have to be conscious of the staff member trying to leverage a relationship with a board member like trying to do something or avoid doing something that the CEO may want or their vice president that they report to may want or something. You know, uh, that just it has to be managed. That’s all. Just You have to be conscious of the possibility of somebody exploiting and a relationship with the board members saying things that are inappropriate. The board members.

[00:22:52.14] spk_1:
I think this has to be designed with a consultant who really understands the area because you’re absolutely right. Tony. Yeah, if you if you aren’t careful, what you’re doing is you’re creating people going behind the executives back to make complaints to board members. And that’s not what the purpose is. So it might be controlled by saying, Hey, the board staff buddy thing is a meeting of the board and staff person in a joint group in a group where we’re all meeting in different corners of the room and just talking about certain specific topics so it can be regulated a little bit more carefully with rules of the game spelled out in advance. This is not a place to complain about employment issues. This is Yeah.

[00:23:04.34] spk_0:
Um, what do you like for board terms? What do you have? Advice? Two years? Three years? Should How many? How many years or how many terms should board members be allowed to continue on?

[00:24:00.64] spk_1:
Um, there’s there’s not, you know, one specific answer. I hate the lawyers. Answer. It depends. It does. But let me just say in a large number of cases, I like the 2 to 3 year term, both balancing a little bit of need for continuity and giving a fair expectation to a new board member of that. This is not just going to be a one year thing and you’re out. Um uh, and I like to have board terms to make sure that the board doesn’t become very insular and its thinking and in its diversity by keeping board members on perpetually until they’re ready to resign. It also makes it hard to ever remove a board member if people think that they have a right to serve on the board forever. So I kind of like board members not to be on board for, like maybe five or six years. Um, having said that, there are times

[00:24:02.67] spk_0:
when to not be on for five or six years

[00:24:04.99] spk_1:
to beyond that

[00:24:08.44] spk_0:
beyond. For five, like maybe two, 23 year terms, two year terms or 23 year terms of the most

[00:24:41.64] spk_1:
something. Something like that. Now, a lot of exceptions to that, if you have, if you had trouble building aboard and you have some great champions on the board. But those have been kind of the long term people who really know and really invested, and everybody else has been sort of lackluster. Um, I don’t think you should kick off your strongest board members, so you have to really think about that before you implement it. It is sort of an idealistic goal to have those term limits and, um, 2 to 3 year terms. But in other situations, I would say one size doesn’t fit. Also, take a look at your own board composition first before you make those type of decisions.

[00:25:19.94] spk_0:
What about in terms of socializing to the board, having social events for the board? Occasionally, Maybe it’s a dinner after a meeting. Um, I wouldn’t have cocktails before a meeting. But you could have cocktails after a meeting, you know, trying to get the board to get to know the members, to know each other outside the board. What else do you do? You go skiing, you go snowmobiling. You know, you’re a Fisher fisherman. You know things like that.

[00:25:26.34] spk_1:
Yeah, I love that idea. I’ve even had cocktails before boarding. So,

[00:25:31.63] spk_0:
uh, all right,

[00:26:10.84] spk_1:
but yes, um, for board members to trust each other and to be open to each other’s ideas and respect each other, the more you know each other, the more likelihood that that’s all going to happen and that you’re going to actually build the board culture rather than have people who don’t know each other who are trying to get out of the meeting, to watch a basketball game or be home with their family and sort of sit and say, This is my duty. For the next hour, I’m going to sit here, take notes and listen and try to do my job. But think of it just as a job. It’s going to be less productive. I think that if you come in and say I love these people that are kind of get to work with. And we’re trying to build something great so we can make change in the world or in our community. And so I really like coming to these events and getting a sense of it. Sometimes there’s, you know, those ice breaker things you know, for five or 10 minutes in front of a meeting that can be hit or miss and oftentimes a

[00:26:33.10] spk_0:
miss. How many people can you talk to in 10 minutes?

[00:26:35.46] spk_1:
Yeah, and that’s another reason why you shouldn’t have too big a board as well. If you have 50 people at a to our board meeting, how many people are going to get to

[00:26:51.84] spk_0:
talk, right? That’s yeah, So I know that I know your answer is there’s no hard and fast answer for this one. But since you just let into it, share your advice on on board size,

[00:28:13.54] spk_1:
Yes. So my maybe not so helpful advice is not too few and not too many, um, that if we dive down a little deeper, you need, um or you’d like to have as many board members as you can utilize to help you govern the organization and help the organization and the board do its best job. So if that number is eight, or if that number is 15, that’s, you know that may be your ideal board size. It’s more important to me to get the right people on the board, um, rather than the right number. But if you can, if you have less than five and you’re a mature organization, I start to worry that you’re gonna lack that diversity in many different perspectives. Um, and if you’ve got more than 20 I have a feeling that a lot of board members feel like their contributions are not being heard because they don’t have an opportunity to sort of verbally contribute, especially if there are few dominant board members at meetings and in a two hour meeting, even 20 people are going to have a chance to say how much about how many issues it will be very few. So to really think about that, and you want to encourage board members to attend every board meeting, not just sort of half of the board meetings or think that they can take a free ride because you’ve got enough people to do that job. I’ll just help on a committee. You don’t want them to feel that way. You want them to feel very invested.

[00:28:31.24] spk_0:
So you feel like an expectation is you attend every board meeting either physically or virtually.

[00:28:33.84] spk_1:
I think that’s the expectation. And if people are missing, you know, one out of 41 out of five meetings, one out of 10 meetings, you know that might be acceptable for special circumstances. But you don’t want it to be a habit. I think you want to aspire to have everybody attend all of them.

[00:28:58.64] spk_0:
Okay, Um, what do you What do you feel like talking about board wise that we haven’t talked about yet? Let’s not go to how to get rid of a board member yet that’s that’s toward the end. What’s your what’s on your mind around your best? Better board?

[00:30:44.94] spk_1:
Well, we talked about kind of the expectations of what the board should do, but they think each director’s gotta ask that question of themselves as well. And maybe that’s part of the board. Recruitment and orientation package is kind of a list of however many 10 things that board members should aspire to do themselves, uh, to be part of this board and attend all meetings. We talked about that, but what else should they do? They should review financials regularly, so if they’re getting a financial before each meeting, they should review them. They should know that they are expected to ask questions that might be at the board meeting or that might be before the board meeting. But if they’re getting information aboard package in advance, which they should get, um, about the matters that are going to be up for discussion at the board, they should know that they should review it first. And if they have any questions, they should share it with the group. Um, and that doesn’t happen enough, in my opinion, that there are these questions and everybody saves it for the board meeting, and then they run out of time to discuss all the issues that they want to. So just having it kind of on an email sort of mass email, the board package comes out on email, and people can ask questions about it so that everybody gets an advanced preview of what some of the issues are before you go into that board meeting and then start to discuss things a little bit more detail. Some of those things might need a little research to be answered to. The executive might have to talk to an accountant or a lawyer or someone else and say, Let’s find out what the answer is and you know that does away with that issue even before the meeting, if you can share that information. So that’s another thing to just think about.

[00:31:35.04] spk_0:
What about managing the board? Uh, some. Some larger organizations have a board liaison where that’s probably not most of our listeners with someone who’s devoted to the board. I think that’s more like university style, big university style. But there doesn’t have to be a lot of staff support for the board. I mean, not only the you mentioned getting the board packages to them at least a week. I’d say in advance, maybe a week or 10 days in advance, something like that. But it goes beyond that. Board members have questions. Have these questions that you’re suggesting they ask in advance of meetings? Um, committee work has to be supported. How do we How do we make sure that we’re giving the board members the support that they need.

[00:33:00.24] spk_1:
Yeah, and it’s a great balance. Is it? Well, it’s a great question, but it is a tough one to answer because of the balance that you have to think of. You want the board to be informed so that they can be of help to the organization. But you don’t want the board to put on so many demands upon the staff that they’re really hurting the staff’s ability to do the work of the organization, the programmatic work that’s needed. So there is a little bit of balance there. I know many staff members and executives hate kind of preparing the board for the board meeting because it may take so much work. Sometimes it’s because they’re trying to justify what they are doing to the board, because the board may come in with a little bit of a negative skew about, you know, prove to us that you’re doing good work of some kind. That may be the perception that the staff is getting. I don’t think any boards are overtly saying that, but I feel that staff can come into it a little bit defensively in preparation of board materials rather than this is an ally of ours. This should be the strongest ally that we have this board group. Let’s give them information and questions for them so that they can help us do our job better. Um, and that takes time. But how many staff are involved with the executive? Certainly is meeting with them. That probably goes without saying if there is a financial person there other than the executive, that person should probably have frequent contact.

[00:35:45.54] spk_0:
It’s time for Tony’s take to the podcast. Pleasantries. They gotta go out. That’s what we start with. Plan giving accelerator that’s coming. The podcast. Pleasantries. Uh, I’m enjoying the nostalgia of sending these again. I’ve missed it. I guess I I ignored it for a while. My my mistake. I’m sorry about that. Pleasantries to you, our podcast listener. Well, you individually. But there’s more than just one of you out there. There’s over 13,000 of you out there. So, to the podcast, listeners pleasantries. You know, I’m grateful. I am. I’m glad you’re with us. I’m glad you’re learning that non profit radio helps you helps your organization open conversations, take action steps, open discussions with the board. Your CEO, your vice president, Whoever it is, you bring stuff too. I’m glad it helps you do all that. And I hope there’s the action steps to I’m sure there are. There is. I’m sure there are the action steps. I’m sure there are. Thanks for being with us. Thanks for being with me. Pleasantries to our podcast listeners. Each of you plan giving accelerator that is the online membership community that I created to help you get your plan giving program started and growing. It’s a membership that you join for a year, and I teach you month by month lesson by lesson, Step by step. Everything you need to get your planned giving program started and growing. If you’re not doing planned giving and you would like to be, is it on your to do list? Have you, like so many folks? Say to me, Had this on your mind for a couple of years. You can get it done. You can get it started to get the initial thing started, and that’s done and then the program continues. I mean, the program doesn’t finish after a year. You continue your playing giving program indefinitely, of course, but you’ll get plan giving off your to do list. You get the going done. Your started 2021. The next class starts April 1st, all the info on how to pick my brain and have me teach you planned giving starting up step by step. Is that planned? Giving accelerator dot com. Okay, that is Tony’s Take two. We’ve got Boo Koo, but loads more time for build your best better board with Jean Takagi.

[00:36:41.93] spk_1:
I didn’t mean to downplay the role of somebody from programming coming in speaking to the board once in a while, I think I wanted to say that that was insufficient for the board to know what’s going on programmatically. But having people come in a little bit more regularly, or at least providing materials to the board more regularly about the program’s impact, you know, and that could be through stories as well. I’m kind of like in fundraising make the board engaged with what the organization is doing programmatically and invested in doing more to help the organization do better with its programs, either serve more people are doing in a better way. You want to create that connection so that the board rallies around you and actually helps you rather than just again just providing oversight and saying We want to make sure everything is lawful. Give us all this information to make, you know, make sure that we can do that. You want to do get more from your board.

[00:37:26.53] spk_0:
I like the idea of regular presentations at board meetings from from program staff. Maybe the 1st 15 minutes of a board meeting every time is from some different employee. Maybe maybe it’s not a unique pro, maybe not different programs every time. But I like the idea of devoting some board time each each meeting to to programs to what our work is, but but not being acquainted by the CEO. But having someone who’s on the ground doing the work answering, I think that would be a real fertile ground for questions to from the board and provides ongoing training.

[00:37:28.53] spk_1:
I think so, too, and maybe even somebody who is a beneficiary of the services

[00:37:32.89] spk_0:
beneficiary to yes

[00:37:51.23] spk_1:
to say Hey, you know you get a chance to speak to the board to because we want to know what you feel about our programs and our organization and how you’ve been treated. So, um, I think those things are good, and I I again think, tony, that will just energize aboard to want to do more if they feel more connected to what the organization is actually doing and not just reading about it and listening to the executive tell them about it.

[00:38:15.32] spk_0:
What about that important CEO board chair relationship that should be very collegial? It should be supportive. What what’s your advice around for? The CEO is probably mostly CEOs listening, although we do have board members listening. But probably we have more CEOs than we do board chairs. So what’s your advice there for them? Although

[00:39:07.82] spk_1:
I’ll say that probably a fair number of CEOs have actually acted in the capacity of a board chair as well and other organizations, so they may understand some of the roles from both sides. I think my advice is what you have just said, as well as to have this collegial relationship and develop one where there’s one of trust where the CEO is not afraid to go to the board and say, I’ve got some bad news. Um, I’m looking for some guidance on this. If the CEO is always about, um, my pay or my job security can be affected by telling bad news to the board chair. So I’m going to try to, uh,

[00:39:09.52] spk_0:
show hide it, make it sound, not as bad as it is not. Be completely honest, etcetera.

[00:39:26.32] spk_1:
Yeah, I think of what you know. For profit, boards of directors may say to their shareholders in public companies, Right, like you want to pose the best view of that organization as possible. I don’t think that’s a healthy relationship for nonprofit board to have its executive,

[00:39:37.42] spk_0:
and and that should be frequent communication to I mean, shouldn’t shouldn’t the CEO feel comfortable picking up the phone and seeking the advice of the board chair?

[00:40:20.31] spk_1:
I think so. And if it’s not the board chair, I I think it’s okay at times. So your board culture is going to have to allow for this, but for them to pick up the phone and talk to another board member, So I’m when I serve on the board. I’m sometimes the only lawyer on the board. I want the CEO to be able to talk to me. I’m not going to be their legal counsel, But I might have a point of view. Or I might spot an issue if they feel like, Hey, is this something we need to talk to our lawyer about? Maybe our board chair wouldn’t be able to answer that question. But maybe I would as a board member. So, yeah, I like the CEO of being able to reach out to multiple board members for for different issues. Yeah,

[00:40:48.21] spk_0:
all right. Should we should we talk about terminating board members the topic before before their time is, Do so Let’s say, you know, a three year term and they’ve been on for a year, and they’re obstreperous, lackluster, unkind. They don’t belong. Let’s just for whatever reason, they don’t belong.

[00:43:09.10] spk_1:
Sure. What do we do? Yeah, it’s a real tough one, right. So, um, sometimes you have to look at it holistically. So oftentimes I get a call and that situation will arise. But it will turn out that that board members also the biggest donor to the organization right now you’ve got to think a little more diplomatically and strategically about how to do this. Um um So again, not one size fits all But one method that some organizations have used has been to say, Let’s talk with this board member and try to find the best role for them in the organization and see if we can move them off the board but into this other role, whether it be advisory, um, or whether it be in an, uh in an honorary position for being, you know, uh, something emeritus. So give them a fancy title. Ask them to show up at fundraising events, um uh, or to to speak to two foundations when you go out with them to do a pitch, maybe that’s where their strength is. And maybe there’s enough there of their passion for the mission and for the organization and what it does. While they don’t have passion for doing the work of a director in a strategic and diplomatic way, they may still have passion for the mission of the organization. And let’s try to take advantage of that, um, and use it in a way where nobody will use sort of the Asian mentality of nobody loses face right, like so everybody gets to keep their dignity and look good. But let’s try to take advantage of not having that person be disruptive on the board anymore. And if that person isn’t giving you much of a contribution in any way, then once in a while removal is an unpleasant but sometimes necessary option. And boards may have to decide that again. Uh, they’re going to ask somebody where they’re actually going to vote to tell somebody, um, that their services as a director are no longer needed, Um, but that has to also be done diplomatically. You have to be careful of alleging reasons for doing that because that could get you involved in a defamation lawsuit from that person if they’re upset with it and litigious so carefully.

[00:43:20.20] spk_0:
So this should be something that’s in the bylaws, then removal of a board member. Yeah, you need to have a documented process.

[00:44:17.09] spk_1:
I think that’s right, tony. A lot of, um, boards have eliminated that from the bylaws because you see that as a negative. But then they would default to the code, right, and they’re not going to usually look up what the code says about removal. It has to be done in a certain way, and in some cases it can get a little bit complicated. If you have a voting membership structure like for certain charities, they might have members who actually elect their board members. It’s more common in trade associations and homeowners associations things like that. But some charities have voting members, and removal, then becomes a lot more complicated. But having it having the procedure in your bylaws at least gives you kind of like the encyclopedia. Look at how to do this properly without feeling like it’s going to be too hard. We can’t do it and just live with it.

[00:44:26.89] spk_0:
I’m not familiar with this model you just described because you and you said it’s some five oh one C threes have elected board members. So

[00:44:28.78] spk_1:
yeah,

[00:44:29.71] spk_0:
so it has. The board has voted members on and can only remove them,

[00:45:22.59] spk_1:
actually the opposite way. So members elect the board members, so the members are responsible for electing and potentially removing board members. So you might think of that more in terms of like a union or a professional association or homeowners association, where all the homeowners elect the board. If they don’t like the board, they’ll remove them and put somebody else on to that board. So some charities are also structured that way. And that was to sort of been seen as a more democratic process of ensuring that the board stays responsive to what the members think. The mission is supposed to be, um, for smaller organizations. I generally don’t recommend it because it’s more costly. It’s much more difficult to manage and administer. Um, but nevertheless, I would say about 5 to 10% of the charities that we run into small charities we run into are structured that way.

[00:45:32.49] spk_0:
Not ideal, though, but they’re trying to be democratic. And

[00:45:36.99] spk_1:
that’s right.

[00:46:19.48] spk_0:
Okay, I see. All right. Well, that Yeah, that conversation to to hope that opening that conversation with the director to be removed is is hard. Maybe maybe the maybe the board member themselves themselves, uh, maybe the person. Maybe they can’t find the right pronoun. Maybe that person isn’t happy in the role either. That’s a possibility. It could be. You know, you could sort of open the conversation with it. Seems like, you know, this isn’t as you were suggesting, and I’m kind of putting a few things together. It seems like this isn’t quite the right role for you. You don’t seem happy as a board member. Uh, you know, you could open the conversation that way in trying to find something else to offer

[00:46:43.88] spk_1:
them. I think that’s a great way often to frame that that situation. I actually wrote an article for the nonprofit Quarterly. I think called something like 10 Reasons Why a director made gracefully want to resign from their organization, um, board. And so, yeah, framing it from their perspective and what they’re not getting is probably a good way to start it.

[00:46:59.58] spk_0:
I thought of something else before we wrap up. What do you think about junior boards, you know, maybe have an advisory role? There’s sort of a training improving ground for future board members, whatever you call it, might. It might just be the advisory board or something. But what do you think of that? That having, uh, that in your organization,

[00:47:26.78] spk_1:
I think you’ve done well. It works. Um, really Well, it raises potential future board members and gives you an introduction to the organization. Rather than bringing somebody straight into the board. They have a chance to be part of whatever you want to call it an advisory committee or, uh, the junior board. I would be careful with the name, depending upon who you’re planning to put on it.

[00:47:30.99] spk_0:
So junior board is not so good. All right.

[00:47:33.37] spk_1:
Unless it’s for, you know, unless you’re putting minors on it for advisory positions. Okay. Okay.

[00:47:44.08] spk_0:
But advisory, an advisory board advisory committee. And and it gets to be seen as a stepping stone for some folks to the board membership.

[00:48:04.17] spk_1:
Yeah, and to offer thought leadership from different perspectives. Um, so I think that’s good. But if you’re trying to increase diversity through an advisory border, Junior. But I would say Be very careful to make it not look like it is of less importance. And that’s why these people were put on that.

[00:48:54.37] spk_0:
Oh, yeah, right. Right. So all your yes, all your all the folks of color and other underrepresented groups are on the advisory board. Yeah, that’s well, that’s a sham. Alright, That’s right. Exactly. That’s inhumane. Alright. Yeah, I’m surprised you thought of that, Gene. You’re well. You see the good and the bad. All right, you’ve It’s not that you thought of it. You’ve seen it. You’ve seen it. I guess it’s It’s out there somewhere. All right. Thank you, Jeanne. Outstanding. Outstanding advice. Jeanne Takagi, our legal contributor. You’ll find them at nonprofit law blog dot com. You can find him at Columbia University if you’re a member of their student body in, uh, what is it? The nonprofit nonprofit management program at Columbia?

[00:49:01.07] spk_1:
Yep.

[00:49:07.17] spk_0:
Okay, so you’ll find him there. You also find him at neo law group dot com and you’ll find him at G T A K at G Tech. Thank you very much, Gene.

[00:49:12.87] spk_1:
Thanks, tony. Been a pleasure.

[00:50:05.17] spk_0:
My pleasure. As always. Thanks. Next week, I’m asking you to trust me. If you missed any part of this week’s show, I beseech you find it at tony-martignetti dot com. We’re sponsored by turn to communications, PR and content for nonprofits. Your story is their mission. Turn hyphen. Two dot c o. Creative producer is Claire Meyerhoff Shows Social Media is by Susan Chavez. Mark Silverman is our web guy, and this music is by Scott Stein. Thank you for that affirmation. Scotty, you’re with me next week for nonprofit radio. Big non profit ideas for the other 95% Go out and be great. Mhm

Nonprofit Radio for September 15, 2017: Run Like A Biz & Program Your Board

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Hillary Schafer: Run Like A Biz

Hillary Schafer brought her 12 years on Wall Street to the Jefferson Awards Foundation, where she’s executive director. She shares her ideas from building core infrastructure to employee policies. (Originally aired September 18, 2015.)

 

 

 

Gene Takagi: Program Your Board

Gene TakagiYour board probably recognizes its fiduciary responsibilities, but does it know its role in overseeing programs? Gene Takagi is our legal contributor and principal of the Nonprofit & Exempt Organizations law group (NEO). (Also aired September 18, 2015.)

