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Nonprofit Radio for February 5, 2024: Zombie Loyalists

 

Peter ShankmanZombie Loyalists

Peter Shankman is a 5x best selling author, entrepreneur and corporate keynote speaker. His book “Zombie Loyalists” focuses on customer service; creating rabid fans who do your social media, marketing and PR for you. Peter’s book isn’t new, but his strategies and tactics are timeless. This originally aired 12/19/14.

 

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And welcome to Tony Martignetti nonprofit radio. Big nonprofit ideas for the other 95%. I’m your aptly named host and the pod father of your favorite abdominal podcast. Oh, I’m glad you’re with us. I’d suffer the effects of brom hydros if I had to walk through the idea that you missed this week’s show. Here’s our associate producer, Kate to introduce this week’s show. Hey, Tony now I’m on it. It’s zombie loyalists. Peter Shankman is a five time best selling author, entrepreneur and corporate keynote speaker. His book, Zombie Loyalists focuses on customer service creating rabid fans who dear social media marketing and pr for you. Peter’s book isn’t new, but his strategies and tactics are timeless. This originally aired December 19th 2014 on Tony’s Take Two. How’s your endowment were sponsored by donor box, outdated donation forms, blocking your supporters, generosity, donor box, fast, flexible and friendly fundraising forms for your nonprofit donor. Box.org here is zombie loyalists. Peter Shankman is a well known and often quoted social media marketing and public relations strategist. His latest book is zombie loyalists. He wants you to create rabid fans who do your social media marketing and pr for you. He’s got super ideas and very valuable stories. I’m very glad Peter Shankman is with me in the studio. He’s the founder of Harrow, help a reporter out connecting journalists with sources in under two years from starting it in his apartment, Harrow was sending out 1500 media queries a week to more than 200,000 sources worldwide. It was acquired by Vocus in 2010. He’s the founder and CEO of the geek factory, a boutique social media marketing and pr strategy firm in New York City. Peter is on nasa’s civilian advisory council. You’ll find him at shankman.com and he’s at Peter Shankman on Twitter. His latest book is Zombie Loyalists using great service to create rabid fans. I’m very glad his book brings him to nonprofit radio and the studio. Welcome Peter. Good to be here, honey. Thanks. Pleasure you um live on the uh on the west side of Manhattan. I do. And you, there’s a, there’s a pretty well known five star steakhouse. Uh I’ll get Wolfgang’s not far from you, but you pass it to go to a different steakhouse. Morton’s correct. Why is that? I am a zombie loyalist to Morton’s. What does that mean? I uh love the service, the attention to detail, the quality, the, the sort of where everyone knows my name mentality. When I walk into that Mortons or any Mortons around the world, they have a tremendous uh custom relationship management system uh when I call one number uh in New York or anywhere in the world, it, it, they know who I am by my cell phone and uh I’m treated with uh just, you know, phenomenal uh uh happiness to, to hear from me and, and my wishes are granted as it were. I, we have a happy hour uh holiday party coming up at Morton’s next couple of days. And uh you know, as always, I forgot to call and make a reservation and, you know, I called yesterday and said, hey, I need a, uh, any chance I get a reservation for seven people, um, you know, Thursday night at, uh, 7 p.m. which is, you know, the, the week of the holiday party. And, uh, they looked and they said, oh, well, and then I guess their computer system kicked in, of course, Mr Shankman. Not a problem at all. We’ll get that for you right away. You know, we’ll have, we’ll have a great booth for you. Um, you know, and we’ll, we’ll, uh, tell us the names of the people attending, you know, you know, you know, they’re gonna have specialized menus for them and with their names on them. So they really, they have a really high level of service that, uh, that they provide. Not just to me that’s the beauty of it. I mean, you know, it’s one thing, yeah, it’s one thing if they just provide it to me, but they they do that for everyone. And, um, that is huge because, you know, being able to call when a normal person makes a reservation and, and not that I’m special, I’m actually rather abnormal. But, um, when a normal person makes a reservation and says, uh, you know, Morton says, ok, great. Are you celebrating anything? Oh, yeah, it’s my wife’s birthday. They always ask anyone who calls. I said, oh, you know what, it’s my wife’s birthday. Great. What’s her name? Her name is Megan or whatever. And you go in and they um and you sit down on the, on the, on the uh menu, it says Happy Birthday, Megan and then Megan, whoever she happens to be will spend the next 45 minutes, you know, taking 50 selfies with her menu and, and, and that’ll go online and then when her friends, you know, want that same experience, they’re gonna go Morton’s. You say uh in, in the book you get the customers you want by being beyond awesome to the customers you have. And that’s why I want to start with that Morton story which is in the middle of the book, but they do it for everybody and then they have the VIP S as well. And there’s the terrific story of you tweeting. Go tell that story. That’s a good story. It’s a good story. I love stories. I, I was flying home from a day trip to Florida and was exhausted and starving and, um, day trip mean you’re flying down, I flew down at 6 a.m. at a lunch meeting, flew back the same day. You know, one of those, one of those days. And, uh, I jokingly said the tweet, hey Mortons, why don’t you meet me at Newark Airport when I land with a poer house in two hours? Ha ha ha, ha, ha. Um, you know, I said it the same way you’d say, hey, winter, please stop snowing things like that. And I landed, uh, find my driver and sit next to my driver is a, uh, is a, a waiter in a tuxedo with a Morton’s bag. Uh, they saw my Tweet, they, they put it together, they managed to bring me a, uh, a, uh, steak and, and, you know, as great of a story as it is. That’s, that’s, it’s a great stunt and it’s a great story and it wasn’t a stage and it was completely amazing. But, you know, that’s not what they’re about. They’re not about delivering steaks to airports. They’re about making a great meal for you and treating you like royalty when you come in. And, you know, I, I, if they just did that, if they just delivered the steak at the airport, but their quality and service sucked. You know, it wouldn’t be a story. He said, oh, you know, look what they did for Peter, but I, you know, my steaks cold, you know, so what it really comes down to is the fact they do treat everyone like kings and that’s, that’s really, really important because what winds up happening is you have a great experience at Morton’s and then you tell the world, you know. Oh, yeah, great dinner last night. That was amazing. I would totally eat there again. And as we move to this new world where, you know, review sites are going away and I don’t, I don’t need to go to Yelp to read reviews from people. I don’t know, you know, if they’re shills or whatever the case may be, I don’t know, or tripadvisor, same thing. I want people in my network who I trust and, and people in their network who they trust and then by default I trust. So that’s gonna be, that’s already happening automatically. You know, when I, when I land in L A and I type in steakhouse, uh, you know, not me. I know, I know where the steakhouse are in L A but if someone types into Google Maps or Facebook steakhouse in Los Angeles, you know, they’ll see all the steakhouses on a Google map. But if any of their friends have been to any of them, they’ll see those first. And if they had a good experience, only if the sentiment was positive, will they see those first? And that’s pretty amazing because if you think about that, the simple act of tweeting out a photo. Oh, my God. Thanks so much, Mortons love this. That’s positive sentiment. The network knows that. And so if you’re looking for a steakhouse, you know, and your friend six months ago had that experience. Oh my God, amazing steak. This is a great place there. The sentiment is gonna be there and, and, and the network will know that the network will show you that steakhouse because you trust your friend. And this is where we start to cultivate zombie loyalists through this, through this awesome customer service of the customers. You, you have, uh say more about zombies. I mean, you have so many companies out there who are trying to get the next greatest customer. You know, you see all the ads, um, you know, the, the, the, the, the Facebook post, you know, we’re at 990 followers, our 10, our 1/1000 follower gets a free gift. Well, that’s kind of saying screw you to the original 990 followers who you had, who were there since the beginning? We don’t care about you. We want that 1000. You know, that’s not cool. Um, the, the, the companies who see their numbers rise and who see their fans increase and their, their, um, um, revenues go up are the ones who are nice to the customers. They have, hey, you know, customer 852 it was really nice of you to join us a couple of months ago. How, you know how are you, we, we noticed that you posted on something about a, uh, you know, your car broke down. Well, you know, we’re not in the car business but, you know, you’re, you’re two blocks from our, our closest, uh, outlet or whatever and, you know, once you, if you, if you need to come in, have a free cup of coffee, we’ll use the phone, whatever. You know, those little things that you can do that, that, that really focus on the customers you have and make the customers, you have the ones who are the zombies who tell other customers how great you are. And this all applies to nonprofits certainly as well. I mean, the, the, but even more so, I mean, if you, you know, nonprofits are constantly worried about how to, how to make the most value out of their dollar and how to keep the dollar stretching further and further. And, uh, you know, you have this massive audience who, who has come to you, who’s a nonprofit and who said to you, you know, we wanna help here, we are volunteering our help and just simply treating them with the thanks that they deserve. Not just a simple, hey, thanks for joining car, but actually reaching out asking what they want, asking how they like to get their information, things like that will greatly increase, um, your donations as well as, um, making them go out and tell everyone how awesome you are. And letting them do your pr for you. And that’s what a zombie loyalist does. And, and this is for, this could be, donors could be volunteers to the organization who aren’t able to give a lot. But giving time is enormous. And if, you know, if they have such a great time doing it, they’ll bring friends as, as zombies. Do you know, zombies have one purpose in life. Real zombies have one purpose in life that’s to feed. It doesn’t matter how the Mets are doing. It doesn’t matter, you know, because a chance that they lost anyway. But it doesn’t matter how, uh how anyone’s doing, you know, or what’s going on in the world economy. It doesn’t matter what matters with a zombie. Where are they gonna get their next meal? Because they feed and they have to infect more people otherwise they will die. Zombie loyalists are the same thing. All they have to do is make sure that their custom, they, they tell the world and we all have that friend who does it. You know, that one friend who eats, eats nothing but the Olive Garden because, oh my God, it’s greatest breadsticks everywhere. You know, and they will drag your ass to the Olive Garden every single time they get that chance. That’s a zombie loyalist. And you want them to do that for your nonprofit. And there’s, there’s a big advantage to being a smaller, a smaller organization. You could be so much more high touch and we’re gonna talk about all that. We got the full hour with Peter Shankman. We gotta go away for a couple of minutes. Stay with us. It’s time for a break. Open up new cashless in person donation opportunities with donor box live kiosk. The smart way to accept cashless donations anywhere, anytime picture this a cash free on site giving solution that effortlessly collects donations from credit cards, debit cards and digital wallets. No team member required. Thus, your donation data is automatically synced with your donor box account. No manual data entry or errors make giving a breeze and focus on what matters your costs. Try donor box live kiosk and revolutionize the way you collect donations in 2024 visit donor box.org to learn more. Now back to zombie loyalists, Peter, it doesn’t take much to uh stand out in the customer service world does it, it really doesn’t, you know, and the reason for that is because we expect to be treated like crap. You know, if you think that III I love this example. Whenever I give speeches, I ask, I ask everyone in the audience, I’m like, who here has had a great flight recently? At least one person will raise their hand. I’m like, ok, what made it great? And without fail, their answer said, well, we took off on time and, and I had the seat I was assigned and we landed on time and like, so you paid for a service, they delivered that service and you’re over the freaking moon about it. Like, that’s the state that we’ve become. You know, that’s how bad customer service has been that you are just beyond thrilled that they did exactly what they said they were gonna do with nothing more, less than 20 minutes in the post office line. And I’m ecstatic. Exactly. You know, it’s, it’s so, we really are at a point where we only have to be one level above crap. I, I’m not even asking my clients to be good. Just one level of crap. You know, if everyone else is crap and you’re one level above that, you’re gonna win. It’s my favorite, one of my favorite jokes. Um, the, uh, the two guys are out in the woods, hunting out in the woods and the, or just jogging out in the woods. The first one sees a, a bear and they see this bear and the bear is raised up and he’s about to strike. And the first one, you know, reaches down and tightens up his, his laces on his running shoes. And the second one says, dude, don’t be, don’t be, don’t be an idiot. You can’t run a bear. And he says, I don’t need to, I just need to outrun you. You know, I love that joke because it’s, it’s so true. That’s the concept. You know, all you have to do is be just a little bit better than everyone else and, and you’ll win the whole ball game. Now, we have to set some things up internally in order to have the, the structure in place to create these, the zombie loyalists. Yeah. I mean, you have a, you have a company where the majority of people in your company are afraid to do anything outside the norm. You know, I mean, look at, look at a cell phone company, you know, they, you call them because you have a problem right AT&T or T Mobile, you call them, you have a problem. They are actually the customer service people that handle your call are actually judged and rewarded based on how quickly they can get you off the phone. You know, not on whether or not they fix your problem, but how fast they can get you off the phone, which means how many more calls they get. I remember I worked, uh, when I worked in America online, we all had to do a day of customer service every month just to see what it was like, which I thought was a brilliant idea. But, you know, again, it’s this, it’s, it was a system called V I where you’d sign on and as soon as you signed on, if you weren’t in a call, you know, that was tacked against you. And if you were in a call and, and it went over a certain amount of time, that was tacked against you. So the decks were stacked not in the favor of the customer. There are some companies out there who allow their customer service employees to simply be smarter about what they do and do whatever it is they need to do to fix the problem. Um You know, my favorite story about this is Verizon Wireless. I, I went overseas, I was in Dubai and I landed in Dubai and I turned on my phone, I had gotten global roaming on my phone which, you know, 20 bucks for every 100 megabytes. Ok. So I land and I turn on my phone and it says, um, uh, like before I’m even off the plane, I get a text that you’ve used $200 in roaming charges. I’m like, what the hell, you know, $300 by the time I get off the plane, I’m like, something’s up here. So I call Verizon and a nice guy answered the phone and, oh, yes, I mean, you know, the first thing is it was, yes. So you do have global roaming but it, it doesn’t work in Dubai. So I’m like, ok, well, that’s not really global, that’s more hemispherical roaming I think is, is the issue. And um, so he, uh I said, well, look, I’m gonna be here for a week. I said, you know what? You have my credit card on file bill me like, I don’t know. Can you bill me like 1000 bucks and just let me have the phone for like the week and you know, that, you know, or 500 bucks, I won’t go over two gigs. Well, just do something for me. Sorry, sir. I’m not authorized to do that. Um, you can, I’m like, so what do I have? He’s like, well, you can pay, uh, $20.48 a megabyte. I’m like, I’m sorry, seriously, which equates essentially to, I would be charged $20.48 seconds, $20.48 for every, I think at the time for every four seconds of the video, Gangnam style if I decided to watch it on my phone, like this is pretty ridiculous. So I simply hung up, hung up on Verizon. I went down the street to the Dubai, the mall of the Emirates, which is the largest mall in the world. Has a freaking ski slope in it. And I’m not joking. It has a ski slope in this mall and uh went to one of like the 86 different electronic stores in this mall. Uh bought an international unlocked version of the same exact cellphone. I have went next door to the local uh SIM card store, bought a SIM card that gave me 20 gigabytes of data and 1000 minutes of talk for $40. I then put that in my phone because it’s an Android phone. I simply typed in my user name. And password for Google and everything imported. And Verizon did not get a penny on that trip. Um, how easy would have been for Verizon to say, ok, you know what, we’ll cut your break. Uh, they’d still make a lot of money off me and I would tell the world how great Verizon was to work with and how wonderful they, how helpful they were. Instead, they guaranteed that I will never, that they will never make a penny for me on any international trip. And I take what, 15 of them a year because now my cell phone, um my international cell phone that I bought, all I do is pop out the SIM card and I land wherever I am put in a new SIM card. So, and you’re speaking and writing and telling bad stories and every time I tell the story about Verizon, I make it a little worse. Apparently, Verizon uh tests out the durability of their phone by throwing them at kittens. I read this on the internet. It must be true, but, you know, not necessarily, but you know, the concept that, that all they had to do, all they had to do was empower Mark customer service and it wasn’t Mark’s fault. Mark was a really nice guy, but he was not allowed to do that. He would have gotten fired if he tried to do a deal like that for me. And so it’s this concept, you know, and the funny thing is, is it comes down to, if you really wanna go, go down the road in terms of a public company like Verizon of, of, of where the issue is, you could even trace it to fiduciary responsibility because the fiduciary responsibility of any company CEO all the way down to the employee is to make money for the shareholders. Ok. That’s what fiti responsibility means by not allowing me by not allowing mark the customer service agent to, to help me and, and take a different tack. He’s actually losing money too many CEO S think about the next quarter. Oh, we have to make our numbers next quarter. I’m fired. Companies in other countries tend to think about the next quarter century and they make a much bigger difference because they think, ok, what can we do now that will have impact in the next 5, 1015 years, you know, and really implement the revenue that we have and, and augment and companies in America. Don’t, don’t tend to think about that and that’s a big problem. Um, I, I buy a product line, uh, that has a lot of natural and recycled materials in the seventh generation. And their, um, their tagline is that in, in, in our every decision, we must consider the impact on the next seven generations. It comes from an American Indian. It’s a great, it’s a great line. I mean, just think about how much money Verizon would have made for me in the past three years. Just, just in my overseas, you’d be telling a story about like them, about Morton’s like the one about MS, you know, look, a lot of people listen to me and they went for a time when you googled roaming charges. When you Google Verizon roaming charges. My story about how I saved all this money came up first because I did the math. And if I had not called Mark and bought my own cell phone and done this, I would have come home to a $31,000 cell phone bill and you know, damn well, Verizon wouldn’t know anything about that. They’d be like, oh, too bad, sorry about the fine print. And plus the, the employee who sold you the international plan. I’m sure you told her where you going, I’m going to Canada and I’m going to Dubai. I’m assuming she didn’t know where Dubai was. She probably thought it was near Canada. But uh long story short, I couldn’t use it. All right. So employees have to be empowered. There has to be, we have to be but changing AAA thinking too. I mean, the customer has to come first. The donor of the volunteer donor, the teer you get at the end of the day. Where’s your money coming from? I don’t care if you’re a nonprofit or fortune 100. Where’s your money coming from? You know, and if you, we see it happening over and over again. We see it. Right. You’re seeing it right now. Play out every single day with the company, Uber. Um, and Uber, it’s so funny because Uber makes, uh, you know, they’re valued at $40 billion right now. But that doesn’t mean anything, that doesn’t mean anything if people are running away in droves which people are, there’s a whole delete your Uber app movement. Oh God. Yeah, people are leaving. Uh Well, it’s several. Number one that Uber is run by a bunch of guys who honor the bro code. The company was actually started by a guy who on business in business insider said he started the company to get laid. Um His goal was to always have a black car when he was leaving a restaurant uh to impress the girl he was with. That’s he came out and said that and you see that culture run rampant throughout Uber um from their God mode where they can see they actually created. There was a uh uh I don’t know where I read this. It might have been Business Insider as well. There was a, they created a hookup page that showed or, or, or, or a walk of shame page that showed where uh women were leaving certain apartments like on weekends and going or leaving certain place on weekends, going back to their home. Um It was obvious that they, you know, met some guy and they did that and then, of course, just their, their whole surge pricing mentality, which is, you know, two days ago there was a, uh, a couple of days ago there was a, uh, the terrorist, uh, I think it was a terrorist attack in Sydney, uh, at that, at that bakery and Sydney, uh, Uber in Sydney instituted surge pricing for people trying to get out of harm’s way. You know? And, and they, they later refunded it. Oh, it was a computer glitch. I’m like, you know, I’m sorry, you, you have a stop button and you can, when you see something happening like that, there has to be someone in the office who can say, you know what? Not cool. We’re gonna take care of that and then hit the stop button and it was, yeah, bad, tons and tons and tons of bad publicity. And, you know, I was having an argument with someone on my Facebook page at facebook.com/peter Shankman because they said, oh, you know, um, so what they don’t, they don’t turn on surge pricing. They don’t have enough cabs there and, you know, people can’t get home. I said I’m pretty sure that the only company I’m sure that no one had cab companies there. I’m sure that there wasn’t anyone who had enough cars there, private cabs, Ubers, whatever yet. The only stories I read about companies screwing up during that event were Uber, not Joe’s Sydney cab company. You know, I didn’t see him screwing it up because he didn’t turn on surge pricing. You gotta, you gotta respect your customer. You have to, as we’re uh training for that, then not only uh trying to change that mindset, well, in, in trying to change that mindset rewards for, for customer, for employees that, that do take go do go the extra mile. Well, first of all, if you give the employees the ability to do it to go the extra mile and understand they won’t get fired. You’re not gonna get in trouble. I I always tell, tell every one of my employees, you’re never gonna get in trouble for spending a little extra money to try and keep a customer happy. You’ll get fired for not doing it. You know, you get fired for not for seeing an opportunity to fix someone and not taking it, not doing everything that you know, Ritz Carlton is famous for that. Ritz Carlton hires people not because whether they could fold the bed sheet but for how well they understand people because in Ritz Carlton’s mind, it’s much more important to be a people person and be able to be empathetic and that is such a key word. Empathy is just so so sorely lacking. You know how many you’ve called customer service? Yeah. You know, I have to, I have to change my flight. My, my, my aunt just died. I really need to get home. Ok, great. That’s $300. I just wanna go an hour earlier, you know, you show up at the airport, your bag is overweight by half a pound. That’s $75. I just, I can, you can, you just cut me some slack. Nope, you know, so empathy and giving the cust, giving the employee the ability to understand that the customer that sometimes you can make exceptions and it is ok to make changes and, and this is where a smaller organization has huge advantage and it’s easier to change. That’s what kills me. You know, I go to these, I, I try to frequent small businesses when I can, I go to some of these small businesses and they won’t, they, they act like large businesses, you know, in the respect that, that they don’t have a, like, they wanna be respected almost. They don’t have like a six, a 6000 page code that they have to adhere to. They can simply, uh, do something on the fly and yet for whatever reason they won’t do it. And, and it’s the most frustrating thing is like, guys, you, you’re acting like a big, you’re acting like mega Laar here, you know, and you’re not Mega Lamar and you’re just Joe’s House of stationery, whatever it is and, you know, not being able to help me, you’re pretty much killing yourself because you don’t have 85 billion customers that have come through the door after me, you know. But I have a pretty big network and for a small business to get killed socially as social becomes more and more what, how we communicate. You know, it’s just craziness. It’s, you know, we’re, we’re pretty much in a world, I think where something almost hasn’t happened to you. Unless, unless you share it. I joked that, uh, you know, if I can’t take a selfie was I really there. Um, but it’s true, you know, we, we do live in a world where, you know, I, I remember God 10 years ago, maybe not even, not even 10 years ago. I was one of the first people to have a phone in my camera, you know, and it was like a new phone. That’s what I said, yeah, camera in my phone, right? And it was like a uh I think it was like a 0.8 megapixel. You know, it looked like I was taking a picture with a potato but it was, um it was this, I remember it was 2002 and I was in Chase Bank and there was a woman arguing with the teller and I pulled out my video, you know, it was, I mean, it was the crappiest video you’ve ever seen. But I pulled it out and I said, you know, II I started recording and the, the woman behind the woman behind the counter was going, the woman behind the counter was talking to the customer saying you do not speak to me that way. You get out of this bank right now. And the customer was saying I just wanted my balance and you and the manager comes over and I get this whole thing on my little crappy three G uh Motorola phone phone. And I, I remember I posted online and gawker picks it up and II I gave him, I, I emailed it, you know, I, my, the headline I put on my blog was, you know, Chase where the right relationship is at. Go after yourself, you know, and it was, and it just got tons of play and then gawker picked it up. It went everywhere, totally viral. So it’s one of those things you’re just like, you know, this is in 2002. It’s 12 years later. How the hell can you assume that nothing is being that you’re not being recorded? You know, I, I, I remember blowing, I, I sneezed a couple of weeks ago and, and, uh, uh not to get too graphic here, but it was, I, I needed a tissue big time after I was done sneezing. And I remember going through my pockets looking for desperately looking for tissue and like looking around making sure I wasn’t on camera somewhere that someone didn’t grab that and it was give me the next viral sensation, you know, I mean, I wait, God, I went to high school with eight blocks from here, right? If the amount of cameras that are in Lincoln Center today. Were there in 1989 1990. I’d be having this conversation entirely. I’d be having this conversation behind bulletproof for myself. And you’d be, yeah. So, you know, you’d be, you’d be talking to me, you’d have to get special clearance to visit me. Probably be at the, the Super Max in Colorado or something. So, you know, it’s, it’s, it’s one of those things that you’re just like my kid who’s, who’s almost two years old now is gonna grow up with absolutely no expectation of privacy the same way that we grew up with an expectation of privacy. And I’m thankful for that because she will make a lot less stupid moves. You know, I mean, God, the things that I thought, you know, in, in, in, in high school, I thought the stupidest thing in the world. Thank God. There wasn’t a way for me to broadcast that to the world in real time. Jeez. Thank God creating these uh zombie loyalists. And you know, we’ve got to change some, we’ve got to change culture and thinking and reward systems. Let’s go back to the, the cost of all this. Why is this a better investment than trying to just focus on new donors? I, I love, I love this analogy and I’ll give you a fun analogy. Let’s, I’m in a bar and there’s a very cute girl across the, across the bar and she catches my eye catch her, I go up to her and I go, you know, you don’t know me. I am amazing in bed. You should finish your drink right now. Come home. Let’s get it on. I’m, I’m gonna impress I’m that good chances are she’s gonna throw a drink in my face. Go back talking to her friends. I’ve done a lot of research on this. That’s probably something I was gonna do now. Let’s assume, let’s assume an alternate world. I’m sitting there on my phone, I’m just playing like, you know, some, you know, words with friends or something like that. And, uh, she’s over there talking to her friends and one of her friends look up said, holy crap. That’s Peter. I think that’s Peter Shankman. I’ve heard him speak. I, he’s in this fantasy world. I’m single too today. He, I think he’s single and he’s having this amazing guy. I, I know he has a cat. You have a cat. You should totally go talk to him at the very least. I’m getting this girl’s number. That’s pr ok. And what do we trust more? Me with my, you know, fancy suit collar going over there in my seventies, leisure suit. Hi. I’m amazing. Or the girl saying, hey, we’ve been friends since third grade. I’m recommending that guy. You should trust me on this. You know, obviously that, that’s