Tag Archives: Kivi Leroux Miller

Nonprofit Radio for February 1, 2021: Communications Trends Report

My Guest:

Kivi Leroux Miller: Communications Trends Report

Kivi Leroux Miller returns to share her 11th annual, Nonprofit Communications Trends Report, released just last week. She walks us through the impact of the pandemic, the resurgence of email, email best practices, CALM, leading a Girl Scout troop, and more. Kivi is CEO of Nonprofit Marketing Guide.

 

 

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[00:02:13.44] spk_1:
Hello and welcome to tony-martignetti non profit radio big non profit ideas for the other 95%. I’m your aptly named host of your favorite abdominal podcast. Oh, I’m glad you’re with me. I’d be stricken with hantavirus pulmonary syndrome if you got ratted out that you missed this week’s show Communications trends report. Kimmy LaRue Miller returns to share her 11th annual non profit Communications Trends report, released just last week. We talk about the impact of the pandemic, the resurgence of email, email, best practices, leading a Girl Scout troop and a lot more tony steak, too. The people are seizing power were sponsored by turn to communications, PR and content for nonprofits. Your story is their mission. Turn hyphen two dot ceo and by dot drives. Prospect to donor. Simplified here is communications trends. Report. What a pleasure to welcome back to non profit radio Kivi LaRue Miller. She is founder and CEO of non profit Marketing Guide, helping hundreds of non profit communicators and participants in the communications director mentoring program. Each year, she called leads a Girl Scout troop and is president of the Lexington Farmers Market Association in Lexington, North Carolina. She also co founded Grow and Go Girls, a small bakery where all net profits go into a travel fund for a group of small town girls to travel. The big World non profit Marketing Guide is that non profit marketing guide dot com? Where else would you expect it from a master communicator? Where else would it be? And at N p m k t g d. I’m not sure about that one. Kivi is at V l m. Welcome back to the show,

[00:02:19.89] spk_0:
Kivi. Thank you, tony. I’m glad to be here. It’s a pleasure to have you

[00:02:23.39] spk_1:
back. You got a little screwed on your Twitter handle for non profit

[00:02:27.08] spk_0:
marketing. You know, it’s too many letters that profit marketing God is just ridiculously log. So you gotta abbreviate these things.

[00:02:43.94] spk_1:
N p m k T g d. I’ll find you on T V l m get you there. All right. Um, what about this Girl Scout troop? What’s that? Like hurting a bunch of girls through a pandemic? Uh,

[00:02:55.57] spk_0:
well, we’re just grateful that the big trip we’re working towards us in 2022. So 20 we will be going to bullies in 2022. God willing so, you know. Yeah, it’ll be a 10 day trip. They are all ninth and 10th graders that we’ve had with us since they were little itty bitty brownies and Daisy Girl Scouts. So, um, it’s great. It’s great. We started the baking business to help them earn more money because you can really only earn so much via Girl Scout cookie sales. But we’re also doing that, too. So it’s alright.

[00:03:23.97] spk_1:
So is an adjunct to the Girl Scout cookies. You’re you’re baking your own throughout. Yes, yes, that’s a short term

[00:03:30.11] spk_0:
campaign. Exactly It Z

[00:03:33.24] spk_1:
is there a brick and mortar store? Thio grow and Go girls.

[00:03:36.32] spk_0:
Well, we participated the farmer’s market six months out of the year. So they have a booth at the farmer’s market. And, uh, we did a little renovation in a building that used to be my father laws electrical shop. So they have a little kitchen out in our backyard, and they do bread and cakes and all kinds of delicious,

[00:03:53.74] spk_1:
so they don’t have to do it in their own home. You have ah,

[00:03:56.28] spk_0:
commercial. We have a state approved home kitchen. Yes, so they can stand that they can sell their stuff legally.

[00:04:05.34] spk_1:
How big is the Girl Scout troop?

[00:04:07.48] spk_0:
It is six girls.

[00:04:09.94] spk_1:
That’s outstanding. Alright, that’s a smaller troop. It’s a small,

[00:04:14.34] spk_0:
uh and you know, the girls they tend to drop out of girl scouts is they get a little older. I think the same is true with boy Scouts to, uh, the promise of international travel is what’s kept them all super engaged in girls

[00:04:26.43] spk_1:
who have Teoh. You have to bake a certain number of gross gross number of dozens or something to get to qualify for your bellies trip. No es somebody somebody brownies.

[00:04:41.04] spk_0:
They’re doing really well. There, there, you know, they’re They’re making significantly more money at the farmers market than we do for the cookie sale. I’ll just leave it at that. We’re gonna be fine. They’re gonna have a great trip. So,

[00:04:49.79] spk_1:
Lisa, what a wonderful exotic place to go.

[00:04:52.54] spk_0:
Yeah. Yeah.

[00:04:53.82] spk_1:
You need any male?