 

 

 


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Hello and welcome to tony martignetti non-profit radio big non-profit ideas for the other ninety five percent. I’m your aptly named host. Oh, i’m glad you’re with me. I need a pancreas. Ole affected me for last week’s pancreas volodya, sis, if you hard into me with the idea that you missed today’s show, run like a biz hillary shaefer brought her twelve years on wall street to the jefferson awards foundation, where she is executive director. She shares her ideas from building core infrastructure to employee policies that originally aired september eighteenth, twenty fifteen and programmed your board. Your board probably recognizes its fiduciary responsibilities, but does it know it’s rolling overseeing programs? Jean takagi is our legal contributor and principal of the non-profit and exempt organizations law group neo that also aired september eighteenth twenty fifteen tony’s take two five minute planned e-giving marketing responsive by pursuant full service fund-raising data driven and technology enabled pursuant dot com and by wagner cps guiding you beyond the numbers wagner, cps dot com you’re not a business you’re non-profit apple of accounting software designed for non-profits they’re at non-profit wizard dot com and we’d be spelling supercool spelling bee fundraisers. We b e spelling dot com here’s hillary schaefer run like a biz. I’m glad to welcome to the studio hillary schaefer. Prior to joining the jefferson awards foundation as executive director, she worked as the head of us institutional equity sales in new york. For citigroup, she was one of the highest ranking women in the equity business in the late nineties, she was the executive director of economic security two thousand fighting to save and remodel social security. The foundation is at jefferson awards dot org’s and she’s at beard hillary on twitter welcome hillary schaeffer. Thank you very much. Glad you’re in the studio. Thanks to be here. Eight and a half months pregnant. Eight and a half months pregnant. We got you at the right time. What what’s behind this twitter id beard? Hillary it’s. My maiden name is beard. Okay, until re beard was taken, i presume and hillary beard is probably taking swiped by some. I had that done on youtube. Some joker i hope he was named tony martignetti stole the channel name tony martignetti and i have you riel tony martignetti but he doesn’t use it. So it’s ah, people don’t have trouble finding me? Not that anyone’s looking, but if they were looking, they wouldn’t have trouble finding me on youtube. Um, tell me about wall street what’s it what’s it like making a living equity say institutional equity sales what’s it like, what does that mean, that’s that place, like, actually, frankly, loved it. I did it for twelve years. I went into wall street thinking i would do it for two. Yeah, we’re really, really fell in love for long enough to stay for twelve instruction equity sales is basically where you manage the relationships for the largest institutional investors who invest in stocks. Okay, so on behalf of citigroup, so on you’re like, on account, uh, liaison to big companies buying stocks. Sort of. Yes, i minimize their eyes like so egregiously. Okay, clearly egregiously. So, what do you how do you how do you keep big institutional buyers happy? What you have to do, too, with more of their blackness is making money, right? So investing in stocks that go up and shorting stocks that go down. And so ah, lot of the business of the equity business of citigroup is to provide really good insights and ideas and research into the companies that they care about and delivering that content into your clients in a way which is consumable. Smart fits with their investment style. It helps them make money is really the core of what you do. Okay, but then there are all of these other services that citigroup offers and help clients run their money from financing stocks. Teo, all of the things that go around the core of running that business, okay, banking and credit relationships, things like that, things like that. Okay? And so core of that business is sort of managing that entire relationship to make sure they get the resource is that they need in orderto successfully run the business and a transition to non-profit work. What? What occasioned that, frankly, hurricane sandy, i had left wall street. I have two little kids already at home. And i decided that i wanted teo figure out what i wanted to do next. I had no idea what that was. Actually, frankly thought it would be in the finance world. Yeah, and hurricane sandy hit new york. And i was sitting in my living room working on a business plan for a finance business okay, and i just got really passionate about the idea that there were children who had gone to bed safe and sound the night before that woke up with no signs of food or shelter or warmth, their security. And so i went to work from my living room to create programs that generated millions of more meals, hundreds of thousands of blankets and warm winter coats for families all over the tri state area and my husband on dh, the executive director of robin hood both basically sat me down and said, please don’t go back to finance the passion that you feel around helping people is so significant. Do something else. Stay in the non-profit so you gave away your entrepreneurial dream, the plan you’re working on, you’re going to start your own business. I did put that aside, although running a non-profit is inherently credibly entrepreneur. Okay, if it’s done right, i think that’s done right. All right, all right, tell us a little about the jefferson awards and the and the foundation. Sure. So we we basically power public service. We’ve been around since nineteen seventy two started by jackie kennedy. Senator robert taft. Junior and my father, sam beard and the original idea was create a nobel prize for public service in america. Celebrate the very best of the country. You celebration to not only say thank you to people do amazing things, but also as a force multiplier to inspire others to do something good. We then translated into programs that accelerate and amplify service for people of every age. So, starting about ten years ago, we became one of the largest creators of public service in the country through training mechanisms and programs that engage individuals again of all ages to do service ranging from the donation of a single book from a child to a child all the way up. Tio young people in adult toe like who are impacting millions of lives and it’s ah, jefferson awards so what’s the awards side of this. So when the awards is the celebration peace. So we are effectively the gold seal of service in america. We give out a we give out jefferson awards the national level, you would know basically every name. Okay. Who’s, one of jefferson word over the last forty three years. And then we have a media. Partner program, where we partner with ah, local affiliates, newspapers, etcetera but primary news outlets in communities all over the country. But today, reaching to seventy eight million households on dh, they are empowered to take the jefferson award and celebrate local grassroots unsung heroes. All right, a nobel prize for ah, for outstanding program work and and saving lives for impact impact. How about the foundation itself? Just number employees, just a quaint little bit number of employees annual budget. So it’s about twenty seven, employees, we have a, uh, about a ten and a half million dollar annual budget, of which much of that is in-kind it’s about a three and a half million dollar operating revenue budget. Okay, and we’re going to go out for a break in roughly a minute or so. So just, uh, give us a little overviewing of what? What some of the lessons are that you brought from equity sales on dh wall street. Teo, your charitable work. And i think the biggest thing is just that any organization, whether it’s for-profit or non-profit, needs to be world class in order to be successful and that starts with everything from how you manage and set your employees up for success to your back end systems that govern how you pay your rent, you know, pay your expenses and collect your revenues to don’t hurt management. Teo everything that you do needs to look and feel like you set for-profit world, but it’s really for impact. So i’m guessing you believe non-profit is your tax status? Not your mindset? Correct? Yeah, cool. Okay, of course. Hillary stays with us. We go after this break. I hope you do too. You’re tuned to non-profit radio tony martignetti also hosts a podcast for the chronicle of philanthropy fund-raising fundamentals is a quick ten minute burst of fund-raising insights published once a month. Tony’s guests are expert in crowdfunding, mobile giving event fund-raising direct mail and donor cultivation. Really all the fund-raising issues that make you wonder am i doing this right? Is there a better way there is? Find the fund-raising fundamentals archive it. Tony martignetti dot com that’s marketmesuite n e t t i remember there’s a g before the end, thousands of listeners have subscribed on itunes. You can also learn maura the chronicle website philanthropy dot com fund-raising fundamentals the better way dahna welcome back to big non-profit ideas for the other ninety five percent. Hillary schaefer let’s ah, let’s, dive into some of these lessons that you’ve brought with you this world class let’s start in the back end investment in infrastructure like c r, m databases, data management so that’s a that’s a terrific place to start because really every non-profit is powered by who they reach and how they reached them and how they communicate with, um and management of relationships, whether that’s a whether that’s, a donor, whether that’s, somebody, who’s won an award from our perspective, whether that somebody who has just invested in you are in your programs and how you understand that relationship, how you manage that relationship is all driven by the back end. Traditionally, people would use spreadsheets or just use, you know, sort of word and lists in their own brains, and fundamentally, it doesn’t get you as far as you need to get, and technology today is so sophisticated and there’s so many great great data pay systems that can integrate seamlessly with your website and with donor management tools and with, um, all mechanisms that you need to communicate effectively and really segment that communication into something that makes sense for that individual. It’s. Almost a shame not to you not to use it. Yeah, segmentation, and we’ll get to the benefit of that. I’ve had other guests. My voice just cracked like i’m a fourteen year old. I’ve had have a congratulations e. Everything else operates at, uh, the requisite age at fifty three. But my voice occasionally. Yeah, so we’ll get to the value of segmentation because people want to talk to personally, not not and mass and like everybody else, but so but this can be hard to invest in me, we’re talking about this is not serving program directly. This is not helping people directly. How do we overcome that mindset that we can get by with, you know, the lackadaisical, the the database that we’ve got her the internal processes we figured out our work arounds, you know we’re okay. It’s it’s finding you say that, right? Because they actually when you invest in a really good database management system and and client relationship manager, which is what c r m stands for, um, what you get out of it, that multiplier effect that you can get from having true, powerful relationships and understanding of all of your constituents, all consolidated is worth every dollar you know, and frankly there’s so many great systems which are out there, and they’re not that expensive. The most expensive part is the time of your staff, an external consultants, which you often need teo, take what is all of the stuff that you’ve cobbled together and to make it work for your organization. So an organization as an example we had brought in sales force. We use sales force. Um, we frankly had the wrong system installed with sales force. It took us a long time to figure out how to get the right system installed in all of those things. But it’s also taking us the better part of eighteen months to clean our data. Teo optimize our data to segment it appropriately so that we can communicate effectively with everybody in the way they want to be communicated with and a fair amount of staff time. And it’s that investment of taking somebody away from something that looks like perhaps it’s more important to their day to day life and put them into what’s really tedious work in order to be a better organization. But for us, if i think about it, if we have a database that reaches sixty thousand people, our ability to grow from an organization that reaches sixty this sixty thousand two, two, six hundred thousand to six million all contingent on us having optimized rc era this is key. So if you want to scale, you have to have the infrastructure to support that every organization wants to be at the next level i get so many questions about, you know, how do i get to next level? Can you refer me to somebody help us get to the next level? But i think often they don’t they’re not set up to get to the next level. They don’t they don’t have the support that they need, even if they were able to teo, multiply by ten there, you know the size of their their outreach. Without data, you have no chance. I’ll give you a great example in the nonprofit world statistic terrifies me, but something like sixty percent of donors don’t repeat on average across the non-profit space every year. Yeah, don’t come back, right? Well, don’t patrician right that’s because we’re not loving the people who are there. Everybody is focused on the next level. No, you’re focused on the next person you forget about the person who’s already said to you with their dollars. I care about what you d’oh at the heart of that is your database management system. I had a guest, peter shankman, um social media expert and marketing guy and his book is called zombie loyalists and basically had a last december. I think i had eternal you’re all your clients and customers into zombie loyalists that love you so much that they’re zombies for your work, and they’ll do your marketing, your pr, your communications for you, but ah, some of what he says boils down to the way to get the client you want is to be awesome to the client. You have that’s exactly right? I mean, i think about it from a from a fund-raising perspective. What the great fundraisers tell you is you should have four contacts with a donor for every time you ask them for something. No in orderto have those four contacts but matter to them, you need to know what they care about that needs to be in your database. You need to understand them that meets not only being your head. It needs to be institutionalized in your database. Ah, and then you need to have systems which set up, which push you to reach out to that person to make sure that you’re not forgetting to touch them four times before you go back to them and say, here’s, your invoice your sales force is a really cool example that you mentioned because for small shops it’s ideal, they’re the first ten licenses from sales force are free to non-profits and then they have a very deeply reduced ah fee for going beyond ten licenses. But i think for a lot of listeners ten licenses is enough for more than enough. So, you know, on i’ve had guests on from the non-profit technology conference and t c talking about the benefits of salesforce, you know, i think that’s right and sales force khun b a terrific tool it’s also it could be not that expensive or if you have the budget, the amount of tools that they have that you khun scale in two really optimizing take you to the next level are huge, so we don’t have we personally don’t have the budget we would love to have to spend with sales force, but we have a big, long wish list of things we would like to spend on specifically with sales force, with the tools that they have something bothering me to my head. Now, i didn’t mean to say lackadaisical databases, i meant to say lackluster, lackluster debate. Lackadaisical database doesn’t make any sense, it’s lazy, lazy self, you know, so that people could be lackadaisical. But the databases lackluster let’s talk a little about the segmentation of the benefit of communicating with people and showing that you know what their interests are when their birthdays are what they, how they like to be communicated with let’s, explore this know people are people, and everybody wants to feel touched individually. Nobody wants to feel like they’re part of a marketing campaign or that they’re part of a sort of a blast. People want to be touched individually. It’s why things like instagram work because they feel touched by a photograph ah, it’s the same thing with with donor or constituent segmentation everybody wants to feel like especially in the nonprofit world where you’re talking about emotion, you are effectively touching people where where they want to improve the world, but you’ve gotta understand which part of it inspires them. Yes, ah, and and also people like being cared for around the things that matter in their daily lives that have nothing to do with you. Ah, their children, their children’s ages what they d’oh? Ah, what their hobbies. Are where they like to travel all of those things. It just matters it’s all about having one on one of relationships. And the better your relationship is, the more likely you are to be able to maximize. And everything you’ve mentioned is data worth preserving its all data. You have to have people love it when you send them a note that says, happy birthday, no, super simple. It is very simple now. So what kinds of reminders do you get? Based on what kinds of things aside from birthday? What? Yeah. What others? Ah, it tends to relate to things that people have told you. Okay? And so for us, it would relate specifically to our program. So we have five different programs that have very, very different calendars. So that could relate. Teo, i i just need to get us a of the date because i know you desperately want to come to our national ceremony in new york city in march. Ah, but it could also be i know you really want to be. Ah, judge at our students in action conference in minneapolis. Ana and so getting that date to you in plenty of advance. Notice it really gets down to that level. All right? So the the value of segmentation and investment in infrastructure what about investment in consultants? You mentioned consulting? Nobody knows everything they need to know, but this could be tough to bring, bring other people in and have a fresh set of eyes evaluating you. It’s interesting on the consulting sight because i i personally have two two minds about consultants. Often i feel like you get charged too much for a percentage of somebody’s brain no on dh that’s the greatest risk with consulting. Ah, but also often they’re just expertise. You don’t want to bring in house. You can’t afford to bring in house, but you need somebody who has fresh eyes who knows something really specific that you don’t know ah, and with without which you can’t can’t go to the next level, you can’t execute effectively. So sales forces a terrific example. Um, there are so many tools inside sales force that enable you to do things like optimize your data and get rid of redundancy and all of those things, um and to, uh, to make it spoke for your organization for think the ways. In which you want to connect with people, i couldn’t do that myself, and i don’t have anybody in house who could do that for me. Could you just send your data data manager, database administrator to a sales force conference or course, yes, we do that too, okay, but it’s not enough, and for the cost of bringing you know you’ve got you’ve got away out the cost. So the question is, can you find somebody who is affordable to you in your organization that helps bring in those that kind of expertise in? I’m their things like building out an effective communication strategy where if you don’t have a big, robust communications team who can think about everything from database management, teo email to social media to all the things that go into digital infrastructure ah, and communications calendars and all of those things. At some point, it becomes really smart to bring in somebody from the outside to say, i’m building you a structure i’m helping you think about inside your organization, for you what a structure would look like, that you can afford let’s turn to our people i think my voice is my voice was crack again, it’s. A big bag, maybe. Yeah, you know. Uh, so you’re important asset, probably your most valuable asset. Most important, most expensive it’s expensive. I would guess inside most non-profits that that people are seventy eight percent of cost big, big, big percentage, um, and making impact in the world all relates to the people who you were in power to make that impact on your behalf as as either a full time employee or an independent contractor and losing employees is as expensive as losing the donors we were talking about, if not more so, you know woobox the amount of time you then need to spend teo find the person, bring them in house, and on average, it takes six to eighteen months to really optimize an employee. That’s a long time to invest in somebody new if you have somebody who’s good who’s sitting there right in front of you. The most important thing with people always is that they feel like they’re being set up to succeed. And they’re being given the tools that they need. Ah, to succeed. All right, how do we do this? Ah, well, that everything from the really basic and can feel very cumbersome to a management manager piece. But ah, gold setting and reviews, letting people know where they stand, being really straightforward with them about what they’re doing that’s terrific, and where they need to develop development goals is a big, big, big piece, and i don’t mean development is in fund-raising i mean, personal development, professional development around how can you be a much more effective employees? For the most part? Certainly in my experience, whether it’s on wall street or in the nonprofit world, when you sit in a review with somebody, they barely hear the good stuff ninety nine percent of what you tell them could be good. Everybody waits for the butt, the but needs to be real, meaning it needs to be i understand you here’s, where i see helping to take you as a human being and as a professional to the next level, and being able to deliver that in a way which is non threatening but having systems and structures around delivering reviews around goal, setting around, holding people accountable to those goals and around understanding them and wanting to be on their side are all the the most important things you can do, and it doesn’t matter what. Kind of an organization you’re out to do that my guest last week, we’re from the university of pittsburgh, and they were talking about incentive pay something that pitt has set up. They’ve defined what an exemplary fundraiser is. It’s basically achieving two hundred percent of your goal. But that’s a big organization, university of pittsburgh, might there be other ways of implementing incentive pay around? Aside from strictly money, money comp, you know, incentives are interesting in non-profits because, um, a, for the most part, non-profits don’t use sort of base bonus type structures, but there are tons of other ways that you can make somebody feel really good about what they do and whether that’s simply celebrating their accomplishments to the other employees into your board. People really thrive on that, but it can also be other things, like giving them an extra days vacation. Um, you know, sending them home on purpose when their kid’s sick and you tell them that family comes first, you know, all those things that’s really more around culture, but there are there are smart things you can do where you say, you know what? I don’t have the dollar to give. You. But i do have a day to give you or two or whatever it is. Whatever it is, that you’ve earned benefits structures are very important. Um, covering people and their families, and how you do that and how you communicate it. Incredibly important and totally under sort of undervalued in the mindset in the nonprofit world about what that means to an individual. And you say, i care about you and your health, and i care about your family in there. We have just about a minute left or so we have a couple more than more than a couple minutes. How much time do we have left? Sam? Okay, dahna then let’s. Ah, my mistake. Let’s. Keep talking about some some policies around employment. Maybe around training. You’ve got a new employee. You’ve spent the requisite amount of time recruiting you believe you’ve got the best person, the orientation, the training process, the onboarding process oven employees that one of the single most important things that you d’oh. So with us, justus a simple example. First, everybody gets a very long, very detailed employee manual that they have to read where they really understand what the operating premises are of the organ you’re holding your hands, like four inches apart for inches. It’s not four inches thick. Okay, okay. They’re recording, so that would be way too much street. All right, but i use my hands a lot. I think i’m going to italy and one hundred in italian, so i didn’t think you were using them enough. That must be the eight and half months. Pregnant part. Yes, i understand. Ok, the but having that set of expectations in somebody’s mind where they read it? They have to affirm it. They have to tell you that they’ve read it. That tells them everything from how many vacation days they do have, how they can accrue more vacation, what the benefits are to them, how they can get in trouble, how they can stay out of trouble. What a whistle blower policy might look like. All of those things very, very important, but then bringing people into the culture of the organization into your programs where they really feel armed. Tio ah, to be an effective employees. Ah, it’s. So fundamental. So we we set up a schedule time with all of our program managers. We have our end of its staff. When they come in they go. They shadow individuals who do either their job or even other jobs inside the organization. Because you’ve got to understand the entire organization. I think in order to be effective in your silo. Um ah, and then we do profession. We were very open to paying from people doing professional development and encourage it. Ah, and then we do regular staff retreats where everybody comes together and we work on pieces that feel like they might be holes in the skill set to the entire organization again. Investment where its infrastructure or people? You just you can’t shortchange these