where, uh, good customer service comes into play and that’s where corporate culture comes into play because if I have a great experience with you and at your company, I’m gonna tell my friend when they’re looking and I will stake my personal reputation on it and there’s nothing stronger than that. And these are the people who want to breed as Zz Willis that’s stronger than advertising, stronger than marketing. And they’re gonna share, people wanna share that. Think about the, the internet runs on two things. It runs on drama, drama, and bragging or bragging and drama. And if you, if you need uh any proof of that, you know, go and look at all the hashtags with crap that’s happened, you know, bad customer service, bad whatever. But then look at all the good hashtags you know it when our flights delayed for three hours and we lose our seat. Oh my God, I hate this airline, you know, worst airline ever but when we get upgraded, right? Hashtag first class bitches or whatever it is, you know, something stupid like that and the whole because we love to share. It’s, it’s only a great experience if we could tell the world and it’s only a bad experience if we can make everyone else miserable about it as well. Its time for Tonys take two. Thank you, Kate. How’s your endowment endowment? That savings account that your nonprofit has that you only spend the interest of each year and maybe sometimes you don’t even spend that much from year to year planned giving. Can help you either launch your endowment if you don’t have one or grow your endowment if it needs to be bigger. And I don’t know many nonprofits that think uh we have enough, our endowment is big enough. We don’t need any more and giving accelerator. I will help you in the accelerator to launch planned giving so that you can start your endowment or grow your endowment throughout the three months of the course, We go March to May done by Memorial Day. So there’s no impinging on your summer plans. We’ll spend an hour a week together on Zoom over those 12 weeks and I will guide you step by step. Had a launch Planned Giving at your nonprofit. I set those weekly meetings up as meetings in Zoom. So there’s lots of cross talk between the members. People are helping each other. There’s a lot of peer support. Uh Aside from the teaching that I’m doing uh each week, if thats of interest to you, please check out Planned Giving accelerator.com promoting the course in uh the rest of this month. And then it starts in early March. That is Tony’s take two Kate. It sounds like a very valuable course. We hope people join. Yes, we do. You’re right about that. We’ve got Buku but loads more time. Let’s go back to zombie loyalists with Peter Shankman. Peter. You have a uh golden rule of social media that a good number of customers like to share and people are gonna keep doing it. People will always share. Um, again, it goes back to the concept that if you create great stuff, people wanna share it because people like to be associated with good things. If you create bad stuff and by stuff, I can mean, I mean, anything from like a bad experience to bad content, people not only won’t share that, but we go out of their way to tell people how terrible you are. Um, you know, how many times have you seen companies fail horribly, uh, you know, after major disasters when companies are tweeting, um, you know, completely unrelated things. Uh, uh, after, after a random school shooting. Uh, no, it was after the, uh, the, the shooting at the, the theater in Aurora, Colorado at the Dark Knight. Um, the Nr A tweets, hey, shooters, what’s your plans for this weekend? You know, and I’m just sitting there going really, you know, but, and of course, the thing was, the thing was retweeted millions of times, you know, with a sort of shame on the NR A. So we, we’re a society like I said earlier that loves to share when, when great things happen to us, but loves to tell the world when we’re miserable because we’re only truly miserable when we make everyone else miserable around us. Um, it’s funny you mentioned, uh, um, the Generosity series, uh, the, one of my favorite stories which goes to sort of a uh a bigger picture of culture and um somehow when you’re just doing your job because that’s what you’re, you’re supposed to do your job. But you don’t realize there are ways to get around that. I, I listen to your podcast among others uh when I’m running through Central Park. Um and more like if you know, my body type, more like lumbering through Central Park. But I, I get there, I’m an iron man. I have, I have that and um so I go through Central Park and it’s super early in the morning because I usually have meetings and I don’t run fast. Um I run like, I really don’t run fast but, but as I’m running, but let’s give you the credit. You have done a bunch of iron man. I do, I do it. You know, my mother tells me that I just have very poor judgment in terms of what sports I should do. But um on the flip side, I’m also a skydiver, which is with my weight is awesome. I fall better than anyone. Um But uh so I’m running through Central Park last year. It was February, uh February 13 and 14. It was of this year. And um it was probably around 445 in the morning because I had a uh I had an 8 a.m. meeting and I had to do 10 miles. So 445 in the morning, I’m running at around 90 79th 80th street on the east side in the park. And a cop pulls me over and he says, what are you doing? And I look at him, you know, I’m wearing black spandex. I have a hat. It’s five degrees and I’m like, what, what playing checkers? You know what, you know, I’m like, I’m running and he, he’s like, ok, can you stop running? I’m like, ok, he’s like the park’s closed. I’m like, no, it’s not like I’m in it. Look around, there are other people. No park doesn’t open until 6 a.m. I’m like, he’s like, uh, do you have any idea on you? I’m like, no, I’m running. He goes, what’s your name? I’m like, seriously. He said, I’m writing you a summons. I’m like, you’re writing me a summons for exercising for I for ex, I just wanna clarify this. You’re writing music and sure enough, the guy wrote me a summons for exercising in Central Park before it opened. The, the charge was breaking the violating curfew. You know, I’m like, I get the concept of the curfew. It’s to keep people out after 2 a.m. It’s not to prevent them from going in early to exercise, to be healthy. I’m like, I’m not carrying, you know, a six pack. I’m not drinking a big gulp. I’m not smoking. I’m, I’m, you know, I’m, I’m doing something healthy and you’re writing me a summons for it. Um, and I said, you know, I’m gonna have a field day with this. I said iii I kinda have some followers. This is gonna be a lot of fun. I’m not, you know, I know you’re just doing your job, sir, even though you have the discretion not to. But ok, so I go back home, I take a picture of my ticket. I email it to a friend of mine of the New York Post, you know, front page, New York Post next day. No, running from this ticket, you know, front page, of course, that’s great. New York Times covered it. Uh Runners world covered it. I mean, I went everywhere, gawker covered it, you know, and, and my whole thing was, it’s just like, dude, you have discretion. Look at me, you know, I’m not, I’m not even going super fast for God’s sake. I’m just, I’m just trying to exercise here, you know, and of course I went to court and I, I beat it. But how much money did it cost the city for me to go to court? Fight this thing. You know, every employee you have to give your employees the power of discretion, the power of empathy to make their own decisions. If you go by the book, bad things will happen. And again, small shops so much easier to do flat line flat organizations. I, I work with a nonprofit um animal rescue, no profit. Um A friend of mine was a skydiver and uh shout him out. What’s the, I can’t, there’s a reason I can. But, but there’s a friend of mine was a skydiver and she was killed in a base jump several years ago. And her husband asked to donate in her memory to this nonprofit. So I sent him a check. And about three months later I get a coffee table book in the mail. And I was living by myself at the time I didn’t own a coffee table. It was, you know, more money to spend on my flat screen. And um I uh I remember I call, I, I look at this coffee table, I throw, I throw it in the corner, I look at it over the next couple of days. It pisses me off about how much, how much of my donation did it cost to print mail and produce this book to me. And so I, I called them up. Well, sir, we believe most of our donors are older and probably prefer to get a print version as opposed to like digital, you know, where they’d throw it away and like, you don’t throw digital away, but ok. Um I’m like, so, so you’ve asked your, you’ve done surveys and you’ve asked all, no, we just assume that most of them are older. I’m like, ok, so I opened my mouth wound up joining their board and I spent the next year interviewing uh customers interviewing every current and past donor about how they like to get their information and shock of shock, 94% said online. And so over the following year, we launched Facebook page, Twitter page, uh um uh Flickr account, uh youtube everything PS The following year for that donations went up 37% in one year. In that economy. It was right around 0809 donations went up 37% in one year and they saved over $500,000 in printing, mailing and reproduction. Imagine going to your boss, hey, boss, revenue is up 37% and we saved a half million dollars. Your boss is gonna buy you a really good beer. You know, all they had to do was listen to their audience be relevant to the audience you have and they will tell you what they want. We have tons of tools for segmentation. You gotta listen to what segment you wanna, people wanna be in. You know, someone, someone asked me the other day. So what, what’s the best? I, I knew nothing about their company. What’s the best uh social media I left for me to be on, should I be on Twitter or should I be on Facebook? I said, I’ll answer that question if you can answer this, this question, I’m gonna ask you is my favorite type of cheese Gouda or the number six. And they say, I don’t understand. That’s not a real question. I’m like, neither is yours. Like I can’t tell you where the best place to be your audience? Can I said, go ask your audience, believe me, they will tell you there’s a gas station in the Midwest. Come and go. Um, I, I just love the name Kum and go, come and go and you can read more about the, their tagline is always something extra. I mean, come on the jokes, just write them for god’s sake. But, um, and they don’t take themselves too seriously. I love that and knowing the name of the company gas station. And, um, you know, I, I like, I remember they were in Iowa and I went up to visit a friend in Iowa and I was like, you gotta get a photo of me in front of the come and go sign, you know, and, um, the beauty of this is that some of their employees actually look at their customers when they’re on their phones in the stores and go, oh, you know, what do you use Twitter more? Or Facebook? And they say, oh, I use that and they record that information and they know it. God customers will give you so much info if you just ask them because then they feel invested, they feel invested in your company. They feel like they, that you took the time to listen to their nonprofit request or their, their, their questions and they feel like they’re, I did it for Harrow every month. We’d have a one question. Harrow survey, you know, Harrow one question survey. And it was, we get like 1000 people respond and I’d spend the entire weekend emailing everyone who responded and thanking them personally, took my entire weekend. But it was great because what would wind up happening is that, you know, if we took their advice and launched it on Monday with the new thing? They go, oh my God. How did this for me? They took my advice. Well, yeah, it was your advice to 800 other people’s advice. But we took it and they’d be like, oh my God, it’s a good thing. And, and it just, it just made them so much more loyal and they’d tell hundreds and hundreds and hundreds of people we’d get, I mean, there were days my God, there were days I remember I was in temple one morning, the garment center synagogue and my phone, I feel my phone getting really hot in my pocket, which is not normal and I was starting to hurt and I look at it, I, it’s, it’s almost on fire. It had frozen because we were mentioned in Seth Godin’s morning blog. And at that time I was getting uh emails every time we get a new subscriber and the phone is actually frozen and was locked and, and was like overheating. I take out the battery and like reset the entire phone because we just got so many new, like 14,000 subscribers in like three hours. It’s obscene, it’s obscene. You say, excuse me, you say uh that customer service is the new advertising. Marketing. N pr It really is. Well, again, you know, if we’re moving into that world where, so imagine a lava lamp. And I love that. I can use this analogy. Imagine a lava lamp. A lava lamp has water, oil and a heat source, right? The heat source heats the oil, the oil flows through the water. It makes pretty colors. I’ve heard it looks really good when you’re high. Now, I’ve heard. Now, imagine if, oh, crystals. Imagine if you’re, uh, everyone you meet in your network. Ok. Is a drop of oil? The water is your network and the water is your world. Everyone you meet in your network. Uh, from, from the guy you’re sitting doing the radio interview with, to the guy who serves you ice cream with local deli to the guy who does your dry cleaning to your girlfriend, to your wife. To not at the same time to your kid’s second grade teacher, to your second grade teacher years ago. Everyone you meet is in your network. You know, right now when Facebook first started, I would see the same weight from a kid. I went to junior high school with, he, his post would have the same weight as like my current girlfriend. Which is ridiculous. I don’t need to know about everything. My friend from junior high school is doing. I haven’t talked to the kid in 15 years. Facebook’s gotten a lot smarter as has Google. Now, I see the people I communicate with the most. Ok. And if I, if I reach out and communicate with new people, they start rising in my feet in my stream. If I don’t they fall, it’s just like a lava lamp. Every person you connect with is a drop of oil. That heat source at the bottom that’s rising, raising or lowering. Those drops of oil is relevance. So if you imagine the heat source is relevance and the more I interact with someone, the more the higher they go in my network and the more I see of them, the more trust level there is when I’m at a bar and I meet someone or at a restaurant or conference, I meet someone. I don’t need to um connect them. I don’t need to go on Facebook and friend request them. You know how awkward friend requesting is when you stop and think that last time my friend requested someone in the real world was second grade. Will you be my friend? My daughter’s doing that now she goes, you know, she goes, it’s like the cat. Will you be my friend? I’m like, honey, the cat doesn’t wanna be your friend. But you know, it’s this awkward thing who the hell friend requests someone anymore. If I’m, if I’m hanging out with you at a bar and we connect again and we talk and we go out to dinner and we’re having a good time. We’re friends. I don’t need to first request that you, you know, so that’s going away. Friending following liking and fanning is all going away. What will interact is the actual connection. So, if I meet with you and I have a good time with you and we talk again if I use your business. If I go to your nonprofit, if I donate, if I volunteer, whatever the network knows that the more I do that, the more I interact with you, the more you have the right to market to me and the more you will be at the top of my stream and the more I will see information about you, the less I will have to uh uh search for you. But if you do something stupid or we’re no longer friends see you, you’re gonna fade. I don’t have to unfriend you. You just disappear. Unfriending is also awkward. I dated a woman. We broke up, but it was nine months after we broke up, either of us wanted to unfriend the other one because it was just awkward. So I, I woke up in front of me anyway. But you know, the concept of not having to, to do that of just, you know, OK, I haven’t talked to you in a while. I don’t see your posts anymore. It’s the real world. That’s how it should be, and if you’re not feeding zombie loyalists, they can start to defect. So I, I want to spend a little time on if you’re not talking to them, giving them what they want, talking about their information, helping them out, they will gladly go somewhere else to someone who is, you know, if I have a great experience with the restaurant, uh, every week for three years and then all of a sudden over time, I’m noticing less and less that restaurant’s doing less and less to uh take care of me, you know, and maybe management’s changed and I don’t feel that uh you know, I’m ripe for being infected by another company. I’m ripe for someone else to come and say, you know, Peter. Uh cause if I tweet something like, wow, I can’t believe I have to wait 40 minutes for a table. It didn’t used to be like that. If I, if someone else is a smart restaurant, they’re following me and they’re gonna be great. You know what, Peter? There’s no way, no way over here. Why don’t you come two blocks north and we’ll give you a free drink, you know. Oh, you know, and that right there, that’s the first sign of infection and I might become infected by, by another company, become a zombie loyalist for them. And so let’s, let’s take, you have a lot of good examples. Let’s take a one on one situation. How can we start to cure that. The simple act of realizing following your customer’s understanding when they’re not happy and fixing the situation before it escalates. Um you know, you can contain a small outbreak, a small outbreak, small viral outbreak. You can contain that by getting the right people finding out what the problem is, getting them into one room, fixing their problem, healing them. You have a good uh united story right back when it was Continental, I was uh a frequent flyer and booked a trip to Paris and uh I was very angry because they charged me like $400 in, in booking fees or something like that. I don’t remember what it was. And, uh, I called the CEO, I just, just for the hell of it. I’m like, I’m gonna, I’m gonna, I wrote, I wrote an email, this was before social and I wrote an email to the CEO and I’m like, this is ridiculous. I’m a frequent da da da da and like 30 minutes later my phone rings like, hello Peter Jman, please hold for Larry Kellner CEO of cotton lines. I’m like, oh crap. You know, and the guy gets on the phone, he’s like Peter, how you doing, Mr Jman? How are you doing? Sorry, listen, these fees, they’re new. Um, we sent them a note, I’m guessing you didn’t see it. We’re gonna waive them for you. But, uh, if you have any more problems, you know, feel free to call me and I hang up the phone for the next 40 minutes just sort of staring at it like, holy crap. Larry Kellner, the CEO of United Airlines just called me and, uh, talk to me and I mean, it was like, it was like God coming down and say you now have the power to levitate your cat. It was just ridiculous. And, um, so, you know, I have been faithful to Continental and now United ever since and, and they continue to treat me with respect and, and do great things and they’re, they’re improving. They, they were getting a lot of crap over the past several years and they really are starting to improve. It’s nice to see and not only, of course, your own loyalty but you’re a loyal guy. You’re a zombie loyalist for them. And how many times how, how much it’s unquantifiable. It’s un, I, I dragged so many friends to United. I’ve, I’ve made so many friends. Uh, I mean, my father, you know, uh, he only flies United now, which means he only drag, he drags my mom only on United. I only dragged my wife on United. There’s a lot of, a lot of work that way. Yeah, we gotta go away for a couple of minutes when we come back. Of course, Peter and I are gonna keep talking about his book comes out in January, zombie loyalists. You have some examples of zombie loyalist leaving en masse like Dominoes, Netflix. They’re both, they’re both in the book. So, so one leaving, if you don’t, if you’re not starting to cure one leaving and then that’s the thing, you know, the beat will be the internet with the hashtags and everything like that, you know, it doesn’t take a long time um for those things to sort of blow up in your face. And, uh, you know, at the end of the day, everyone say, oh, you know, Twitter’s responsible for, for us losing money. No, they’re not. You’re responsible for you losing money. You know, and, and if your product isn’t great and you, your actions don’t speak well of who you are, then there’s no reason your customers should stay with you, you know, and it was, oh, social media is really hurting us because no, you’re hurting yourself. The only difference is that social media makes it easier for the world to know about. They’re just telling the story. Dominos and Netflix are, are good examples because they, they bounced back. They took responsibility and they both owned the Dominoes came out and said, you know what? You’re right. Our pizza, we do have a problem. We’re gonna fix this and they spent millions fixing it. And sure enough, they’re back with a vengeance. Now, I’m, I may or may not even have ordered them every once in a while. And I live in New York City. That’s, that’s a, that’s a sacrilege. But, um, you know, I have the app on my phone for when I’m over, you know, traveling somewhere. I’ll be in shea, whatever. And, and you know, what are you gonna get at 1130 at night when your flight’s delayed and you land? It’s Domino. Um, which reminds me I should probably go exercise on the flip side, you know, something like Netflix. They, uh, they also were screwing up, you know, they were losing, they tried to switch between the two. They came up with a new name and it was like gross in public. And so, and again, you’re watching the same thing happen with Uber right now. So it’ll be really interesting to see if they were able to repair themselves. Listening is important. Both, both those, both, those two examples, they listen to their customers. I think there’s a problem with listening because everyone’s been saying, listen, listen, listen for months and years and years and years now. But, you know, no one ever says that you have to do more than just listen. You have to listen, actually follow up. It’s one thing to listen. You know, I, I use the example of my wife, I could sit there and listen to her for hours, you know, but if I don’t actually say anything back, she’s gonna smack me, you know, and go to the other room. And so you really have to, it’s a two way street, you know, listening is great, but you gotta respond and uh look, I’ll take it a step further. I was like, oh, Twitter’s so great because someone was complaining on Twitter and we went online and we, we saw the complaint and then we fix their problem and yeah, how about if the problem didn’t exist in the first place? You know, because the great thing about Twitter is that, yeah, people complain on Twitter. The bad thing about it is they’re complaining about on you’re on Twitter. So it’s like, what if the problem didn’t exist in the first place? What if, what if you empowered your front desk clerk to fix the problem so that I didn’t have to tweet. Uh Hertz is my favorite story of all this. Uh I used to rent from Hertz religiously. Um And then I went to uh Phoenix Sky Harbor Airport this past April and I gave it, I was giving a speech and I, I go and I, my name is supposed to be on the board, you know, so I can go right to my car and it wasn’t, it was ok. That happens. I got upstairs, I wait 40 minutes on the VIP line. Um After 40 minutes they finally say, you know, there’s a uh only one guy here, a lot of people might have a better chance if we go up to the regular line. Like, ok, you probably could have told us that a little earlier, go up to the regular line. Spend 45 minutes waiting in the regular line. It’s now been. Are you tweeting while this is happening? Well, I had, I was actually not only tweeting, I had enough time to create a meme that should give you some idea of how long I was online with my cell phone. I was enough time to have a meme. I get it to the counter. Hi, can I help you? Yeah. Um I, I was downstairs at the VIP desk and they told me that oh your VIP reservation you have to go downstairs like yeah. Ok, let’s let’s put a pin in that. Um they just sent me up here like uh right. They have to help you. Well, it’s not really, they, you guys are the same company. I mean I could see the reservation on the screen. You, you, you, you can help me. Sorry sir, I can’t help. You have to go to the VIP next. I’m like you just next to me. Ok. So if you know anything about Sky Harbor Airport in Phoenix, um all of the rental car company, they’re all in the same place. So I walked 50 feet. It’s a bus takes you to the big to the big pavilion where they’re all next to each. I walked 50 ft from the cesspool of filth and depravity that was hurt to the, the wonderful Zen Garden of tranquility. That was Avis. And in four minutes I had a nicer cheaper, more or a nicer less expensive car given to me, a woman named Phyllis who was 66 and moved to Phoenix from Detroit with her husband for his asthma. I knew this because she told me, um, she smiled at me. She brought her manager out and said, ah, it’s another refugee from, uh, Hertz. And I said, so this happens a lot. They’re like, yeah, I’m like, wow, you’d think they’d have done something about that. And so on the way out in Avis. Um I, I thank them, I walk past hers. I shoot them this, you know, sort of look at the look of the beast. I get my Avis car and I drive to my hotel. Once I get to my hotel, I write a wonderful blog post about my experience called Peter and Hertz and the terrible, horrible, no good, really bad customer experience. Once you have a kid, you find up rewriting titles about your blog posts that have to do with kids books. Um I do not like Hertz Sam. I am and things like that. And um I included in this blog post, the five things I’d rather do than ever. Uh ran from Herz again, I think number three was um was uh ride a razor blade bus through a lemon juice waterfall um with just, you know, and, and so, but, but of course, the next day Hertz reaches out to me. Oh Mr Jman, this is the head of North American customer service. That’s all you’re about. I’m like, they’re like, you know, we’d love to let Nick know like you, you’re not gonna fix the problem. Number one because I’m gonna Nas Car. I’m never going back to Hertz. Number two. There were five people yesterday, five people I interacted with all of whom had the chance to save me and keep me as a customer for life. A, a customer who had been so happy and I would have loved you. Five people blew it. So don’t waste your time trying to convert me back. You’re not going to what you wanna do is spend some of that energy, retraining your staff to have empathy and to give them the ability and the empowerment to fix my problem when it happens because five people it it takes every single employee to keep your company running, it takes one to kill it. Yeah. PS Avis reached out um to thank me personally and uh I am now just this ridiculously huge loyal fan of Avis and always will be you have a pretty touching story about uh when you worked in a yogurt shop, you were really young. Um We have a couple of minutes tell that, tell that good story. That was on the east side, which again is another reason why I live on the west side. Nothing good ever happens in Manhattan’s East side. So I was uh I was working and I can’t believe it’s yogurt, uh, which was a store that I think back in the eighties IC by. No, no. TCBY was the country’s best yoga. IC biy was a poor, I can’t believe it’s yo, I can’t believe it’s not yoga. I can’t believe it. Yogurt. It was a poor attempt to capitalize on. That was TCB. And I’m working at this store and, um, I go in every day and make the yogurt to clean the floors. I do. You know, it’s a typical high school job and, uh, it was during the summer and thousands of people walking by, I think it was like Second Avenue or something. And there were these brass poles that hung from, you know, it was the, the, the, there was an awning, right? That’s a, that there and there were the brass poles that held the awning up and they were dirty as hell. Right. I’m sure they’d never been polished ever. And I found some, I found some brass polish in the back like, oh, they buried in the back. And one afternoon I went outside and IP started polishing the poles. My logic was if the poles were shiny and people saw them, maybe they come into the store, maybe they’d wanna, you know, buy more nice clean place. And the manager came out. What the hell are you doing? I said, I told him what I thought, I don’t pay you to think, get inside. You know, I’m like, there’s no customers in there. I’m like, ok, I’ll, I’ll, I’ll make sure the yogurt’s still pumping it full blast. And I quit, I just quit that job. Like, I mean, I, I couldn’t even begin to understand why someone would invest, I mean, to own a franchise for 50 grand, to at least to buy that franchise. Why wouldn’t he invest in the two seconds? It took little elbow grease to make the poll clean That might bring in more customers. What the hell? You know, but you’re not paid to think. You’re not paid to think. My favorite line. Yeah. Um, I, I just, I, I encourage if any kids are listening to this teenagers. If you, if your boss says that to you quit, quit, I will hire, you just quit. It’s, it’s, it’s probably the worst thing in the world that you could possibly do because you have customers who you have customers who every day can be helped by people who are paid to think. And that’s the ones you wanna hire. We gotta wrap up. Tell me what you love about the work you do. I get paid to talk. I mean, my God, this is the same stuff. I used to get in trouble for in high school, but on a bigger picture, what I really love about it is being able to open someone’s eyes and have them come back to me. Um, I run a series of masterminds called Shank Minds Business. Masterminds. It’s shank minds.com. They’re day long seminars all around the country. And, uh I had someone come to me and say, you know, I took your advice about XYZ and I, I started listening a little more and I just got, uh, the largest, um, retainer client I’ve ever had in my life by a factor of four. And she goes, and I just can’t even thank you and I send me like a gorgeous bottle of tequila. She’s like, I can’t even thank you enough. Oh my God. Being able to help people, you know, at the end of the day, we’re, we’re, I, I have yet to find another planet suitable for life. I’m looking so we’re all in this together. And if that’s the case, you know, why wouldn’t we want to help people just a little bit more? You know, there really isn’t a need to be as douche as we are as a society. We could probably all be a little nicer to each other and you’d be surprised how that will help. The book is Zombie Loyalists. It’s published by Palgrave macmillan comes out in January. You’ll find Peter at shankman.com and on Twitter at Peter Shankman, Peter. Thank you so much. Pleasure is Amanda. Oh, thank you. Next week. That’s an open question. If you missed any part of this week’s show, I beseech you find it at Tony martignetti.com were sponsored by donor box, outdated donation forms blocking the supporter generosity donor box, fast, flexible and friendly fundraising forms for your nonprofit donor box.org. Our creative producer is Claire Meyerhoff. I’m your associate producer, Kate Martti. The show 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 be with us next week for nonprofit radio. Big nonprofit ideas for the other 95% go out and be great.