things and expect to scale on grow the organization. I mean, for the amount it costs me, tio run a staff retreat every year, eyes about one percent of what it costs me to pay my staff. Yeah, that is a very worthwhile investment to make that staff be a leverage oppcoll army. We’re gonna leave it there. Hillary shafer she’s uh, executive director of jefferson awards foundation there at jefferson awards dot or ge and again on twitter. She’s at beard, hillary. Thank you so much, hillary. Thank you. Real pleasure and gun muzzle tough. Congratulations on your pregnancy. Thank you very much. Jean takagi and program your board coming up first. Pursuant acquisition campaigns. They had a free webinar to help you acquire new donors. That was back on august thirty first. But it’s not too late. This is not a date news. No, no one current news. You can watch the archive. Go to tony dot m a slash pursuant capital p please. And the info was there to watch. The archive video tony dahna em a slash pursuant for the archive on acquisition campaigns. Rechner, cps. They do go way beyond the numbers. They have lots of policy statements for you. Ah, more than from last week. Ethical conduct for board members, disaster recovery, investment policy, independent contractor versus employee checklist i know non-profit struggle with that. We’ve covered it and there’s a lot more resources at wagner cpas dot com quick resource is then guides that’s where you get all this good info stop wasting your time using business accounting software for your books you aren’t a business you’re non-profit appaloosa counting is designed for non-profits built from the ground up to make your non-profit financial management simple and affordable. Please check this out. Our new sponsor, apple, owes its fund accounting, advanced reporting, donation tracking and there’s mohr included in annapolis. Accounting it’s all in one, easy to use. Go to non-profit wizard dot com now for tony’s take two. I still got this five minute marketing for planned e-giving i condensed down to the to the, uh most essential information twenty five minutes. Hard to believe that i could talk for twenty five minutes and it not all be critical. I had difficulty with that, but the whole concept of distilling it down. But i did. And i got it down to about three minutes. Roughly and that’s the best of the five minute marketing tips that i’ve got for you for planned giving. I want you to get started with your plan giving marketing. Watch the tips. Check out the video. Three minutes worth it’s at tony martignetti dot com. And that is tony’s. Take two. And here is jean takagi with program you’re bored jean takagi he’s, a principal of neo the non-profit and exempt organizations law group in san francisco. Gene has been gene has been a regular contributor to show it’s got to be going on three years. Gina i if it’s not three it’s very close. He had it’s, the non popular of the non popular beautiful he had it’s the popular non-profit law blawg dot com non-profit law blogged dot com it’s very popular. And on twitter he’s at jack g t k happy new year jean takagi. Welcome back. Happy new year. Tony it’s. Great to be on. Thank you. I love having you. How long have you been? A contributor every month, i think it’s been a little over three years. A zit? Is it over three? Love it. It could be i think we met three years ago at a bar in san francisco, if i remember, right? Oh, for sure. It’s not like we pick. I picked you up there where i knew you before. I’m not that easy with contributors. I mean, yes, we we knew each other. And then we certainly did meet that’s, right? With along with emily chan? Yes. That’s. Right. Um, let’s see, our board has our board has some responsibilities and around program you’re concerned that they’re not they’re not fulfilling those responsibilities. Yeah, i just feel like there’s there’s, maybe some lack of attention paid on the boards roll on program oversight? I think so often went especially when you talk with lawyers or accountants were talking about financial oversight and we’re saying we’ll make sure you’re solvent. Make sure you have enough money to pay off your debts. They become do we don’t really talk very much about programs, but certainly the management folks and the thunder’s air talking about programs and whether they’re effective and efficient that furthering the mission. So, you know, i thought we should explore a little bit about what the board duties are in in that event as well. Can you just remind us first, we’ve talked about this a while ago. There are three duties that board members have. I was faith, hope and chastity, or on the greatest of those is but yeah, the three duties are the duty of care and that’s act with reasonable care in providing direction and oversight over the organization, the duty of loyalty, and a lot of that has to do with avoiding conflicts of interests that are not in the best interest of the organizations, but are more for the best interest of an insider and the duty of obedience which lawyers air very interested in, and that’s a bang with both the outside laws of you know, that apply to the organization and the internal laws like the by-laws and other policies that the documents may have those air the three to be to be concerned with. Okay and and around program program is essential. Man. That’s what charity’s exist for his programs? Oh, my voice just cracked like i’m a fourteen year old exist that’s. Exciting stuff. Now that it is, it is that’s. Right? Well, you make it interesting. That’s. Why? I love having you back. You make the what could very well be a dry topic. I think you make it interesting. And listeners do too. Yeah. That’s. What? Charity’s air here is for a program. Yeah, exactly. I mean, who cares? The indie at the end of the day, if we’ve got great financials, it’s none of our programs are effective, and we don’t do a service to the community. Precisely. So what? What do we need to be doing? What to boards need to be doing around around program. Well, i think in meeting those three duties, the critical aspect for boards to make sure they’re reasonably informed. Ah, and just get a program report every month or every two months. You know, a ten minute program report from the executive director or program director is fine and good. But does that mean the board really understands the programs and whether the advance the mission on do they understand how the program’s advance emission? And did they ever ask you more difficult questions about are the programs effective? At advancing the mission. Or do we have alternatives? Or should we think of alternatives that might be able to advance that mission mohr effectively or more efficiently, given the limited resources that we all have? First up in this is and we have talked about this, your mission needs to be very clear. Yeah, and one of the things you have to do is make sure you go back. And this is the lawyer speaking, make sure you go back to your articles of incorporation and by-laws and make sure that the mission statement that years, thinking that you’re furthering is consistent with what the law says your mission is, and that’s that’s how it’s displayed on the governing documents and figuring out whether we are effective at meeting our mission. Now we’ve gotto identify cem numbers, right? I mean, it’s, not just gonna be a ten minute report from the program director, we’ve got to be looking at some numbers to figure out whether our we’re having the outcomes that we want, right and it’s such a such a difficult question and that’s, why it’s it’s all about keeping informed? Because you know the whole area of program. Evaluation and that cantor and and a lot of institutions like the stanford center on philanthropy in civil society and mckinsey and, you know, the non-profit cordially foundations under the all have been raiding all sorts of things on program evaluation and how we need more metrics and, you know, but all of that is great, but this is really hard stuff for a lot of non-profits to do so, yes, trying to figure out what what measurements are are important for us to figure out. Are we advancing our mission effectively? And then are we advancing it efficiently is really hard stuff, i think tip typically non-profits will, you know, measure how much money we’ve raised, how many visitors we’ve had or people with served, how many members we have? What is our overhead ratio on? We’ve had discussions on that topic as well, and, you know, those are interesting figures in all important, and i don’t want to downplay that, but what about, you know, then, you know, the number of clients served, for example, does that really tell us what impact that’s done? No before the clients and you know, the program staff may know that, but how does the board know that if we have? If we served two thousand clients last month, did we did we serve them by giving them one meal? Did that change their lives? Did we do more than that? Did we provide services? What? What and impact are we trying to aim for? And what results are we getting those air really difficult things to try to figure out. But i think the board needs to push the organization in that direction. Of trying to figure out are the programs that write programs? Are we effectively implementing it? And if you want to, you know, evaluate your executive and evaluate your programs. You’ve gotta have a good understanding of that. I feel your passion around this, jean. I really do. It comes it’s it’s palpable. Now, in managing these programs, it’s not the board’s roll. Teo to be day to day there’s clearly there’s a delegation that has to be happening. Yeah, absolutely. And and the board certainly has the ability to and should be delegating if they have staff in an executive director. Particularly, um, delegating those duties on those people. And especially, you know, holding the executive accountable. And tasking executive and making sure the executive has resources to be able to do this, to try to figure out what measurements should we take? Teo, evaluate our programs. What what’s important? What do we have the capacity to do now? And what? What do we aspire to do? What are outside stakeholders wanting? What are the foundations saying we must have? And what are the donor’s expecting from us and how to our competitors provide that type of information back? I think we just need to push our executives. We’re lucky enough to have them to figure some of those things out. And none of this has done overnight. Of course, tony. But you know, you you’ve gotto work at this, and sometimes you’re going to move forward, and sometimes you gotta move backwards. But you’ve got to keep pushing, pushing ahead. You just asked five or six really difficult but critical questions. Um, it’s a good thing. This is a podcast cause now people can listen. Go, go back to the past one minute and listen to those five or six questions. Jean just just named, you know, difficulty, but but but critical. And and yet the board’s oversight responsibility remains, and that can’t be delegated. That’s, right? So you know, the board, khun delegate management, but the board can’t delegate its ultimate oversight of the organization and it’s, you know, it’s responsibility to plan the direction of the organization. So status quo, if you know if that’s all you’re satisfied with and you don’t aim to do anything else with that, you know, that may not that may indicate that you don’t have the best board in place, and i was a little shocked. Teo learned, i think two days ago guidestar held a web cast, and there was a survey done of executive directors, and seventy five percent said they were unhappy with their boards and there’s a big disconnect there seventy five percent approved. Okay, what else? What else, uh, is part of the boards oversight of program? Gene? Well, you know, one thing i kind of want to emphasize as well is that i don’t want to put all of this on the board of directors, and i realized that the vast majority of board members are volunteers and have busy lives otherwise and are doing an amazing job. Trying to contribute to their organizations, the disconnect with the exec director is usually because of communications and a lack of understanding of their respective roles. So i just want to put a little bit of a burden on the executive director as well, to make sure that they are emphasizing board development and helping the board understand its responsibilities and sometimes bringing in experts, even though they may cost a little at the outset. Khun b really valuable to an organisation to try to figure out what these roles are, and again put in a little investment up front, and you can get payoff down the road even if you have some failures along the way. But it’s just that continuing to push forward to trying to understand what you’re doing who’s responsible for what? On figuring that stuff out the metrics themselves again. Our khun b, you know, exceedingly difficult if if i asked you give us metrics on changing laws when we were fighting for civil rights, well, that might take years or decades to get any measurable results per se that might make a thunder happy. And you know what would have happened in the early sixties you know, civil rights organizations just had their program shut down because boards didn’t get the right metrics. That would have been ridiculous, right? So we have to understand the limitation of these measurements as well, but continue to try to figure out what important steps or benchmarks we’re shooting for and what’s important to do, even if we don’t get the metrics. Ah, and make sure our funders and donors and stakeholders understand those limitations. Well, just a minute or so before before breaking what? What kind of expert would help us with this? What would we search for? Well, there there are some consultants out there who specialize in program evaluation, and there there are definitely resource is out there. I have named a few organizations already, but let me give you a few more the foundation centre and they’re grantspace website has got some excellent resource is on program evaluation, the national council of non-profits also has some excellent resources. They’re they’re definitely resource is out there. And if you look for non-profit consultants who got program evaluation exper thirties, i think that can be a starting place. This is also a ripe area for collaboration. Amongst organizations that are serving similar populations, or half similar missions, to try to meet together and talked about how they’re measuring, you know, their program, results and what would work for maybe, you know, across the sub sector that that they’re serving, all of those things are really important. I think again, executive leadership is really important to get the board in motion, but the board also has to hold the executive responsible for making sure that happens as well. Let’s, take a break. Gene and i, of course, will keep talking about the board’s responsibility around program and the executive director’s, too. Lynette singleton and at lays, right. Thank you for thank you very much. For those very, very kind thoughts on twitter. Hang in there. Like what you’re hearing a non-profit radio tony’s got more on youtube, you’ll find clips from stand up comedy tv spots and exclusive interviews catch guests like seth gordon. Craig newmark, the founder of craigslist market of eco enterprises charles best from donors choose dot org’s aria finger do something that worked neo-sage levine from new york universities heimans center on philantech tony tweets to he finds the best content from the most knowledgeable, interesting people in and around non-profits to share on his stream. If you have valuable info, he wants to re tweet you during the show. You can join the conversation on twitter using hashtag non-profit radio twitter is an easy way to reach tony he’s at tony martignetti narasimhan t i g e n e t t i remember there’s a g before the end he hosts a podcast for the chronicle of philanthropy fund-raising fundamentals is a short monthly show devoted to getting over your fund-raising hartals just like non-profit radio, toni talks to leading thinkers, experts and cool people with great ideas. As one fan said, tony picks their brains and i don’t have to leave my office fund-raising fundamentals was recently dubbed the most helpful non-profit podcast you have ever heard. You can also join the conversation on facebook, where you can ask questions before or after the show. The guests were there, too. Get insider show alerts by email, tony tells you who’s on each week and always includes link so that you can contact guess directly. To sign up, visit the facebook page for tony martignetti dot com. Hi, i’m kate piela, executive director of dance, new amsterdam. And you’re listening to tony martignetti non-profit radio. Big non-profit ideas for the other ninety five percent. More live listener love junction china ni hao, the netherlands gary indiana the home of christmas story, right? I’m pretty sure a christmas story that movie took place in gary, indiana live listen, i’d love to gary, indiana, and we’ve got a couple checking in from japan, hiroshima and kobe konnichi wa, farmington, michigan live listener love out to you. We have a question from twitter jean very loyal listener lynette singleton asks, do we know why there’s this lack of love between executive directors with and their boards, any ideas what’s contributing to that? I think i’m sorry, tony, that i think there are a number of factors that make be contributing to that, but i think the first is lack of understanding of the rules at each place and then it’s it’s a matter of communication between the two parties there are greater vacations that that board’s place on executives and reliance on the executives tio tio make do with limited resources to produce amazing results, and that can sometimes be a very heavy burden on the executive without a lot of support from the board and exactly what the board’s role is in supporting the executive director’s. Also, i think they’re many areas where there’s a lack of agreement or understanding between those roles and, you know, fund-raising is actually one of the areas of ax. Actually, some controversy, i think, you know, is the board involved. Is the board’s role no to raise funds for the organisation. From a legal perspective, i might answer no to some extent, from a more operational perspective, i would say, of course it is, so they’re they’re different considerations, and that was a charity navigator study, right? I’m not sure. I thought you said i’d start with, i’m sorry, the organization that did the webinar. Okay, okay, god start. Pardon me. Ok wave talking, talking about program meeting the mission, but there’s also legal requirements around program as well. Sure, and then the board should make sure that the executive is ensuring that the program is in compliance with whatever applicable laws might be there, whether it have to do with the facility of the organization or the employees and volunteers working for it, their basic risk management steps that they may want to take a swell, including ensuring that there’s proper insurance that, for whatever activities are are involved. Obviously, if you’re doing a summer day camp involving rope climbing and like that that’s going to be a little bit more significant in terms of risk management than if you’re just doing administrative work, but lots of legal compliance things, licensing, permitting and in all of those think, well, can board members be personally liable if laws are being broken and that’s why we have directors and officers insurance, isn’t it? Yeah, part partly why we have that it’s usually, you know, if there’s some sort of negligence involved when the board members acting not as a boardmember but is a volunteer for a program, then you’re probably looking at commercial general liability insurance to protect against, you know, somebody slip and fall and blaming the volunteer who was right supposed to set it up on the board members, directors and officers. Insurance will really protect against decisions that the board made that ultimately, you know, in hindsight, we’re negligent or grossly negligent, and, you know, if they decided to hold a program in involved involving bungee jumping with six year olds and without adequate supervision that, you know, that would be the type of negligence that could get boardmember personally liable for something like that. But volunteermatch boardmember czar really, really, really rarely held personally liable absent some sort of malfeasance or self dealing really benefit themselves. Okay, i’ve seen some six year olds on the subway that i wouldn’t mind having participate in that that bungee jumping off a cliff i could i could give them a little shove to get them started, but not not kids. I know nobody related to me only only what’s people i’ve seen in some pipe it that it go well, now they’re real. I’ve seen him in the subway, i just don’t know who they are. I can’t name them, but i could point them out easily. Probably on my way home. I’ll encounter a few. Um, what else should we be thinking about? You know, your get before i asked before we do that, you’re an anarchist. Also, you’re making us. I got two troublemakers on the show today. You are making us ask questions that are very difficult, but but critical? Yeah. You know, i think of lawyers and consultants more broadly, that’s what what we do, we can implement the changes that we talked about, what we want to raise the questions because we want boards and executives to really be thinking about these things and discussing them. And that’ll help break down the barriers and the misunderstandings and hopefully make more executive directors feel that their boards air great, make more executive, make more boards feel that their executive directors are doing a great job as well. As i said, i feel your passion around this. We have just about two minutes. What? You have another thought around this? Yeah. You know, just tio, make sure that again and i’ve talked a little bit about this is that there are limitations to what metrics can provide to an organization and some things just take a really long time to figure out research i mentioned lobbying on civil rights issues is one example, but research as well, you know, for going to engage in research of a new program and how it’s going to work or developing a new medical device or drug that’s going to be beneficial to developing nations and that the people there who might not have the resources to be able to afford these things, we’ve got to be a little bit experimental. And i know you know, there’s been preaching to the choir about embracing failure and sharing it so we can learn in advance, but that really is something that all echo as well, that, you know, we’re going to get metrics and sometimes the metrics they’re going to show we failed, but if we never fail, that means we’ve never really pushed the envelope of making a more substantial change, and we’re just sort of, you know, relying on making little incremental changes, and we have to think about our organizations and say, are we detective organization that just wants to stay status quo? Do we want to make little tiny? Incremental changes year by year or do we actually want to look at solving or advancing our mission in a really big way and actually take some risk and find some programs out there that might be more risky and that might fail and help educate our funders and our donors and our supporters that this is what we’re doing and not everything is going to work, but this is the way to advance, you know, our cause lawyer with a heart, jean jean takagi, really so grateful that you’re contributing to the show? Jean, thank you so much. Thank you, johnny. And thanks for basing this serious subject today. That’s all right, uh, we have a little fun with it. You’re an anarchist is no question cubine you’ll find jean at non-profit law blogged dot com that’s the block that he edits and he’s at g tack on twitter. Thank you again, jean, thanks so much. Next week it’ll be a good one. You have my word. I don’t know anything about fermentation. If you missed any part of today’s show, i beseech you, find it on tony martignetti dot com and these are our sponsors pursuing online tools. For small and midsize non-profits data driven and technology enabled pursuing dot com wagner, sepa is guiding you beyond the numbers. With your cps dot com. You’re not a business. You’re non-profit stoploss accounting software designed for non-profits non-profit wizard dot com, and we be spelling supercool spelling bee fundraisers. We b e spelling dot com, a creative producers, claire meyerhoff. Sam liebowitz is the line producer, shows social media is by susan chavez, and this terrific music is by scott stein of brooklyn. Be with me next week for non-profit radio. Big non-profit ideas for the other ninety five percent. Go out and be going. Buy-in what’s not to love about non-profit radio tony gets the best guests check this out from seth godin this’s the first revolution since tv nineteen fifty and henry ford nineteen twenty it’s the revolution of our lifetime here’s a smart, simple idea from craigslist founder craig newmark yeah insights, orn presentation or anything? People don’t really need the fancy stuff they need something which is simple and fast. When’s the best time to post on facebook facebook’s andrew noise nose at traffic is at an all time hyre on nine a m or eight pm so that’s, when you should be posting your most meaningful post here’s aria finger ceo of do something dot or ge young people are not going to be involved in social change if it’s boring and they don’t see the impact of what they’re doing. So you got to make it fun and applicable to these young people look so otherwise a fifteen and sixteen year old they have better things to do if they have xbox, they have tv, they have their cell phones. Me dar is the founder of idealist took two or three years for foundation staff, sort of dane toe add an email address card. It was like it was phone. This email thing is right and that’s why should i give it away? Charles best founded donors choose dot or ge somehow they’ve gotten in touch kind of off line as it were on dno. Two exchanges of brownies and visits and physical gift mark echo is the founder and ceo of eco enterprises. You may be wearing his hoodies and shirts. Tony talked to him. Yeah, you know, i just i’m a big believer that’s not what you make in life. It sze, you know, tell you make people feel this is public radio host majora carter. Innovation is in the power of understanding that you don’t just do it. You put money on a situation expected to hell. You put money in a situation and invested and expect it to grow and savvy advice for success from eric sacristan. 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Nonprofit Radio for September 9, 2016: Going Social In The Boardroom & Creative Commons 101

Big Nonprofit Ideas for the Other 95%

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Jeanne Allen & Nancy Rose: Going Social In The Boardroom

There are lots of ways your board can use the social networks to make their work more efficient and fun. The possibilities start with recruiting; orientation; chat; and content creation. Those and other ideas come from Jeanne Allen, principal of Jeanne Allen Consulting, and Nancy Rose, executive director of the North Carolina Center for Public Policy Research. (Recorded at the 2016 Nonprofit Technology Conference.)

 

Carly Leinheiser: Creative Commons 101

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Carly Leinheiser explains what Creative Commons is and how valuable it can be if you need video, images or pubs or want to release your own content to raise awareness. This originally aired on September 26, 2014, before Carly was an associate at Robinson+Cole.

 

 


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Okay. Hello and welcome to tony martignetti non-profit radio big non-profit ideas for the other ninety five percent. I’m your aptly named host. Oh, i’m glad you’re with me. I’d suffer with quadrant ah, you believe that i’d suffer with quadrant a topia if i saw that you missed today’s show going social in the board room, there are lots of ways your board can use the social networks to make their work more efficient and fun, their possibilities starting with recruiting, orientation, chat and content creation. Those and other ideas come from gene allen principle of gene allen consulting and nancy rose, executive director of the north carolina center for public policy research, that was recorded at the twenty sixteen non-profit technology conference and creative commons one or one carly leinheiser explains what creative commons is and how valuable it khun b if you need video images or publications or you want to release your own content to raise awareness of your work that originally aired on september twenty six, twenty fourteen and also seth godin, the author, blogger and speaker sat down at the two thousand ten next-gen charity conference with regina walton than our social media manager, his advice about shipping product failing and permission marketing remains quite sound until on tony’s, take two non-profit radio testimonials responsive by pursuant full service fund-raising data driven and technology enabled, you’ll raise more money pursuant dot com, and by we be spelling supercool spelling bee fundraisers. We be spelling dot com i’m gonna try to untie my tongue, and in the meantime, you can listen to gene allen and nancy rose on social networks for your board. Welcome to tony martignetti non-profit radio coverage of sixteen ntc the non-profit technology conference this is also part of ntc conversations were in san jose, california, at the convention center. My guests are gene allen and nancy rose. They’re session topic is moving social media into the non-profit board room. Gene allen, seated next to me is trainer and consultant, a gene allen consulting, and nancy rose is the executive director at the north carolina center for public policy research. Incorporated ladies gene, nancy, welcome welcome, thanks for having thank you. My pleasure, my pleasure geever a bit of interesting maybe i don’t know, maybe provocative topic social media in the non-profit boardroom and we’re gonna get through it very shortly, i just to shout out our swag item for this. This interview, which is from start male it’s, a very, very firm bug. I could hear that. If you’re not, you’re not watching the video on the backside from start mail. It says, my friends, my email, my business, start mail, dot com. We’re going to put this in the swag pile for the day two and t c swag. Right, he’s got a dreadful place. Okay, this is very interesting. Nancy let’s. Start with you. What what’s the potential for for social in the boardroom. Well, i’m coming at it from an executive director’s position, as well as in my former position as the technology person from our organization and moving boardmember sze into social media helps a lot with four duties, if you can get them to do tweeting for you communications, but not only that things like working in committees, if you can get them toe move online, and actually i let gene talk a bit more about it. I’m sort of the non-profit. Side kick teens. But there’s this interesting. Now, as a technologist, you became executive director. Yeah, i don’t think that’s very common now, it’s not, uh, how does that work? Well, i’ve been with the organization for a little over thirty two years, almost thirty two years. And our executive director had been there for thirty three and he retired and i was in the finance operations in technology side. So i was doing all of that side and ended up moving into the position about seven months ago. But you were broader than just broader than just technology. Okay. Okay, alright. Jeanne what’s the potential here transform how boards do work. Transformed. That’s. All right. That’s. That’s. Pretty dramatic. Yeah. Be creative. Duitz concept of fell fast. Just trying new things. See what the board could get involved with. Okay. We got two ladies from north carolina, by the way. So, uh, onda gonna guy actually, north carolina, just very recently, not thirty two years for me. All right, so let’s, say now the description includes i don’t know if you read this that you proof. Read this. Yeah. It says ah, this session is feared for those who work with leadership or boards, i think, supposed to be geared, but it does, say, feared snusz feared. There, i circled the word feared we’d like to keep people on their toes, so i don’t think geared. Yeah, so is their fear a in the board room around social? Are they so unskilled that they’re they’re fearful? You got a wide range of people on board? You get people who are ready to use social media to get people who like the way things have always been done. Yeah. Plus i think the point here also is people just don’t think of using social media this way. They think of using it to get boardmember is to ask for money. Sure, they think of events they think of broadcasting out and the ideas well, how can we take some of this these products that are out there and use them in this in that boardroom? Okay, well, you identified working internally and and having the board be external ambassadors on social. So how about we start with the internal? Because i think aside from the fact that this is not really very much thought of, i think the first thought would be oh, well, we could have them out tweeting as as you said, but let’s start in so let’s start internal, the board committee structure and the mechanisms of the board. Right. So what’s the potential here. What? What? What are they gonna do when i presented this before the group, some of them are well advanced in some of mark’s there’s. Kind of two. Two different strategies here. One is the idea that you can do collaborative tools. To get bored or committees to me. But the other side of that there’s been a lot of talk of this going on his conferences. What’s the strategy for just making change happen. How do you get people to try something new with a willingness to have that learning curve and a willingness to fail? That’s? Why, nancy, not make a great pair? Because i bring these great ideas and nancy tries them and then says, well, some of these work better than others. What can we learn from it? You know, great idea needs to be a diaper adapted by somebody. Okay. Okay. So what are some of the collaborative tools that we can that we can employ for our board? Well, summer simple, like google plus and just learned how to share your documents have been in a lot of workshops talking about the paid platforms that you come by. So, it’s, just the idea. Board, pack or board effect where you can have your whole board process online. The bigger non-profits alright, let’s not gloss over these resource ideas. Board pack is one right. Ph you and another’s board effect. Okay, so that is you buy a platform and you can have all of your documents, all of your information, and one space that’s organized now the people who work for the huge non-profit sitter nationwide often have these platforms, but the individual non-profits don’t have anything, so they have to they’re the ones that might be most interested. Well, those are our listeners, actually small and midsize. Non-profit so even though i think some of the people inside national organizations could learn, they’re there, i’m not producing the show for them, we’re so we’re targeting the smaller midsize non-profit so all right, so you don’t have to be his fancy as the ones you’re named right but simple google docks and google plus, right? Yes. Yeah, for example, with some of our board members with our committees. If we have boardmember sze that air taking notes for their committees, they can put those into the google docks so that everybody can can see that would add to them as well. Now, getting everybody to use google dogs moving them along sometimes takes a little longer than you would might hope. Say you have toe you have to try it and keep at it for a while. Before you, you decide that it’s not going to be working for you. Ok, there is this age dependent sometimes. I mean, i find that there are people who are all ages come with different expectations, but part of it is people the board members, you’re recruiting the new ones. We want to bring on the boards, bringing new skillsets how do we make sure they’re interested in being on the board? So the process forever has been paper driven? How do we change it? Make it more online? Ok, somewhat aged driven. But not everybody who is young uses all the tech called upon all the platforms and not everybody who’s older doesn’t use them. Okay, i think one of the other things is, you know, our board mirrors the population of north carolina, so they’re coming from all across the state there. You know, we have business people, we have academics. We have people in government, and they all use lots of different tools. And so trying to find one tool that everybody is comfortable using, that can be a challenge sometimes. Okay. How do you have you overcome that challenge? Well, sometimes i’m not sure at the moment the you know, google docks has been fairly successful for us. We do have board members that work and financial institutions that if they are asked if they’re remote ing into a, um into a meeting, they may not be ableto access google docks through their workplace wifi because of security reasons, so they either have to bring in a personal dahna device or they have to leave the premises and work it, but they they’ve been pretty good about it about doing that, okay, okay, songs you give me a heads up. So what are the potential activities that that boards could be doing around the social tool? So we mentioned committee meetings, right? Committee committee meetings between the full board meetings, other other things, they they’re cheating or what? Well, the other one of the things you want boardmember is to be is an ambassador for your organization. Instagram is a great example. Fifteen seconds you considered a board meeting and say, what are some points we could all make? Passed the phone around into a fifteen second video of each boardmember in front of the logo of the organization. So then you have some content you can put out once a month or whatever, and it’s, i’m on this board for this reason, and somebody else gives another one you khun planted ahead of time by everybody saying one of the points we want to cover shows the personality, the face of who’s on the board and people don’t think using instagram that way, and maybe you’re bored doesn’t come in and think that’s, the way they can show their enthusiasm. Yeah, yeah, we’ve also had boardmember tze, when we’re doing our nominations, process du videos of why i serve on the board and then we’ll post those on youtube and share have them share out so that people understand you have different various boardmember see why they’re passionate about the way you’ve actually done that once we have done that and then have the board members themselves share it, or they were or you have done it for them, we’ve shared it and tried to encourage them to share it. We’ve had less success. We’re still working on getting them, but they’re still working on that. Okay? Okay. That’s. Why? The beauty is you can do it on a phone right there in the room. You can practice everybody, does it instead of go home and do it. We’re doing it right now and we could look at it and see what it is. It’s fun. So you’re creating these board meetings that are fine and, you know, and look at this video, you could be silly and then do another one and just to make it have fun, ok? Excellent, excellent. What? Elsie? Glad i asked because i was just thinking of committee meetings on dh nancy mentioned the board minutes, but okay, motion content, you’re tuned to non-profit radio tony martignetti also hosts a podcast for the chronicle of philanthropy fund-raising fundamentals is a quick ten minute burst of fund-raising insights published once a month. Tony’s guests are expert in crowdfunding, mobile giving event fund-raising direct mail and donor cultivation. Really all the fund-raising issues that make you wonder am i doing this right? Is there a better way there is? Find the fund-raising fundamentals archive it. Tony martignetti dot com that’s marketmesuite n e t t i remember there’s a g before the end, thousands of listeners have subscribed on itunes. You can also learn maura the chronicle website philanthropy dot com fund-raising fundamentals, the better way. What else? So another example i use in the workshop we’re going to do is i take the picture, ellen, the generous tweeted out from the oscars remember that one that you have the selfie? Yes, our kevin spacey and much people, yeah, but just celebrity. So i did a little bit of research on this, and i found some other pictures where people kind of newsjacking s so so to speak. There’s one where there’s a picture, it is the picture right after the picture was taken, so it shows all i’m after they step back about three feet looking at the picture, then there’s another one that shows this person who’s associating united way, who then photoshopped himself into the picture with a united way shirt like you’re bored could do that. It’s just silly things to say to people, look, you can start newsjacking what’s out there mean jacking taking pictures that are out there and adapting them, getting your board toe laugh and have fun so they don’t just see the serious part of the job. All right now that’s a great one for the united way pictures. Great. Yeah, yeah. Like that film zelig, you know the woody allen looking up? He sees it through the kennedy assassination in that place that the lincoln inauguration hour and whatever you know throughout history is face is always there, okay, is there more? I mean, sharon, what else can we now internally still still keep it internal before we start having the board go out and tweet for us and, you know, facebook close for us? Well, actually, i think internal board management stuff so one of the things that i have found about twitter that’s very interesting is i find it to be a great search engine so you can put in topics you’re interested in and stuff pops up boards are always one thing they seem to not know his financial management, so you could get somebody to tweet with it. I mean, search within twitter and i for the trial run to this and found a free webinar there’s being offered on non-profit financials, so you could ask boardmember is to do some searching on twitter to find topics that might be of interest and bring it back to the board members so they could then have signed up for one or two people. Could have signed up for the webinar on non-profit financials seen what it was about brought it in and said here’s, a couple of ideas of what i learned so it’s using twitter is away toe search for information. Then i did an example had to do with lung cancer just for an example of a non-profit that might be with that as a focus, and some report came up from the journal of american medical association that if you were on that board, it might have been of interest to you and it’s one you would have found otherwise. So it’s just getting people thinking you can use twitter to find information, not just tow broadcast put it out, of course, okay, uh, nancy much much with on the board with twitter. Um, we haven’t had the board do much with twitter yet, other than searching for media outlets when we need to do press release those people in their area who we should, who we should be adding to our list and that’s helpful, but the most recent thing we’ve done internally with board is working with our board treasure we’ve implemented slack, which is, you know, sort. Of ah, tool that’s a combination of texting and file sharing all in one place. I don’t know this one it all okay, so it’s of the howto explain slack messaging. So yeah, so it’s sort of like instant messaging back and forth. You can have secure channels and you can have open channels that anybody can anybody that’s invited can be a part of so the treasure and i have a secure channel and that’s where we share all of our financial conversations back and forth our budget information, our treasures reports that we’re working on together so that it’s also searchable, so that if he puts in the word budget, all of the conversations that we’ve had with the word budget and all of the budgets come up in one place so we don’t have to go through lots of emails back and forth or have, you know, set up a specific site excellent that land slack. All right, so using it for internal communications so you and the board or boards could board committees could use it? Yes, and that’s what? I’m hoping we’ve started just with the treasure and i, but i’m hoping it’ll it’ll spread. Out toe have the rest of the committee’s use it. Very interesting. Did you find that one who brought interestingly enough center and ten brought it to me the antennas using it for their five o one tech club for there. What are we called? Were father one tech club in the raleigh durham tol arika oppcoll nc tech for good. Ok. Yes. Come visit sometime. I may so they started using that for communication tool between all of the organizer’s and i thought, oh, that’s a great idea to try with board members so i got used to using it with in town and then started trying it with with the board treasury. Okay, excellent slack. Ok, i love this resource is people khun you can go online and see if it works for them. I love those kinds of ideas i think listeners really appreciate. And the bass part that we’re using is free. So okay, so there’s a page version is the papers and you haven’t found a need for it. So funny before. Yet you said there’s security there could be secure or public. Yes. Ok. Ok, right. So i see how it diverges from email. Plus that they’re all concentrated to search all the remaining on board budget. Just search my communications with nancy. Yeah, talk about budget, and i also integrated double level search. It integrates with other tools, like ed ingrates with box and drop box, so that if you have files that are stored over there, you can just share a link to those files. And when you do the search with, then it’ll pull those up as well. Yes, that’s, what you mentioned, okay, excellent that’s, a great one, all right. Anything else? Internal? Well, they’re all kind of internal from the perspective of it’s, about looking at social media is a way to do the work of the board, so one of the ideas boards need to do is recruit new board members. So what would you use that? So we decided, how can we use link thin? And the idea behind lengthen is if you got all your board members to put that they were on your board, which sometimes people don’t even put that on their profile, then it starts toe raise the profile of your organization because there’s your name out there of people wanted to search, they could see who’s on your board, you could have boardmember put a statement while i’m on this board, he wouldn’t think to use linked in. It helps with your searching when you come up, and it also just helps with if if anyone was asked to be on your board and they might search to see who who’s on the board that comes up that way, who’s on what kind of skills they bring it. You should listen to non-profit radio because we’ve had people talk about some of these chicks linked in cars to me most recently, but you just mentioned, but we’re just and none of the tell you the truth. None of these are brilliant new ideas, the packaging them just for the board to say here things boards khun do right right with social, yes, excellent, excellent. Um, go ahead. Nancy was going to say, i think, gene, you have some, um, examples of using it for orientation as well. Well, that’s, my i like the fun when it’s using slideshare, which now is part of linked in. But the idea is, i’ve seen cem orientation. You can put your orientation slide, show up on slideshare, and then the idea is to use the concept of the classroom where you would do the work ahead of time, right? Flip the classroom where they where they look at the slide show or video first, and then you come in and you have your education after they’ve already looked at. Okay, so you take your somewhat boring, perhaps orientation to being on the board, but you can watch it at eleven o’clock at night and i could watch it it’s six in the morning and then you show up saying to people, come to the board meeting and we’re going to discuss what was on there. And i shows some examples that i found of a couple of groups, one of which embedded some questions and said, we’re going to talk about these questions when you get here, the ideas you don’t pull people into a room and use their precious time to look at a slideshow that’s one dimensional even though it’s important, they can look at it on their own time. Yeah, why slideshare and not other places you don’t have to keep changing it. It sits there. You don’t have to it’s just it’s. Ah threespot to put your information don’t have to go in and change it once a week don’t have to change it twice a year. Every time you have an orientation, if you upgraded, you could put something in there, and then other people who might want to know something about your organization might come across and go. Oh, isn’t this interesting? So the questions i get sometimes about that is what we have information we don’t want to share. Well, then, don’t put it in the slide show. I mean, if it’s crucial, we’ll just deal with that at the board meeting. Exactly. All right. But the key on that is to use people’s time in a wise way and say, we’re gonna use your time when you’re together doing things you could only do together and use the time alone where you could go what’s the slide show. Okay. Excellent. Slideshare for boards. Yeah. Brilliant. All right, all right. We still have a couple more minutes left together. What? Whatever. We talk now. Okay. Well, i guess i mean, i was organizing it inside and outside. Yeah. Let’s go. So let’s, go outside. Okay. Um, you’re boardmember xaz social media ambassadors. Yeah, yep. You’re doing this, nancy. So we’re just starting, i mean, we’ve had a couple of tries and fails, so when we’ve released a publication, we’ve certainly ask board members to repeat our tweets toe tweet out in comment, etcetera, but we’re finding we have a couple of board members that really do that, but we’re finding that if we go ahead and craft tweets and craft facebook posts and send them to them and all they have to do is cut and paste and they consent it from their own that’s what? We’re going to try for our next release and we’ll see how it goes, okay, yeah, i mean, the wisdom, the conventional wisdom is that you want make it as easy as possible for people to share and at least getting started, you know, write, especially for those that are not as comfortable with it as others. All right, all right, we’ll get there, but you’re you know, you said you’d try and fail, try and fail sometimes that that’s what we should be don’t fear that don’t feel failure. That’s part of the flow of the organization is not at risk for what your trying you know, you’re just trying some simple tweeted to twitter and facebook outreach try it, it’s creating the culture who were willing to trust something what works and find the two or three tools that work well for us. Part of this is bringing on new people on the board that creative class, the new thinkers. I had a friend who just joined the board who said to me i only want to join the board whether to one fun things and creative things. I don’t want to be on an old fogey board. Well, it’s not necessary in age thing, but it’s a tool thing sometime and a culture. Yes. What do you know? What are they using their board for? How were they using them? I was how engages the board. Okay, there’s. A lot to that. So do a lot of more development. And with the number one question, i get asked us how to get our board more engaged. So that started this whole presentation. How can we do things that engage? Boardmember is it’s not just telling him what to do but gives them a chance to create stuff? So the idea would be perhaps what i have a board come up with. What? Are some of the topics we need to learn more about, which is always financial management and then instead of staff driving it, divide it up amongst the board members and say, okay, here’s, some topics, tony, you’re going to charge the september meeting, we’re gonna have a ten minute time slot. We just want to do a little bit of introduction on this topic, why don’t you go look for it on twitter or look for a video on youtube and you bring the content to us and i wouldn’t ask you if you were the lawyer or the accountant necessary because we don’t want that high level. We just want some layperson description of whatever the function is, so you could bring in a a video you found on youtube said, hey, this is one about non-profit financial management that really lays out some ideas we could look at, so people are taking some ownership for teaching themselves how to be on the board nasco you’re doing that are the are board members bringing topics either on their own or once you’ve asked him to look into well boardmember zehr always bringing us topics study for our for our policy studies way. We have not had them bring topics necessarily for board development yet. Okay. All right, so we just have a few more minutes. I mean, another minute or so really men and a half. This is really it’s very motivating mean, they’re very simple things you contest. You know, this is no, nothing outlandish, but but true productivity, i mean, the idea of the of slack love that one, you know, simple productivity tools that board’s air just not thinking about and boards can be very paper intensive. Yeah, we but we all know that yes, yes. Created a culture who are willing to try new ideas because if we try i’m in the board room with using social media. We might come with other ideas for how to do fund-raising or take some ownership in some other ways. I have one. I’m going to throw out for you. I was in a board meeting for ah client organization, and they invested in ipads for all their board members. Now you have to give it back when you leave the board, but they’re boardmember it’s. Well, don’t you start with the minutes report packages leading up to the board meeting instead of these three ring binder is being shipped out all over your state or something? Just upload you put them somewhere. They all grab them from there, they will grab them for their own into individual ipad. Read them at their leisure so you’re not you’re not. I don’t know if they found that they saved money, but they know that they have safe time in copy and reproduction and on dh. Maybe they haven’t in these shipping costs because they have board members all over new york state. So i’m thinking north carolina, you know? So yeah, it’s an upfront investment. Although the older ipads now are a lot less expensive uh s so all the board packages they’re online, right? Please download it at your leisure and obviously have read it. And then the board minutes get circulated that same way. And we need to take the stories of the non-profits doing that and kind of write it up and share. So we get more people trying things like that. Okay, i agree. Yeah, we finally moved from eight and a half by fourteen hundred and thirty eight page paper board packets to bring your own device and download. Download the you’re doing that way just now got into that. Space, but it took about four years. All right, all right. You’ve been testing audiocasting contrasting and trying exactly really write their test and try and don’t be afraid to fail. Great. Outstanding. All right, seated next to me is gene allen, trainer and consultant of gene allen consulting and also nancy rose, executive director, the north carolina center for public policy research. And this is tony martignetti non-profit radio coverage of ntc steen the non-profit technology conference. Thank you so much for being with us. Cuadra to know pia cuadra to know pia cuadra, tono pia, creative commons one o one and seth gordon coming up first. Pursuant fourth quarter starts next month, which means a big fund-raising push for you. Do you need help? Check out their year end accelerator. It combines a proven best practices with their innovative acquisition and cultivation strategies. What does all that mean? You have a strong year end push, that’s what? It means their accelerator at pursuant dot com slash year end accelerator we be spelling spelling bees for non-profit fund-raising you want to bring millennials into your organization? This is perfect because it’s not your grandma’s spelling bee. Check out the video. You’ll see live music, dancing, standup comedy, fund-raising and spelling. These are great millennial events. They run them in a bar or restaurant on behalf of your organization. If those very fun video at we b e spelling dot com now time for tony steak too. The itunes testimonials and reviews are amazing. I had to keep this video up for a second week. One of the guys on invoked the cartel. Guys remember tom and ready, marriott. See, the show is still on there. Just not doing that