Nonprofit Radio for June 19, 2023: Feasibility Studies: What, Why & How

 

Brian AbernathyFeasibility Studies: What, Why & How

If a capital, endowment or other campaign may be in your nonprofit’s future, you’ll want to consider a feasibility study beforehand. Brian Abernathy, from Convergent Nonprofit Solutions, explains what they’re all about.

 

 

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[00:00:53.31] spk_0:
Welcome to tony-martignetti non profit radio. Big non profit ideas for the other 95%. I’m your aptly named host of your favorite he Abdominal podcast. I’m still traveling without my studio mic. So my sound won’t be up to par. It’ll be back to normal next week. And I’m introducing my niece Carmella as our sponsor announcer this week. Oh, I’m glad you’re with me. I’d be thrown into trypanosomiasis. If you infected me with the idea that you missed this week’s show feasibility studies, what, why and how if a capital endowment or other campaign, maybe in your nonprofits future, you’ll want to consider a feasibility study beforehand. Brian Abernathy from Convergent non profit Solutions explains what they’re all about on Tony’s take too classy digs non profit radio.

[00:01:14.17] spk_1:
We’re sponsored by Donor box with intuitive fundraising software from donor box. Your donors give four times faster helping you help others. Donor box dot org.

[00:01:57.82] spk_0:
Here is feasibility studies. What? Why and how? It’s a pleasure to welcome Brian Abernathy to nonprofit radio. He is General Manager at Convergent non profit Solutions where he has supervised and managed capital campaigns that have raised more than 100 and $25 million. The company is at convergent non profit dot com and Brian is on linkedin. Brian Abernathy. Welcome to nonprofit radio.

[00:02:00.54] spk_2:
Thanks tony. Great to have the opportunity to join you today.

[00:02:13.07] spk_0:
I’m glad you can. Thank you. Let’s talk about feasibility studies. Let’s before we get into the how and the why, which actually will do the why and the how, but before we even do the why and the how, let’s talk about the what, what, what are we talking about? Feasibility studies?

[00:02:39.09] spk_2:
Yeah. So a feasibility study, tony, you could boil it down very simply to a strategic due diligence. Before a major funding initiative in capital campaign. That’s the context of feasibility study. The convergent manages and works with our clients on it’s not a will this new building attract the right market of folks? That’s a different type of study, researching utility. What we’re talking about here is, can this program of work raise the necessary amount of money? And are we confident that we’ve got the right dynamics to go out and execute a successful capital campaign to secure that

[00:03:09.00] spk_0:
funding? Do we need to know what our goal is going into the feasibility study or have a working goal or I mean, surely the study is going to refine that? But do we need to have a ballpark of what we’re, what we’re looking for?

[00:04:22.18] spk_2:
Yeah, within reason, we always say it’s good to think big in a feasibility study. When we go into this process, the the proposed program of work that we’re gonna take out and use in confidential interviews. We refer to that as a draft prospectus. So it is a working document uh primarily because we want everyone we meet with to know that their feedback can still shape that plan. But it also gives us the opportunity to test different aspects of the goal amount and the utility of that funding. So we know we might need to do a building campaign for instance. But do we want to also test the prospect of some endowment to underwrite the long term maintenance of that building? Now, that’s obviously gonna bring the funding goal up. We can test all of those things in the study. We will come back and recommend a specific goal range for a camp pain, but it’s always easier to bring that number in a little bit after a study than to realize, oh, we should have, we should have tested the endowment for the building, but we didn’t think about it in advance. So we want to think with a, what could we possibly need to execute this plan? Uh and, and reference that number as our proposed goal during the feasibility

[00:04:51.34] spk_0:
process? Okay. So, so a part of it is getting feedback on the proposed

[00:05:12.77] spk_2:
goal. That’s right. That’s right. Did people get sticker shock? If, if most of the folks that we talked to see a number in their eyes get really wide and they start to sweat in the interview that tells us it may be a little bit ambitious and sometimes they’re really easy ways to resolve that. Maybe there’s a piece of the program like an Indie that we can just quietly approach in the appropriate individual conversations. But sometimes it is a recommendation of you might want to look at phasing how you go about this so that you can get the necessary funding and just look at a longer horizon of time and potentially a couple of campaigns or more to bring that funding.

[00:05:37.96] spk_0:
Okay. Okay. All valuable info. All right. Um And, and how many folks are we, are we talking to typically? How does that work?

[00:06:07.38] spk_2:
So, excuse me, on average, we’re going to interview between 55 65 participants in a feasibility study process. We typically are going to do three weeks of in person interviews. That number obviously varies a little bit depending on the specific client, the geographic scope. If you’ve got a statewide campaign, it’s hard to get to all the right folks, maybe in a three week period. But we want to talk to the highest capacity, most influential stakeholders for whatever the nonprofit is that we’re working with, uh and get their bearings on where this proposed program of work and potential capital campaign might be headed.

[00:06:31.57] spk_0:
Does it have to be a capital campaign? Can it, can it be a programmatic campaign that we’re doing a feasibility study for or strictly an endowment campaign.

[00:07:22.80] spk_2:
Yeah, that’s a great question. And a lot of folks hear the words capital campaign and think, oh, we don’t need a new building so we don’t need a capital campaign. When we talk about a capital campaign, we speak more about the funding strategy and infrastructure. So it’s a focused initiative to fund a multi year program of work. It may be 100% programmatic. It may be 100% building capital. We’ve got a couple in process right now that are 100% endowment focused. We worked with the boys and girls club in Kentucky last year. That was all of the above. It was retrofitting a building that have been provided to them, funding the operation and utility of that building and its staff for a five year period of time and also putting into place an endowment to fund the maintenance and upkeep of that building. So a little bit of both, but when we say capital campaign, we certainly are not exclusively talking building capital.

[00:07:45.75] spk_0:
Okay, cool. Alright. So let’s move to the y what, what, what’s the value of doing a feasibility study? What are you gonna get out of it?

[00:09:26.25] spk_2:
Yeah. So the old adage of, of counting the cost before you start to build a tower plays in perfectly here, we’re going to approach the study and there’s a few key factors that we’re looking to validate. We need to know that there is a sense of urgency for whatever the need is that this program will work is going to address. We need to know that it’s being conveyed in a compelling way that those who hear about the need and then hear about the solution to that need are gonna be compelled to step in and be involved. We want to know that the right leadership is ready to step up for that campaign and this comes in two factors, tony, um One is just the right influence. Fundraising is a game of relationship strategy goes a long way. But if you don’t know anyone in a community and have all the best strategy, you’re probably not going to get the right doors open. So we want to vet out who would the best possible leaders be from a volunteer influence standpoint in the campaign. And the second piece of leadership is funding leadership, are we able to identify viable prospects ready to step in and play significant roles in terms of their investment in whatever this campaign will be implementing, knowing that we’re able to set the right perspective for the top of that uh donor pyramid or what we call an investment range tape. We’re specifically looking for a way to identify the top level potential supporters for a campaign knowing that that’s gonna set the peak where everybody’s gonna look too. So uh let

[00:09:46.06] spk_0:
me just flush out some of these So, so you can identify uh top potential campaign leadership and also top potential donors through a feasibility study.

[00:10:55.94] spk_2:
That’s right. So every single interview that we’re in, we’re gonna ask a number of questions focused on these two factors. And we’re gonna come out with a recommended list of key campaign cabinet and volunteer leaders for each campaign that we conduct a fees ability study. On, in most cases, we’re actually gonna have a drafted organization chart of different prospect divisions and leaders that we believe are gonna have influence with those different pools of individuals, organizations, foundations, whoever it may be, uh what that tells us is, we’re gonna have somebody with the right set of keys to open the doors that we need to get to and then getting a little bit further down the road into a campaign. We’re able to make the strategic highest and best use of each volunteer’s time because we know volunteers and fundraising efforts generally have day jobs and a lot of other things drawing on their time. So that’s critical intel, it’s for any nonprofit going into a funding initiative, especially a major funding initiative like a capital campaign because you just don’t want to churn and wear out your volunteers on a campaign that runs, you know, 18 months, two years, three years, folks just really start to get exhausted. So we, we map all of that out to inform a leadership strategy for the campaign.

[00:11:37.63] spk_0:
Okay. Uh So So, so far, we’ve talked about a need and a compelling purpose that’s gonna move people. Um you know, the, the value you get out of this, the leadership, the volunteer leadership for the campaign structure, the donor leadership. What else, what, why, why else do these do a study?

[00:12:14.42] spk_2:
Yeah. So in that donor leadership reference point, we do reverse analytics on every campaign that we complete. So when we look at non profit sectors or whatever the case may be, we’ve got a general idea of, we need to find a top pledge of X percent of the overall campaign goal. And our top five need to be the next percentage in the top 10 and so on and so forth. So we’re strategically modeling out a highly, highly reliable perspective on this is the funding mix that needs to be in place so that a campaign can be successful. So

[00:12:42.66] spk_0:
in these interviews, you’re, are you coming right out and asking folks, what, what, what, what do you see your participation as in this campaign that, that we’re talking about or do you, are you proposing, you’re proposing dollar amounts for each interviewee or we’ve got a, are you getting at this, this, this potential campaign contribution? Yeah,

[00:14:16.75] spk_2:
we’ll take the test goal and break it down into a funding chart just to show a visual of, we use around numbers. If we’ve got a $10 million campaign goal, we need a 15% lead pledge that would be a million and a half dollars. And so we do a couple of things. We ask every interviewee, who do you think could be up here potentially at the top ranges of this, of this pyramid? So who might be that million and a half dollar lead or a couple of folks at half a million below that? And, and in these candid confidential conversations, folks will say, oh, so and so would be great or this foundation or that family, you should try to talk to them. Uh The other thing that we do after that is we ask each interviewee if the right leaders were engaged in this campaign and if you had the right confidence in the case for investment, but where do you think from a low to high range your organization or family or whoever it is might land in terms of a potential investment? So it’s all very hypothetical based on the very the conversation, we’re very clear, it’s not a commitment to funding, but the majority of the time because we’re the third party outside person who is not putting a pledge card in front of them, asking them to sign it in this conversation, they’ll give us that range and sometimes it’s pretty broad within appropriate reason based on questions the interview you may still have. But it helps us to know both for those individuals and also for some industry and community subsets of peers where we might expect to be able to find the, for the campaign

[00:14:39.40] spk_0:
when you ask who might be at this, this top level, the 15% of the goal, do people ever say? Oh, I could do that

[00:14:41.93] spk_2:
in some cases? Yes. Does that happen a great way to identify a potential?

[00:14:48.03] spk_0:
Yeah. I mean, if they self identify, yeah. Say there’s no better way but that, that happens. People say, oh, I could do that. Yeah.

[00:15:48.57] spk_2:
Yeah. And especially when you’re talking buildings and you’re talking about naming opportunities, which we would of course address in a feasibility study. If there is a building in play, you get to have a whole another set of conversation to follow down of what might be more most appealing in terms of naming this facility to honor the memory of your mother or whoever the case may be. Now those are confidential conversations. So we’re using that to inform strategy moving on down the line in the campaign. Uh But we do not share that information. So we assure them that they’re never gonna see a report that says Bob and Susie really want to be the lead pledge and name the whole facility. We, we still work through the process, honor the reality that they may have other things they need to vet out and validate before they’re ready to finalize that commitment. But we’ve got a pretty good idea from that conversation, how we would want to approach them when in the campaign timeline, we might want to approach them and even what leaders would be most influential to garnering their pledge because we also asked them who they think would be the best leaders.

[00:16:37.22] spk_1:
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[00:17:19.90] spk_0:
Now back to feasibility studies. What why and how? Okay. Very interesting. So if you’re, if you’re a client, the non profit asks, well, who is it that stepped up? What makes you so confident uh that we can get this? We have a very good prospect for this 15% leadership gift. And who are they? You, you, you can’t say it’s Bob and Susie. Uh

[00:18:34.56] spk_2:
We don’t know, we probably could, we choose not to. Um because it, it is one of those factors that helps ensure that we’re getting the most candid and direct feedback out of those interviews. Uh What we do provide is a perspective of we’re highly confident that these folks should be considered in this range of potential investment or we believe based on prior conversations, this family could be a great naming target. Most of the time, tony with a nonprofit that’s highly connected and engaged with their constituents. They’ve already got a pretty good idea of who those folks are. So it’s not common that we get a complete surprise out of that and more often than not, we’re going into those interviews, uh sort of ferreting out. We think this person could have interest in naming a facility or, or stepping up and taking a key leadership role. So prior to even getting into interviews, we’ve gone back and forth several rounds with the list of interviewees getting all the background information on all the perspective from our client. What’s their past giving history look like and so forth? So we’ve got a pretty good starting point that we’re, we’re strategically approaching those conversations and when we find that potential lead pledge that we weren’t expecting, we’re thrilled. But, but most of the time we’ve got a pretty good idea where those need to come from before we even start the interviews.

[00:19:23.12] spk_0:
This sounds very much like an art. I mean, these, these face to face interviews or whatever zoom or, you know, however they’re done. But these interviews, it sounds like you get one shot, have a serious conversation with a donor or an individual donor or foundation or maybe it’s a couple, you know, it’s got to be it just sounds like an art. I mean, you got to be organized, you have to have the story complete. I think, I don’t know, it looks bad. I think if you come back and, well, you might say we have some follow up questions, I guess I could see that. But it seems to me you get one shot to do it really well.

[00:20:28.03] spk_2:
Yeah. And you’re exactly right. Tony. Most of these folks don’t have hours and hours of time that they want to give over a number of weeks or months to have following. So we’re very strategic. We developed a questionnaire that we use for each client and some of those questions are our standards. Some of those are obviously very unique to the client situation. But we’ve also got a team of consultants, most of whom are former uh sea level nonprofit executives. And so there’s a lot of intuition that comes into play here of if somebody says something about one initiative and a program of work that makes some interest, we may chase that thought a little bit more, uh We may push a little bit harder for what we would call the financial indication in some interviews and other places we may back off. So there’s a lot of nuance in how those conversations

[00:20:31.03] spk_0:
play out. All right. So let’s, let’s keep pulling on this thread about what you’re gonna get out of it, the, the value, why, why do it

[00:21:46.55] spk_2:
so the, if you want to think about value in terms of a simple deliverable, uh We’re gonna prepare what we call an opportunity, analysis report and recommendations and that’s gonna give um the objective responses that we collect did some quantitative, some qualitative, we’re gonna analyze those. We’re gonna give you perspective on the trends in the feedback that we got. And then it’s gonna give specific recommendations on next steps. Very, very rarely. Tony. Is that next step? A cold and hard? No, go on a campaign. Sometimes it is a bad time for an organization to step into a campaign. Most of the time there is specific work to be done to prepare for a campaign or we’re going into a campaign pretty swiftly. Some of that is the shelf life on these reports. We think of it about a 92 120 day times fans. Um The, uh we know from the pack last few years, a lot can change in three months. So sitting and waiting and considering, should we go forward? Should we not on the side of a non profit can be risky in some

[00:21:57.51] spk_0:
cases. Let me ask you what, what might some of that work be that has to be done first? If it’s not a, it’s not a hard, let’s go. We’re 100% or where you can never be. 100% were 95% confident. But if you’re not at that point, what might some of that work be that needs to be done first.

[00:23:57.83] spk_2:
So generally, it’s gonna fall into one of three specific subsets that we focus on. And we’ve got a principle we talked about it convergent called Asking Rights and Asking rights is the intersection of your nonprofits credibility. Uh The clarity of the outcomes that it delivers through the work that it does not the outputs or the activity, but the true bottom line impact and then fundraising skill. So we’re gonna look at those three dynamics through the interviews and we may come out of a feasibility study process and say your credibility is not quite where it needs to be. And so we need to take some focused time to cultivate messaging, to engage your constituency, get the right leaders committed, maybe do some board work to get them ready to step in and be active. Sometimes this can take place in the foundational phase of a capital campaign. Sometimes it takes a little bit more time on the outcome side. Generally, we’re gonna address this through something we call program refinement early in a campaign engagement where we’re taking that draft plan from the study were sharpening it up. We’re answering the questions that we heard, adding some specificity and really, really working on developing what we call an organizational value proposition, which is how we would convey the the true outcomes and economic value that whatever the nonprofit is we’re working with is delivering in their community. Uh And then the last piece is the fundraising skills. So in some cases, we’ve got a great plan, we’ve got the right outcomes. But the fun fundraising infrastructure to go out and execute on the campaign is just not there. And so one of the common engagements that we work with clients on in that space is a multi month resource development strategy engagement where we’re addressing and building out some of those fundraising infrastructure points so that when the time does get there to turn on a capital campaign, the organization is ready to move forward

[00:24:28.21] spk_0:
smoothly. Meanwhile, though the clock is ticking on the value of the the study, you said what you said 9200 and 20 days is that I don’t mean to put words in your mouth. Is that right?