new new shows every week anymore. But the archive is still very active. And one of the people who wrote a testimonial said he sees elements of the car talk guys in non-profit radio, which i loved. That was very gracious because i, you know, i don’t know so much now, but in the beginning i was sort of channeling tom and ray because, you know, they have features and the show has features and e yes, i was thinking about them. So for that to come full circle on someone in the in the audience to recognize that was really felt very good. He also invite invoked mike pesca. Who’s a guy i don’t know if he’s nationwide, but i hear him on w n y c public radio here in new york city and he’s also a pretty good talent. So i was very grateful for that kind of stuff. And there are others on dh i thank you if if you’ve posted a review or testimonial at itunes, thank you very much. The video that covers some of these other some of the other ones and shows my gratitude is at tony martignetti dot com. The itunes paige for the show is at non-profit radio dot net. And that is tony’s take two here is carly leinheiser from september twenty six twenty fourteen talking about creative commons welcome to tony martignetti non-profit radio coverage of the non-profit technology conference and t c twenty fourteen we’re at the marriott wardman park hotel in washington, d c with me is carly leinheiser she’s, an associate at perlman and pearlman that’s ah, law firm in new york city. And her workshop topic is share use remix an introduction to creative commons. Carly welcome. Thank you. Pleasure to have you. Thanks, it’s. Great to be here. Thanks. Thanks. And thank you. For taking time on a pretty busy conference day. What is creative commons that i think a lot of people have heard of and not so familiar with? Sure, so creative commons is itself a non-profit they were founded in two thousand won with a mission of making the basically making content on the internet accessible, so they developed a suite of licenses, which are basic copyright licenses that allow creators, artists, authors to disturb you work under one of these licenses, and that signals to anyone who might find their work that it’s freely available for use subject to certain different restrictions. So this is quite a service really it’s a certain unorganised ation serving non-profits and making content available, right? I mean, they’re serving not only non-profits but sort of ah, the larger idea of basically the commons there, they’re making a easier to put more works into not exactly the public domain because they’re still under copyright but making more works freely available for anyone to use. So the idea is that right now, the way copyright works is any time that somebody creates a work it’s automatically subject to copyright, you don’t have to register it. You don’t have to put a notice on it if you’ve created a work it’s copyrighted and so that’s what is known as the all rights reserved model and that’s, what happens automatically? So if you are an artist and you get benefit from distributing your photos online and having other people take them and incorporate them into their works, it’s hard to do that because somebody would have to seek you out and get individual written permission from you in order to do that, otherwise they’d be infringing your copyrights. Um, but most people’s experiences it’s incredibly easy to find content online that you can just, you know, screen, grab our download and creative commons brings the law in line with that experience that it’s fine it’s easy to find content online, it’s easy to incorporate it into new works. And so by with using these licenses, it makes it easy for people to know they have permission from the artist to do that. Do we need to know a little bit the basics of intellectual property law before we go to into too much detail? Well, i think that that sort of covers it so i could say copyright well, i could talk a little bit about it. Copyright is ah, is basically a bundle of rights that anybody who creates a creative work gets in there in their work. So you have a set of exclusive rights that you’re the only one they you khun the only one who can exercise those rights with respect to your work. And um, and then you can also assigned those rights or licenses rights out to other people, so you have the right to use the work to distribute it, to make copies, to make derivative works or a new work based on the original work, so that something like a translation or collage would be a derivative work and to license that out to other people. So what you’re doing with the creative commons licenses, you have your bundle of rights, and you’re saying anybody can use my work. Anyone has access to my work on anyone can exercise those same rights as long as with all creative commons licenses, you have to give attribution or credit. So you link back to the original work and then there’s certain other restrictions that are in some of the different licenses. Okay, andi, some of those different restrictions is get a little too technical. Know that’s that’s, sort of the heart of creative commons there’s. Six basic licenses. So all of them, including attribution requirements. So say i post a photo online and i license it under a creative commons attribution license. That means anybody who came across my photograph could take it, download it, use it, put it into a new work. All they have to do is give me attribution. So that means maybe linking back to my web page just putting my name on it. And i would normally specify how i want to be attributed. So some of the other restrictions are share alike. Which means that i would license my photo under a creative commons attribution share alike license meaning anyone could take my photo, download it, use it, make a new work with it. But if they did that and distributed that new york new work, they’d have to release it under the same license on. And this is a concept called the copy left. And the idea is that i’ve created a work that someone else is used. And then now their work is also in the commons for anyone to use s o, for example, wikipedia’s content is licensed under c c it’s, cc by essays or a creative commons attribution share alike license so anyone can use the content on wikipedia and incorporated into a new work, but then they have to also license in the same way so grows the body of work. Yeah, exactly. They’re two other restrictions. One is no derivatives, meaning you can download my work, you can share it or distribute it, but you can’t change it in any way, so i’m not allowed to make a new work based on it. So you’ll see this sometimes with some sort of reports that in the case of non-profits maybe report that you’ve published on a particular policy issue and you want that shared as widely as possible, but you don’t want people sort of taking accepts reinardy um or, you know photos or maybe personal histories, things that i’d like you want shared sort of intact on dh. The last restriction is a noncommercial restriction, so that means anybody could use the work as long as what they do with it is for a non commercial purposes. Ok, thank you, little detail. But details, i think, are interesting. I think they are. You think they are. I think they are all right. Like what you’re hearing a non-profit radio tony’s got more on youtube, you’ll find clips from stand up comedy tv spots and exclusive interviews catch guests like seth gordon. Craig newmark, the founder of craigslist market of eco enterprises charles best from donors choose dot org’s aria finger do something that worked neo-sage levine from new york universities heimans center on philantech tony tweets to he finds the best content from the most knowledgeable, interesting people in and around non-profits to share on his stream. If you have valuable info, he wants to re tweet you during the show. You can join the conversation on twitter using hashtag non-profit radio twitter is an easy way to reach tony he’s at tony martignetti narasimhan t i g e n e t t i remember there’s a g before the end he hosts a podcast for the chronicle of philanthropy fund-raising fundamentals is a short monthly show devoted to getting over your fund-raising hartals just like non-profit radio, toni talks to leading thinkers, experts and cool people with great ideas. As one fan said, tony picks their brains and i don’t have to leave my office fund-raising fundamentals was recently dubbed the most helpful non-profit podcast you have ever heard. You can also join the conversation on facebook, where you can ask questions before or after the show. The guests were there, too. Get insider show alerts by email, tony tells you who’s on each week and always includes link so that you can contact guess directly. To sign up, visit the facebook page for tony martignetti dot com. I’m peter shankman, author of zombie loyalists, and you’re listening to tony martignetti non-profit radio. Big non-profit ideas for the other ninety five percent. How do we how doesn’t non-profit go about using creative commons? What do we need to do? Right? Assumes we create something. I understand we have a bundle of automatic rights, but we’re talking about now making it available under creative commons license. Sure. So if you want teo well, i guess i’ll start with how do you find works that you could better license? Okay? Because they think that’s a lot more people have experienced with searching on flicker, for example. So if you’re looking for safe photographs to put on your website or incorporate into a brochure and you want to find a photo that’s, all you have to do is give attribution to the person who made it. Ah, you can go on. Flicker flicker has a search feature and also the creative commons website itself has a search feature where you can go in and specify what you want to do with the work, whether it’s going to be for commercial or non commercial purposes. O r all you want, you want the least restrictive license and you put in your search terms and it pops up. So when i was putting together my talk, i wanted to find pictures of cute cats because that’s, what people like to look at on a saturday morning esso i search for cute cats license under creative commons license and found a whole bunch as far as really seeing your work under creative commons license if you’re distributing it online, creative comments has a license chooser on their website, so you don’t even have to really know the technical restrictions you go in and you say, i want people to give me attribution. I want to allow derivative works or not. If i allowed derivative works, i want them to be released center share, like license or not, and i’m ok or not with the commercial uses, and then creative commons tells you which license you’ve picked on degenerates thiss html code that you can in bed on your site, which then makes your work searchable by license. Okay, you become part of the search results and and it generates a little button you can put on the work, so you’ll see in a lot of like footers of websites this you know, this pages published under creative commons license in which one? Okay, now the search function sounds pretty easy finding finding going back to finding content. Pretty simple. Yeah, it’s really simple. The the only risk is you want to make sure that that thing’s air correctly tagged so but it is really pretty intuitive. And you khun search you can search flicker you khun search through google images i think that there are more and more search engines that are supporting a search by license, so it is really easy to use and in terms of releasing your own content, any restrictions on what that content is? Well, i mean, it’s basically anything that’s subject to copyright so you wouldn’t you use a creative commons license with se your trademark or something that was protected by patent law, not copyright law. It also doesn’t deal with model writes in photographs, so if you have a photograph that includes an image of a person, um, creative commons doesn’t really deal with that person’s, right of publicity or protections that they get for being in the photograph. So there was actually a litigation over this issue where a company used a photograph that included an image of a person, and the photographer had released the image under creative commons license but never secured the model rights s o the person in the image sued the company and ask them to stop using it. Okay, are there other other cases that air don’t necessarily mean litigation case? Maybe client examples? You know that air that interesting, that and somewhat, you know, instructive. Yeah, so, no, i don’t have any specific client examples. They do have some examples i found in researching for my talk. One of my favorite it’s actually is the brooklyn museum, which is i live in brooklyn, so i have a lot of pride for the brooklyn museum. They do really interesting things with their they’ve done two very interesting things. One is that a lot of their collection, they made their collection searchable by license. So much of their collection is very old and in the public domain, so you can have search their collection online and see what’s in the public domain and use those images if you want, and i actually incorporated a few of their images into my presentation and where stuffs not out of copyright but they on the right, innit? They’ve released it under creative commons license, so you can use some of the works in their collection. Another interesting thing that they did was in connection with the show they did a few years ago, go called who shot rock n roll, which was a siri’s of portrait it’s and photographs relating to rock n roll. They did a remix contest, so they had chris stein and believes his name from blondie put together a bunch of tracks that he released under a creative commons license. And then anybody could download those tracks, remix them, upload them and those tracks would again be really center creative commons license. And they picked a winner and they’re all available on their website it’s really interesting. So it was this great way to engage with their community and sort of further their mission of, like getting culture out to the public on really engaged people while completely avoiding the issue of having to get signed releases and have people wave their their rights or sign rights. Tio in their tracks that they made to the brooklyn museum, they were just available to use, which i think is a really interesting example of what you could do. So photo contests, anything like that. Video as well. Video? Yeah, absolutely. I think on a new tube, isn’t there? Ah, little pull down window, whether you want to use a have a standard creative commons license to your video yeah, i wouldn’t be surprised i’m not positive, but i think that sounds right. Ok, i think they have a three or maybe four licensing options, and one of them, i think, is standard creative commons license. Yeah, and actually, when i was uploading my slides teo the ntc, they asked whether i wanted to release my slides under creative commons license or not, so they’re they’re on top of it is excellent, you know, i don’t know what teo asked specifically, but what more do you want to share that we haven’t talked about? Let’s? See, i think i mean, one of the things that i think is most interesting for me is they think a lot of non-profits have have sort of limited experience using creative commons in looking for photos and things like that on flicker, but i think that there are a lot of great examples of non-profits releasing their contents under creative commons license, so not only so the brooklyn museum is a good one, yeah, but and wikipedia is another one. There’s another organization called teach aids that creative commons features it’s a case study on their site. They big they make sort of educational health materials that are really sandorkraut of commons license so anybody can download materials from their sight, redistribute them on. And i think for non-profits that have any kind of educational mission thie idea that you could create these materials and then just release them out into the world and they would be freely shared and no one had to worry about, like, violating your copyright if they wanted to download a report or, you know, i know your rights pamphlet or health materials, those kind of things i think are really great uses for creative commons, particularly for non-profits that have a mission based on education, where you’re not worried about so much selling individual copies of your materials, but that the more you get the word out about your organization by distributing materials, you’ll get your name out donordigital here about you, and you don’t have to worry about the transaction costs of negotiating, you know, okay, that person could buy a copy. To do this or that so i think it’s one of the more interesting things, all right, i hope listeners will pay attention to a creative commons both in terms of their own you’re your own work and searching for others as well. Sounds like it sze i’ve learned a lot more about the community than, uh, than i knew. Thank you very much, carla. Thank you, pleasure. Carly leinheiser is associate perlman and roman. You’re listening to tony martignetti non-profit radio coverage of ntc non-profit technology conference twenty fourteen. Thanks so much for being with us latto visser love. We are rocking tons of live listeners. We’re going to start abroad with a country that i don’t believe has checked in the past. Morocco robot robot, morocco i hope i pronounced that right in ah, in the in the a small chance that you are among the one third speaking french moroccan bonem sure, if you’re not, i’m sorry for that that’s. The live love still goes out. It just goes out in english. Right, mexico cua cua em alpa quantum oppcoll mexico buena star days! We’ve got multiple in korea always sold, always checking in so grateful for that. But also young django jungle korea, i think do the best i could on your haserot comes a ham nida you are south korean listeners. China always checks in we got multiple beijing, but we’ve also got guangdong china ni hao st louis reserved no, i’m sorry that’s not abroad that’s not very nice to do. Uh, sometimes they do it in person, but on purpose. But not today taipei. We got taiwan in the house also, and they are occasional listeners. And i’m always grateful for that, of course, niehaus to our taiwanese listeners here in the u s. Berkeley, california! Springfield, virginia. Coral gables, florida. New bern, north carolina joined us late. But there you are, loyal nonetheless. New bern edmonds, washington rock in chapel hill, north carolina only about five hours from where i hang out a lot in emerald isle, albuquerque, new mexico. Cool smyrna, delaware. Smyrna, maybe it’s smear now think it’s smeared a delaware live listener love to each of those live listeners. You’ve also got new york. New york thank you very much. Appreciate that were here on seventy second street and st louis, missouri, right after live. Listen, love comes apart cast pleasantries you can’t you can’t proceed with the show one without the other. Grateful to all our podcast listeners, whatever platform, whatever device and whatever activity you’re engaged in while you listen. Thank you so much pleasantries to the podcast audience and the affiliate affections to our am and fm stations throughout the country. Let your station know that you’re listening. I’d be grateful for that they’d be grateful for that affections to the many affiliate listeners throughout the country listening and all kinds of different times, most of them next week. Affections to you. Back in two thousand ten, my aa and the show’s my end, the show’s inaugural and excellent social media manager was with me at a conference and next-gen charity conference was here in new york city, the that only they really ran about three of those, but we were at the inaugural one and i had a commitment. I had a run out for something for like an hour and that’s when seth godin was available, he was speaking at the conference, he came off stage. Regina walton got him. Got the interview. Here it is. And then right after that, we got a surprise. Maria semple is with me in the studio with her husband bob and she’s going to join us for jamie for a few minutes. Right after here’s. Seth gordon and regina walton. My name’s. Regina walton. None of you have heard me before. I am tony’s social media manager andi. We’re here at nextgencharity and i have the pleasure of speaking with south code hyre regina. Hi. Um, question when you were giving your speech, you were talking teo charities about how to adjust to this new world of work. Can you give a quick summary of what you were talking about? I’m not sure i’m happy with the word adjust. Okay, as a revolution. But this is the first revolution since tv nineteen. Fifty and henry ford nineteen twenty. It’s the revolution of our lifetime. If you look at the revolution, we are buy-in and you view it as something one needs to adjust to that’s a little bit like being a horse sales and say i have to adjust to the car. No, you have to embrace it. You have to dive into it. You have to figure out how do i use this open door and this opportunity to make a dent in the universe. Right? So from that perspective than what do you recommend for people? Tio? Jump in and embrace and revolutionize. And teo, you know, innovate three steps ship, get it out the door haven’t intersect with the marketplace until there’s an intersection. Nothing happened to connect. Understand that the internet is a connection machine. That’s what? It’s for that’s what was invented for wasn’t there to help you sell shoes was there to connect one to another. So you have to keep track of how many connections you’ve got and what are they worth? And number three is fail fail. Often people in revolutions fail in nineteen twenty. There were two thousand three hundred car companies in the united states. Think about that for a minute. Wow. Right. So you don’t say i’m going to start a car company if i can be guaranteed to be general motors. No, you say. Well, give it a shot. Let’s. See what happens and that’s, you know, non-profits have so. Much at stake in the on the upside and so little its take on the downside that there is no excuse whatsoever for them not to make the choice to ship and to fail and to repeat, because if you do nothing, you’re going to get what you already got. But if you do something and it works, then you can make some lives change. Great. And so this connects to your point when you brought up charity water and and i do remember, you were saying, if you d’oh what scott does it’s not gonna work, so can you expand on that goes back to the idea? Purple cow, right? You know, marcel duchamp was a visual artist, and he was a dada ist he put a urinal into an art exhibit, and it was a sensation. The second guy who put a urinal into museum was a plumber very big difference between being the first guy in the second guy. So if we’re doing art, if we’re making conversations, if we’re telling stories that spread, we have to be the one who does it first, you have to be the one who does it in a way that impacts people, if you say, well, i’m just like that guy, but me, we’re going to go with that guy. He was first, he got our attention. Now we don’t need you. We’ve solved out whatever problem he solved, right? Okay. And just one more question at least, is that with nextgencharity, you know, there are a lot of new charities here, but with tony, he does a lot of work with plan giving. You’ve got to be around for ten years and before you can even start that process so and people are trying to keep up with, i’ll bring him up again. Charity water people are trying to keep up with these new guys. So how do you help them or what can you say to them? The older charities that are still going well, i would start by saying this that ten dollars, texted donations are dramatically overrated. You can’t count on them, you can’t build a real organization on them, they’re flashy but that’s not the future permission is the future, the privilege of anticipated personal and relevant messages to people who want to get them. The american cancer society has permission the legacy charities have permission and they’re blowing it. They blow up the way politicians blow it to get your e mail address they have for you for money until they burn it out and then you’re gone. The answer instead is to say, these people care enough to listen to me. How can i say something to them that they want to hear? How can i create platforms and scenarios and stories that make them look forward to hearing from me? How do i take this permission and nurture it and grow it over? Time has supposed to slam bam! I got to make this quarter’s numbers of the board’s gonna get mad at me. Mindset. That shift is a fundamental shift from the tv spams economy to the connection permission economy that we live in now. Okay? And just one more thing in terms of revolution. What? I talk about this in terms of what i do, which i won’t talk about a lot. I also talk about how in some ways it’s going back, you know, it’s. Like when your grandfather was talking, teo, you know, whoever and they’re just talking over the fence. It’s just it’s nowhere fancier and flashier. Would you agree? Your dad? Actually, they call it a global village. And when they think about it, what they mean is, tribes are one hundred fifty, two hundred fifty people who care about each other. Well, now it doesn’t have to be geography. It can be one hundred fifty people in united states who all grew up in that village. And all grew up in that slum who are now coming together to fix that thing. It can be the three hundred scientists who care the most about the truth about global warming and want to connect over that. So it’s. Yes, it’s, that conversation over the back fence. But it might be digital. So stop worrying about slamming strangers and start worrying about creating friends. Okay, great. So thank you so much for your boss. Really work six years ago and still excellent. Excellent advice. Regina walton. What a beautiful radio voice she has. Real simple. Welcome to studio. Hey, great to be here today. So you got your boat parked on seventy nine street, right? Yeah. Yeah. That’s. Right. Okay. Excellent. You and your husband bob here? Yeah. The two of you look very similar. We were told that a lot. Yeah, you’re not brother and sister are you know. No, no, no, no, no, no. Absolutely. Ok. Ok, sure. Although he’s been told he looks like a kennedy a lot. Yeah, but maybe his dad especially. Yeah. Yeah, that looks like joe bob. Your head. Ten. Really maria. Simple. Of course. The prospect. Find her. She’s. She’s. Ah, at maria, simple and she’s. Also the prospect finder. Dot com outstanding outsource prospect research. Right for businesses to not only for non-profits, of course. Right. I help robbery. Help small businesses with prospecting. Excellent. Okay, so you drop by tonight, which is very cool. You’re done. You got the boat parked in seven nine street for how many nights? Just through tonight. And then we’ll leave tomorrow morning, so i figured i was in the city. I’d pop by and say hi to both. You here? I really appreciate that. That’s, the both of us being me and sam. Sam and i i appreciate that. Thank you, bob. Nice to meet you. Cool. All right. Welcome. Very simple. What? Good to be here and have a great weekend. Oh, thank you. Thanks so much. Cool. All right. We’re gonna wrap it up, sam, what you think next week, beth cantor and her co author, eliza sherman, with their new book, the happy, healthy non-profit. If you missed any part of today’s show, i beseech you, find it on tony martignetti dot com. We’re sponsored by pursuant. They have a year end accelerator pursuant dot com slash year and accelerator, aptly named and by we be spelling supercool spelling bee fundraisers. We b e spelling dot com ah, creative producers. Claire miree off sam liebowitz, he’s here is a line producer. Gavin dollars are am and fm outreach director shows social media is by susan chavez. On our music is by scott stein. Thank you, scotty, with me next week for non-profit radio. Big non-profit ideas for the other ninety five percent. Go out and be great. What’s not to love about non-profit radio tony gets the best guests check this out from seth godin this’s the first revolution since tv nineteen fifty and henry ford nineteen twenty it’s the revolution of our lifetime here’s a smart, simple idea from craigslist founder craig newmark insights orn presentation or anything? People don’t really need the fancy stuff they need something which is simple and fast. When’s the best time to post on facebook facebook’s andrew noise nose at traffic is at an all time hyre on nine am or eight pm so that’s when you should be posting your most meaningful post here’s aria finger ceo of do something dot or ge young people are not going to be involved in social change if it’s boring and they don’t see the impact of what they’re doing. So you got to make it fun and applicable to these young people look so otherwise a fifteen and sixteen year old they have better things to do if they have xbox, they have tv, they have their cell phones. Me dar is the founder of idealised took two or three years for foundation staff to sort of dane toe add an email address their card. It was like it was phone. This email thing is fired-up that’s why should i give it away? Charles best founded donors choose dot or ge somehow they’ve gotten in touch kind of off line as it were, and no two exchanges of brownies and visits and physical gift mark echo is the founder and ceo of eco enterprises. You may be wearing his hoodies and shirts. Tony talked to him. Yeah, you know, i just i’m a big believer that’s not what you make in life. It sze, you know, tell you make people feel this is public radio host majora carter. Innovation is in the power of understanding that you don’t just do it. You put money on a situation expected to hell. You put money in a situation and invested and expected to grow and savvy advice for success from eric sacristan. What separates those who achieve from those who do not is in direct proportion to one’s ability to ask others for help. The smartest experts and leading thinkers air on tony martignetti non-profit radio big non-profit ideas for the other ninety five percent.