[00:24:34.82] spk_2:
That so

[00:24:51.09] spk_0:
three, so 3 to 4 months, you see uh after that, the landscape could have changed from the conversations that you had time is ticking while you’re trying to do this sort of fundraising infrastructure work. That’s

[00:25:27.40] spk_2:
right. So if we end up with a longer term engagement, uh that, that were involved in what we’re gonna do is maintain the reference points to know what factors we need to see, shift to be prepared for moving into a campaign. If we get beyond that horizon, we’ve got the perspective from the critical interviews that we conducted in the study and we would just roll what we call some re interviews into the early stages of the capital campaign to get some re validation and affirmation. One of those findings adjusted and that’s usually somewhere in the neighborhood of, you know, 6 to 10, maybe 12 key conversations. And once we validate yet, we still got the right leaders, we still have the affirmed support of some of those lead prospective donors or investors. Then we’re confident to move forward with the rest of the recommendations as we had previously

[00:25:48.10] spk_0:
identified. Okay. Okay. Anything else on the value proposition part, what we’re going to get out of this study? Why we’re doing it?

[00:26:13.92] spk_2:
Yeah, the, the last big pieces that campaign strategy and timeline. So we’re gonna give specific recommendations on the scope of campaign. What we believe a high to low feasible goal range is gonna be the number of months that we believe it’s going to take you to manage a campaign. Uh And then if that client is interested in working with us, we’re also recommending the level of campaign management or council from our side that we believe would be most conducive to their success, given their community size, size of their organization and staff and so forth.

[00:27:03.95] spk_0:
So now we have this, we have this report, I guess it’s, it’s also typically a presentation to the board and the C Suite leadership imagine, but also written report. Um Now then folks can take that report and go off and I don’t know, try they can try to try the campaign on their own. I’m sure they’re free to engage convergent, which, which you would love, you’d love to do that work. Uh, or they can do, they could hire some other firm, I guess.

[00:27:06.81] spk_2:
Right. Yeah, that’s right. So, every now and then we will do a campaign where another firm did a study. It’s not all that common and vice versa. It’s not all that common that we would do a study and another firm would come in and manage a campaign just because you can imagine there’s such a depth of institutional knowledge and connectivity that comes

[00:27:38.66] spk_0:
connection. You had somebody else did the interviews and now you’re executing, you’re going back and getting serious about soliciting volunteers, leadership soliciting gifts, but you don’t have the, you don’t have the connection. That’s right.

[00:28:27.79] spk_2:
Right. All right, you do get engaged periodically with an organization that’s got a strong development staff. We’ve got a few repeat clients in this vote. They are prepared to and understand what is involved in going out and raising the money. But they always want third party objective feedback out of the feasibility study. So they’re getting perspective on how do we do over the past X number of years in communicating with our constituents. How is our leadership seen in the community? Who would be the right leaders is the goal feasible? Now again, we’re not divulging the specific feedback from interviewees in these engagements, but we still say, hey, yes, we, we believe this goal range is a pro for you to pursue uh and so on and so forth. But they’re doing that based on aggregate data. Whereas if were retained to manage a campaign, we have the benefit of all of that very specific and nuanced feedback from interviews that our team members would draw on throughout the campaign to, to guide strategy and next steps with, with the different prospects that we may have interviewed.

[00:29:18.23] spk_0:
Okay. Okay. Um So let’s, let’s stick with, you know, I want to the nuts and bolts of this, of this uh feasibility study. Um How do we, who schedules the, who schedules the meetings? Is that, is that the nonprofits responsibility? Now, we’ve got this list of, you said, typically, I think 50 to 65 interviews. Um you know, who’s who, what’s the mechanics of moving forward? Yeah.

[00:30:33.89] spk_2:
So we will have on average between 55 65 interviews that’s gonna come from a list of normally around 120 or so interviewees. We know we’re not gonna schedule everybody we want to meet with, but we want to get critical mass of feedback. So we start with a list expecting some folks won’t be available. What we have found a over time and time continues to affirm a schedule er, from the nonprofit organization is far more successful in securing these interviews, especially with your higher influence, higher capacity interviewees. Just because it’s a name and a and a number or an email address that they recognize the, the email from convergent non profit solution is not incredibly likely to get a response when asking for a meeting. If any, if anyone’s like me, they get a number of those emails every day from somebody uh selling wares or offering something. And so we want to build from a place of strength in the scheduling. So we start with a representative of the organization. Usually we give about a two week lead time for scheduling and then our average feasibility study is going conduct interviews over a three week period. That person may have a little bit of scheduling work to do over the first couple of weeks, just filling in the gaps. But typically that, that schedule, er, is 2.5, 3 weeks ish of their time making some phone calls and following up on emails.

[00:31:02.20] spk_0:
And what are they asking folks to participate in? Uh, you were, the insiders are calling it a feasibility study or you even have a different phrase that you call it uh

[00:31:03.56] spk_2:
opportunity,

[00:31:04.81] spk_0:
opportunity analysis. But what are we using for? Our, our interviewees are potential interviewees? What are we calling it? What are we, what are we saying? We’re asking them to agree

[00:32:12.93] spk_2:
to, we send a letter over the signatures of a few key leaders that are affiliated with the organization explaining why we are there that we absolutely not asking for funding. We’re seeking candid confidential feedback on the proposed plan that is attached to that letter. So we’re giving them an opportunity to see what we want to talk about before the meeting. Uh Partly so they know, but also so they’ve had an opportunity to digest it and come up with questions before we walk into the room and we tell them it’s a feasibility study. It’s a vetting of a potential campaign that it would be unwise for the organization to go forward apart from the feedback of these key valued stakeholders and constituents. And so that information goes out to everyone on the interview list. We have some cases where for, for sensitive information in the program of work. Uh the client that we would work with might not send out the full plan until someone actually schedules an interview. We have online cloud based scheduling system that we use. So all of that is automated and simple. So not a lot of extra work there. But we want uh we want the interviewees to have perspective well, before we walk in the room because it’s gonna help us get the strongest feedback.

[00:33:45.25] spk_0:
It’s time for Tony’s take to thank you, Classy. Their blog post is 17 podcasts for nonprofits you need on your radar, non profit radio. That’s this show is there number five, it would be my pleasure to name the others, but there are 16 of them. You wouldn’t remember them all. And that wouldn’t be fair to the ones that you don’t retain. Imagine that I’m not gonna let that happen to my fellow podcasters. Well, I’m not going to allow it. So there’s really only one show you need to know this one. Tony-martignetti non profit radio. The post with the full list is on the blog at classy dot org. Classy. Thank you very, very much. That is Tony’s take two. We’ve got Boo koo, but loads more time for feasibility studies. What why and how with Brian Abernathy, they’re, they’re being asked to meet with someone outside the organization, right? That you, they’re, they’re being asked to meet with someone from convergent.

[00:34:08.09] spk_2:
That’s correct. And we identify that person even in that letter, uh you will be getting a call from so and so at the nonprofit organization to schedule a time for you to meet with Brian from Convergent for 45 minutes to an hour at a time of your convenience. So pretty, pretty clear all the way through. So they don’t think uh the executive director of the nonprofit is coming to meet with them and then it’s this outside consultant and they’re caught off guard or what have you,

[00:34:23.64] spk_0:
you prefer to do these in person or is zoom a suitable substitute?

[00:34:29.58] spk_2:
Zoom. Zoom has become a suitable substitute for a lot of things. I

[00:34:33.59] spk_0:
don’t know a necessity, right?

[00:35:20.41] spk_2:
But we still do the vast majority of our interviews in person and most of that is the opportunity to cultivate relationship when we meet with someone in their home or in their office or wherever it may be, you know, just the, the fundraising experience of walking in and seeing things in their office to be able to draw some personal connections. If that’s someone uh that we’re interviewing is 34 months later being sat down with by the same consultant to solicit a pledge. We walk in with that much more relational credibility and equity that we can leverage on behalf of our clients. So we love to do in person. That’s always our recommendation. But we, we absolutely are still doing some zoom interviews and in some cases, that’s just the most functional. We’ve, we’ve worked with some higher ed clients that have donors all over the country. And so in person is just not realistic and zoom allows us to do that. Uh And what we sacrifice in terms of not getting that uh in person sit down sort of warm fuzzy feel is certainly not detrimental to the results that we get in the final.

[00:36:28.17] spk_0:
But you prefer the in person. I always, I always prefer in person meetings with, you know, for me, I’m talking to planned giving prospects are playing, giving donors doing stewardship. But you know, there’s just nothing like seeing pictures of grandchildren, a picture of a sailboat awards from their business, whatever brother photographs there might be. I mean, there’s just a wealth of questions and you know, you can ask folks about to try to build a foundation with people and some of it, you know, may end up, you know, see pictures of yachts in the Caribbean or a yacht in the Caribbean. You know, that, that may be indicative of some, some potential potential giving that you maybe didn’t know about. Uh there’s just so much in someone’s home or office, but even just drawing, just like I said, just drawing a foundation for a relationship asking about the pictures, those Children, grandchildren, you know, etcetera. So yeah,

[00:37:13.30] spk_2:
and these days, the in person meetings are the ones that stand out in our memories, right? Where you’re like me all the time. But the so and so came by sat in my office or my living room, we spent time together. Those are now very much inflection points in terms of our interpersonal reactions are interpersonal interactions. And so that helps uh sort of entrance that conversation in the mind of the interviewee as well, which is a benefit when we get to a campaign because we want to come back and build on that prior conversation. Yeah,

[00:37:30.27] spk_0:
just have a warmer foundation to the relationship if it’s, if it’s not virtual, if it’s in person. What about meals? You like? Uh I like to, I like to, but I may have a different purpose. I’m not doing feasibility studies, but I happen to like to meet prospects and donors over meals is that, is that maybe not so suitable for a feasibility study?

[00:37:52.05] spk_2:
Yeah. We specifically tried to avoid meals and places for these conversations and some of it is we want to hear really candid feedback and we want to hear it about the organization we’re working with. We want to hear it about, as I mentioned a few moments ago. Who do you think could be that

[00:38:03.33] spk_0:
other people? Right. Right. The other person might be sitting two tables away. Yeah. Right.

[00:38:35.84] spk_2:
That’s right. That’s right. So it makes it a little bit easier to get the type of feedback we want. When we’re in a quiet private setting, we had clients who have said, hey, we’ve got a conference room right here in the office. We can do all the interviews in the office. And certainly that’s, that’s not the worst scenario. What we don’t want is somebody weird. Well, gosh, the executive director’s office is on the other side of this wall. I don’t want them to hear some of my true thoughts. So I just won’t share those things. So we, we try to always go to the interviewee so that we’re sitting down in, in their turf. So to say

[00:39:02.67] spk_0:
okay. And then, uh you have a conversation, right? You’re, you’re building that foundational relationship because hopefully you’ll, you’ll be embarking on a campaign with this non profit. Any bad story, like any war story, you ever get thrown out of someone’s home or office. Um I hope not. But if you did, I want to know if you did, I want to hear about it if you got thrown out.

[00:41:02.02] spk_2:
So you always get folks that have some sort of other unique local agenda or organization that they’ve got a stronger affinity for. And you hear a, well, this is, this is good but this other organization is, it’s really getting great work done. So, those are pretty commonplace. Um I had one that is sort of my favorite feasibility study. Worst story that, that really undergirds the importance of that fundraising skill that I talked about earlier. I walked into a feasibility interview. Uh The gentleman that I was gonna interview was ready. He was right there as I walked in, he had the draft program of work in front of him. So I’m thinking great. He read it, he’s ready to go and he pulls out another piece of paper and he says, I’m really glad that you’re here because uh five years ago, I supported this organization in a prior campaign. And this is the invoice for my last payment, which I’ll be sending off later this week. And then he held up that program of work. And he said this is the only other information I’ve received in five years is this proposed program of work. So I’ll be sitting this one out, but I appreciate your coming by to hear my thoughts and I didn’t get my questionnaire out. I thank you, I’ll be sure to convey your thoughts appropriately. Uh And, and that was the end of the interview. It was pretty quick, but that just goes to undergird tony, that all that we’re doing in nonprofits is setting the stage for the next opportunity. So you may not have a capital campaign in the next two years. But the things that an organization is doing today are laying the foundational building blocks so that they can be successful whenever that capital campaign or major funding initiative for an annual campaign you’re in, you can swap out the, the avenue. But that, that communication and relationship cultivation is absolutely critical. And

[00:41:30.92] spk_0:
the stewardship that follows. That’s right. He sounds like he made a five year, a five year pledge. He was just about to send his fifth pledge payment, happy to do it. But the stewardship was awful and all he got was the next funding plan. But he, he set

[00:41:49.98] spk_2:
you up very valid reasons for that organization and its leadership. But, but that, that individual didn’t care if there was a valid reason. His perception was the reality that he was working from. Um, and, and learning those things is good. Sometimes it’s painful to learn those things. But again, I would say that’s a value of a feasibility study as you get some of that inside perspective you otherwise might not

[00:42:30.47] spk_0:
have. Oh, absolutely. You know, you can’t count on that guy. He’s not he’s not gonna be your volunteer. He’s not gonna be your honorary chair. That’s right. It’s not gonna be any kind of volunteer and he’s not gonna give. So that is valuable to know because they probably thought exactly the opposite because he made a five year pledge to the previous campaign. So they probably thought he was a very, very good prospect for this campaign, but they did not do a good job at stewardship. So he’s sitting it out. I do note though that he set you up. He wanted to tell you this face to face. He didn’t want to do it by email. He didn’t say have Mr Abernathy call me an anti before he arranges the, before we meet Mr Abernathy called me. Didn’t, didn’t offer that. He, he wanted to tell it to your face to face.

[00:43:04.01] spk_2:
That’s right. He was going to schedule the meeting right after and you know, I can’t even, it’s probably not fair to presume intent or motive, but there’s a little bit of uh giving you the level of interaction that I didn’t get. Right. Nobody came by to talk to me, but you’re here now. And so I’m gonna tell you face in my perspective, it conveyed the seriousness of his thoughts. It’s really easy to ignore an email. It’s really easy to just say no, thanks. Don’t have time to meet with you. But it appropriately conveyed how, how significant it was to him that he had not been communicated with

[00:43:25.22] spk_0:
stewardship, stewardship. There’s no chance of trying to resurrect that relationship. And then maybe in the midst of the campaign, I mean, the, the CEO would have to be very humble and humble and apologetic, but maybe it’s worth exploring.

[00:44:55.96] spk_2:
Yeah, that’s one of those spots where you look at. Okay. Presuming you have the information available who connected with this individual last time. What was the process by which they were cultivated and solicited? What’s their prior other engagement with the organization? And sometimes tony, I’ve had feasibility interviewees tell me we might give a very nominal amount to this and I would have no interest in a leadership role because I’ve got my business to run and I’ve got these other things going on, but then you go back to them with the right person and they’re your campaign chair, right? I’ve literally seen that in that specific instance, play out in a campaign. And so it goes to show that just because someone says yes or no in one of these conversations does not mean that’s their final answer. And, and again, some of that is in the feasibility study, the value of an outside consultant is nobody’s afraid to tell them the truth. They don’t know them, they don’t have any local affiliate e affiliation. And so they’re just talking objectively about a program of work and collecting information when you get into a campaign, what you want is the exact opposite. You want relationship, you want influence and you pair the strategy and the perspective of a consultant with someone with local relationship and influence and you go back, you can change the response that you get very readily in many cases.

[00:45:16.28] spk_0:
So I’m not so naive. I mean, it’s, it’s possible to resurrect even the guy who says,

[00:45:24.89] spk_2:
but he

[00:46:56.46] spk_0:
held firm. But I would try if I was the CEO I would try and then if he’s not gonna meet me or, you know, he’s dismissive of the, you know, then of course, you can’t go any further. I’m not suggesting go any further, but it’s worth a try. I think, you know, I’m of the mind that if he didn’t care, I know we’re pulling on this one thread, but you picked a very valuable, that’s a really valuable outlier in your experience. He did care enough to tell you why he didn’t. He didn’t just do the things that you suggested would have been much easier, ignored the phone call, ignore the email just, you know, and then, and just blow the whole thing off. He did take the time to tell the organization that they messed up the relationship with him in so many, in so many words. So my belief is if people are willing to tell you that you’ve messed up, they, they still love you just not as much as they did when they made the five year pledge from the previous campaign. They don’t love you as much, but they do still have an affinity. They want you to know that you screwed it up. So, I, I see some, I see some potential but, and you’re saying I’m not 100% naive and at least trying to explore it. I’m optimistic. I have a glass is half full. What else can you tell us about the mechanics of, you’ve got these 55 to 65 interviews? You said you don’t do them over like three weeks. Obviously, you need some time to prepare your report. Do all you have multiple, I guess you have multiple interviewers, then how do you, how do you sort of coalesced the opinions of multiple interviewers?

[00:49:13.19] spk_2:
Yeah. So we’ve got some data collection and analysis tools that we use internally, uh that we come out from a couple of angles. So typically we would have one dedicated consultant who is running through the entire feasibility study process. And in a lot of cases, another of our senior team members is going to come on site for 23 days to, to join some interviews. What we want is a couple of different set of eyes on things. Um And then we come back out of those are our team member who’s been face to face with. Folks is telling us sort of the, the nuance of I heard these trends in conversation and these things don’t bear out in the numbers which are readily evolving day by day as we complete interviews. So we’re watching those trends as things move forward. But we’re able to say this, this number ticks here, but there’s, there’s a fact over here that’s meaningful, that’s not going to show up in the numbers. And so are are on the ground. Consultant is looking at that then a member of our client services leadership team is just blinders on looking at the data, right? Did we see a high enough level of interest in filling a leadership role? If we didn’t, we know there’s a hurdle, we’re gonna have to address do the completely objective numbers of a number of potential high level investors. We say investors, not donors. Now does the number of potential high level prospects match with what we would want to see to know that we could go out there and you know the 300 Hall of Fame batting average and still have a suitable pool of lead investments. Uh Do the numbers of financial indications match up to what history has shown us, we need to see to validate the campaign goal. And then we come together as a team internally and compare all of those things and triangulate in on the positive factors, the challenging factors, we identify what we call X factors that are outside variables that no one could control. But we heard enough about this that if X Y and Z bro this direction, it could have an adverse impact on the campaign. And again, we can’t do anything about it, but we need to always be aware of it so that we’re not surprised if something happens to shift, whether that’s local economy. I mean, who knows what those things could be? But they pretty often will reveal themselves through our interviews

[00:49:38.54] spk_0:
and then it’s a delivery to the, to the board. I don’t know, do the board leaders get an advanced copy of the report and then it’s a delivery to the full board or everybody gets it released to them at the same time, how does, what’s the best way there?

[00:51:14.32] spk_2:
So generally, within about a week of completing our interviews, we’re going to jump on a call with the executive and maybe executive team for our client by depending on their preference and share our preliminary find. So this is yes, we believe a campaign is feasible or not. Here’s the goal amount that we believe is uh is feasible low to high range and here or any other unique variables that we want to get planted in your mind so that you can think through how would be best to present those to your board and other key leaders. That meeting is typically about three weeks or so after we complete the interviews, because it does take us a couple of 2, 2.5 weeks to get that report together and polished up and presentable. And then we would send it to our client executive and give them discretion as to how they would want to distribute it in some cases. They just want to share an executive summary. And so we’ve got that ready in others. They want us to present and then they want to share the report. So we’re pretty flexible on that. And that’s really because every organization is different. And so we don’t, that’s one of those spots that we don’t try to prescribe. You’ve got to send the whole report to the whole board before some boards would read it and then check out of the conversation in person. And you know, there’s all kinds of variables out there that we don’t try to over prescribe a method for, for how we would present. But we would step in and show them the details of the findings. Give them some of the candid feedback at a again aggregate level and share whatever our recommendations would be for next steps.

[00:51:34.26] spk_0:
That’s, that’s a feasibility study. And then they’ve got their 9200 and 20 days to make a decision.

[00:51:52.56] spk_2:
Yeah. And most of the time it’s uh it’s, there’s a campaign or follow on work, I should say most of the time, it’s a much quicker transition. We had a client recently that um it’s sort of still in this process. So, but they had a very specific piece of X factor outside variable that needed to have a clear decision before they would be well positioned to move into a campaign that happened to involve some public sector decisions that has played out over the course of about nine months. And it looks like now they’re gonna be ready to move towards that campaign.

[00:52:14.87] spk_0:
Okay. But now they’re now they’re nine months past the feasibility study. So there might need to be some follow up interviews.

[00:52:17.27] spk_2:
That’s right. We’ll schedule over the first month or so of the campaign. A handful of those re interviews, just rechecking bearings knowing that there’s no new surprises that may have crept up or identifying any new surprises and course correcting for how we would want to navigate those moving

[00:52:53.73] spk_0:
forward. You had mentioned foundations as interviewees, foundation staff are willing to, to take these kinds of meetings and make a broad, I mean, they can’t commit, they can’t commit because every decision is a decision of the board. But foundation staff or I guess it’s a program staff are willing to take this

[00:53:47.41] spk_2:
in varying cases. And so you hit a very specific point that we always monitor when there are foundations on our interview list is 99% of the time that foundation staff person is gonna say a grant is a decision of the board. Our grant guidelines are on the internet or invitation only or whatever the variables. But we typically can be pretty strategic in using an interview if we get it as a cultivation approach. So less of a tell us what the foundation would do and more of a, how would we best position this for success? Given your focus areas as a foundation and would your foundation rather lead the way and help us get out of the starting block strong or put us over the goal line at the other end of the campaign? And as you probably know very well, there are foundations that have very specific spots that they want to play in that process. And we need to know that in a campaign so that we’re not starting out thanking on a meaningful grant from a foundation when that foundation’s board would rather be making that grant. You know, when we’re 80 90% of the way to the goal already.

[00:54:31.92] spk_0:
And, and it could be a funder that’s funded the nonprofit in the past, they’re still not gonna commit to something they’re still going to defer to their board. But uh they, you can deepen the relationship in, in that case. Okay. All right, Brian, why don’t you just leave us with a little uh a little motivation about feasibility studies.

[00:56:15.09] spk_2:
The important thing with a feasibility study is I would say is getting it right. It’s not one of those things that you want to rush through, I would say to a non profit, it’s not something you really want to do on your own because you’re gonna miss some of that objective third party perspective. And that is such a valuable due diligence, a campaign, a capital campaign of a large scale and we’re typically testing multimillion dollar projects. It’s not one of those things that you want to risk swinging and missing. Uh knowing exactly what is out there in terms of the fund, ability of a plan, the amount of funding that’s there. You can save a lot of relational equity and as we talked about before credibility for an organization. So like I said, we will do feasibility studies where there is no interest in our doing a campaign uh and, and offer that perspective in that guidance. But it also we’re an organization recognizes, they don’t have the capacity for a campaign in terms of their internal staff is a just invaluable first step of counting the cost before you don’t go out and start to build that tower. So we’re no surprise big proponents of feasibility studies. We’ve talked a lot internally. Is there uh is there a way to get the same information out of a different process? This is one of those things we’ve tried every thought of innovation and how, how could we move faster? But the reality is from our experience, there is just not a better way to get the level of intelligence that a feasibility study provides and then be able to go into a capital campaign from a position of

[00:56:51.64] spk_0:
success. And plus there’s that relational foundation. Yeah, that, that, that’s so much that’s so much value to it as Well, building that building that relationship. All right. Thank you, Brian. Brian Abernathy, General Manager at Convergent non profit Solutions. The company is at Convergent non profit dot com and you’ll find Brian on linkedin. Brian. Thank you very much. Thanks so much, tony. My pleasure. Thanks for sharing next week, data driven storytelling with Julia Campbell. If you missed any part of this week’s show, I beseech you find it at tony-martignetti dot com.

[00:57:17.04] spk_1:
We’re sponsored by Donor box with intuitive fundraising software from donor box. Your donors give four times faster, helping you help others. Donor box dot org. Our creative producer

[00:57:37.14] spk_0:
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 be with me next week for nonprofit radio. Big non profit ideas for the other 95% go out and be great.

Nonprofit Radio for December 20, 2021: Zombie Loyalists

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Peter Shankman: Zombie Loyalists

Peter Shankman is a 5x best selling author, entrepreneur and corporate keynote speaker. His book “Zombie Loyalists” focuses on customer service; creating rabid fans who do your social media, marketing and PR for you. This is our annual rebroadcast of a show with very smart ideas for you to think about over the holidays. It originally aired 12/19/14.

 

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[00:00:04.14] spk_3:
Hello

[00:00:52.94] spk_2:
And welcome to Tony-Martignetti non profit radio big nonprofit ideas for the other 95%. I’m your aptly named host of your favorite abdominal podcast. Oh, I’m glad you’re with me. I’d suffer the embarrassment of Brome Hydro sis if I had to walk through the idea that you missed this week’s show. Zombie Loyalists. Peter Shankman is a five time best selling author, entrepreneur and corporate keynote speaker. His book, Zombie Loyalists, focuses on customer service, creating rabid fans who do your social media marketing and PR for you. This is our annual rebroadcast of a show with very smart ideas

[00:00:57.71] spk_1:
for you to think about

[00:01:19.84] spk_2:
over the holidays. It originally aired December 19, Antonis, Take two Thank you for the year We’re sponsored by turn to communications, PR and content for nonprofits, your story is their mission. Turn hyphen two dot c o. Here is a zombie loyalists.

[00:02:41.54] spk_1:
Peter Shankman is a well known and often quoted social media marketing and public relations strategist. His latest book is Zombie Loyalists. He wants you to create rabid fans who do your social media marketing and PR for you. He’s got super ideas and very valuable stories. I’m very glad Peter Shankman is with me in the studio. He is the founder of Haro. Help, a reporter out connecting journalists with sources in under two years from starting it in his apartment. Horror was sending out 1500 media queries a week to more than 200,000 sources worldwide. It was acquired by Vocus in 2010. He’s the founder and CEO of the Geek Factory, a boutique social media, marketing and PR strategy firm in New York City. Peter is on NASA’s civilian Advisory Council. You’ll find him at Shanklin dot com, and he’s at Peter Shankman on Twitter. His latest book is Zombie Loyalists, using great service to create rabid fans. I’m very glad his book brings him to nonprofit radio and the studio Welcome, Peter. Good to be here, honey. Thanks Pleasure. You, um, live on the West Side of Manhattan And you and you. There’s a there’s a pretty well known five star steakhouse. I’ll get Wolfgang’s not far from you,

[00:02:44.54] spk_0:
but you pass

[00:02:45.28] spk_1:
it to go to a different steakhouse. Correct? Morton’s correct. Why is that?

[00:04:33.94] spk_0:
I am a zombie loyalist to Morton’s. What does that mean? I, uh love the service, the attention to detail, the quality, the the sort of where everyone knows my name mentality. When I walk into that Morton’s or any Morton’s around the world, they have a tremendous, uh, customer relationship management system. When I call one number, uh, in New York or anywhere in the world, it they know who I am by my cell phone. And, uh, I’m treated with just, you know, phenomenal, uh, happiness to to hear from me and my wishes are granted as it were. I we have a happy hour holiday party coming up at Morton’s next couple of days. And, you know, as always, I forgot to call and make a reservation. And, you know, I called yesterday and said, Hey, I need a, uh, she has to get a reservation for seven people. Um, you know, Thursday night at seven p.m. Which is, you know, the week of the holiday party, and, uh, they looked and they said, Oh, well, and then I guess their computer system kicked in. Of course, Mr Shank, not a problem at all. We’ll get the frame and we you know we’ll have. We’ll have a great booth for you that, um, you know, and we’ll we’ll tell us the names of people attending and, you know, you know, you know, they’re gonna have specialized menus for them and their names on they Really, they have a really high level of service that they provide, not just to me. That’s the beauty of it. You know, it’s one thing, everybody. Yeah, it’s one thing that they just provided to me, but they do that for everyone. And that is huge because, you know, being able to call when a normal person makes reservation. And not that I’m special. I’m actually rather abnormal. But when a normal person makes a reservation and says, Uh, no, Martin says. Okay, great. Are you celebrating anything? So, yeah, it’s my wife’s birthday that’s always asked to anyone who calls. I said, Oh, you know what? It’s my wife’s birthday. Great. What’s her name? And her name is Megan. Whatever. And you go in and they and you sit down on the on the on the menu. It says, Happy birthday, Make it. And then Megan, whoever she happens to be, we’ll spend the next 45 minutes, you know, taking 50 selfies with her menu and and that will go online. And when her friends, you know, want that same experience, they’re going to go Morton’s,

[00:05:04.54] spk_1:
you say, uh, in in the book, you get the customers you want by being beyond awesome to the customers you have. And that’s why I wanted to start with that Morton story, which is in the middle of the book. But they do it for everybody, and then they have the V. I. P. S as well. And there’s the terrific story of you tweeting tell that story. That’s a good story. It’s

[00:07:24.54] spk_0:
a good story. I love stories. I was flying home from a day trip to Florida and was exhausted and starving, and they trip meeting you’re flying down and slow down at six a.m. At a lunch meeting, flew back the same day. You know, one of those one of those days, and I jokingly said, the tweet Hey, Morton’s, why don’t you meet me at Newark Airport when I land with a porterhouse in two hours? Ha ha ha ha ha. Um, you know, I said it the same way you’d say, Hey, winter, please stop snowing. Things like that and I landed. Uh, find my driver and sit next to my driver is a, uh is a waiter in a tuxedo with the Mortons bag. They saw my tweet. They put it together. They managed to bring me a, uh, a steak and, you know, as great of a story as it is, it’s that’s that’s it’s a great stunt and it’s a great story and it wasn’t stage, and it was completely amazing. But, you know, that’s not what they’re about. They’re not about delivering states airports. They’re about making a great meal for you and treating you like world when you come in. And you know, if they just did that, if they just delivered the state of the airport, but their quality and service sucked, you know, it wouldn’t be a story because, you know, you know what they did for Peter. But, you know, my steak is cold. So what it really comes down to is the fact they do treat everyone like kings. And that’s that’s really, really important, because what ends up happening, you have a great experience importance. And then you tell the world you know Oh, yeah, Great dinner last night. that was amazing. I would totally eat there again. And as we move to this new world where you know, review sites are going away and I don’t I don’t need to go to yelp reviews from people I don’t know. You know, if they’re shills or whatever the case may be, I don’t know. Or trip Advisor. Same thing. I want people in my network quite trust and and people in their network who they trust by default, I trust. So that’s gonna be that’s already happening automatically. You know, when I when I land in L. A and I type in steakhouse, uh, you know, not me. I know, I know where the steak house in l. A. But if someone types into Google Maps or Facebook Steak House in Los Angeles, you know they’ll see all the steak houses on Google map. But if any of their friends have been to any of them, they’ll see those first. And if they had a good experience, only if the sentiment is positive. Well, they see those first. And that’s pretty amazing, because if you think about that, the simple act of tweeting out of photo Oh, my God. thanks so much. Martin’s love this. That’s positive sentiment. The network knows that. And so if you’re looking for a steakhouse, you know, and your friend six months ago, I had that experience. Oh, my God. Amazing state. This is a great place. There’s a the sentiment’s gonna be there. And and And the network will know that network will show you that steakhouse because you trust your friend.

[00:07:25.84] spk_1:
And this is where we start to cultivate zombie loyalists. Exactly. Through this awesome customer service of the customers, you you have to say more about

[00:08:22.64] spk_0:
zombie. I mean, you have so many companies out there who are trying to get the next greatest customer. You know, you see all the ads, you know, the Facebook post. You know, We’re at 990 followers are 10 are 1000. Follower gets a free gift. Well, that’s kind of saying screw you to the original 990 followers who you had who were there since the beginning. We don’t care about you. We want that 1000 you know, that’s not cool. Um, the the the companies who see their numbers rise and you see their fans increase and their their, um um revenues go up are the ones who are nice to the customers they have. Hey, you know, customer 8 52. It was really nice of you to join us a couple months ago. How? You know, how are you? We noticed that you posted on something about a you know, your car broke down. Well, you know, we’re not in the car business, but, you know, your your two blocks from our our closest outlet or whatever. And you know, if you if you need to come in, have a cup of coffee when I use the phone, Whatever. You know, those little things that you can do that that that really focus on the customers you have and make the customers. You have the ones who are the zombies who tell other customers how great you

[00:08:35.54] spk_1:
are. And this all applies to non profits, certainly as well in

[00:09:12.94] spk_0:
the system. But even more so, I mean, if you you know, non profits are constantly worried about how to how to make the most value out of their dollar and how to keep the dollar stretching further and further, and you know you have this massive audience who has come to you, who is a non profit? Who said to You know, we want to help here we are volunteering our help and just simply treating them with the thanks that they deserve, not just as simple. Hey, thanks for joining us, but actually reaching out, asking what they want, asking how they like to get their information. Things like that will greatly increase your donations as well as, um, making them go out and tell everyone how awesome you are and letting them do your PR for you. And

[00:09:17.22] spk_1:
that’s what a zombie loyalist does. And this is for this. Could be donors could be volunteers organization who aren’t able to give a lot. But giving time is enormous.

[00:09:25.27] spk_0:
And if you know if they have such a great time doing it, they’ll bring friends

[00:09:29.84] spk_1:
as zombies.

[00:09:49.84] spk_0:
Do you know zombies have one purpose in life? A. Real zombies have one purpose in life that’s to feed. It doesn’t matter. How the Mets are doing it doesn’t matter, you know, because chance that they lost anyway. But it doesn’t matter how, how anyone is doing, you know, or what’s going on in the world and any kind of bad. It doesn’t matter what matters with zombies. Where are they gonna get their next meal? Because they feed and they have to infect more people. Otherwise they will die zombie loyalists to the same thing. All they have to do is make sure that their customer, they tell the world, and we all have that friend who does it. You know that one friend who eats nothing but the olive garden because oh my God’s greatest breadsticks everywhere, you know and they will drag your ask the olive garden every single time they get that chance. That’s a zombie loyalist,

[00:10:04.75] spk_1:
and you want them to do that for your nonprofit, and there’s a big advantage to being a smaller, smaller organization. You could be so much more high touch, and we’re gonna talk about all that. We got the full hour with Peter Shankman. Gotta go away for a couple of minutes, stay with us.

[00:10:35.54] spk_2:
It’s time for a break. Turn to communications. You’re 2022 writing. Do you have time to do all the projects that you need to do? Like social posts and blog posts, newsletters and annual report Web updates board reports, fundraising appeals and acknowledgment messages. What about your staff Communications? What about your process? Documentation? What about training and on boarding documents?

[00:10:51.74] spk_1:
Do you need help with writing

[00:10:53.52] spk_2:
In 2022?

[00:10:55.64] spk_1:
I mean, you can talk to them about

[00:11:24.24] spk_2:
2023, but that seems premature. But if you need help in 2022, with all your projects talk to turn to, they can create the content for you. They’ll get to know your tone and your messaging. They’ll create in your voice, turn to communications. Your story is their mission. Turn hyphen two dot c o. Now back to zombie loyalists.

[00:11:27.44] spk_1:
Peter, it doesn’t take much to stand out in the customer service world, does it?

[00:11:52.24] spk_0:
It really doesn’t, you know. And the reason for that is because we expect to be treated like crap. You know, if you think that I I I love this example. Whenever I give speeches, I asked, I asked everyone the audience I’m like who here has had a great flight recently, Like at least one person raised their hand. I’m like, Okay, what made it great and without fail. And I said, Well, we took off on time and I had the seat I was assigned and we landed on time. And so you paid for a service. They delivered that service and you’re over the freaking moon about it. Like that’s the state that we’ve become. You know, that’s how bad customer service has been that you are just beyond thrilled that they did exactly what they said they were gonna do it. Nothing more.

[00:12:05.51] spk_1:
Less than 20 minutes in the post office line.

[00:12:24.44] spk_0:
And I’m ecstatic Exactly. You know, it’s so we really are at a point where we only have to be one level above crap. I’m not even asking my client to be good. Just one level of crap. You know, if everyone else’s crap and you’re one level above that, you’re gonna win. It’s my favorite. One of my favorite jokes. Um, the two guys are out in the woods hunting in the woods and or just jogging and was the first one sees a bear and they see these bearings bears raised and he’s about to strike. And the first one reaches down and tightens up his laces on his running shoes and see what the studios don’t be. Don’t be. Don’t be an idiot. You can’t outrun a bear because I don’t need to. I just need to outrun you. You know, I love that joke because it’s it’s so true. That’s the concept. You know, all you have to do is be just a little bit better than everyone else and you’ll win the whole ballgame.

[00:12:50.14] spk_1:
Now we have to set some things up internally in order to have the structure in place to create these The zombie loyalists.

[00:16:14.14] spk_0:
Yeah. I mean, you have a you have a company where the majority of people in your company are afraid to do anything outside the norm, you know? I mean, look at look at the cell phone company. You know, they call them cause you have a problem, right? 18 T or T mobile. You call them, you have a problem. They are actually the customer service people to handle your caller, actually judged and rewarded based on how quickly they can get you off the phone. You know, not on whether or not they fix your problem, but how fast they can get you off the phone. Which means how many more? Cause I remember I worked when I worked in America Online. We all had to do a day of customer service every month just to see what it was like. That was a brilliant idea. But, you know, again, it was a system called Vantive, where you’d sign on and as soon as you signed on, if you want to call, you know, that was tacked against you. And if you were in a call and and it went over a certain amount of time, that was tacked against you, So the decks were stacked Not in the favor of the customer. There are some companies out there who allow their customer service employees to simply be smarter about what they do and do whatever it is they need to do to fix the problem. Um, you know, my favorite story about this Verizon, uh, wireless. I went overseas as in Dubai, and I landed to buy and I turned on my phone. I had gotten global roaming on my phone, Which, you know, $20 for every 100 megabytes. Okay, so I land and I turn on my phone and it says, um, like before I’m even off the plane. I get a text that you’ve used $200 in roaming charges on what the hell you know, $300 by the time I get off the plane. Like something’s up here. So I called Verizon and a nice guy answer the phone and Oh, yeah. I mean, you know, the first thing that was Yes. So you do have global roaming, but it doesn’t work in Dubai, I’m like, Okay, well, that’s not really global. That’s more hemispherical. Roaming, I think is the issue. And so the, uh I said, Well, look, I’m gonna be here for a week. I said, you know what? You have my credit card on file build me like I don’t know. Can you give me, like, 1000 bucks and just let me have the phone for, like, the week? And you know, daddy, you know, 500 bucks, I won’t go over two gigs. Would just do something for me. Sorry, sir. I’m not authorized to do that. Um, you can. I’m like, So what do I have? He’s like, Well, you can pay $20.48 a megabyte. I’m like, I’m sorry. Seriously, which equates essentially two. I will be charged $20.48 seconds, $20 or 48 cents for every I think at the time was for every four seconds of the video Gangnam style, if I decided to watch on my phone Like this is pretty ridiculous. So I simply hung up, hung up on Verizon. I went down the street to do by the mall of the Emirates, which is the largest mall in the world, has a freaking ski slope in it. And I’m not joking. It has a ski slope in the small and, uh, went to one of the 86 different electronic stores in this mall. Uh, but an international unlocked version of the same exact cell phone I have went next door to the local SIM card store, bought a SIM card that gave me 20 gigabytes of data and 1000 minutes of talk for $40. I then put that in my phone because it’s an android phone. I simply typed in my user name and password for Google and everything imported, and Verizon did not get a penny on that trip. Um, how easy would have been for Verizon to say Okay, you know what? We’ll cut your brake uh, they still make a lot of money off me. And I would tell the world how great Verizon was to work with and how wonderful, how helpful they were. Instead, They guaranteed that I will never they will never make a penny for me on any international trip. And I take, what, 15 of them a year. Because now my cell phone, um, my international cell phone that I bought all I do is pop out the SIM card in my land. Wherever I am, put in a new SIM card. So

[00:16:14.85] spk_1:
and you’re speaking and writing and telling bad

[00:17:32.54] spk_0:
stories, Of course. And and every time I tell the story about Verizon, I make it a little worse. Apparently, Verizon, uh, tests out the durability of their phone by throwing them kittens. I read this on the Internet Must be true, but, you know, not necessarily. But you know, the concept that that all they had to do, all they had to do was in power mark customers. And it wasn’t Mark’s phone. Mark was a really nice guy, but he was not allowed to do that. He would get fired if he tried to do a deal like that for me. And so it’s this concept, you know. And the funny thing is, it comes down to if you really want to go down the road. In terms of a public company like Verizon of where the issue is, you can even trace it to fiduciary responsibility because the fiduciary responsibility of any company CEO all the way down to the employee is to make money for the shareholders. Okay, that’s the future. Responsibility means by not allowing me, they’re not allowing Mark, the customer service agent to to help me and take a different tack. He’s actually losing money. Too many CEOs think about the next quarter, so we have to make our numbers. Next quarter, I’m fired. Companies in other countries tend to think of the next quarter century, And they make a much bigger difference because they think, Okay, what can we do now that will have impact in the next 5, 10, 15 years, you know, and really implement the revenue that we have and and augment and companies Americans don’t think about that, and that’s a big problem. I

[00:17:39.24] spk_1:
buy a product line, uh, has a lot of natural and recycled materials its seventh generation and their, um, their tagline is that in in our every decision, we must consider the impact on the next seven generations. It comes from an American Indian.

[00:17:48.98] spk_0:
It’s a great it’s a great line. I mean, just think about how much money Verizon would have made for me in the past three years. Just just in my overseas, you’d be telling

[00:17:55.71] spk_1:
a story about like them about Martin’s like the one of Morton’s

[00:18:19.64] spk_0:
look, a lot of people listen to me and they for a time when you Googled roaming charges variety When you Google Verizon roaming charges. My story about how I saved all this money came up first because I did the math. And if I had not called Mark and bought my own self on and done this, I would have come home with $31,000 cell phone bill and your damn of what I’m gonna do anything about that would be like up Too bad. Sorry should read the fine print

[00:18:23.91] spk_1:
and plus the the employee who sold you the quote international

[00:18:27.56] spk_0:
plan, right?

[00:18:28.53] spk_1:
I’m sure you told her,

[00:18:29.93] spk_0:
she said, where we’re going, I’m going to Canada and I’m going to Dubai. I’m assuming she didn’t know where to buy, was she? Probably. It was near Canada, but, uh, yeah, Long story short, I couldn’t use it.

[00:18:40.14] spk_1:
All right. So employees have to be empowered. There has to be. We have to be changing a thinking too. I mean, the customer has to come first. The donor of the volunteer

[00:20:41.74] spk_0:
Don’t volunteer. You get at the end of the day, where is your money coming from? I don’t care if your nonprofit or Fortune 100, where’s the money coming from? You know, and if you we see it happening over and over again, we’re seeing what you’re seeing right now. Play out every single day with the company uber, um, and uber. It’s so funny because uber makes, uh, you know, they’re valued at $40 billion right now, but that doesn’t mean anything that doesn’t mean anything. If people are running away in droves, which people are, there’s a whole delete your uber app movement. People are God’s people are leaving. What’s the problem? Well, it’s several number one. That uber is run by a bunch of guys who honor the bro code. The company was actually started by a guy who, in on business in business insider, said he started the company to get laid. Um, his goal was to always have a black car When he was leaving a restaurant, uh, to impress the girl he was with that he came out and said that And you see that culture run rampant throughout uber, um, from their God mode, where they can see they actually created. It was, uh I don’t know where I read this business insider as well. It was They created a hookup page that showed or or or or walk of Shame Page that showed where, uh, women were leaving certain apartments like on weekends going, leaving certain place on weekends, going back to their home. Um, it was obvious that they, you know, met some guy like they did that. And then, of course, just their whole surge pricing mentality, which is, you know, two days ago there was a couple days ago. It was a the terrorists of the figures, a terrorist attack in Sydney at that at that bakery and Sydney, uh, uber and Sydney instituted surge pricing for people trying to get out of harm’s way. You know, and and they later refund it. Always a computer glitch. You know, I’m sorry. You have a stop button. And you can when you see something happening like that, this has to be someone in the office, because you know what? Not cool. We’re going to take care of that and and hit the stop button. And it was Yeah, bad tons and tons and tons of bad publicity. You know, I was having an argument with one of my facebook page facebook dot com slash peter Shankman Because they said, Oh, you know, um, so what? They don’t they don’t turn on surge pricing, don’t have enough cabs there, and, you know, people can’t get home. I said I’m pretty sure that the only I’m sure that no one had cab companies there. I’m sure that there wasn’t anyone who had enough cars, their private cabs, ubers, whatever. Yet the only stories I read about companies screwing up during the event where uber not Joe’s Sydney cab company. You know, I didn’t see him screwing up because he didn’t turn on surge pricing. You gotta You gotta respect your customer. You have to,

[00:21:07.34] spk_1:
As we’re training for that then not only, uh, trying to change their mind shift. Well, in in trying to change that mindset rewards for for customers, for employees that do go, do go the

[00:22:11.74] spk_0:
extra mile. Well, first of all, if you give the employees the ability to do it to go the extra mile and I understand they won’t get fired, you’re not gonna get into. I always tell every one of my employees you’re never gonna get in trouble for spending a little extra money to try and keep a customer happy. You’ll get fired for not doing it. You know, you get fired for, not for seeing an opportunity to fix someone and not taking not doing everything that you could. You know? Ritz Carlton is famous for that. Ritz Carlton hires people not because whether they can fold a bedsheet but for how well they understand people. Because in Rich Collins mind, it’s much more important to be A people person and be able to be empathetic. And that is such a key word. Empathy is just so sorely lacking. You know how many have called customer service? Yeah, you know, I have to have to change my flight. My my my aunt just died. I really need to 100. Okay, great. That’s $300. I just want to go an hour earlier. You know, you show up at the airport, your bag is overweight by half a pound. $75. I just Can you Can you just cut me some slack? Nope. So empathy and giving the custom, giving the employee the ability to understand that the customer that sometimes you can make exceptions and it is okay to make changes.