Nonprofit Radio for March 20, 2015: Your Board As Brand Ambassadors

Big Nonprofit Ideas for the Other 95%

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My Guest:

Roger SametzYour Board As Brand Ambassadors

Does your board know the basics of your brand? Do you? How many volumes in your story library and how do you build your board’s talent at sharing them? Roger Sametz is president and CEO of Sametz Blackstone Associates, a brand consultancy.

 

 


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Hello and welcome to tony martignetti non-profit radio big non-profit ideas for the other ninety five percent. I’m your aptly named host. Oh, i’m glad you’re with me. I’d be stricken with adaptive hypertrophy if i heard the thickening story of how you missed today’s show you’re bored as brand ambassadors does your board know the basics of your brand? Do you? How many volumes in your story library and how do you build your boards talent at sharing them? Roger sametz is president and ceo of sam it’s blackstone associates, a brand consultancy on tony’s. Take two a caution for your plan giving program part do we’re sponsored by generosity siri’s hosting multi charity five k runs and walks roger sametz is with me in the studio. He is the president and ceo of sammons, blackstone associates, boston based brand consultancy, integrating brand editorial and digital strategy with design and digital media. They work with academic research and cultural non-profits as well as corporations, roger rights and speaks widely on brand building he’s at sam it’s on twitter and his company is at sametz se m e t z dot com. Roger sametz welcome to the studio hyre glad to be here pleasure, but it have you why do we need board members to be brand ambassadors? Why important? Well, a lot of board members, you know, sign up to be born members and given of their time and money and expertise, and they don’t actually think they have to do more than that. But there’s no marketing or development department in any non-profit of any size that actually doesn’t need help, and board members have networks, so to the extent that they could be out there and actually talking to their networks in productive ways or opening the doors for the fund-raising staff for being an extension of the marketing staff that’s all to the good, and what does it mean to be a brand ambassador? Well, to be a brand ambassador means you have to sort of first sounds tautological understand the brand so that you could be out there and actually talk about the organization and what it means and what its vision is and how you might, you know, convince other people too participate, donate or even be another boardmember and this is something that can be trained since, since people don’t come to the organization most likely with these skills, they can learn them of, of course, well, boardmember is generally have you no aptitude for learning things, or they might not be on boards, so sure, and a lot of the work we do with boards actually happens in ah boardmember ng setting, or perhaps a retreat setting or some sort of special meeting because if you come into a board and you know you’re the finance guy or you’re the you know, you’re the lawyer who helps out or, you know, help out and, you know, some particular aspect going out and chatting may not be something that you’re actually conversant in or you have done, how come they’re not? We’re not natural ambassadors, brand ambassadors because it just come naturally? Well, i think part because we love the organization well, part of it may be that some people, of course, are better actually having conversations and drawing people out and others, but leaving that to one side, people come into organizations because they know some chunk of it. You know, you come in because you care about the kid’s education provoc you came or you care about, you know, their hunger. Programs or something. But you may not know the full scope of an organization. You may only know that sort of bit that, you know, touched you. So part of the education process is getting people up to speed on the whole of the organization, and then, you know, coaching them like you would coach anyone to anything to be more pompel all right, on dh to start this coaching training we need we need to recognize that there’s a gap between i think, the way they weigh the organs, they perceive the organization on the way they like it to be perceived the way they describe it on the way they’d like the organization to be perceived. Help them. See that there’s some dis constants there. Sure. I mean, often leadership in an organization or the person charged with stewarding. The board is pretty clear that their boardmember zehr not really good ambassadors. And then there are plenty of board members who, when asked to go out and, you know, be ambassadors, sort of look at the clock or look at the floor or say, not my thing. Um, but there’s a sort of an easy exercise. That one. Can actually do and it’s sort of fun, so take a board meeting. Take twenty minutes onboarding passed out a bunch of four by six index cards and ask boardmember is on one side. Write down how you actually describe this organization, the friends of yours at a cocktail party or a barbecue or something. Give them seven minutes or whatever to do that, and then ask them on the other side of the index card to write down what they might like to see if the local newspaper we’re writing an article on the organization so typically a newspaper will write, you know, x organisation comma, eh blank comma. So, you know, there was three or four words there that come after the name of the organization that are sort of pinned to it in the first paragraph of some article, so ask the board members what would you like to see their so the first side of the card is, how would you actually talk about this to some peer, a cocktail party? The second side is sort of this distillation, this aspirational take on how you’d like to actually have the organisation described. So you do that? And the reason you actually using index cards is so tony who’s sitting next to janice can’t say, oh, you know what? Jenna said so people have to commit to writing on and then you go around the room and you share what people have written on both sides, two hearts and two things. If history is our guide will happen, you either end up with or either or both, you’ll end up with very disconnected descriptions of the organization as you go around the room, you start to get thes looks like, oh my god, we really are not singing off the same page, and then when you get to the second side of the card, the aspirational side, you’ll get these completely different visions, so just doing this exercise will make pretty clear to people that, hey, we could use some training. Um, yeah, sounds it sounds very eye opening, especially the aspirational side, the way you’d like the organization to be described. But in your experience, you see lots of lots of disparate answers to those. Well, you do. I mean, boardmember czar recruited or they sign up, but they’re not part of leadership. I mean, they’re not sitting in the, you know, ceo or executive director’s office, so they may never have actually been in on the vision of the place. So there’s some catch up to do ok? And, uh, they need to become masters of the the brand, the organization’s brand, what are what are some elements of brand this a very ethereal thing that a lot of people regrettably reduced to logo, logo in tagline or something? Dahna we know it goes a lot deeper than that i’ve had guests on who have made that very clear, but what are some of these, whatever some of the concepts around in brand that we’re trying to grasp? Okay, so if you think of brand not as the label on the toothpaste box and certainly brand in the context of non-profits is fairly recent and there’s still a fair amount of resistance around that because there will be many people who think it’s too commercial. But if you think a brand, not as to your point, not is the logo a logo is sort of a symbol of the brand, but if you think about it as what an organization means, what it promises the expectations it sets well, then that’s a whole different way of of looking at brand so boardmember is have to sort of understand that, but took sort of get to that. I have to sort of get under that hood. They’re some sort of grand basics to go over. So we started a minute ago to talk about what is an organization. Means so you need to understand. Okay? What’s the organization’s vision. They may not be clear on that. What are our areas of focus? Which means, you know, if we’re an anti hunger organization, how we actually you know what? One of the areas in which we’re working to accomplish eradicating hunger, what of the roles we play? You could be a convener. You could be, you know, an inventor. You could be any number of things. But constituency out there are not gonna remember seventeen programs that you have. So you need to sort of. Boyle is down into a finite number. I don’t know. Three, five areas of focus and rolls that people can actually remember. And then the sort of more evocative side of this. What are the brand attributes that you want? Associate it. So these air generally adjective. So to take commercial metaphor here. You know, volvo has always been associated with safety. Then they sort of managed the product and brand slightly differently, and they kept safety and added performance. So organizations tend to have attributes that they own that are already associating with them, and attributes that they would like to have associated with them, which will call aspirational. So if you work through these areas of focus, the mission, envision the rolls and the attributes both owned an aspirational you get a pretty good sense of the underpinnings of how an organization can be presented externally. All right, we need to dive deeper into some of this because it sounds i mean, it’s it’s very basic to the organization, the its promise. What are the expectations? I know when you didn’t mention that i know is part of it. How do you measure success? This is not something that, uh, you know, if it’s not already clear, we’re not gonna be ableto answer all these questions in a in a board meeting. Is strategic planning up a part of this process? Well, strategic planning certainly could be part of the process, but leadership also may know some of this, but the board may not, so no, some of it so you certainly could have sessions where you educate or you could use the board too, actually surface these by putting a big post its around the room and actually putting these topics down and writing down different suggestions and then sort of figuring out where you are. Okay, we’re gonna go out for a break and when we return, of course, roger and i’m going to keep talking about your board as brand ambassadors stay with us, you’re tuned to non-profit radio tony martignetti also hosts a podcast for the chronicle of philanthropy fund-raising fundamentals is a quick ten minute burst of fund-raising insights published once a month. Tony’s guests are expert in crowdfunding, mobile giving event fund-raising direct mail and donor cultivation. Really all the fund-raising issues that make you wonder am i doing this right? Is there a better way there is? Find the fund-raising fundamentals archive it. Tony martignetti dot com that’s marketmesuite n e t t i remember there’s a g before the end, thousands of listeners have subscribed on itunes. You can also learn maura. The chronicle website. Philanthropy dot com fund-raising fundamentals the better way. Welcome back to big non-profit ideas for the other ninety five percent. Let’s. Do some live listener love and let’s do it starting abroad. Tokyo, japan and multiple tokyo, japan and musashino in japan. Konnichiwa, seoul, south korea always so loyal soul. Unbelievable! Anya haserot to our listeners in seoul and in china, we’ve got none jing and guangzhou konnichi wa live listen love here in the u, s st louis, missouri, sioux falls, south dakota, san francisco, california, new york, new york welcome each of you and, of course, podcast pleasantries to those listening wherever you are at whatever time on whatever device pleasantries to the podcast listeners over ten thousand of you and to our affiliates, affiliate affection love each of you lots of alliteration, zon non-profit radio an abundance of them. I admire. I like now. I like a little rations. Roger i yesterday i was speaking at a at a a present. I did a presentation on, uh, hosting a panel, and i met a boardmember for ah who’s on the big apple circus board. I don’t know if you’re familiar with big circus. There sure are a lot to new york and one of the things she lamented is that they’re not too well known, but i think she was an excellent brand ambassador because within a minute she had me understanding how first, reminding me that it is a non-profit which a lot of people don’t know, but that they use clowning techniques to help children in a bereavement program that they have, and also a clown, techniques in education, on some of the outreach in the school programs that they have. And she ticked off like three or four things within a minute or a minute and a half that i had no idea of the big apple circus did. Um, and i just i i complimented around being ah ah, an outstanding bruh broad no, outstanding brand ambassador that was jenny keim, virginia chambers kind. But jenny keim is what she goes by. I was really struck teo to meet a riel what i thought was a real good brand ambassador boardmember well, it seems like she was pretty clear on as we were talking about before the break the organization’s rolls? Yeah, it’s areas of focus, she made it clear to you, you know that it wasn’t on profit, which could have been ambiguous, and she clearly engaged you. So whether she comes by this naturally or it’s been soaking in it or had some training you, but i don’t know, but that is what we’re aiming for. I urged her i told her that if her fellow board members are not as good ambassadors as she, that she should listen to this exact show because you were coming on the next day, just yesterday, some of these basics that we were just talking about seems to me that the organization should already know all the stuff that you mentioned. Mission values, expectations who with constituents he should already be known factors leadership certainly should know all that, but sometimes they actually get a little bit down in the weeds. So if you’re an organization that has seventeen different programs or you’re an academic research organization that has seventeen different labs or whatever, people often sort of stay at that program level and don’t actually think about how can we group thes into, you know, sort of higher level categories or buckets that people could more easily understand because they’re so focused on, you know, keeping the ship going in the right direction so sometimes they don’t think about that. And also there’s we determined over these over the years, people within non-profits see their value as self evident. You know, i work here, i believe in it. You should believe in it too, and they don’t quite understand that it actually takes more work to get someone who’s on ly connected tangentially or not connected at all to understand it. So there’s work to do to move from that sort of internal. Ah, phew! Point to being externally focused, what you need to do if you’re trying to, you know, get more donors or increase your participation or, you know, whatever, with people who are not in the fold, how do you find boards take to this work? Are they enthusiastic about the idea that we’re gonna be talking about brandy and being an ambassador or however it’s described to them? How did they how did they have they think of it? We’ve always found that people were actually quite thankful because they’re they’re nervous. They know that part of their role is to be ambassadors, but yet they don’t really know howto ambassador for my rittereiser yeah, so you know any sort of help that gets them into position of, you know, both comfort and sort of fluency so that it feels natural and not nervous about it. That’s great. And a lot of the exercises that we sort of put together, they’re helped by wine there, helped by camaraderie. Well, fluid. Sure. So you could make these exercises fun. And to the extent that they actually build fluency within it specific person, they’re also building deeper engagement of your board, you know, across all the members. Do you find red or white? Wine is a better, better beverage to accompany this. And then i think people could choose either one. Is you’re you’re agnostic. Teo. Totally. Okay. Okay. Um how let’s. See, when? When organizations are coming to you for for help in this area. What kind of symptoms are they showing? How do they know they have a problem? Well, we talked about that index card exercise before the break, which is sort of a diagnostic tool. But i think organizations khun simply know they need some more help from their board members. I mean, any non-profit board needs their board to help open doors for fund-raising. And that’s only gonna happen if the boardmember is, you know, comfortable in fluent and can you no understand enough to actually make that happen? Yeah, okay. And ve so is it usually the case that the organizations do recognize themselves that they’ve got some some shortcomings around their their boards participation in fund-raising sure and or is just a good idea, okay? And do you describe when you’re when you’re when you’re about to come to the board, do you describe it as we’re going? We’re going to help you, coach youto be good ambassadors? Oh, absolutely. I mean, there’s no reason to hide around this time that people you know, they’re ashamed of. I was just wondering, you know, they’re generally up for it. Okay? All right. There are for the help askew described. Okay, um, so let’s, let’s talk a little more about some of these, some of the basics of the brand there’s, some more elements to it that we haven’t talked about it. Like, who do we serve, where we focus on what is a mother? Sure. So so almost any non-profit is going to have a range of constituencies. So, you know, we’ve been talking about donors, donors are one constituency. People actually take advantage of your services and offerings. That’s, another constituency, you may have partners, you may have government agencies you may have, you know, people you’re trying to recruit as staff. So all of these people have slightly different needs about what they need to know about your organization that orders or connect in ways that make sense for them. So you need to identify constituencies and what they care about so that you can sort of rearrange things in ways that make sense for them. I mean, you would do the same thing in planning a website. You need one very interesting potential. Potential employees, people who use you’re hoping to recruit to the organization. Ah, a brand ambassador. Boardmember could easily be talking to the next cfo or or any person, any level? Absolutely. And, you know, given that non-profits generally pay less than profit organizations, you have to want to be there. So to the extent that the brand is another reason to want to work in that work for that organization that’s all to the good. But you have to understand that in order for that to be, you know, a magnet our next step once we’ve well have we exhausted all the basics of the brand before we go the next step, i think we have i think, if we understand, you know, areas of focus and rolls and the only thing we didn’t talk about was sort of category, which sounds a little odd, but sometimes boards have a hard time articulating what exactly are you? You know, are you an anti hunger organization, or are you a social services organization really instant? You find that we often find that, and so that that sort of stymies people, that that first level of conversation, if they can’t even clearly say, you know what category the organization? So it sounds simple enough, but when you sort of put to the test, it isn’t that simple, and often it actually takes some work to both evolve and then subsequently get agreement on interesting. So so that actually it’s a good agreement on so there’s differing opinion as to whether we’re we’re social service or community based? Or, you know, however, we defining ourselves, you get your getting different opinions around that you will get different opinions and you’ll get different language, even around the same opinion can share a any chance you, khun recollect what we’re working with, that we’re working with one organization at the moment, that’s a non-profit that actually helps non-profits and part of the organization thinks they’re in the capacity building business, which is probably accurate but not particularly mellifluous to talk about and part of the organization thinks they’re in the business of shifting power and influence to change values in society. These are two very different ideas. Yeah, now they actually do both, but if you’re out there talking about it and you pick one or the other, you’ll get a very different picture. And how does the process mediate that these different opinions? Well, this would actually happen at a leadership level and not a board level one would have one would have the chats, and we do have the chats with senior leadership to sort of nail this all right, it’s a very, very esoteric stuff. You’re dealing with this brand well, yeah. It’s always interesting and there’s a lot more to it. Then, you know, the star burst on the side of the toothpaste box. Yeah, all right. Um, we once all the board members are are comfortable with the brand basics, then we’re going to help them put together a new elevator speech, right? Sure. Ok, everybody wants one. This is a couple minutes like, i basically what i heard about the big apple circus from from jin in-kind well, everyone, you know, elevator speeches just shorthand for what’s your high level of message, but implied in this it’s the notion of being able to have everybody on the same page. So one template that you can use actually comes from a game that some people may have played earlier in life called mad libs, which was, if you remember, there was sort of a story on a pad and they were blanks, and you were asked to fill in a noun or a verb or an adverb, and then when the story i read back, you know, some level of hilarity and sued because the words don’t make any sense. So when you do this on a brand focused level, you’re actually looking for more specific things, so the template runs something like it will try to draw this in radio air, okay, for whatever constituency. So if you’re an arts organization, you could be art’s interested. Public could be prospective donors. Could be artists, you know, for ex constituency. Your organization is what, so that’s, where you get that sort of category answer and you provide another blank. What do you provide? And then how we’re through, how do you actually provide it? And then what value to deliver and how the organisation worthy of participation and how is it worthy of support? So these are all blanks. So, again, it’s an exercise with big sort of post its up around the room and you put lots of different answers in and then the board together sort of calls. Okay, what are the best responses here? And then you start to sort of string it together, along with adjectives that actually could come from your brand attributes. So an example might be so let’s. Take, for example, wgbh, which is a public television stations radio station in balkan. There we worked with. So the big category answer might be public media powerhouse or content engine, which were both a lot more evocative than television and radio stations. The second part of that might be trusted. Guide to new worlds and new ideas that sze what the organization is. Yes, of course. So it’s a more evocative answer than a literal answer. Yeah, but that hey, you’re out being ambassadors so you can certainly be we’re not trying to divine this is not a definition that is not a dictionary process and it’s, not a tax form, okay, you know, in terms of areas, well, they’re they’re in news and drama there in public affairs therein kids programming, they’re in science, so you get to nail the sort of areas of focus they have signature programs like masterpiece everybody knows downtown and that what do they provide? They provide opportunities for exploration and interaction and an independent voice, especially if you’re talking about the news and public affairs programming. Where did they do this? Well, it’s locally, the boston area but now that everything streams it’s much farther, and of course, it’s multi platform so there’s a more complicated answer toa wear then there might have been in years past, and then you can end with, you know, it’s for you and supported by you. Or you could take another completely different example i referenced anti hunger organization a while ago so the constituents he might be for those who care about in this case, we’re talking about massachusetts seven hundred thousand people in massachusetts who actually don’t know where their next meal is coming from. So that’s the constituency, the people who care about that and then project bread what’s the category, the leading statewide anti hunger organization. And what do they do? Offer fresh approaches to ending hunger? What are they? By pioneering funding, facilitating a range of programs and through education advocacy, they actually have programs that meet people where they are rather than just handing food out of back of a truck, and then you get into that next level of details? Well, you know, how do they actually do this? So it’s programs that are in the community programs that are schools with kids, programs that are building sustainable food ecosystem? So then you get into more detail and then what’s the benefit well, it’s all the sort of fulfill a vision that the opposite of hungry isn’t just full it’s healthy, which then musicians the organization differently against sort of just emergency food and nutrition versus full nutrition vs and then you go, you bring it down to donors, which is with the support of people. They also sponsor a large hunger walk. Those who walk and our corporate partners, we’re able to eradicate hunger in the state. All right, two two excellent examples. A little long, but but i think the examples help help us teo to fill in the in the template. Um, okay, we’re going to give ah, roger. We’ll give you a break for a couple minutes and there’s going to be mohr with roger coming up talking about brand ambassadors and tony’s take too, of course before that. But i have to mention generosity siri’s because they sponsor the show. They help you raise money. You being small and midsize non-profits that’s, who that’s their sweet spot by hosting multi charity five k runs and walks lots of groups that couldn’t sponsor something on their own. Come together and you can have a terrific day in new york city. Twelve charities came together, raised over one hundred fifty thousand dollars in the last one in philadelphia. Nine charities raised over seventy five thousand dollars. I know because i am see a bunch of their events. For them, and i’m the one announcing the fund-raising total’s at the end of the day. So it’s a fun day, it’s a it’s, a successful day around fund-raising and that’s what generosity siri’s through generosity, siri’s provides that’s them. They’re coming up in northern new jersey, miami, florida and new york city. Pick up the phone, talk to david lee and he’s the ceo. Be sure and tell him you’re from non-profit radio seven one eight five o six. Nine triple seven or generosity siri’s dot com my video this week, which is from my laundry room, is a follow up to last week’s caution for your plan giving program it’s, a story of a twelve million dollars lawsuit against chapman university by a ninety eight year old donor who