[00:22:18.91] spk_1:
And this is where a smaller organization has huge

[00:22:33.84] spk_0:
advantage. It’s easier to change. That’s what kills me. You know, I go to these. I try to frequent small businesses when I can I go to some of these small businesses and they won’t they act like large businesses, you know, in the respect that they don’t have a like they

[00:22:35.45] spk_1:
want to be respected. Almost. They

[00:23:14.14] spk_0:
Don’t have, like, a 66,000 page code that they have to adhere to. They can simply, uh, do something on the fly. And yet, for whatever reason, they won’t do it. And and it’s the most frustrating things. Like guys, you’re acting like a big you’re acting like Mega Lo Mart here, you know, And you’re not Mega Lo Mart, and you’re just Joe’s house of stationary, whatever it is and you know, Not be able to help me. You’re pretty much killing yourself because you don’t have 85 billion customers that come through the door after me, you know? But I have a pretty big network, and for small business to get killed socially, as social becomes more and more how we communicate, you know, it’s just craziness.

[00:23:23.64] spk_1:
It’s, you know, we’re pretty much in the world. I think we’re something almost hasn’t happened to you unless unless you share it.

[00:25:44.34] spk_0:
I joked that, you know, if I can take a selfie. Was I really there? Um but it’s true, you know, we we do live in a world where, you know, I remember God 10 years ago. Maybe not even not even 10 years ago. I was one of the first people to have a phone in my camera you know, and it was like drinking from that’s what I said. Yeah, I can’t find my phone right. And it was like a I think it’s a 0.8 megapixel, you know, it looked like I was taking a picture with a potato. But it was, um it was this. I remember it was 2000 and two, and I was in Chase Bank and there was a woman arguing with the teller, and I pulled out my video. You know, it was it was the crappiest video you’ve ever seen. But I pulled it out and I said, You know, uh, I started recording, and the woman behind the woman behind the counter was the woman behind the counter was talking to the customers, saying, You do not speak to me that way. You get out of this bank right now and the customers saying, I just wanted my balance, and you and the manager comes over and get this whole thing on my little crappy three g Motorola phone phone. And I remember I posted online, and Gawker picks it up. I gave my email. You know, my headline I put on my blog was, you know, chase where the relationship is that Go after yourself, you know? And it was It just got tons of play. And then Gawker picked it up. It went everywhere. Totally viral. So it’s one of those things here, just like, you know, this was in 2000 and two. It’s 12 years later. How the hell can you assume that nothing is being that you’re not being recorded? You know, I I remember blowing I sneezed a couple weeks ago and, uh ah, not to get too graphic here, but I needed a tissue big time after I was done, anything. I remember going through my pockets looking for desperate, looking for tissue and looking around making sure I wasn’t on camera somewhere that someone didn’t grab that. Give me the next viral sensation, you know? I mean, I went God, I went to high school with eight blocks from here, right? If the amount of cameras that are in Lincoln Center today Were there in 1919, 90 be having this conversation entirely, I’d be having this conversation behind bulletproof himself. And, um, yeah, so you know, you’d be you’d be talking to You have to get special clearance to visit me, probably at the Supermax in Colorado. So, you know, it’s it’s one of those things that you’re just like my kid, who’s who’s almost two years old now is going to grow up with absolutely no expectation of privacy the same way that we grew up with an expectation of privacy. And I’m thankful for that because she will make a lot less stupid moves. You know? I mean, God, the things that I thought, you know, in, in, in, in high school I thought the stupidest in the world. Thank God there wasn’t a way for me to broadcast that to the world in real time. Jeez, thank God

[00:25:59.64] spk_1:
creating these zombie loyalists. And we’ve got to change some. We’ve got to change culture and thinking and reward systems. Let’s go back to the cost of all this. Why is this a better investment than trying to just focus on new donors?

[00:27:20.74] spk_0:
I love I love this analogy and I’ll give you a fun analogy. Let’s look at a bar and there’s a very cute girl across the across the park and she catches my eye catcher. I go up to her go. You know you don’t know me. I am amazing in bed. You should finish your drink right now. Come home. Let’s get it on. I’m gonna impress. I’m that good chance that she’s gonna throw a drink in my face. Go back talking to her friends. I’ve done a lot of research on this. That’s probably understand. Now let’s assume let’s assume an alternate world. I’m sitting there on my phone. I’m just playing like, you know, some words with friends like that. And, uh, she’s over there talking to her friends, one of her friends. Holy crap. That’s Peter. I think that’s Peter Shankman. I’ve heard him speak. He’s in this fantasy world. I’m single, too. He’s I think he’s single and he’s having this amazing guy. I know he has a cat you have. You should totally go talk to him. At the very least, I’m getting this girl’s number. That’s PR. Okay. And what do we trust? More me with my, you know, fancy suit collar Going over the seventies, leaders did. Hi, I’m amazing. Or the girl saying, Hey, we’ve been friends since third grade. I’m recommending that guy. You should trust me on this, You know, obviously that that’s where, uh, good customer service comes into play. And that’s where corporate culture comes into play. Because if I have a great experience with you and at your company, I’m going to tell my friend when they’re looking and I will stake my personal reputation on it. And there’s nothing stronger than that.

[00:27:26.19] spk_1:
And these are the people who want to breed

[00:27:27.55] spk_0:
as it’s stronger than advertising stronger the marketing

[00:27:30.74] spk_1:
and they’re gonna share. People

[00:27:55.94] spk_0:
want to share that. I think about the Internet runs on two things. It runs on drama, drama and bragging or bragging and drama. And if you if you need any proof of that, you know, go and look at all the hashtags with crap that’s happened, you know, bad customer service, bad, whatever. But then look at all the good Hashtags. You know, when our flight’s delayed for three hours and we lose our seat. Oh my God, I hate this airline. Worst airline ever. But when we get upgraded right hashtag first class bitches or whatever it is, you know something stupid like that and the whole because we love to share. It’s only a great experience if we can tell the world, and it’s only a bad experience if we can make everyone else miserable about it as well.

[00:28:54.94] spk_2:
It’s time for Tony’s take two Thank you for the year. It’s been another the second in a row up and down years. But you can count on nonprofit radio, and I know I can count on you are consistent, loyal podcast listeners year after year or some of you. Some of you knew this year. Welcome. Whether you knew this year whether you’ve been with us for a long time. I mean, this is show # 570. So, have you been with us 570 shows? Um, that’s a long time that I’ve been here. I’ve been here 570, however long. Thank you. Thanks for being with us. Yeah. And up and down year yet again. But, you know, you can count on nonprofit radio,

[00:29:00.74] spk_1:
and I know I can count on you.

[00:29:31.84] spk_2:
That’s the That’s the bargain. So thank you. Thanks for the year. We’re gonna be off next week and then and then back in early January. Thanks very much. So glad to have you with me. That is, tony. Stick to We’ve got Boo Koo, but loads more time for the classic zombie loyalists.

[00:29:41.34] spk_1:
Peter, you have a golden rule of social media that that a good number of customers like to share and people are going to keep doing it.

[00:31:15.14] spk_0:
People will always share again. It goes back to the concept that if you create great stuff, people want to share it because people like to be associated with good things. If you create bad stuff and buy stuff, I can meet, I mean anything from a bad experience. Too bad content. People not only won’t share that, but we go out of their way to tell people how terrible you are. Um, you know, how many times have you seen companies fail horribly? Uh, you know, after major disasters when companies are tweeting, um, you know, completely unrelated things after after a random school shooting? Uh, no. It was after the shooting at the theater in Aurora, Colorado at the Dark Knight. Um, the NRA tweets. Hey, shooters, what’s your plans for this weekend? You know, and I’m just going, really, you know, but And of course, the thing was, the thing was retweeted millions of times, you know, with the sort of shame on the NRA. So we we’re a society. Like I said earlier, that loves to share when when great things happen to us, but loves to tell the world when we’re miserable, because we’re only truly miserable. We make everyone else miserable right now, Um, it’s funny you mentioned, uh, generosity series, Uh, the one of my favorite stories, which goes to sort of a bigger picture of culture. And, um, somehow when you’re just doing your job because that’s what you’re supposed to do your job. But you don’t realize there are ways to get around that. I I listened to your podcast, among others, when I’m running through Central Park, Um, and more like, if you know, my body type more like lumbering through Central Park. But I get there. I’m an iron man. I have, I have that. And so I go through Central Park and it’s super early in the morning cause I usually have meetings and I don’t run fast. Um, I run like I really don’t run fast, but But as I’m running, But

[00:31:24.23] spk_1:
let’s give you the credit. You have done a bunch of iron man. I have try.

[00:33:28.64] spk_0:
I do. I do it, you know, my mother tells me that I just have very poor judgment in terms of what sports I should do. But, um, on the flip side. I’m also a skydiver, which is with my weight is awesome. Yeah, I fall better than anyone. Um but so I’m running through central park. Last year it was February, February of of 13 and 14 of this year and it was probably about 4. 45 in the morning because I had a an eight. AM meeting. I had to do 10 miles. So 45 in the morning, I’m running about but around 19, 79th, 80th Street on the east side, in the park and a cop pulls me over and I said, What are you doing? I look at him, you know, I’m wearing black spandex. I have a hat. It’s five degrees. I don’t like what I’m playing checkers, you know? But, you know, I’m like, I’m running and he’s like, Okay, can you stop running? I’m like, Okay, because they give the park’s closed like, No, it’s not like I’m in it. Look around. There are other people who know part does nobody else exam. I’m like, he’s like, Do you have any idea on you? I’m like, No, I’m running. He goes, What’s your name? I’m like, seriously, like I’m writing you a summons. I’m like you’re writing me a summons for exercising. I just want to clarify that you’re writing music, and sure enough, I wrote me a summons for exercising in Central Park before it opened. The charge was breaking the violating curfew. You know, I’m like I get the concept of the curfew is to keep people out after two a.m. It’s not to prevent them going in early to exercise, to be healthy. I’m like, I’m not carrying, you know, a six pack. I’m not drinking a big gulp. I’m not smoking. I’m you know, I’m doing something healthy, and you’re writing me a summons for it. Um, and I said, you know, I’m gonna have a field day with this. I said I I kind of have some fathers. There’s gonna be a lot of fun. I’m not, You know, I know you’re just doing your job, sir, even though you have the discretion not to, but Okay, so I go back home, take a picture of my ticket, I email it to a friend of mine in New York Post. You know, front page, New York Post. Next day. No running from this ticket. You know for that. Great New York Times covered it. Runner’s world covered. I mean, I went everywhere. Gawker covered it, you know? And And my whole thing was just like, Dude, you have to scratch. Look at me. You know, I’m not I’m not even going super fast, for God’s sake. I’m just I’m just trying to exercise here, you know? And of course, I went to court, and I beat it. But how much money they cost the city for me to go to court, fight this thing? You know, every employee you have to give your employees the power of discretion. The power of empathy to make their own decisions. If you go by the book, bad things will happen.

[00:33:36.14] spk_1:
And again, small shops. So much easier to do. Flat line, flat organizations.

[00:35:10.94] spk_0:
I work with a non profit um, animal rescue nonprofit. Um, a friend of mine was a skydiver and shot him out. No, I can’t, but but there’s a friend of mine was a skydiver, and she was killed in a base jump several years ago. And her husband asked to donate in her memory to this non profit. So I said, I’m a check and about three months later, I get a coffee table book in the mail. And I was living by myself at the time. I didn’t own a coffee table. It was more money to spend on my flat screen. And I remember I call I look at this coffee table book. I throw it, I throw in the corner. I look at it over the next couple of days and pisces me off. And how much How much of my donation did it cost to print? Well, and produce this book to me, And so I called them up. Well, sir, we believe most of our donors are older and probably refer to get a print version as opposed to, like digital. You know where they throw it away and like, you don’t throw digitally, but okay, um, I’m like So So you’ve asked your you’ve done surveys and you’ve asked, you know, we just assume that most of them are older. I’m like, Okay, So I opened my mouth, wound up joining the board, and I spent the next year interviewing customers, interviewing every current and past donor about how they like to get their information and shock of shocks, 94% said online. And so over the following year, we launched Facebook page, Twitter page, uh, Flickr account, YouTube, everything. Ps the following. After that, donations went up 37% in one year In that economy is right around 809. Donations went up 37% in one year, and they saved over $500,000 in printing, mailing and reproduction. Imagine going to your boss. Hey, boss. Revenues up 37%. And we saved a half million dollars. You’re gonna buy a really good beer. You know, all they had to do was listen to their audience, be relevant to the audience you have, and they will tell you what they want. We have tons

[00:35:17.89] spk_1:
of tools for segmentation. My God, you’ve got to listen to what segment that you want to. People want to

[00:37:33.83] spk_0:
be in. You know, someone? Someone asked me that they show what? What’s the best? I knew nothing about the company. What’s the best, uh, social media outlet for me to be on? Should be on Twitter should be on Facebook. I said, I’ll answer that question. If you can answer this this this question to ask you is my favorite type of cheese Gouda or the number six? Yeah, they say, I understand that’s not a real question like neither is yours. Like I can’t tell you where the best place to be your audience can. I said, Go ask your audience. Believe me, they will tell you there’s a gas station in the Midwest. Come and go. Um, I just love the name K U M and G O come and go and they’re tackling the book you can read more about. Their tagline is always something extra. I mean, come on, the jokes just write themselves, for God’s sake. But they don’t take themselves too safe. Really love that Come And just knowing the name of the company gas station. And, um, you know, I remember there in Iowa and I went to visit a friend in Iowa and I was like, You got to get a photo of me in front of come and go inside. And the beauty of this is that some of their employees actually look at their customers when they’re on their phones and the stories go. You know what do use Twitter or Facebook? And they say Oh, yeah, And they record that information and they know it. God, customers will give you so much info if you just ask them, because then they feel invested. They feel invested in your company. They feel like they that you took the time to listen to their nonprofit request for their their their questions. And they feel like they did for Harrow. Every month we have a one question Harrow survey, you know, harrowing question survey. And it was like 1000 people respond, and I spent the entire weekend emailing Everyone responded, thanking them personally took my entire weekend. But it was great, because what wound up happening is that, you know, if we took their advice and launched on Monday with the new thing, they go, Oh, my God. Howard did this. They took my advice. Well, yeah, it was your advice to 800 other people’s advice, but we took it and they’d be like, Oh, my God, this is it. And it just it just made them so much more loyal. And they tell hundreds and hundreds and hundreds of people we get I mean, there were days like there are days where I was in Temple one morning, the Garment Center synagogue and my phone. I feel my phone getting really hot in my pocket, which is not normal, and I’m starting to hurt and I look at it. It’s almost on fire. It had frozen because we were mentioned in Seth Godin’s morning blog, and at that time I was getting emails. Every time we get a new subscriber and the phone is actually frozen and was locked and and was like overheating, I take out the battery and reset the entire phone because we just got so many new like 14,000 subscribers in, like, three hours. It’s obscene. Obscene,

[00:37:35.25] spk_1:
you say. Excuse me? You say, uh, that customer service is the new advertising marketing NPR?

[00:40:23.41] spk_0:
Yeah, it really is well again. You know, if we’re moving into that world where so imagine a lava lamp and I love that. I can use this analogy. Imagine a lava lamp. Lava lamp has water, oil and heat source. Right heat source heats the oil. The oil flows through the water. It makes pretty colors. I’ve heard it looks really good when you’re high. Now I’ve heard now imagine if Crystal’s imagine if you are, uh, everyone you meet in your network, okay, is a drop of oil. The water is your network. And what is your world? Everyone you meet in your network from from the guy you’re sitting doing the radio interview with to the guy who serves you ice cream with local deli to the guy who does your dry cleaning to your girlfriend to your wife, too, at the same time to your kid’s second grade teacher to your second grade teacher years ago. Everyone you meet is in your network, you know, right now, when Facebook first started, I would see the same weight from a kid with junior high school with his posted at the same weight as like my current girlfriend, Which is ridiculous. I don’t need to know about everything my friend from junior high schools do. We have to talk to the kid. In 15 years, Facebook’s gotten a lot smarter as Google. Now I see the people I communicate with the most, okay, and if I if I reach out and communicate with new people, they start rising in my feet and my stream. If I don’t they fall. It’s just like a lava lamp. Every person you connect with is a drop of oil. The heat source at the bottom that’s rising. Raising or lowering those drops of oil is relevance. So if you imagine the heat sources relevance and the more I interact with someone, the more the higher they go in my network. And the more I see of them, the more trust level there is. When I’m at a bar and I meet someone at a restaurant or conference, I meet someone. I don’t need to, um, connect them. I don’t need to go on Facebook and friend requested, you know, awkward friend. Requesting is when you stop and think. The last time I friend requested some of the real world was second grade. Will you be my friend? My daughter is doing that because, you know, she goes into like, the cat. Will you be my friend like honey? The cat doesn’t wanna be here, but you know it’s this awkward thing. Who the hell friend request someone anymore? If I’m if I’m hanging out with you to bar and we connect again and we talk and we go out to dinner and we’re having a good time with friends. I don’t need to first request that you, you know, that’s going away Friending following liking and fanning is all going away. What will interact is the actual connection. So if I meet with you and I have a good time with you and we talk again if I use your business, if I go to your non profit, if I donate if I volunteer or whatever the network knows that the more I do that, the more interact with you. The more you have the right to market to me and the more you will be at the top of my stream and the more I will see information about you, the less I will have to, uh, search for you. But if you do something stupid or were no longer friends, yeah, you’re going to fade and unfriend, you just disappear. Unfriending is also awkward. I dated a woman we broke up. It was nine months after we broke up. There was one other friend, the other one, because it’s just awkward. So I woke up in front of me anyway. But you know the concept of not having to do that, just, you know? Okay, I haven’t talked to in a while. I don’t see your posts anymore. It’s the real world. That’s how it should be.

[00:40:24.73] spk_1:
And if you’re not feeding zombie loyalists, they can start to defect questions. So I want to I want to spend a little time on. If you’re

[00:41:11.71] spk_0:
not talking to them, giving them what they want talking about their information, helping them out, they will gladly go somewhere else to someone who is. You know, if I have a great experience in the restaurant every week for three years and then all of a sudden over time, I’m noticing less and less that restaurants doing less and less to take care of me, you know, and maybe management to change. And I don’t feel that, you know, I’m ripe for being infected by another company. I’m right for someone else to come see. You know, Peter, Because if I tweet something like, Wow, I can’t believe I have to wait 40 minutes for a table that didn’t used to be like that. If someone else is smart restaurant, they’re following me. And they’re gonna get you know there’s no way. No way over here. Why don’t you come to black storms will give you a free drink you know, you know, and that right there, that’s the first sign of infection, and I might become infected by another by another. Company becomes a lot less for them.

[00:41:22.81] spk_1:
And so let’s let’s take. You have a lot of good examples. Let’s take a one on one situation. How can we start to cure that? The simple act of realizing

[00:41:42.21] spk_0:
following your customer’s understanding when they’re not happy and fixing the situation before it escalates. You know you can contain a small out Brett. A small outbreak small viral outbreak. You can contain that by getting the right people finding out what the problem is getting into one room, fixing their problems, healing them.

[00:41:42.84] spk_1:
You have a good united story. Back when it was Continental,

[00:42:40.50] spk_0:
I was a frequent flyer and booked a trip to Paris, and it was very angry because they charged me $400 and looking for you. Remember what it was and I called the CEO just just for the hell of it. I’m like, I’m gonna I’m gonna write a letter or an email. This was before Social wrote an email to the CEO and like this is ridiculous. I’m freaking tired, huh? And, like, 30 minutes on my phone rings. Hello? Peter, can you please hold for Larry Kellner, CEO of Cotton Airlines? I’m like crap, you know, and the guy gets on the phone. He’s like, Peter, How you doing? How you doing? Sorry, Clinton. These fees, their new, um, we send them a note, I’m guessing it and see it. We’re gonna waive them for you. But if you have any more problems, you know, feel free to call me and I end up the phone for the next 40 minutes, sort of staring at it like Holy crab Larry killed or the CEO of United. Everyone just called me and talk to me, and it was like it was like, God coming down and say you now have the power to levitate your cat. It was just ridiculous. And so, you know, I have been faithful to Continental and now united ever since, and and they continue to treat me with respect and and do great things, and they’re they’re improving. They’re getting a lot of crap over the past several years, and they really are starting to improve. It’s nice to see

[00:42:52.50] spk_1:
And not only, of course, your own loyalty. But

[00:42:54.41] spk_0:
you’re my God.

[00:42:55.11] spk_1:
How zombie loyalist for them And how many times how much it’s

[00:42:58.83] spk_0:
unquantifiable qualified. Dr. Drag, So many friends to united. I’ve made so many friends. Uh, my father, you know, uh, he only flies united now, which means he only drag drag my mom Only in United only drag my wife in United States. There’s a lot of a lot of work that way. Yeah.

[00:43:22.80] spk_1:
Are we gonna go away for a couple of minutes when we come back? Of course, Peter. And I’m gonna keep talking about his book Comes out in January. Zombie loyalists. You have some examples of zombie loyalist leaving and mass like dominoes. Netflix. They’re both They’re both in the book. So it’s so one leaving. If you know, if you’re not starting to cure one leaving,

[00:43:59.20] spk_0:
and then that’s the thing. You know that it will expand the internet with the hashtag everything like that. You know, it doesn’t take a long time. Um, for those things to sort of blow up in your face and, uh, you know, the end of the day, everyone say, Oh, you know Twitter is responsible for for us losing. No, they’re not. You’re responsible for you losing, you know, And And if your product isn’t great and you’re your actions, don’t speak well of who you are. Then there’s no reason your customers should stay with you, you know? And it was so social Media is really hurting us. I know you’re hurting yourself. The only difference is that social media makes it easier for the world to know about.

[00:44:06.14] spk_1:
They’re just telling the story. Yeah, dominoes and Netflix are good examples because they got back, they took responsibility and

[00:44:38.89] spk_0:
they both owned the dominoes, came out and said, You know what? You’re right. Our pizza. We do have a problem. We’re gonna fix this. And they spent millions fixing it. And sure enough, they’re back with a vengeance. Now I’m I’m maybe not even ordered them every once in a while and I live in New York City. That’s that’s a That’s a sacrilege. But, you know, I have the app on my phone from overseas, traveling somewhere I’ll be showing or whatever. And you know what? You’re gonna get it 11. 30 at night when your flight is delayed. You land down. Um, which reminds me I’d probably go exercise. On the flip side, you look at something like Netflix. They they also were screwing up, you know, They were losing their trying to switch between the two. They came up with a new name and everyone’s like, gross public man. And so and again you’re watching the same thing happened with uber right now would be really interesting to see if they’re able to repair themselves.

[00:44:55.39] spk_1:
Listening is important. Both both those. Both those two examples. They listen to their

[00:46:54.48] spk_0:
customers. I think there’s a problem with listening because everyone’s been saying, Listen, listen, listen for months and years and years and years now, But, you know, no one ever says that you have to do more than just listen. You have to listen actually follow up. It’s one thing to listen, you know, I use example, my wife I can sit there and listen to her for hours, you know? But if I don’t actually say anything back, she’s gonna smack me, you know, and go to the other room. And so you really have to. It’s a two way street. Listening is great, but you gotta respond and look, I’ll take it a step further. I was like, Oh, Twitter is so great because someone was complaining on Twitter and we went online, and we we saw the complaint that we fixed the problem and, yeah, how about if the problem don’t exist in the first place? You know, because the great thing about Twitter is that yeah, people complain on Twitter, the bad thing about it is they’re complaining about you on Twitter. So it’s like, What if the problem didn’t exist in the first place? What if What if you empowered your front desk clerk to fix the problem so that I didn’t have to tweet? Hurts is my favorite story about all this? Uh, I used to rent from Hertz religiously. Um, and then I went to, uh, Phoenix Sky Harbor Airport this past April, And I gave it. I was giving a speech, and I go and I my name is supposed to be on the board, you know? So I can go out to my car and it wasn’t it’s okay. It happens. I got upstairs. I wait 40 minutes on the v. line. um, after 40 minutes, they finally say? You know, there’s a, uh, only one guy here. A lot of people might have a better chance to go up to the regular line, like Okay. You probably have told us that a little earlier. Go to the regular line. Spent 45 minutes waiting. The regular line, it’s now been. Are you tweeting while this is happening? Well, I had enough. I was actually not only tweeting I had enough time to create a meme that should give you some idea of how long I was online with myself. And I was okay. Enough time. I mean, I get to the counter how I can help you. Yeah, I was downstairs the V i. P does, and they told me Oh, you’re very preservationist downstairs like, Yeah. Okay. Let’s let’s put a pin in that, um They just sent me up here, like right? They have to help you. Well, it’s not really they You guys are the same company. I mean, I can see the reservation on the screen. You you can help me. Sorry, sir, I can’t help. You have to get the V i p. Next. Like you just next to me. Okay, so if you know anything about Sky Harbor Airport in Phoenix. Um, all of the rental car company in the same place. So I walked 50 ft. It’s a

[00:46:57.76] spk_1:
bus, takes you to the big the Big pavilion, where they’re all

[00:48:53.37] spk_0:
next to each. I walked 50 ft from the cesspool of filth and depravity that was hurt to the the wonderful Zen Garden of Tranquility that was Avis. And in four minutes, I had a nicer, cheaper or nicer, less expensive car given to me a woman named Phyllis, who was 66 and moved to Phoenix from Detroit with her husband for his asthma. I knew this because she told me, um, she smiled at me. She brought her manager out and said, that’s another refugee from Hertz and I said, This happens a lot. They’re like, Yep, I’m like, Wow, you think they have done something about that? And so on the way out in Avis, um, I I thank them. I walked past her as I shoot them. This, you know, sort of look at the look of the beast. I get my Avis car to drive in my hotel. Once I get my hotel, I write a wonderful blog post about my experience called Peter and Hurts and the terrible, Horrible No book. Good, really bad customer experience. Once you have a kid, you find rewriting titles about your blog post that has to do with kids books. Um, I do not like hurt Sam. I am. And and, uh, I included in this blog post the five things I’d rather do than ever, uh, rent from Hertz again. I think number three was was ride a razor blade bus through a lemon juice waterfall. Um, with just, you know, and so. But, of course, the next day hurts reaches out to me. I’m Shannon. Well, this is the head of North American customer service. So your bike I’m like, they’re like, you know, we’d love to have Nick No. Like, you’re not going to fix the problem. Number one of the Navy’s car. I’m never going back to Hertz number two. There are five people. Yesterday five people interacted with all of whom had the chance to save me and keep me as a customer for life. A customer who had been so happy and I would have loved you. five people blew it so don’t waste your time trying to convert me back. You’re not going to. What you want to do is spend some of that energy retraining your staff to have empathy and to give them the ability and the empowerment to fix my problem when it happens. Because five people it takes every single employee to keep your company running. It takes one to kill it. Yeah, PS Avis reached out, um, to thank me personally. And, uh, I am now just this ridiculously huge, loyal fan of Avis and always will be.

[00:49:02.47] spk_1:
You have a pretty touching story about when you worked at a yogurt shop. Really? You’re really young? Um, we have a couple of minutes to

[00:50:39.26] spk_0:
tell that. Tell that story that was on the East Side, which again is yet another reason why I live on the West Side. Nothing good ever happens on Manhattan’s east Side. So I was I was working, and I can’t believe it’s yogurt, which was a store that I think back in the I c b y. No, no TCB. Why was the country’s best yoga The countries I c b i y was a poor? I can’t believe it’s yogurt I can’t believe it’s not. You can’t live yogurt. It was a poor attempt to capitalize on that. And I’m working at this store, and I go in every day and make the yoga to clean the floors. I do. You know, the typical high school job. And, uh, it was during the summer and thousands of people walking by, I think, like 2nd Avenue or something. And there were these brass poles that hung from, you know, there was an awning, right? That’s something that they’re never the brass poles that held the awning up and they were dirty as hell, right? I’m sure they’ve never been polished ever. And I found some. I found some brass polish in the back all the way back in the back. And one afternoon I went outside and I started polishing the polls. My logic was, if the polls were shining and people saw them, maybe they come into the store. Maybe they want to, you know, buy more screenplays. And the manager came out. What the hell are you doing? I told them what I thought. I don’t pay you to think. Get inside. You know, I’m like there’s no customers in there, like, Okay, I’ll make sure the yogurt still pumping it full blast. And I quit. I just quit that job. I mean, I couldn’t even begin to understand why someone would invest. I mean, do you own a franchise by 50 grand to at least to buy that franchise? Why wouldn’t he invest in the two seconds it took a little elbow grease to make the poles clean? That might bring in more customers. What the hell? You know, But

[00:50:40.04] spk_1:
you’re not paid to think

[00:50:49.76] spk_0:
you’re not paid to think my favorite line. Yeah, um, I I just I encourage if any kids are listening to teenagers. If you if you boss says that to you, quit, quit. I will hire you. Just quit. It’s probably the worst thing in the world that you could possibly do because you have customers who you have customers who every day can be helped by people who are paid to think. And that’s the ones you want to hire.

[00:51:00.56] spk_1:
We gotta wrap up. Tell me what you love about the work you do.

[00:51:44.76] spk_0:
I get paid to talk. I mean, my God, this is the same stuff I used to get in trouble for in high school, but on a bigger picture. What I really love about it is being able to open someone’s eyes and have them come back to me. Um, I run a series of masterminds called shank mines Business masterminds shank mines dot com their day long seminars all around the country. And I had someone come to me and, you know, I took your advice about X y Z and I started listening a little more. And I just got the largest retainer client I’ve ever had in my life by a factor of four. She goes, and I just can’t even thank you never sent me a gorgeous bottle of tequila like I can’t even thank you enough. Oh, my God. Being able to help people, you know, at the end of the day, we’re I’ve yet to find another planet suitable for life. I’m looking So we’re all in this together. And if that’s the case, you know, why wouldn’t we want to help people get a little bit more? You know, there really isn’t a need to be, as do she. As as we are as a society, we could probably be a little nicer to each other, and you’d be surprised that will help.

[00:51:54.56] spk_1:
The book is Zombie Loyalists. It’s published by Pal Grave. MacMillan comes out in January. You’ll find Peter at shankman dot com and on Twitter at Peter Shankman. Peter, thank you so much pleasure as Amanda. Oh, thank you

[00:53:05.15] spk_2:
Next week, As I said, No show you’ll have an extra hour. Have fun, have fun with your extra our next week, and we’ll be back on January 3rd. 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. A creative producer is Claire Meyerhoff. The shows Social Media is by Susan Chavez Marc Silverman is our Web guy, and this music is by Scott Stein. Thank you for that affirmation. Scotty. Be with me next week for nonprofit radio. Big nonprofit ideas for the other 95 Go out and be great.

Nonprofit Radio for October 11, 2021: Next Year’s Plan For Your Year-End Donors

My Guest:

Poonam Prasad: Next Year’s Plan For Your Year-End Donors

We’re in the 4th quarter and you’re expecting a lot of fundraising revenue. You want those donors with you next year and beyond. Poonam Prasad has the strategies to make that happen. She’s president of Prasad Consulting & Research.

 

 

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Turn Two Communications: PR and content for nonprofits. Your story is our mission.

 

We’re the #1 Podcast for Nonprofits, With 13,000+ Weekly Listeners

Board relations. Fundraising. Volunteer management. Prospect research. Legal compliance. Accounting. Finance. Investments. Donor relations. Public relations. Marketing. Technology. Social media.

Every nonprofit struggles with these issues. Big nonprofits hire experts. The other 95% listen to Tony Martignetti Nonprofit Radio. Trusted experts and leading thinkers join me each week to tackle the tough issues. If you have big dreams but a small budget, you have a home at Tony Martignetti Nonprofit Radio.
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[00:00:10.84] spk_4:
Hello and welcome to tony-martignetti non profit radio

[00:01:41.44] spk_1:
Big non profit ideas for the other 95%. I’m your aptly named host of your favorite abdominal podcast and oh, I’m glad you’re with me. I’d suffer the embarrassment of Ruba malaria if you made me hot with the idea that you missed this week’s show next year’s plan for your year end donors. We’re in the fourth quarter and you’re expecting a lot of fundraising revenue. You want those donors with you next year and beyond. non Prasad has the strategies to make that happen. She’s president of Prasad consulting and research on tony state too 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 a pleasure to welcome to the show for the first time Hunan Prasad. She is founder and president of Prasad consulting and research, providing board and staff training, audit, major gift capital campaign and publication services to non profits. She’s on the executive committee of the Giving institute, leading consultants to nonprofits before nonprofit work. She was an investigative reporter and worked in journalism, advertising and pr in India south Korea Hong kong the West Indies and the U. S. Her company is at Prasad consulting dot com and she’s at prasad c Welcome to the show. Prasad opponent. Prasad. Welcome to nonprofit radio

[00:01:53.44] spk_0:
Thank you Tony. It’s a pleasure to be with you.

[00:02:02.54] spk_1:
My pleasure to have you. Thank you. There’s so many so many facades. I guys called um facade instead of being um so you’re in you’re in new york city, right? You’re coming

[00:02:05.65] spk_0:
to us from new york? Yes. Coming to you from downtown Manhattan

[00:02:09.30] spk_1:
downtown. What neighborhood?

[00:02:11.54] spk_0:
Oh, east mid down. Sorry.

[00:02:13.84] spk_1:
Oh, now you moved in downtown anymore.

[00:02:16.17] spk_0:
Yes. Now we moved, we moved recently near Grand Central Station.

[00:02:20.74] spk_1:
Okay. And your Grand Central. And how about your home? Where where, where is your home?

[00:02:24.55] spk_0:
Also in midtown,

[00:02:26.08] spk_1:
midtown, midtown east. Also,

[00:02:28.39] spk_0:
midtown east. Also. Okay,

[00:03:06.04] spk_1:
East side of new york city. For your business and your home. Wonderful. So we’re talking about this year’s fourth quarter donors and how we want to treat them and work with them So that we hold on to them into 2022 and beyond. So just, you know, because we know the donor attrition is a big problem. It’s a appalling somewhere around 75% annual donor attrition rate. What do you see? You know, generally that, uh, nonprofits could do better about holding on to their year end donors

[00:06:17.64] spk_0:
actually, tony uh, the attrition rate or the leaky bucket is almost, uh, from three donors, you get down to 1.5 or from two donors, you could be down to one next year. So for all the efforts that you’re putting in to bringing these donors in. If you think about, you know, we were a research firm. So we often get people asking us, can you find me new donors? Can you find me new donors? I’m sure we can find them new donors. But the point is, once they’ve got them in, they have spent so much effort and time and money on getting them in. And then if you don’t steward them, if you don’t get to know them and you don’t work with them, then you’re going to lose them by next year. Um, and that’s the tragedy of uh, fundraising. You know, that is really very inefficient. So I suggest only just two little tips, the donors that you get in at the end of the year. There are only two things you need to do with them. one is get to know them. And then the 2nd 1 help them to get to know you. So show them that you are doing the right thing with their money. You know, the impact report reporting, telling them what you did with their money and how you could not have done it without their money. And the second thing learn about them. You know, if you were trying to become friends with someone, you went to a party and you met somebody and you said, you know, this was a really interesting person. Uh, they came to my birthday party, they gave me a present. I would like to be more friends with them. Would you not write them or thank you not? Would you not invite them to a body afterwards. Would you not say it? Let me have coffee with you. These are simple things that we do in everyday life. But then when you’re the executive director of a of a charity, a little social service charity, you said, I don’t like to do fundraising? Well, it’s not it’s human relations. These are people who gave you something they didn’t have to give you. They could have bought a boat, they could have bought a car, they could have bought a dress, they could have bought a rug for their living room. No, they gave that money to you. Shouldn’t you be grateful? Don’t we tell our Children you get a thank you gift for Aunt Mabel. You never met Aunt Mabel writer. Thank you. Not sit down here and right, right, and a thank you note, she sent you this gift. It’s simple. It’s it’s it’s not it’s not it doesn’t even have to be about fundraising. Yes. A lot of small agencies don’t have fundraisers, don’t have dedicated development people, but this is not even about development, This is about standard manners, you know, standard courtesies, things that we grew up with. But when it becomes, oh my goodness, it’s my donors. I don’t like doing this. I’m afraid to ask them for more. You know, just thank them first before you think about asking them for more, you know, and don’t wait too long to figure it out. You know, have the plan now, you’re getting the money in 40% of the money is going to come between October and November and December, that means it’s coming in now, October. You know, and in December you’re gonna get 20% of your money. So what is your plan for January? What is it that you’re gonna do?

[00:07:17.04] spk_1:
Okay, well, we’re gonna we’re gonna get there, we’re gonna get there. Hold on. Um So you made a couple of things, points that I want to amplify about it. Just being a matter of common courtesy in in a lot of respects, and it being about relationship building. All right. So, you’ve got, you know, in in in corporate marketing, there’s the idea of get a finger grab a hand. You know, someone walked into a Starbucks, they bought a coffee. Well, Starbucks doesn’t only sell coffee. They sell music, they sell food, they sell coffee accessories, they sell a tire, right? But not to mention they sell an environment. Uh, so I think there’s a lot we can learn from that. You know, get a finger grab a hand. So someone, let’s let’s take the donor that’s made their first gift, Right? Because that’s the tougher one. That’s the that’s the easiest one to lose

[00:07:20.79] spk_0:
that 1st 1st. That’s the that’s the most fragile relationship,

[00:07:56.14] spk_1:
right? So, we’re gonna start with that. I’m giving you the toughest hypothetical, right? So, all right. So we’ve got a bunch of first time donors, we had a very successful fourth quarter in donor acquisition. We brought in a good number. What however good number is defined by My listeners. That could be 12. It could be 1200. It could be 12,000. We’ve got a bunch of new first time donors. You started to allude to, you know, what’s your plan? What’s your plan for january? What’s your first recommendation for? What we’re gonna do with this, this nice rich cadre of first time donors?

[00:07:59.40] spk_0:
Well, my first recommendation is of course they didn’t within 48 hours to get a tax

[00:08:03.07] spk_1:
receipt. If it’s

[00:08:04.11] spk_0:
Over a certain amount that you need to give them a tax two

[00:08:06.41] spk_1:
$100, requires a receipt. How about your about just a simple acknowledgment letter

[00:08:20.04] spk_0:
Also, you start then you start with the next. So then depending on how much money they got They sent you, you need to figure out who they are. If it’s over $1,000, you need to send it to somebody to research somebody in your office or somebody you outsource it to. You need to figure out who this donor is and why they gave to you.

[00:08:34.84] spk_1:
Well, all right. But for some non profits that could be, if it’s over $100,.

[00:09:16.54] spk_0:
Yes. If it’s over $100, you might wait till January and take the whole batch and screen them. So we are now screening a batch for a social service agency in Connecticut and we’re screening uh $690 that gave From $20 up in the last two years now. It’s late that we’re doing it now. But you know, it’s better than nothing. So ISIS suggests that, you know, we have another client that we’re doing over the pandemic. They said they had 274 new donors who gave over $500. And we’re looking for people within that Group within that cohort who would give maybe $10,000. They actually have people, we just finished that project and they actually have people who would give them, not just $10,000, but $100,000.

[00:09:46.04] spk_1:
Okay. Okay. All right. Let’s take a step at a time. So We’re sending our acknowledgment within within 48 hours. And if the tax receipt is required, then you might incorporate that into your acknowledgement or you might send something separate. Alright. We’re saying thank you fast. Now, is there is there nothing else between, you know, suppose that’s in october or november, donor. Nothing else between that and screening them in january. Don’t we want to we want to be involved with

[00:10:41.94] spk_0:
them. Yes. Yes. So then you start then you start with the seven. Thank you. Then you start with the seven. Thank you because this person has given you a a donation and depending on their level of giving and the effort you have to put in. You start with sending them your annual report, your newsletter. Welcome email. Some some agencies have a three series of welcome emails. And so you do that. Maybe you send them a donor survey which they respond to and tell you what aspect of their uh of your program they are interested in. That will help you a lot uh to know you know, we have a social service agency. They do senior care, they do middle school education, they do uh other kinds of adoption. So now which program is that person interested in? They can tell you or you can find out given are based on when you do the screening and when you do the research, you will see what else they’re giving to. And that will give you a clue as to which part of your program they care about.

[00:11:03.94] spk_1:
All right, well, you also have a clue based on what they gave to. Yes.

[00:11:04.45] spk_0:
Yes. If if

[00:11:05.88] spk_1:
if you know a lot of people don’t designate a gift. I agree. I agree with you. But if they designate their gift to a particular program, then you know where their affinity is.

[00:11:14.69] spk_0:
Yes. And you know that in the database right away. Of course.

[00:11:33.44] spk_1:
Absolutely. Yes. It’s important to preserve what people give to. Just like. It’s important to preserve the donors survey results that you suggest? Absolutely. Okay. What what might be. What what might we be soliciting uh information about in that in that follow up donor survey? You want to get to know folks better

[00:12:47.54] spk_0:
which aspect of the program they care about how they heard of your agency. You know uh Would they ever would they attend a webinar? If if you had one would they be willing to travel and come and see your facility? Uh You know is there a particular staff person that you know they have met with or or they know about you know each each agency is different. So you would ask different questions based on what you want to know about them. Uh what would help you? So those would be for instance with this where there are three different uh we have an irish theater company. Well they would want to know which which playwright you know with their favorite if you’re a music or something you might want to know which music they care about. If you’re a medical agency might we used to send out service and say which disease do you want to know more about? So we can send you newsletters about that disease. So you know based on your interest based on your work. You ask the right questions.

[00:12:49.08] spk_1:
Okay. And you also mentioned the seven. Thank you.

[00:12:52.23] spk_0:
Yes

[00:12:53.93] spk_1:
I say a little more about your seven. Thank

[00:15:37.44] spk_0:
you. This is this is my mantra that I have been teaching. You know I’ve been teaching at N. Y. U. And also at Columbia and I teach workshops all the time. And this is one of my mantra that I teach. And now my students have started deciding it back to me. So and it seems like oh my God you’re going to say thank you thank you thank you. It’s not that you have to be creative. So you might send them the tax receipt which is the first thank you. And then depending on after that you might have uh the executive director writer. Thank you. You might have the development director writer. Thank you. You might have the program director. We have a little archaeological excavation. You know there are two main archaeologists, archaeologists involved with it. and depending on which one uh is uh you know closest to that person who send the gift. We’ll have them right appears on the on the thank you note which we draw for them for some people. I might call them and say you know because I’m in new york city I might call them to say thank you. I have received your gift. It’ll take a while for us to process it. But in the meantime I want you to know that your check was received and we’re so grateful and the excavation will start on such and such a date and we’ll send you pictures and this is our facebook page and you know communicate with them. Uh one of my friends uh sent her son to a boarding school and she sent a little gift where she’d been sending it to the local school all the time. But now because it was a boarding school, the parents suddenly she got a call from my parents really wanted, why is the parent calling me when she said, you know, I know you sent a gift and I wanted to tell you thanks from the school. But also I want to tell you that I was yesterday at the tennis match in which your son played and my son is captain of the team and he played so well and we were so proud of my goodness, do you think that lady is not going to give another gift after that? I mean it’s just brilliant and it wasn’t even a staff member. It was a volunteer. I have I have another agency this year. There was a crisis and people ask me and I happened to have insight into that particular problem. They said what should we give to? I said, oh, this is a great agency. I’ve been, you know involved with them as a volunteer for a long time. You know, they use the money very well. They’re doing really great work. They sent the money. I sent the money. None of us have ever gotten a thank you note. Now they’re doing the work. They have social media, they have facebook, they have Lincoln they have a blast. They’re sending us the, all the information about what they’re doing and we are so happy. They’re doing it. But they didn’t do God one Thank You. And one of the donors sent it from a donor advised fund. He’s got no thank you, let alone seven.

[00:15:43.44] spk_1:
It’s time for a break.

[00:16:43.64] spk_2:
Turn to communications. I’m on their email list and they said something this week. That’s very interesting. They talk about seeing good news stories on social media, uh, specifically linked in, in this case and the uh, frequent lament that people will, will comment that you’ll never find stories like this in the mainstream media. In fact turned two points out that many, many of these good news stories originated in mainstream media. Um, you know, some are, we’re in newspapers, others might have gotten exposure from national outlets like the new york times or CNN, or one of the major networks. But the point is a lot of these stories originate and in some mainstream media and then make their way to social media. So what’s that mean for you? It means there are a

[00:16:44.64] spk_3:
lot of journalists

[00:16:58.94] spk_2:
that are interested in good news stories that maybe just generate a laugh or a smile or it’s, it’s um, it’s more of a story about work that a nonprofit has done.

[00:17:02.04] spk_3:
So the journalists

[00:17:03.33] spk_1:
are out there.

[00:17:04.28] spk_2:
They are hungry for these good news stories. If

[00:17:06.79] spk_3:
you’ve got something

[00:17:07.85] spk_2:
like that.

[00:17:09.74] spk_1:
Look internally,

[00:17:10.74] spk_3:
if you’ve got some good news

[00:17:27.94] spk_2:
turn to, can help you get it noticed right, help you craft that good news story and then get it exposed in all the outlets you’ve heard me talk about. So they finish up this on this. I’m choking up. That’s, that’s how that’s how, uh, much this touches me,

[00:17:33.04] spk_3:
they finish up there

[00:17:58.64] spk_2:
their email by saying there are lots of journalists out there that are ready to give good news stories a look despite what you may read on linkedin. So, you know, they’ve got their eyes on the media market. Turn to communications. Your story is their mission turn hyphen two dot C O. Now back to next year’s plan for your year end donors.