became discontented with the organization. You have to be careful with the relationships that you build and how close you get to someone, and the whole story is in the video, which is at tony martignetti dot com and that is tony’s take two for friday, twentieth of march eleventh show of twenty fifteen roger sam it’s feeling a little under the weather, but he’s mustering well, if you hear your silence, that’s ah, that’s cutting rogers mikes that we can give him a cough. But he’s made the trip down from boston. Thank you for doing that. It’s. Been a tough boston winter, as most of your listeners probably already know we do. And it’s not been much better here. Today is the first day of spring. I believe march twentieth and it’s snowing outside. We look out the window right now, there’s pretty brisk snow coming down in new york city. Um all right, anything more you want to add? We don’t need another example. But anything more you want to add about this this template, but helps with the elevators. Bitch. Well, i think it does two things. I mean, you actually end up with an elevator speech is not going to be eloquent language by putting things up in this mad libs posted format, but it will give you the content. So then, you know, either some sub committee of the board or staff can then be charged with actually, you know, wordsmithing it. So everybody likes it, okay? But getting the content down is important. And then the other thing it does, of course. Which all of these exercises do is get boardmember is engaged, so to the extent that people sitting around the board table or wherever you’re sitting in doing this are participating in developing messages it’s already getting into their heads. So we stand a much better chance of people becoming comfortable with something if they’ve had a part in evolving it much more so than if you just took, you know, a piece of paper and slated across the tape foisted on them and say, memorized, memorized this on dh have it prepared for the next for the next meeting? Yes, quite okay. All right, so they’re involved in the involved in the creation of it. Um, this is going tio this is one of the tools that were empowering board members with basically i mean, this is what we’re trying to make comfortable, confident brand ambassadors and, uh, another tool that you recommend his stories. Yes, well, you know boardmember sze, can we, like anybody can sort of talk about an organization either from the top down or the bottom up. So the top down would be starting with your elevator speech and then presumably, if you haven’t run to get another ice cube, the person you’re talking to, you might tell a story another boardmember might swill around it a barstool and actually just start with a story and end up with the elevator speech. So a bottom up approach, okay, but this only really works if people have the stories one way or the other, and what happens is boardmember because they’ve experienced the organisation themselves in one way or another, you know, they might have a story, um, but they might have on ly that one story and, you know, the other board members would have different stories, so the extent that you can sort of pull these stories and even get a story library going, perhaps online, internally online, then people have more things that they can talk to and they can sort of pivot. But if you want to sort of think about a story there’s, of course, another template to try to actually do that, and you could sort of start by thinking, okay, if if this were a movie title, what would be the name of the movie? And that will lead you immediately to some sort of evocative top end to the story. And then, of course, you want to talk about, well, who’s in the story, who’s the protagonist. So this could be a person or it could be an organization. Then the next step to think about is okay. So where what’s the problem? What? What has to get solved? And then where does your organization come in? So what programs air services get marshaled to help solve that problem and then what’s the end of the story. And is thie ending? You know, finite? Or is the benefit ongoing? So you can use that very simple template and really think about okay? How does your organization, you know, participate in either other organizations or other people’s lives to make a difference? Where where else might these stories emanate from? Your example was bored boardmember tze maybe each person has a story or something, but they can also filter up from the program’s staff that’s out, actually doing the work. Um, i know a lot of organizations like to invite people who are benefiting from the work the people of the organization is serving. Have them come to board meetings and tell their story. Sure, you could absolutely do. That what you’re going for is something that’s authentic where you khun, you know, show that you made a difference and that you’re not sort of, you know, overreaching, you’re not trying to say you made you more of a difference and people would believe, yeah, but sure, i mean, you know, every organization writes up profiles or highlights people, those are generally stories, whether they’re set up a stories that have sort of a, you know, beginning middle and an end that has a benefit, you know, that varies, but what you are going to make sure that you have it, you know, you have an impact statement at the end, you have a benefit to show that you know, why people should participate or why people should be donors and just, you know, give them a reason to believe we gotta get these stories down, too, what under two minutes, right? If if i’m in a conversation with somebody at a reception or something, you know, i can’t hold their interest too long, let’s have a master storyteller? Well, you might be, but yes, i think you’re right under two minutes or, you know, if you’re writing it. Out, you know, under two hundred words. Yeah. Okay. All right, um, and you mentioned a story library like internally online. But what? What is that? Well, you could do a story library in any number of ways, but if your organization has some sort of internal web set up that’s a great place to post them if it doesn’t have that, you know, you could just compile them. But the whole idea is you don’t want stories to just leave an individual’s heads if they’re really good and they could be shared and, you know, people can use them in conversation out there in the world, you might even be sharing them on the web. Well, with the public doesn’t have to be behind a, you know, an internet or anything, you know, a lot mean, a lot of what we’ve been talking about because we’ve been talking in the board. Ambassador context is useful for word ambassadors, but of course, it’s useful for staff. It’s useful for senior leadership? Yeah, potential donors have thes stories, air there’s. Quite a bit of talk among non-profits about around non-profits around around storytelling, right? And as i said earlier, you know, storytelling is simply sort of the inductive way of describing your organization that’s supposed to starting from the top down, which is sort of more than deductive way, but both are valid, and it has to do with how you’re comfortable talking with people, okay, what’s our next tool that we want teo arm, are board members within making them confident? Well, we started to talk about donorsearch let’s, let’s focus on that for a minute. So most organizations because they do more than one thing or not monolithic and as we already discussed their constituencies or not model to think either even within a donor community and if you think about major donors for the moment, they’re just not good do bees, they’re generally interested in giving money to some organization that they believe will advance goals that they personally care about. So if you take the goal around major e-giving to be connecting institutional priorities with donor passions and interests, and you understand that the people aren’t monolithic and the organizations not monolithic, then it behooves you to come up with different ways that people can connect. So this is another way that you can actually work with. Your board to evolve what we call ways in. So for instance, taken orchestra could be a tiny little orchestra, really big workers treyz some people are going to care about performing the traditional repertoire, some people are going to care about commissioning new music, probably a smaller number. Some people are going to care about the space that music is performed it, and you know what? What shape that’s it some people are going to care about kids education programs if there are such, some people don’t care about building the audiences of the next generation, and the answer to that is yes, so some donors will connect in one way, and some donors will connect in another but it’s important that for your non-profit that you actually evolved what thes different ways in our so that if i’m, for instance, i’m going out to talk to tony, and i think he’s wants to support kids education, but he really wants to support community outreach. I’m able to actually pivot and talk to you about community outreach, of course, implicit in all of this, and we could have talked about this at the top of the hour, is they? Need to listen because you’re going to have any conversation with someone outside your organization, you have to also understand where they are otherwise you’re just pushing things at them. Yeah, yeah, you’re a billboard. So you wanted you wanted to be a conversation, so you have to learn enough about the person you’re talking to two actually take what you’ve learned in terms of these areas focus and rolls and stories and mission in category and no talk to the person in terms that are meaningful to have her see you like to rehearse this with boards once you once you farm doing with the tools? Is there some practice? We do a lot of role playing, which is also fun and also better served with wine so you can set up small groups. There’s not much that isn’t isn’t helped by wine. I find my favorite seven young blonde personally, but well, it depends whether your board meetings here in the evening at seven. Thirty in the morning. Yeah, well, bloody mary zahra possibility? No, i would not have not tried. But if their evening most activities in life i find very well lubricated by wine. Well, you have an italian last name? I do, um but yes, a lot of these can be when you have after you evolve the kinds of things we’ve been talking about, whether it’s in small groups or people making, you know, presentations to the larger group, anything that has people actually use what we’re talking about rather than just sort of take it in because the more people use the information that we’ve been discussing, the more comfortable they ll get and them or it’s actually in their heads, and they make it their own. So never are we asking anyone to like, you know, memorize words or spew things back, it’s all about understanding that the content and the concepts and then being able to actually talk about it in words that are comfortable your own? Yeah, on your own that connect with the person that you’re actually talking with. How long is this process to build the board, ambassadors, brand ambassadors? Well, these air separate different kinds of exercises that we’ve been talking about it and there’s no, no fixed timeline are sequence to any of this you could certainly come up with, you know, three or four these workshops, depending on how often you want to meet so you know it, it may be better to do oneaccord er just because the board has other things to do and you have to hijack some time here, or you could do a concentrated session if you had, you know, a two day retreat and you, you know, take some of that time, okay? Yeah, the ways in i mean, they should be already known to the organization. There shouldn’t be anything new here in terms of identifying how you khun be supportive. Well, there’s always a difference between things that exist and actually sort of understanding it and remembering it. So if you, for instance, well, let’s, take a life sciences organization example, um, you may care about the work they’re doing in a specific disease area. I may care about how they’re using new technology. Somebody else may care about how their training scientists of the next generation. So you may know that the organization actually doing those things, but you really care about that disease area that you care about. So in order for you to feel comfortable talking about the technologies that i care about you do have to learn more about it and sort of, you know, soaking it a little bit. All right, yeah. So right, right again, everybody got their own perspective and reason that they’re with the organization exactly. We need to share all these and everybody’s converse and in all the ways, right? Because the goal of an ambassador is to be able to meet people where they are not to just go out, as you said earlier and be a billboard that, you know, is inflexible, and this is an electronic billboard isn’t going to change any, so you need you need the information, the confidence, that fluency and of course, the content, which is largely what we’re talking about during this hour to, you know, start someplace and be able to pivot to someplace else and, you know, not be flustered in the middle, um, you you also work with boardmember is to overcome potential resistance points as their out ambassador rising? Sure, well, i mean, everything doesn’t go smoothly. We’ve been talking about ways to make boardmember is more comfortable. That doesn’t mean you’re not going to bump up against some donorsearch prospect that just, you know, says no, or i don’t believe in you or comes up with, you know, some reason why, you know he or she should not entertain a conversation with you so there’s no guarantee it’s all going to just, you know, fall into your lap. So again, we keep coming back to role playing and the’s group sessions, but and leadership or bored or the fund-raising staff probably knows the points of resistance, so one thing the board can do is come up with what the arguments are for dispelling that. So this is a good thing to do in small groups who could even sort of picture seeing a couple people on one side of a table in a couple of people on the other. And, you know, one side has the resistance, and the other side has duitz with what we’ve just been talking about, you know, the roles in areas of focus and the impact stories try to convince the, you know, the first party no, you’re wrong, you know? Or give it another thought so that you can in fact, bring some more people into the fold. Okay, um, before we move on anything, anything more we can talk about with the respect of these resistance points. Anything else there? Well, they’re different for every organization. I mean, we worked and some tell a story tell somebody you worked with has some are harder to overcome than others. I like stories. So for a large ballet company that we worked with, one of the points of resistance that we we heard often was, you know, i fall asleep hard to see what the argument for that might be rather than take a nap earlier. Well, the persons of phyllis stein or whatever or, you know, write them up, we would just write them off, i fall asleep at the ballet or i fall asleep at the opera. Are we really going to get anywhere? Not necessarily ok, some of these you don’t get anywhere, okay? Or, you know, there aren’t any words, so i don’t get the story or for modern ballet, whether isn’t a story, i really don’t get the story, so you have to explain, you probably have to actually sort of inculcated people about what they’re actually seeing in hearing, but there are some things that, yes, it’s harder to overcome. Um, some things are easier to overcome. So, going back to wgbh, the pbs station in boston, one of the things they tell you. What down before you kill the gbh story, we’re gonna go out for a couple minutes, okay? Give your voice a break and we’ll come back and we’ll go right to the gbh story. Stay with us. Like what you’re hearing a non-profit radio tony’s got more on youtube, you’ll find clips from stand up comedy tv spots and exclusive interviews catch guests like seth gordon. Craig newmark, the founder of craigslist marquis of eco enterprises, charles best from donors choose dot org’s aria finger do something that or an a a me levine from new york universities heimans center on philanthropy tony tweets to he finds the best content from the most knowledgeable, interesting people in and around non-profits to share on his stream. If you have valuable info, he wants to re tweet you during the show. You can join the conversation on twitter using hashtag non-profit radio twitter is an easy way to reach tony he’s at tony martignetti narasimhan t i g e n e t t i remember there’s a g before the end, he hosts a podcast for the chronicle of philanthropy fund-raising fundamentals is a short monthly show devoted to getting over your fund-raising hartals just like non-profit radio, toni talks to leading thinkers, experts and cool people with great ideas. As one fan said, tony picks their brains and i don’t have to leave my office fund-raising fundamentals was recently dubbed the most helpful non-profit podcast you have ever heard, you can also join the conversation on facebook, where you can ask questions before or after the show. The guests are there, too. Get insider show alerts by email, tony tells you who’s on each week and always includes link so that you can contact guess directly. To sign up, visit the facebook page for tony martignetti dot com. I’m peter shankman, author of zombie loyalists, and you’re listening to tony martignetti non-profit radio. Big non-profit ideas for the other ninety five percent. Welcome back again too big non-profit ideas for the other ninety five percent, as peter shankman just said, more live listener lovemore live listeners have joined us. Woodbridge, new jersey, east bridgewater, massachusetts, and brooklyn and queens, new york welcome live listen love to each of you schnoll a france bonsoir got shanae india somewhere in the uk uk unfortunately your mask you can’t tell where, but we’ll presume it’s england, but live listener love to india and the u k listeners also. And ah also joining us moscow and you know us brazil. I apologize if i pronounced that wrong. But you know who you are listening in? Brazil also got italy, but we can’t see where you are. We don’t know what city or town i’ve been to italy four times, so i should be able to say hello in what am i missing? What am i missing? Child? Go must die. I can order a meal and i can find my way to hotels. That’s, about by like restaurant and hotel. Italian is about what i speak. You could start with bum jo know when jordan was really good. Thank you, roger. You don’t even have the italian name? I don’t. Thank you. Thank you. Um okay, let’s. Ah, so we were overcoming our resistance points. So anything and you were going to tell a story about wgbh? Sorry, that’s where we were. Yeah, well, it’s not so much a story as so it’s a little different from some other non-profits in that it depends not only on individual donors, it depends on sponsorship, so one goal of a particular board is actually to help with sponsorships. So many organizations, of course, do have sponsors and sponsors requires that the different value proposition than perhaps an individual or a major donor is going to have. So some of the areas of resistance were because it’s a public television station, for instance, i don’t want to support you because you’re too liberal. Okay, so then the board got together and came up with some arguments around that or it doesn’t congress pay for everything? Well, no, but so that’s a point of ignorance that you could then sort of overcome or isn’t your audience to old? Well depends, you know, too old. For what? And it’s also younger than you think. So there. You know, there are things out there that are often misperceptions that board members will get hit with or in fact staff will get hit with that one can marshal arguments for. So yes, that’s different than falling sleep at the ballet. How does the staff support this? This whole ambassador rising process? Well, in a lot of these organizations that were working with, you know, we’re facilitating these sessions, but staff, of course, has to organize them and make them happen, and to our earlier point probably procure the wine. But an interesting side effect of all of this, not the side effect of the wine is how what comes out of these meetings, then benefits staff so they’re learning right along with the board so they will be clearer on the organization. They will be clearer on some of these arguments. It will be clear they will learn new stories so there’s a definite no relationship between, you know, staff on board. They’re not just there in a supportive role. It’s actually making their jobs, you know, more successful, actually, even though it’s a aboard process the staff is vicariously elearning right and that’s a that’s a goal, even though it was not. Necessarily sort of, you know, a stated goal, but we see it happen all the time. You’re sort of raising both sides of the seesaw in the in the course of doing these exercises. Okay, then, it’s not a seesaw anymore. Both sides arising it’s. Some kind of rising platform. It’s. Just a seesaw that’s level a level level seesaw. But then that’s not really a seat it’s not really. See? So it doesn’t have a fulcrum in the middle. One side rises on the other side falls, but both sides rise. I don’t know. What’s that a jungle that’s a jungle gym. We’ll find another metaphor. Okay, beating you up, you know you don’t feel well, um, ok, we’ve we’ve we’ve covered the resistance points, and this sounds like something that would be valuable to revisit over over time. Not just do once and, you know, kind of put on a shelf well, like brand building, which is also a process and not an event. All of these could be processes and not events. So to the extent that you take some of the exercise we’ve been talking about, instruction them over some period of time. It also serves an organization well, too, to bring these back at some kinds of men of different periods, first of all, boards change, so everybody isn’t going to be always up to speed in equal way. And this notion of fluency like practicing anything else, you know, piano, swimming, whatever you have to do it so you can certainly come up with short role playing exercises at some other point. You khun certainly revisit stories you could revisit rolls and areas of focus. All of this stuff could have a sort of rinse and repeat kind of cycle. We talked earlier on about strategic planning, something formal, possibly being a part of this. Do you find many organizations that really don’t have the basics in master so that they can carry on further? Well, lots of organizations have the basics and not have a strategic plan, which is fine, you know you’re not always in a strategic planning moflow but if you are, if your organization does have a new strategic plan, all of this is even more important because there’s no stresses you playing that we bumped into that doesn’t depend on its success by having people think and act in. Your favor. So all of what we’re talking about on the board of the staff level is helping you to convince people to think and act in your favor, otherwise would be to plant. Just sit on a shelf. Yeah, well, they all depend on some actions. Yeah, that’s something i’ve had guests lament that a strategic plan gets done and then he really does just get parked on a shelf and it doesn’t live, doesn’t evolve and the organization doesn’t really benefit from it. Other than it’s a checkmark the board can now move on to the next project. Right? So if you go back to either the ways in that we were talking about or just being sort of clear on the different aspects of the organization you could sort of back into ok here. These aspects are a strategic plan. What do people have to think and do and feel in order for this to be successful so that they will, you know, realize is section to be of the plan. And then how can boardmember sze help so sure you could bring that in as another discussion topic. Now we just have about thirty seconds left. Roger, but i want you to share with me what you love about the work that you do. Oh, all right, well, have to think about that for a nanosecond here. I think that the top answer would be because we worked with so many non-profits and they’re in so many different fields that first of all, it’s never boring and there’s always an opportunity to help these different organizations achieve their different missions. Um, you know, we’re all about brand building not just to build the brand, but brand building to help organizations evolve and to better navigate change and that’s just about every non-profit roger stamets president and ceo sam it’s, blackstone associates, they’re at sam it’s dot com and he’s at sam it’s me tc on twitter. Roger. Thank you very, very much. Thank you for having me. My pleasure. Ugh! Ugh! Ugh! Mustard on quite well, despite being a little under weather next week. A peer-to-peer fund-raising report with the president of the peer-to-peer professional forum, david hessekiel. If you missed any part of today’s show, find it on tony martignetti dot com. Where else would you go mean, of course, our creative producers claire meyerhoff. Line producer today is janice jennifer genesis cerini janice taylor. Of course, i forgot that. Thank you. Shows social media’s by susan chavez, susan chavez, dot com and our music is by scott scott scott scott stein. Of course, i know that when janice let’s got it right here in print. It’s supposed to be a little self deprecating humor please be with me next week for non-profit radio. Big non-profit ideas for the other ninety five percent. Go out and be great. What’s not to love about non-profit radio tony gets the best guests check this out from seth godin this’s the first revolution since tv nineteen fifty and henry ford nineteen twenty it’s the revolution of our lifetime here’s a smart, simple idea from craigslist founder craig newmark insights orn presentation or anything? People don’t really need the fancy stuff they need something which is simple and fast. When’s the best time to post on facebook facebook’s andrew noise nose at traffic is at an all time hyre on nine am or eight pm so that’s when you should be posting your most meaningful post here’s aria finger ceo of do something dot or ge young people are not going to be involved in social change if it’s boring and they don’t see the impact of what they’re doing so you gotta make it fun and applicable to these young people look so otherwise a fifteen and sixteen year old they have better things to do if they have xbox, they have tv, they have their cell phones me dar is the founder of idealised took two or three years for foundation staff to sort of dane toe, add an email address their card. It was like it was phone. This email thing is fired-up that’s why should i give it away? Charles best founded donors choose dot or ge somehow they’ve gotten in touch kind of off line as it were and and no two exchanges of brownies and visits and physical gift mark echo is the founder and ceo of eco enterprises. You may be wearing his hoodies and shirts. Tony talked to him. Yeah, you know, i just i’m a big believer that’s not what you make in life. It sze, you know, tell you make people feel this is public radio host majora carter. Innovation is in the power of understanding that you don’t just do it. You put money on a situation expected to hell. You put money in a situation and invested and expected to grow and savvy advice for success from eric sacristan. What separates those who achieve from those who do not is in direct proportion to one’s ability to ask others for help. The smartest experts and leading thinkers air on tony martignetti non-profit radio big non-profit ideas for the other ninety five percent.