[00:19:01.14] spk_1:
Yeah. I mean, that’s that is a very bad practice To have gone. Well, you know, some folks say 24 hours, you’re, you’re being more generous 48 hours, that’s still fine. But If it goes much longer than that and you’re, you’re saying it’s been months or whatever, you know, that, uh, to not acknowledge every single gift, I don’t care if these are $3 gifts. I don’t care if the dollar and a half. It still deserves an acknowledgement. You just never know. Someone might be testing you with a small dollar amount and really who gives a dollar and a half anyway, so that, that’s, you know, that’s a hyperbolic on the low end, right? Uh, but if someone gives you $5, they might be testing you, they might have capacity to give 5000 or 50,000. They may have capacity. They may feel whether they can’t or or they know they can, but they’re they’re trying you out every gift deserves acknowledgement. So when you were just describing that’s very poor practice.

[00:19:08.04] spk_0:
Well, unfortunately, the excuse is that they are because they’re doing such good work. They are understaffed and their non profit. So they don’t have capacity.

[00:19:34.24] spk_1:
That doesn’t, that doesn’t sell. That’s a that’s a nonstarter. You need to invest in your organizations to the extent that you can thank people. Thanking people is not overhead, It’s not worthless. It’s it’s an administrative investment. It’s not an expensive, it’s it’s an investment in the relationships that you’re talking about. You mentioned earlier, you know, absolutely relationship building, if that’s an investment thanking

[00:21:02.24] spk_0:
people. Absolutely, and and that’s how one needs to think about it. And and you know, the board members, the staff, the executive director, everybody needs to be aware that how important this is. Now, another thing that people ask us a lot is we got a gift from a donor advised fund and we don’t have any access to the donor. So we don’t know how to thank them and we want to know who they are, what they are and you know, they’re freaking every sort of possible way of trying to google it to trying to get us to do it. This is so simple. This these these two donors who gave to this charity that gave through the donor advised fund that I know about, they are friends of the board members if they put a list in front of the board members and said, you know, we got a gift from. So and so family fund and unfortunately we don’t know how to thank them. They said that maybe they sent a thank you note to the to the donor advised fund agency. Somebody would speak up or you look in your database and say, oh, they came to the gala. This is the same person who came to the gala and sat at, you know, board member access table. So he’s gonna know this person. So let’s tell him that your friend gave us a gift even though there was no gala, even though there was just a virtual gala and he still gave us a gift. He didn’t even sit at your table.

[00:21:24.64] spk_1:
All right. So those, right. Those are, those are good ideas. But there is frustration among, among nonprofits getting donor advised fund gifts when you know, okay, so you’re right, try try your board query your database. But there are gifts that come that sometimes that folks can’t identify and that I know that is a frustration among nonprofits.

[00:21:56.24] spk_0:
Yes. But you know, more and more people have who have set up donor advised funds want people to know who is giving. It’s, it’s less and less about being anonymous. Now, people are going back to setting up foundations or entities from which they can give, uh, and be known and they want that because they want to add their credibility to the gift. They want people to know that a person whom they know give to this charity because it helps the charity.

[00:22:28.74] spk_1:
It does. Right. But there are, there are donors who would not agree with you. But I do, I agree. But there are always some donors that are going to remain anonymous. And I mean, I’ve always thought, you know, focus on the donors who you can identify. I understand the frustration for those. You cannot, they may come to you through a facebook fundraising event and facebook doesn’t share the information. They might come to you from a donor advised fund. That is not a name that you can track, uh, focus on the folks that you can thank and for the donor advised fund. Of course we should be sending a letter to the fund. Right, thanking asking them to forward the letter onto the anonymous donors.

[00:23:12.94] spk_0:
Exactly. And they would, I’m sure the same donor, the same donor, the friend of mine that gave because I said, oh, this is a good charity could give to them. It’s also sent to another charity in the same space. And he got his seven. Thank you. He actually told me I got seven. Thank you. So, he said, you know, the development director wrote, the executive director wrote the board member wrote, they sent him an annual report. You know, they invited him to an event. They sent him different things. You know, I mean reports, personalized. Yeah. All right. I mean, you could take a little video and send it to the person, you know, that you can do

[00:24:18.44] spk_1:
personalized video is a terrific idea. Um, I’ll give a shout out to a company that’s not expensive. Bond euro bongiorno dot com, bong boro easy personalized videos. You shoot a one minute video and you say thank you. And you can, you can be walking, you can have any background you want to know the production value is not the concern, sincerity, The genuineness. That’s the concern. And you do it in a 45 seconds or one minute video. You sent it right back to the right to the person. You can do it immediately. You could do it the next day. So, and Bongiorno is by no means the only personalized video platform out there. But Um, yeah, you’re right. Personalized video is a good one. all right. So you mentioned these screenings. So now we’re now we’re a little longer on now. We’re into January. Right? We’ve done our activities for the fourth quarter. Now we’re conveying into January. What kind of information uh, you’re looking for in a, in a screening. Does it have to be a commercial screening? You know, what are we,

[00:25:09.24] spk_0:
what are we looking at? You could, you could do research or you could just go for a screening depending on the number of donors. If you have seven donors, you know, you just give them to somebody to research who has tools like screening tools and research tools and ask them to do it for you and that’s all you need, You don’t need a sophisticated screening. But if you have 670 donors or something that I knew and they were given maybe over $20 or $50, then you certainly should have a screening down. But don’t try to do it yourself because then when you get it back, you have this information and you have no idea what to do with it because there are mismatches in the screening. It’s an automated process. There are mismatches in the screening. You know, there’ll be a lot of tony-martignetti is and Putin presides in there and you have to make

[00:25:30.54] spk_1:
sure that I don’t know if there are such good examples who not pursued and tony-martignetti are not very common names, but there’ll be a lot of there’ll be a lot of smith’s and uh smiths and joneses et cetera. Okay.

[00:25:32.68] spk_0:
Yes. And and you know you being me is how many food and presents? All

[00:25:39.12] spk_1:
right. There aren’t too many tony-martignetti is I would be surprised.

[00:25:50.84] spk_0:
Okay. In fact it’s more confusing when there are only two or three because then you really begin to think this is your person and then it turns out it’s not your person.

[00:25:53.14] spk_1:
Right? Okay. So you’re you’re you’re caution against doing it on your own or I mean if you’re going to do it on your own. You said if you had just seven or so. You know, you’re not gonna hire an agency for that. But you just, the point is you need to be careful that you’ve got the right person

[00:26:08.50] spk_0:
right? Like checking,

[00:26:10.24] spk_1:
check middle initials, check addresses, check whatever you do know against what you found to make sure you’re, you’re dealing with the right person.

[00:27:04.64] spk_0:
Well, you can, you can outsource, you know, a little bit of work every month with somebody with some research firm. We do that all the time. Uh, you know, it’s not that we do it all, you know, in one go and finish. You know, we have like an arrangement where if somebody new comes in, gives more than $1000 get more than $500. Whatever matters to them, they send it over to us and we screen them, research them, give them back information on that person. Okay. Okay. But it’s geared to small agencies. It’s geared to small agencies so that, you know, because otherwise what happens is the Harvard University’s and the big, big who have seven researchers get all the big donors because they have the tools and they have the staff. So you, you do need to implement some of the techniques that the top fundraising organizations you

[00:27:13.64] spk_1:
mentioned, you mentioned before screening and research tools there, are there some out there that you can suggest that folks can use

[00:28:02.94] spk_0:
on their own. Yes. You could, you could make a substitution with with something like ivy or donor search and try to do some work on your own. You could look at the, you could look at the linkedin profile of the person. If you know, you know, I mean small simple things. You could google them of course. Uh small things that you know, you could look at if you know where they work. You could look at the bio most law firms have the lawyers while on on the website many firms have the, you know, employees, bio senior employees bio doctors. There are free sites for looking at doctors to see what kind of specialty does the doctor have. Is it something that’s relevant to my cause?

[00:28:05.45] spk_1:
Yeah. Good. Alright, right. If you can find the person’s company firm that they work for or practice. Okay. And you mentioned I wave and donor search.

[00:28:31.94] spk_0:
Yes. These are subscription services. So you have to pay a little bit uh, you know, usually it’s in your subscription and you can check out your donors through that. And the aggregate information of other gifts that the organization has received. Other organizations have received from the same donor. Okay. Right. Right.

[00:28:37.14] spk_1:
Other charities that the person is given to us. So then you start to get a little profile of person. All right. So you can have

[00:29:03.54] spk_0:
to be careful because of the person your donor is in new york and the person, a person with the same name is giving in texas, you have to be careful to see why would my donor given texas? Maybe it’s another person or maybe he went to school in texas and he is giving in texas. Or he’s giving to a senior center in texas because my daughter has a mother there who’s in that home. So you know you need to be a bit intelligent about.

[00:29:30.84] spk_1:
Yeah right with that. With that caution you gotta you gotta that caveat. You gotta be uh certain that you’re dealing with the right person. Otherwise you’re going down you’re gonna start talking to the person about their gifts to texas. And they’re going to say I don’t know what you’re talking about and then then you’re gonna be embarrassed. So all right. All right. Um Okay so screening is a possibility. Good. You can engage your company. You can do some on your own. What what what what are we gonna do from what we learned from our screening now? What?

[00:31:54.44] spk_0:
So there’s the thing I mean you know we do research where research for and we send research to our clients. The question is how do you read this research? What does it mean to you? What what is the interpretation you get out of a research report on? Suppose we write a little bio on this person. So what what what what is the strategy that comes out of this research. So the first thing that indicates higher giving is age. So anyone over the age of 60 or 65 has more disposable income. They paid their mortgage, they probably paid their children’s college education. They’re beginning to think about their own, you know, legacy and they’re beginning to give more generously. So 60, you have a better chance of getting a higher upgrading their gifts before that. People are still on that little hamster wheel, you know, increasing their mortgage, buying a little bigger house, sending their Children to a better school. You know, getting them into college, they just often do not have time unless they are very community minded and they might give to their local community or their college or things like that. But but they become more Uh philanthropic, more generous generally after the age of 16. Now, there are always exceptions. The other thing there are a lot of people look for as you know, being in plan giving is people without Children, because people without Children do not have that usual legacy is, oh, I’m leaving good Children into the world. Yeah, that’s great. But when you don’t have Children, you have to really think, what is it that I am leaving? What footprint am I living in this world that I lived and who benefited because I lived And those people take a little more care and thought and and usually we’ll try to make an impact in a different way and you can help them do that and make them happy. And you know, there there’s a lot of studies that say people who give are happier people who give actually benefit more from their gifts than the person receiving. So it’s at that age, particularly when you have that reflective time for reflection that we see better gifts.

[00:32:02.64] spk_1:
It’s time for tony steak too

[00:32:59.84] spk_2:
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[00:33:03.14] spk_3:
You want to start in 2022,

[00:33:05.64] spk_1:
you can start

[00:33:06.28] spk_3:
with plan Giving accelerator. I

[00:33:19.34] spk_2:
hope you’ll join me. All the info you need is that planned Giving accelerator dot com. That is tony stick to, we’ve got boo koo

[00:33:20.86] spk_1:
but loads more

[00:33:21.61] spk_2:
time for next

[00:33:23.10] spk_3:
year’s plan for your

[00:33:24.59] spk_1:
year end donors,

[00:35:46.14] spk_0:
then there are other things like education for one thing, if you know the education you can no other people who went to that school. So maybe you can have them go on. Maybe have a board member went there so you can build a relationship more strongly. But also of course education indicates more disposable income. So you begin to see when you build a profile of the person you say, oh well they went to the school from that area, They studied social work or they studied history or that tells you something about what they are interested in. Right? And then there’s the question of, Although I said that people who don’t have Children, you know, are very sought after by plan giving professionals, on the other hand, people in their lifetime are more generous who have Children over the age of six Because they’re trying to inculcate good values in their Children. They start to see the value of a community. So there are studies that show that people who have Children over the age of six, there could be 6-18, they could be 18-24. But a family unit, a couple usually has more disposable income. It could be a same sex couple or a heterogeneous couple. But the heterosexual couple. But the point is because there are two incomes in that family, they usually have more disposable income. So so that that’s important when you see that. So those are little things that you’re looking at. And then of course there’s the interest, what else they give to, You know, how old are they? Was it their parents that also gave to this charity or this type of charity? I have a I have a friend and he gave to a university music program. And I said to him, why do you give, you didn’t even go to that university? Why are you giving to that music program? He said, well, I became friends with the dean. They invited me to an event. I went on a trip with them to Austria to listen to classical music. And he said in the end, you know, my father died when I was very young. And the one thing I remember is sitting on his lap when he played the piano. So the piano music to him was, and he doesn’t have any Children. So, you know, that’s what makes him happy giving to students who play the piano

[00:36:20.23] spk_1:
reminds us of course reminds him of his dad. And he hopes that that uh those young students will have Children of their own and their those Children will sit on their laps the way he sat on his dad’s lap. All right. Those are good. Those are, those are valuable insights that we can, we can get from uh, that we that we can get from the screening. So now going back to what you had suggested earlier when you said get them to know you and let them get to know, uh, sorry, get to know them and let them get to know you. So how do we do the second part of that now that we have this information, valuable insights? How do we let these new donors get to know us?

[00:37:37.13] spk_0:
Well, we talked about the series of three emails that welcome them. We have invitations. Uh, and of course in this environment, maybe you can’t invite them so easily, but you could still send them a video. Now. We had a homeless, uh, organized agency for homeless people last year that we were working with. And they sent out a video of their new building and somebody sent them $25,000 just from that video because it was the Executive director going through the building and saying, you know, we had such hopes for this building. We finally got it built. We’ve got all these people were going to bring into this building and the person was so touched. He was also a senior citizen. He had money. He felt like, oh, let me help. There are other people out there my age who do not have housing. And here is somebody who’s an agency that’s providing it. And that video, you know, a small video that they didn’t even actually seriously ask for money in it. They just said, and if you’d like to, you know, there was a little bit and

[00:37:44.23] spk_1:
well, it it touched it touched somebody. Well, video can do that. It’s powerful that way.

[00:39:16.22] spk_0:
All right. And of course a tour with the executive director. So you’re really getting to know the person, you know, face to face. So as best you can in this environment. You know, it’s a trusting relationship. So by video you’re seeing them as best you can. The other thing is of course you could set up coffee with them and people are much more accessible now because they’re not going out. So people are taking calls even if they are not. Yeah. In where at home, they’re still taking calls from wherever they are. They’re doing zoom with you. They want to be conducted. All of us are starved for human contact. We took these things for granted. And now suddenly we realized how valuable our community is. You know, I walk out, I’m an anonymous new york city right where nobody really knows anybody and you walk on the street and nobody should recognize. You know, it’s not like that anymore. The moment I walk out on the street, my neighbors are standing out there, they’re also walking. There’s no nowhere to go and nothing to do except to go for a while. So they’re all out there walking and they all suddenly know each other. So you realize how important your community is. So do you think that the area neighborhood association and things that are being done in our neighborhood are getting more attention. Sure, more people are planting, helping to plant in the parks, more people are helping to give to the local community association. Suddenly that’s becoming more important. So something that’s good for the small agencies.

[00:39:18.39] spk_1:
So engagement, Yeah. Uh, engagement at whatever level it might be something communal and community and in, in face to face,

[00:40:10.61] spk_0:
yes, might be something come and paint a mural on your wall of your, you know, of your agency. We have a, a friend of mine runs a clear art center community, you know, they make pottery, they got the local artists together to come and paint the wall even urine Corbett, they could still do that. You wear your mask, You come and paint the world their artistic. So you could plant flowers in your garden, invite them to do that, invite them to do outdoor things in the local park. You could have a gathering of rooftops. People have been doing gatherings or some of our clients have been doing gatherings or rooftops whatever you can do outdoors, especially in the summer. And then also we were talking, well, we were

[00:40:14.43] spk_1:
talking about january, but that’s okay. Well into spring

[00:40:55.71] spk_0:
now january, you could do a lunch and learn, which is a good time to do a lunch and learn. And that also gives you an information back because the people who attend, you do the lunch and learn on different programs and people sign up based on the interest. So then, you know, well this donor signed up for this lunch and learn on this program. So obviously that’s what they care about or they might write to you and say I didn’t, I really wanted to attend this, but I couldn’t. So you send them the recording of that lunch. That’s another, uh, value of having something which is recorded, which you’re doing on zoom. You can record it like, just like your radio programs, tony

[00:41:15.11] spk_1:
I’m a, I’m a big fan of big fan of audio. I think it’s very intimate medium, yep. All right. So we’ve, we’ve, we’ve thought through our engagement, it might be something in real life. It might be something virtual. I love. I mean, you gave a lot of good ideas. Um, now we need to plan for the next solicitation.

[00:41:21.53] spk_0:
Now

[00:41:49.61] spk_1:
we’re in, we’re in like the third quarter of 3rd quarter of next year and it’s coming time to solicit the person again. They made a year into gift this year. So we’re going to presume, but they’re, they’re going to do the same. Let’s exclude the folks who maybe became major donors and they’ve got a relationship now with a gift officer. We’re not, we’re not at that level. Uh, we’re dealing with the larger group. We’re planning our fourth quarter. What should we be thinking about in terms of possibly upgrading or should we not try to upgrade in the second year. What’s your advice around planning that, that second year solicitation?

[00:45:27.39] spk_0:
Well, another thing that we never spoke about and some of my clients and colleagues will be very upset if I don’t mention it is creating a giving circle. So you could have, if you have enough donors at certain levels, you could try to upgrade them by creating a council, uh, you know, giving society, you know, so, so somebody who gave 500 you could give them an incentive to upgrade to 1000 because when they’re at 1000 they’ll get such and such benefits. You know, they’ll meet somebody that they care about or they’ll get a painting or they’ll hear a concert or you’ll have some event just for them. So, so you’re constantly upgrading those who gave 500 to 1000, those who gave 1000 to 5000, those who gave 5002, 10,000. So, so a little theater client is probably going to say, oh, you know, uh, famous irish actor is going to speak with 10 of you and you only get invited to that if, if you give, you know, a little bit more than what they were already given and that and that creates a cohort of people. So they have a little sense of community because that giving society is going to meet, um, we have the example of a museum that was up. It’s a very famous glass museum called the corning Museum of Glass and it was very well supported by the corning company. But the corning company went through some very tough times and so they needed private support during that period. So they started with a giving society where people came up, they went through the museum, they were passing by on their way to Niagara Falls or they were interested in glass or whatever and they were told that if you give this much that’s great, we are very grateful. But if you give this much you’ll be invited to an event the opening of our show and guess what? We’ll fly you up in our private plane because corning had the private plan and you won’t have to drive all the way you know from new york city well and and that was something the company could no longer support the museum financially. But they had this plane which flew up with their executives and I was such a such a cashier to to fly up in the blind drain, arrive at this museum, attend this beautiful event on roman glass with food from roman times and then have the director of the museum walk you through the show. I said one of the most beautiful things that you know, I was a stuff remember trying to attend this and I thought I was wowed and and so you know you can be creative with almost anything you could if you’re a social service agency will say well I can’t do that well you know you have people in your community who will come out and provide their celebrity help to you. So you could still have somebody do a little concert or somebody, somebody from your community who’s a wonderful singer musician or something. And and it may be not relevant, but maybe their daughter was helped by your uh, you know, educational charity or their mother was served by your senior citizen center. They will do things for you. There was a person who used to come and play the piano at a senior citizen center in uptown all the way up, you know, above the Columbia University is in Morningside

[00:45:30.03] spk_1:
Heights or something, riverside

[00:46:01.08] spk_0:
riverside riverside. Yeah. You know, they’re above Colombia where the cloisters, the museum is there and nobody knew who this person was. But when we looked him up, he was a very famous pianist who used to play at the Carlyle and his mother was in the center. And so he would come up and perform. And so we asked him if he would perform and he did a concert and Steinway hall for us because he was a famous man and there are little treasures in your community. You just have to find out about them. There are little gems floating around.

[00:46:14.68] spk_1:
All right. So you like the idea of incentivizing folks to give a little give more, Even even in the 2nd year. So they were they were our, it was first year was last year. Now we’re planning for the next year incentivize them to increase even in that just in that second year. Yes,

[00:46:46.98] spk_0:
yes. And they will because you’ve been talking to them, you’ve been engaging with them in different ways and, and maybe some of them will become, you know, much higher level donors because for small agencies, a small amount can make a big difference. There is if they gave that small amount of a much larger organization, they can’t give them that personalized attention and it’s not going to make, its going to be a drop in the bucket.

[00:46:52.58] spk_1:
Yeah. There are those folks who will be more will be more generous

[00:46:56.35] spk_3:
to smaller agencies

[00:46:57.35] spk_1:
because they get a lot better treatment. They have more fulfilling relationships with a smaller organization than they would at an organization where their gift was

[00:47:07.88] spk_0:
not in their communities. They, you know, they feel closer to it.

[00:47:14.38] spk_1:
Okay. Alright then. Um, why don’t you leave us with some final thoughts please?

[00:47:54.88] spk_0:
Well, just remember about the leaky bucket. You know, it’s a, we all grew up with that song. There’s a hole in the bucket, realize a dear Liza. So just remember you are not going to let your bucket leak. You’re gonna make every effort you can to get those the donor who’s gonna fall through the cracks, Give him as much attention as I say lavish movie cultivation, whatever tactics you can think of. Whatever relationship building and getting to know you uh, thoughts and strategies that you can come up with, have a plan, learn about them and let them learn about you.

[00:48:16.47] spk_1:
Excellent. I’m gonna look, I’m going to remind myself uh refresh my memory about there’s a hole in the bucket, dear Liza, dear Liza what do we do something like? What do we do? All right, thank you. Hernan Prasad founder and president Prasad consulting and research. The company is at prasad consulting dot com and she is at Prasad C Thank you very much. Program.

[00:48:24.37] spk_0:
Thank you Tory pleasure to talk to you.

[00:48:27.07] spk_1:
My pleasure as well.

[00:48:30.77] spk_2:
Next week engaged

[00:48:31.62] spk_3:
boards will

[00:48:32.58] spk_2:
fundraise with Michael Davidson and brian

[00:48:55.77] spk_1:
Saber from asking matters if you missed any part of this week’s show, I Beseech you find it at tony-martignetti dot com were sponsored by turn to communications pr and content for nonprofits. Your story is their mission turn hyphen two dot c o. Mhm. Our creative producer

[00:49:26.17] spk_4:
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 with me next week for nonprofit radio Big Donald. profit ideas for the over 95% go out and be great. Mhm

Buon Giorno From Venice! How To Keep Your Planned Giving Above Water

Cultivation and solicitation of the right prospects and potential donors for your Planned Giving program will maximize your gift revenue.