Nonprofit Radio for August 9, 2013: Get the Best Out of Your Board & Back To Board Basics II

Big Nonprofit Ideas for the Other 95%

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My Guests:

Allison Chernow, Terry Billie & Holly Bellows:  Get the Best Out of Your Board

Interviewing (L to R): Allison Chernow,Terry Billie & Holly Bellows at Fundraising Day New York 2013

 

Our panel from Fundraising Day in June shares wisdom on identifying, recruiting, training, engaging and transitioning board members. They are Allison Chernow, director of external affairs at the Bronx Museum; Terry Billie, director of corporate and foundation relations at Goodwill Industries of NY & NJ; and Holly Bellows, chief development officer for the Helen Keller National Center.

Interviewing (L to R): Allison Chernow,Terry Billie & Holly Bellows at Fundraising Day New York 2013

Gene Takagi: Back To Board Basics II

picture of Gene TakagiGene Takagi, our legal contributor, returns to continue our discussion on sound board practices. We’ll talk about term limits; how often they should meet; automatic removal; and very young trustees (in real age, not how they act). Gene is principal of the Nonprofit & Exempt Organizations law group (NEO).

 

 


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Hello and welcome to tony martignetti non-profit radio, where we’re talking about big non-profit ideas for the other ninety five percent. I’m your aptly named host. Oh, i hope you were with me last week. You would cause me to go into cardiogenic shock if i learned that you had missed fermentation sandorkraut cats is a fermenter. We talked about the history, benefits and methods of fermenting foods and volunteermatch making scott koegler, our technology contributor and the editor of non-profit technology news, shared ideas about tech that matches willing volunteers with seeking charities this week, all aboard. First, get the best out of your board our panel shares wisdom on identifying, recruiting, training, engaging and transitioning board members. I talked to allison char now, terry, billy and holly bellows at fund-raising day in june and back to board basics, do you, jane takagi are legal contributor returns to contribute to continue our discussion on soundboard practices? This time, we’ll talk about term limits, how often you’re bored should meet having automatic removal provisions and very young trustees that’s young in age, not in how they’re acting, and jean is principal of the non-profit exempt organizations law group between the guests on tony’s take to my beth cantor interview is on video, and i feel i let you down last week, and i’m going to explain that right now. We have the interview from fund-raising day this past june, where we’re talking about getting the best out of your board, and here is that welcome to tony martignetti non-profit radio coverage of fund-raising day two thousand thirteen where at the marriott marquis hotel in times square, midtown new york city and we’re talking now about board relations. My guests are it’s needed most closest closest to meet holly bellows, chief development officer of helen keller’s services for the blind. Next to her is terry billy, director of corporate and foundation relations for goodwill industries of new york and new jersey. And we also have allison for now director of external affairs for the bronx museum of the arts ladies welcome. Thank you. Thank you. It’s. A pleasure to have you. Your seminar topic is bored. Relations getting the best out of your trustees. No, let’s start far away. Allison, can we start with recruitment? What? What? What’s? Some advice around identifying and recruiting the right boardmember well for museum. We have a lot of opportunities for cultivation of perspective, trustees. We looked to people who come to many of our events. We sort of noticed repeat attendees way start plucking them out. We invite them to special private events. We find that people are very attracted to sort of exclusive private events, not generally open to the public. So we invite them to dinners or preview openings of exhibitions and that’s how we generate interests, and we see if they respond to that we just keep cultivating more and generally that’s, that’s way, tio sort of notice and pounce on perspective prospects. We also use other trustees to help us, and they bring along people whom they think would be a fit for the museum to two events as well. Okay, i mean, i sort of go down the line on different topics. Teri, you have anything you’d like to add about identifying the right people? Well, we’re different kind of agency were a social service ages. We don’t really have events or exhibitions or things like that that people would come to so instead we have to really go the traditional route, which is working with our trustees to see if they have friends or colleagues or others that might come be interested in working with our organization or we go toe on organizations such as bored source to do recruitment. Two or two funders, corporations, foundations that might be interested in supporting us in a different way through ford relations. Okay, so you’re relying more on your board because you don’t have those cultivation events. By the way, terry, i want to welcome you back to the show. Thank you. Chatted with you this time last year. How about you, holly? Like they have that goodwill industries is doing well differently. Well, we’re also human service organization. We serve the blind, and those were deaf blind. And so we have the same process as terry. We look for people who are already within the organization. People that know people that want to be committed for the long along home. Okay? And i apologize. I confused you with i’m sorry, terry. I’m here with goodwill industries and holly. Of course, you’re with falik falik color this’s blind. Thank you very much. Coach me on each individual word. Now i have it. Holly’s with helen keller services for the blind. Thank you, but no, thank you. Thank you for saving me. Okay, after we’ve way haven’t identified the right people way have to start. Teo, make conversation a lot more serious. Terry, how do we how do we go about that? Well, we work with a development committee. In fact, i had my development kitty meet committee meeting last night, which we met with five of our board members. And we talked about the different things that were doing to raise money. And we talked about developed direct mail cultivation events and funding alerts for possible corporate foundation connections, finding out what they’d like to do, how they like to help. And so that’s that’s, how we work with our board, we have a lot of other board members that in war policy driven, so they’re not so much into fund-raising so we have to use them as ambassadors they’re not so comfortable in. They get scared about fund-raising and what the expectations will be have to have to come out in the recruitment process. Right? Right. Would you say holly? This is critical. We need to be up front. How do you how do you do that? Helen keller. Well, right now i weigh had a board meeting on monday morning and a golf tournament afterwards. And so i i spoke with the board that i will be interviewing them over the next couple of months. Existing existing board, the existing board. Okay, and on that will be part of the question is, we also had a former board members come to the golf tournament to reinforce the other ties to the organization, and i will be interviewing them, too. And so is part of that process reaching out to not only what they’re interested interests are going forward, but, you know, looking for prospects and, you know, foundations as well as their personal connections for future board development. Imagine it’s it’s it’s important not to be trying to fit a square peg into a round hole. Different board members have different interests. Aptitudes abilities, right? They can all come to the board for different reasons. Maybe they had someone in their family that is blind or deaf blind. Or maybe it just seems like a really cool thing to do. They learned about helen keller in third grade here in new york state. And they want teo you. Know, be a part of it. So various everyone has various reasons why they want to be on the board, and we want to exploit those personalities and and credentials, right? That’s, right? Some people they may not be able to get give from their personal wealth or their corporate wealth, but they are connected to lots of people who may be able to give to us or a foundation. I interviewed someone earlier today who uses is actually sort of ah, trainer on linked in hey uses, linked in board, connect on trains, organizations to use linked in board, connect to any of you use that for identifying potential board members. Anybody? Yes, that’s one of the things that we are planning to grow our board in the coming fiscal year fiscal starts in july, so we will be using board, connect as one of the tools and dish in tow board source to reach out and look for a new board members. So you haven’t used board connect yet? No. Yeah. Okay. Okay. I do plan to use it, though, so you’re so holy. You’re aware. Also aboard. Connect. I’m aware of it, but i haven’t used it. I’m creating a separate committee. A cz i told you before the interview. I’m hyre helmsley. We have a grant from the helmsley found charitable foundation and one of their charges tow us is to create a aboard for one of our programs so that we can attract funders and people who are interested in serving the deaf blind. And so i’m going to be using it soon to look for people across the country that might want to become members of this committee. Alison to make this aa two way street. How does the organization identify what it has to offer board members in return for their for their service? Right? Well, when we interview a prospect way really try and find out what? What is it that draws them to the museum? What is their interest? And for us, we have, ah, large education component. We have the whole art collection component, so they’re different reasons why a trustee would join the board of the museum. So we try and suss out what that will be. And i find a commonality is that they want to learn more. They often want to learn more about art. So for those who do, we put them on the acquisitions committee, and that way they can meet artists, and they can learn all that are they come to gallery tours. We sort of feel what? What is it that attracts them? So for others, it’s education, and they want to be part of the whole education programs. So they join the education committee for the board waken segment, their interests, and sometimes they don’t even overlap with board members. But we can sort of put them where they’re most enthusiastic. Okay, talking alternative radio twenty four hours a day. Do you need a business plan that can guide your company’s growth? Seven and seven will help bring the changes you need. Wear small business consultants and we pay attention to the details. You may miss our culture and consultant services are guaranteed to lead toe. Right, groat. For your business, call us at nine. One seven eight three, three, four, eight, six zero foreign, no obligation. Free consultation checkout on the website of ww dot covenant seven dot com are you fed up with talking points? Rhetoric everywhere you turn left or right? Spin ideology no reality, in fact, its ideology over in tow. No more it’s time for action. Join me. 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Interested simply email at info at talking alternative dot com and just while we’re still on this recruitment process, terry, how i said, terri and i looked at allison mary-jo terry, how do you explain the organization’s expectations? Is it in writing, or is it just a conversation? Thie expectations around all all the functions of a boardmember it’s through conversations way actually, in the past, our board has not really been a fund-raising board, and so we’re in the process of kind of transforming and educating our board as to their financial responsibility, even though that’s something that most people understand that that is one of the reasons why you become aboard is to support the organization, unfortunately, we have boardmember is that have not made a gif right? And so we need to have the conversation with them and to say that we need one hundred percent support, it doesn’t mean that you need to give us one hundred thousand dollars. You can give us five thousand dollars, you could give us three thousand dollars, you need to give us something so that’s one of our challenges with our organization, with a board that we are working through, even though we’re jumping way ahead in the boardmember life. Cycle that could be an indicator that it’s time for a boardmember step down exactly. In fact, we just started a new campaign to attract the millennials, the young twenties and thirty somethings to start, eh? Maybe a young, not so much a board, but a council we’re going to call the good the good counsel, and they’re going to be younger people that we want to get involved and engaged and so that they could eventually turn into board members. So we’re starting with the youth, starting with they’re all about cause marketing and the finding ways to make a difference by their volunteering, so we’re going to be working with them to do that, and then eventually, you know, have them start their own, like little special events and cultivation and awareness and marketing, and then eventually waken see floats to the top and hopefully get him on board. Okay, back-up another step, let’s say we’ve recruited the boardmember we need to keep that person active, engaged who wants to talk about keeping a boardmember active and engaged way have we’re fortunate that we have a vehicle for doing that, we can invite them to openings and too many events, but it’s really also about having them see the inner workings, lights, lights just dimmed here. Nothing wrong for those of you watching the video on youtube, there’s nothing wrong with your vision. The overhead lights all just went out here. Marriott marquis. But we’re continuing. We have our own lights powered battery so doesn’t doesn’t interrupt back on. Okay, no, don’t adjust your sets. Everything is fine. Okay? I’m sorry. Go ahead. So for example, that the trustees who are interested in education way let them come and see the classrooms that come to the museum to see the work in progress and to see the work that we do so it’s very important that they come in and see all the grassroots work that’s that’s happening. And the other thing is that we just try to make them feel special. I mean, we try to write letters that are personalized for them that nobody else could get, so that they would feel that, you know, they in fact do make a difference there. So, you know the gratitude combined with hands on and really seeing what what’s going on works to really keep them interested. Invested? In it good, great, it isn’t. One of the things that i have begun doing is whenever we get a grant or a large donation, even a small donation, but we are an organization that’s been around for one hundred twenty years or more, and so we have lots of get small gifts that we get and half for a long time, but i ask different board members to call the foundation or call the person and just a thank you they don’t ask for anything, but to in that way, they’re learning more about that organization, and they’re feeling connected and that’s been a real positive response that i’m getting. So as i said, we’ve been around for a long time, we have many donorsearch couldn’t call everyone they are picking up more and more that they can do. So. Holly, how about training training the new boardmember what does that look like for for helen keller way haven’t i haven’t started training yet since i’ve been since october, but what that will look like is for is creating a talking points and some role playing for those that haven’t gone out and ask for money, paring them with someone who has done it and feels comfortable with it, having conversations about their experience on other boards. It’s, interesting custom, many of our boardmember serve on other boards on, sometimes they’ve gone out and made asking some have not so it’s going to be a combination of things here teach person’s comfort level. At the very least, i tell boardmember sze in in the past that invite the person to join you, make your donation in first and then in fight uh, your prospect to join them if you just can’t really say, can you give x amount of dollars so that’s a nice, non threatening way to get started and asking for money. Allison, how about training the new boardmember bronx museum of the arts? What does that look like? Well, we have a retreat on annually and in terms of role playing, there was a facilitator who came and your role played about making an ask and talking about the priorities for the museum, so it was really a time it was a very concentrated long day dahna meeting the other board members really learning about the mission and learning how to move it forward howto ask. And how to do that. Nut’s involves metoo holly, it sounded almost like you have ah, maybe a mentor mentee relationship for board members is that? Is that is that overstating? No, it didn’t help that a senior boardmember mike, you that’s correct, my position is newly created position, and part of that is to help our board became come more of a fund-raising board many of our programs our government funded, so there wasn’t a need in the past to be a fund-raising board and many organizations like helen keller, are transitioning from having helly government funded programs to where they’re going to have to go out for private gifts, and they’ll get bored members more senior boardmember help with that, terry. Anyway, you want to add about training the new boardmember right that’s, exactly the same situation that good will in addition to having individual individuals support, we have also had in the past a lot of government funding, so asking board members to help with raising money is a somewhat new angle for them. So what we’ve been doing is bringing on a different new board members, for example, way just havin a new boardmember from j p morgan chase, who has been on other boards and has done fund-raising so he is kind of going to be a example or role model to the other board members to show show them how easy and painless it is, but we do have to identify tasks board members who just can’t do fund-raising or maybe maybe won’t? Well, maybe won’t takes little training, but they’re just they’re timid. They’re terrified of it. Terry, what do we identify other things that that boardmember could do around fund-raising right, right. Other than asking right it’s it’s getting them to come to different events or different cultivation events, too, talk, be an ambassador, so they’re not asking for money. They’re building awareness, they’re talking to their friends about what they do about what goodwill does and sharing the passion about what the organization’s all about and really building awareness, not so much asking for money. If they’re afraid of asking for money, they could be a representative and record. For those who are afraid, teo, ask or it’s just uncomfortable for them. We often say what we need you to do is identify potential trustees, advocate cultivate b passionate and then we come in that’s our job and the and the executive director’s stopped to come in and do the ask, so it takes the awkwardness and the onus away from them, and they feel that they can just freely invite a guest without the worry of having to do the actual ask, okay, how about may be hosting an event? They could perhaps open their home? Holly other tasks that again trying to identify things that people who will solicit can still be involved in around fund-raising well, i have someone on our board who is an attorney, and that person uses their personal skills to review documents that are very important to fund-raising such as st charitable registrations for things like that that are very important documents that keep my department moving and keep us legal and transparent, but that’s not at, you know, going out, asking for money, but it is very important to the movement of the organization. So, yes, there are other task that besides fund-raising the other part of my practice, besides plan e-giving is the charity registration i wrote. I wrote a new book on how to do-it-yourself you and i do the registrations for charities i don’t want to do. Them so very well acquainted with that enormous morass called charity registration. Terry, we’re gonna have something. Yeah, just the same thing is asking people to host a breakfast, maybe at the club, maybe at a restaurant they go to or at there. If they have a nice house or an apartment to host something again to invite their friends or people that we want to get more engaged, all they need to do is be the be the host they don’t need to ask. Okay? And we do that also especially we play in the bronx nostalgia. So we have people hosting private problem bronze talk to sow bronx artists from storytellers. We really emphasize the bronx and have these very small, intimate events at people’s homes, and those people who host often become interested because they posted they become vested. And then the whole positive spiral happens where they want to get more involved. It’s great. How about the i don’t know the recalcitrant boardmember who just either can’t do it? I won’t do it. Or that you could. But it’s just not too. Is that person need to be transitioned off the board? How do we how? Do we finesse that situation or they’re recalcitrant? Maybe about or maybe there their attendance is very poor. Maybe they are. Maybe they’re great fundraisers, but their attendance is back. You start to see these signs, how do we want to take the first shot that way? Especially the previous job i had at a small museum. It’s, very hard because in a small shop you get to develop relationships with your trustees and you realized, especially in the economic downturn in the past years, that life happens that trustees have goes divorces, they go through bad business times, and that may account for they’re not coming there, not being able to give. And i think in a small place where you built intimacy it’s really important to have some flexibility to give them, for example, if you know there’s a personal situation to give them a year or so, it is sorted out and have a little bit of leeway. On the other hand, you know, once you do that and it continues, i think then that’s, when the board president needs to talk to the boardmember find out what’s going on and have a really frank discussion about whether it’s working for both people often they’re relieved to be let off the hook. Okay, mary-jo you’re tense, that’s totally familiar with me. I mean, we in my past organisations and in this one you have sometimes people that you just know that they’re heading out because they haven’t shown up wave a big gold wheel or a rappel wheel in the four in the booth next to us. That’s what you’re hearing it’s not we’re not giving any other way, but with next to us is giving away t shirts, caps, mugs or ipad mini being in the drawing for a night. So that’s that’s what you’re hearing going so, you know, we just recently had one of our board members say that she needed to step down because life changes and different areas of interest abila different, different levels of interest in what we’re doing, we’re already priorities changed, and she said she would continue to support the organization, but she needed, you know, she just couldn’t make it to meetings, and we knew that because she hadn’t been to meetings in like, a whole year that starts to hurt ford morale generally, i mean other board. Members who are making the time fine, making time making effort start to get resentful everything right? Holly? Yes. Okay, anything you want to add more about thie transitioning off boardmember i just sort of playing what you’re doing in terms of building up a younger constituency in my past job and now in the bronx museum, trying to build a board a parallel board. It’s called the leadership council, which conserve as a farm team for future board members and also as a retirement place for trustees. Who can’t you know, the financial onus is too great as trusting, but there’s a lesser amount expected as from a leadership council member. So it’s nice to have a transition. You’re keeping them in the fold, keeping them interested. But they don’t have all the responsibilities and duties of a trusting. Do we each have term limits for boardmember ship? No, none of you have term limits. Really that’s interesting. And that’s, you know, that’s. A very double edged thing. Because in my former job we had founder syndrome. You know trustees who had been there a long time. Really? Basically. So i ran the board de facto it’s very tough. And it really made me understand why term limits would be good. On the other hand, when you have donors who give these were our biggest donors, it’s very tough to give up financial support that they provide so that’s one motivating reasons to have this other board where they could go as well. Anybody thinking about adding board limits, we would like normal social. Yeah, we would like to add term limits, that’s something that we need to have a discussion with the board president and make some changes so that we’re hoping that we can implement that, then they’re coming here, ok, way happening had that discussion on at this point way have long serving board members who and she said, contribute and are active, and i don’t want to say goodbye to them because they’re valuable to the organization and we love them. So ish, as she said it, zo double in. Okay, we have about a minute left or so anybody want one talk about anything that i didn’t ask you about, that you’re it’s on your mind because you’re doing your seven or in a couple of hours about the board relationship hyre final final final thoughts? No, nobody. Okay, well, we’ll leave it there. All right, thank you. Oh, my god. Thank you. Thank you all very much. Thank you. Say that. Remind listeners and viewers that holly bellows is chief development officer of helen keller services for the blind. And terry billy is director of corporate and foundation relations for goodwill industries of new york and new jersey. On up, of course. Alison looking for your name here? Alison? Sure. Now sorry. Director of external affairs in the bronx. Regime of the arts, ladies. Thank you very much. Thank you for sharing your experiences. Thank you for being with me. Tony martignetti non-profit radio coverage of fund-raising day two thousand thirteen i love that roulette wheel in the in the background they were giving away the big prize was an ipad mini so i heard that in a bunch of interviews always nice to have a little little pleasant background music for an interview. And my thanks, of course. Also to the organizer’s at fund-raising day i’ve got some live listener love moscow in the russian federation and in china, taiwan, guangzhou, wuhan and beijing. Ni hao i’ve been to beijing and of into wuhan, also, and seoul in south korea, on yo haserot in japan, hiroshima, metallica and tokyo. Lovett konnichi wa there’s. Plenty of domestic live listeners will get to them in a couple of minutes. Right now, we go to a break when we come back, tony’s, take two, and then gene takagi, continuing our are all aboard day with back to board basics, do keep listening. They didn’t didn’t dick, dick tooting, getting dink, dink, dink, dink, you’re listening to the talking alternate network e-giving. Dahna good. Are you suffering from aches and pains? Has traditional medicine let you down? Are you tired of taking toxic medications, then come to the double diamond wellness center and learn how our natural methods can help you to hell? Call us now at to one to seven to one eight, one eight three that’s to one to seven to one eight one eight three or find us on the web at www dot double diamond wellness dot com way. Look forward to serving you. Hi, i’m ostomel role, and i’m sloan wainwright, where the host of the new thursday morning show the music power hour. Eleven a m. We’re gonna have fun. Shine the light on all aspects of music and its limitless healing possibilities. We’re gonna invite artists to share their songs and play live will be listening and talking about great music from yesterday to today, so you’re invited to share in our musical conversation. Your ears will be delighted with the sound of music and our voices. Join austin and sloan live thursdays at eleven a. M on talking alternative dot com. You’re listening to the talking alternative network. Schnoll if you have big ideas but an average budget, tune into tony martignetti non-profit radio for ideas you can use. I do. I’m dr. Robert penna, author of the non-profit outcomes toolbox. And i’m dr tony martignetti and it is time for dr tony martignetti is take two. I just appointed myself phd since last week. They’re pretty easy to come by, so i figured, why go through the that the trouble? I’ll just name myself one my interview with beth cantor, which was on this show a couple of weeks ago. The video is now on my blogged you may recall, she is the author of the network to non-profit and measuring the network to non-profit we talked about riel online engagement and had a measure your success in your online efforts. That video is on my blogged at tony martignetti dot com, and i think i let you down. Last week i tried a new segment called out of the blue, and my intention was to bring things bring in people who have you are supporting non-profits but are doing work that’s not directly related to non-profits on dh sandora cats was the fermenter who are brought in, and he was terrific. He was delightful, but a zay was listening to him, and then i replayed it during the week, you know, i was kind of struck with why what? Is it why we listening? What does this have to do with non-profits it’s just not close enough to non-profits he supports non-profits um, but we didn’t talk much about that and that’s not really. Why you listen, is tto find out why people support non-profits i mean, at least not from one person’s perspective. S o we’re not goingto i’m not going to continue that out of the blue i what my intention was was to try to recognize that people who work in non-profits have lots of interests that have nothing to do with non-profits i read all the profiles of new twitter followers, and a lot of people comment on food that their food either to cook, ah, a lot of people coming on their kids, wine is a pretty popular one, different sports, so, you know, so that got me thinking people are multidemensional and maybe we should bring in some other dimensions besides non-profits and i thought a fermenter was a great place to start, but you have plenty of other podcasts, tens or hundreds of thousands of other podcast that you can go to to satisfy all those multidemensional interests that you have and i don’t think it’s right for me to try toe satisfy all those we have our niche here non-profits and picking the brains of experts to help people in non-profits that’s my mission here on this podcast, there’s plenty of other outlets for youto satisfy all those other interests that you have, so i think i let you down. We’re not going to continue out of the blue. We’re going tow. Focus more on on the core and that is tony’s take two for friday the today’s the ninth of august, the thirty second show of the year. I’m very happy to bring back jane takagi he’s, the principal of neo the non-profit and exempt organizations law group in san francisco he edits the very popular non-profit law blogged dot com and on twitter he is at gi tak gt a k welcome back, jean takagi. Hi, tony it’s. Great to be back. Thank you. I can tell you’re smiling i couldjust always telling you i could tell when you’re smiling. It’s ah it’s. Wonderful to have your energy even from san francisco. I feel it great. I’m conveying that over the phone. You absolutely are. Yes, we started this. Conversation back to board basics two weeks ago, july twenty six so you can go back and listen to that if you missed it, jean and i are going to pick up where we left off, and that was with term limits. Question of whether there should even be term limits. What’s your what’s what’s the advice around that gene. Well, first piece advice tony’s to check with your state laws because individual state laws may vary. My understanding is that under in most states, that there are no term limits, meaning that a boardmember could get reelected onto the board over and over and over again, without any restriction of the law, unless the organization’s by-laws say otherwise. So then it depends upon the individual board thinking about, well, what are the good things about keeping board members on potentially forever? Versace? What is the good thing about limiting how long any boardmember serves so we can get new people onto the board? Increased our diversity on pursue other things and other perspective. So that’s kind of the starting point, but i’m wondering, tony. What? What do you feel about board term limits if you’re serving on the board? I’m i’m pretty pro term limits. Um, in fact, i was just on a phone call this morning with someone who works at the gnu heimans center she’s an instructor there, and i mentioned that you and i are going to talk about this very subject and she said has to be bored limits has to be, yeah, i like them, i think that they they boardmember could be extended if it’s a two year term or three term, you can always extend in addition on additional term tua boardmember but after four or six or maybe even eight years, nine years, i think boardmember tze get a little stale and i’d like a fresh perspective and i think there’s other things that boardmember khun do we don’t kill them just because they leave the board, they don’t die there’s other things there’s other ways they can help that’s such a great point, tiny, and i agree with you a hundred percent, i’m there are exceptions, but i’m very much generally in the pro term limit kapin with without term limits, i think you can encourage very insular boards that get stale as you said, they could become rubber stamp. Boards just going with the flow, you may not be able to attract additional skills and perspectives of the same people are staying on the board, and you’re not bringing new people in boardmember khun get very entitled about their positions and start toe slack off a little bit, and it becomes very difficult to remove long term board members politically speaking into from a sense of relationships and when you have term limits, it really encourages bringing in those new perspectives and thoughts and skills. But the best thing you know is to make sure that when you bring in new people that you’re really engaging them and not just bringing them as tokens so that that becomes very important too. But i like your ideas of, you know, just reelecting, you know, the board members who are performing really well don’t re elect the board members that are performing poorly or unable to attend the majority of the meeting and see exactly how many terms you feel would be sufficient before you could bring in new people. The previous segment was all about keeping boardmember sze engaged from the beginning getting, you know, identifying what their passions are. So these these two segments are discussion, and the the pre recorded panel discussion are fitting together very well. Now i asked each of those three panelists if any of them had board term limits on in in their non-profits and none of them did, and one of them express the concern that their board members are major donors and they don’t want to, you know, the way she said it, they don’t want to say goodbye to them, but i do think there a said there are other things that board members khun do maybe there’s, an advisory board or something that’s, not a fiduciary capacity, legal, legal, legal duty capacity, but still meaningful and not frivolous. Yeah, i think is individuals tonny it’s natural that we like to get our egos stroked a little in there for a major donor to a non-profit to be asked to leave the board can be, uh, a difficult thing for both parties, but i agree again one hundred percent with you let’s find other rules for them. And advice report doesn’t seem to sound prestigious, but maybe emeritus board oh, it’s latin oh, that’s latin brings immediate prestige. Yeah, obviously. Okay. You know, we can we can play around with the titles of the committees and even the titles of the individual board members or former board members if we really value their contribution, we continued to engage them but have been take a term off the board and maybe if we’re not if the board is struggling to recruit and can’t find somebody, teo, take the place of the departing boardmember after term off, maybe that person can come back on again. So that may depend upon each organization but that’s, the that’s, the putin model of boardmember ship you depart and then you come on. All right, all right, well, if we’re going to implement terms, then we should talk about how long those terms should be. What, um, is there is probably not state law guidance on that kind of that. That kind of detail is there. There actually is. So there is among state laws. So some state laws, like in california, we say if you have voting members, the maximum length of a term is four years. If you don’t have voting members who elect the board, the maximum term length is six years and that’s that’s just for one one term, but doesn’t wait. I’m confused by that doesn’t every boardmember have a vote aren’t all board’s voting boards? Well, so in terms of voting members like in the auto club or a homeowner’s association where members who are not board members elect the board members? Oh, i see ok, yeah, so a lot of operations a lot, but many organizations have voting membership structures, which are much, much more administrative, burdensome and difficult to maintain, so i typically don’t recommend that for smaller public charity type organizations, but for other organizations that do have voting members, they’re subject to different, or they may be subject to different term length rules under state laws. So be careful of that there’s also a special on california that i think maybe in other states as well. That says ifyou’re by-laws and articles don’t define what a term length is it’s automatically set that one year, so many organizations get tripped up on that. They didn’t contemplate that in their by-laws and they let boardmember stay on until the board members feel like, you know they want to resign, and you’ve got to make sure that the elections are going on on a regular basis, just sort of on the side, the by-laws air are so important because our don’t state laws have lots of defaults for by-laws being silent on different issues, absolutely. Tony, you’re one hundred percent right? So if if you’re by-laws don’t contemplate something than the default will be, whatever the state could end up with a lot of things you didn’t even know you had, right? And now imagine if you’ve got a board that didn’t do proper elections and you’ve got one boardmember who voted the opposite way from everybody else and then says, well, it doesn’t matter that it was ten against one, this sport isn’t properly compose. I challenge the validity of that action that that one thing can trip up the whole board until they solve that issue. Okay, okay, so we just have, like, a minute and a half or so before a break different term, you know, i guess obviously the shorter the term, the fresher the board is going to be, but you’re going to lose, you know, institutional knowledge. Yeah. And so what is the expectation when you recruit a boardmember if you recruit a new boardmember and you say the term length is one year, they make oh, yeah, easy commitment, but they made me feel very good about serving that one year before they really got you know the organization and develop a director for that organization and then leave after one year feeling fulfilled. Meanwhile, the organization may not be very satisfied with just the one year term. Human three year are probably more common, but some lawyers actually liked the one year term because it allows boards to get rid of or shed. Directors are really not performing very well ever failing to attend meetings, failing to live up to their produce, very duties where it otherwise might be a little bit complicated. Relationship wise toe formally remove. All right, so you can get you could get rid of the trouble quickly on. You could just continue to reappoint them. And i guess if you had one year terms, you probably want they’re to be many possible successive terms allowed. Yeah. You might set your term limits that something like four or five in that case? Yeah. Okay. All right. We’re going to go away for a couple minutes, of course. Jean stays with me and hope that everybody else does, too. And we’ll get some live listener loving as soon as we come back. You’re listening to the talking alternative network. Oppcoll oppcoll are you stuck in your business or career trying to take your business to the next level, and it keeps hitting a wall? This is sam liebowitz, the conscious consultant. I will help you get to the root cause of your abundance issues and help move you forward in your life. Call me now and let’s. Create the future you dream of. Two, one, two, seven, two, one, eight, one, eight, three, that’s to one to seven to one, eight one eight three. The conscious consultant helping hunters. People be better business people. Oppcoll have you ever considered consulting a road map when you feel you need help getting to your destination when the normal path seems blocked? A little help can come in handy when choosing an alternate route. Your natal chart is a map of your potentials. It addresses relationships, finance, business, health and, above all, creativity. Current planetary cycles can either support or challenge your objectives. I’m montgomery taylor. If you would like to explore the help of a private astrological reading, please contact me at monte at monty taylor dot. Com let’s monte m o nt y at monty taylor dot com. Talking alternative radio twenty four hours a day. Gotta live listener love all over the country mesa, arizona golden, colorado in daytona beach, florida live listener loved to you, newport, north carolina and brooklyn, new york live listener love podcast pleasantries gotta send those out, especially to germany, where there’s a big subset of podcast listeners and if you are a podcast listener and you want some podcast pleasantry sent directly to you, let me know who you are, you know there’s ah there’s, facebook, there’s, twitter, there’s a contact page on my block. Let me know where you’re listening from, and i will send you those podcast pleasantries. Always great for the for the live listeners as well. Jean, what if we had a hybrid? What if we what if we make the first term one year? I kind of like this one term one year term, and i’ve really thought about it until you mentioned and we started talking about this topic. What if you had a first term is one year and then successive terms are two years or maybe three years? Could you do that? Yeah, absolutely. Tony there’s there’s actually a lot of room in the by-laws if you decide if the board decides it wants to spend some time to create the right structures. You could do something like, like, one year for your first term. And if everybody gets along in this thing well, to do the second term of two or three years and that might be sort of communicated to prospective board members with the understanding that the first years kind of that test period. Although everybody has their fiduciary duties to live up to. But they hope that they’ll be continued service after after that term. All right, so it also doing my classes, tony? So we could have different classes of attorneys or different classes of directors? Sorry. Lawyers? Yes, yes, everybody. The whole world is attorneys. Everybody knows that the world revolves around the all of them. And then they’re just two or three people out there who are not lawyers. Yeah. Further embarrassed, not you. You’re welcome. So, yes, we could have different classes of directors out there in some classes of directors. Could have a two year term. Some might have a three year term. Some might be prone to term limits of two term limit. Some might be subjected to classes, but how? You gonna decide how you decide who’s in which class, when i have tears and and the senior the three year member is going to look down on the lonely one year members? How you going to make those distinctions? Yeah, really top i mean, this is these air possibilities that you, khun contemplate the sea if they would fit within your organization, but yeah, creating different respect levels for remembers, but absolutely be wrong. So i understand your caution there about forming classes and maybe classes is not the right word now, but still different to you, even tears. Or, you know, however you however you euthanize it. It’s still g. She got a three year term and i only get a one year term. Why is that? We often do that originally with brand new organizations to get staggered board. So if you have a two year term and you start the initial board members everybody in two years, everybody turns off at the same time. But by staggering it, having some served three years in some serve two years and sometimes that’s done just by lottery. Believe it or not, ok, that won’t can get half the board being elected each year, i guess if it’s random, then then i could see you’d overcome at least the personality or ego concerns. All right, but what? So what are your recommendations around term limits? What is gene takagi like? I generally like to the three year term limits, although i’m not opposed to what you just suggested about having a one year initial terms and then two or three year terms after i do think that it’s important to get that commitment from directors, that it’s not just going to be this one year where we’re expecting you to serve for one year and then you can jump off and serve on another board, i’d like to see a longer term commitment and deeper bond created between the organization and its director. Okay, now, when you’re talking to non-profit clients do do they ask you, what should we do on then? Do you deflect that back to them, or how does that how do you finish that? Yeah, it’s a good question, tony, you know, i can’t get to paternal about it and just tell people what the best practices, so we have to make sure that it fits what their individual facts and circumstances are not if they’re three, you know, founders of the organization that want to be on the board and are going to champion other people, the recruitment of other people, perhaps those three founders, they’re goingto have longer terms uh then then the subsequent boardmember is that get brought on, but it really depends because we don’t want to create that class hyre key system that you suggested before, so we’ll have to take a look at stuff like that. Very careful, okay, it xero only is individual and look, look at gene is not a paternalistic attorney, one of the few you said it, so i’m sure he’s not, um, let’s, let’s look att since we’re talking about being on a board and being removed from aboard, should there be automatic removal if you’re not not performing up to snuff? Well, removal for not performing up to snuff is going to require a board decision and that’s going to be governed by state laws well, and even if state law permit sports to remove poor performing directors, practically speaking it’s, so hard to do, especially if that boardmember is also a donorsearch otherwise, support organization in other ways what we like to see is an automatic removal provisions, but only for failing to attend board meetings. So for example, if there was, you know, the board meeting’s every two months, if you fail to attend three successive board meetings without an excuse that had been approved by the board, even either before or after the fact you are automatically removed without further board action, so the board doesn’t actually have to vote to remove you. You’ve just automatically been removed, and they called me allow that. Okay, of course, then you’d want to go a little further and define does attendance mean live attendance in in person? Or can it be attendance by phone? I think it’s the state laws permit by phone than and the by-laws permitted as well, and most state laws, i would say, would permit it by phone, then you’re fine. I would count that as attendance, but if you just failed to show up at all and then it’s something else and it may be whether you’re sick or you’re you’re on sabbatical or have a valid excuse that the board is willing to say where we’re going toe not apply this removal rules because of this exception, but then the board approves to save a person they don’t approve. They don’t vote to remove a person, which is much, much harder. Yes. Ok, i see. All right, just about a minute or so before we go. What about having young people on boards if it’s appropriate to your mission? But in certain states, including new york, they have provisions for having young people onboard. Youth onboarding i think in new york you have to be above sixteen years old, and only organizations that served used or deal with issues like education or juvenile delinquency are allowed to have such boardmember okay, other states there expressly not allowed, you must be eighteen in order to do it, but most states i think forty states are silent on the issue now, it’s great to engage in engagement is the key word again. You to participate with boards and maybe having them entitled toe participate in board meetings is a great idea latto have them on the board and giving them fiduciary duties can be a little bit more problematic if you’re going to do that and there may. Be some rare exceptions where i think that that’s okay, you want to make sure that they’re not tokens and that their contributions are valid and their vote is equal to anybody, anybody? Else’s, vote on that board, you’ve got to be very careful now you can probably be held liable for breaching their fiduciary duties, although that’s not very clear, and if it was really agreed, just perhaps they could, and they can’t sign contracts on behalf of the organization because they probably wouldn’t be enforceable. So be careful about having that emily chan, my former colleague wrote a great block post called youth boardmember khun miners serve on a non-profit board that that i recommend for any organization considering having having young people on their board. Jean, we have to stop there. Is that? Is that blood post at on your block? It non-profit latto block dot com it is, and it was also captured in a non-profit quarterly article as well. Okay, thank you very much, gene. Great, thanks. Durney pleasure you confined gene at that non-profit law blogged or at g tack on twitter next week a fund-raising day interview we’ll start and then maria semple is here she’s, our prospect research contributor and the prospect finder the overhead myth show his book i got the three ceos who signed the overhead myth letter are going to be with me on september sixth. That’s, the ceo of better business bureau wise giving alliance guidestar and charity navigator, and ken berger from charity navigator has been on the show before. I would love to have your questions for these three ceo’s these three signers of the overhead myth letter you know you can ask questions on twitter, through facebook or contact page on my blogged love to have your questions for these ceos, please insert sponsor message over nine thousand leaders, fundraisers and board members of small and midsize charities. 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