[00:04:55.45] spk_0:
Uh, schedule is very flexible. We’ll put you on the wait list. Tony.

[00:05:08.14] spk_1:
It really wouldn’t matter when you’re going. I know I could accommodate it. Very flexible schedule. Believes I would love. Yeah, Wonderful. Um and so how about the girls through the pandemic. Well, what’s what’s that like right now?

[00:05:32.24] spk_0:
It’s tough, you know? I mean, they’re all doing online schooling, so they don’t really want to get on Zoom to do Girl Scouts. So we we occasionally do things outside, whether permitting, you know, here in North Carolina, it’s not totally frozen out. It’s certainly a little too cold right now, but, um, we were doing some things outdoors with them. It’s a small enough group that we could meet outside. All

[00:05:39.16] spk_1:
right. Wonderful commitment to non profits. You got. You got a bakery. They got the farmer’s market. I love farmers markets. When I lived in New York City, I would look forward to Saturday Farmers markets.

[00:05:49.54] spk_0:
Oh, yeah? Well, New York City got some

[00:05:51.40] spk_1:
amazing one. Yeah, they do. But now here in Emerald Isle, North Carolina, I could just go to the farm stands. There is a There is a local farmers market a couple towns away, but it’s only every other week, you know? So all the farmers are together in a big lot, but But otherwise, you know, we have the luxury of farm stands. I mean, I could go to my favorite please get my apples in the winter. Get my straw. Get my strawberries. Starting in like April May uh, for my favorite You pick place. You go right to the farmers here in North

[00:06:19.19] spk_0:
Carolina. Right? We’ve got lots of lots of roadside stands and curb markets. All kinds of choices

[00:06:26.06] spk_1:
stuff so But I admire your You have a six month, six year, six months a year farmers market in Lexington too.

[00:06:33.54] spk_0:
Yeah, made October. So being a communications professional, I got roped into being on the board. Shocker. Eso now. So now the president of the board

[00:06:45.24] spk_1:
another? Well, food, food, food. Uh, the emergence of girls as leaders.

[00:06:51.94] spk_0:
Yeah,

[00:07:19.34] spk_1:
that’s all. Great baking. You got your food component. It’s You’re staying active. Alright, so let’s talk about the trends report. Um, coming out Well, by the time we record is just last week, it z Tomorrow, as we’re recording, congratulations on 11 annual reports. Thank you. Uh, this was presumed this was an unprecedented one. I mean, you had the we had the recession, but that’s that Z not as significant as the pandemic.

[00:07:38.74] spk_0:
Right? And so, you know, we we there are sets of questions that we ask every other year. So we stuck with some of those. But then we did shift it up a little bit and asked a number of questions. Specifically related. Thio. How people, Whether the pandemic in 2020 and I suspect given how things were going this year, we may ask some of those questions again. Next year is well, since I think we’ll be living with this through 2021 as well.

[00:07:48.84] spk_1:
Uh, certainly a good part of it. Yes. Uh, So what What’s your What’s your like number one take away from from this year’s report?

[00:08:17.24] spk_0:
Well, you know, I think, Ah, a lot of people did really well Ah, lot of nonprofits did really well in a lot of non profits did not do well, And I think there’s a There’s a pretty big stark contrast between the ones that were able to really pivot. I know that everybody hates that word now, but, uh, really pivot in to do things differently. And to do that successfully and the ones that were really just kind of stuck and paralyzed by all of the change that was thrust upon them

[00:08:32.64] spk_1:
and your you have your acronym for what characterizes those who distinguishes those who did well from those who didn’t.

[00:09:18.34] spk_0:
Yes, yes. So we the way that we talk about communications, management frameworks and and effectiveness is calm and calm stands for collaborative, agile, logical and methodical. And that is true. Pandemic or no, the organizations that really embrace those for qualities and the way they manage their communications work are always more successful than those who don’t. And you know, I was very curious to see if that would have an impact if the if that mattered or not in 2020 and in fact it mattered quite a bit. Based on our survey results, it’s time for a break

[00:09:55.74] spk_1:
turn to communications. The Wall Street Journal, The New York Times, CBS Market Watch, The Chronicle of Philanthropy You want to be in media outlets like this. Turn two has the relationships with outlets like these, so that when they’re looking for experts on charitable giving, non profit trends or philanthropy, they call turned to turn two calls you because they know you because they’re your their client. Turn hyphen two dot ceo. Now back to communications trends report. Um, I don’t suppose you consider bomb I was thinking a bomb like bold, bold, agile, logical, methodical.

[00:10:03.04] spk_0:
We’re going. We’re going with com e like bomb, too, but, you know, already wrote the column. Not busy book, tony. So late on your A little late on your assistance with the acronym there.

[00:10:13.74] spk_1:
Well, I wasn’t. My opinion wasn’t solicit. Well, that’s my opinion. Wasn’t solicited 30 seconds ago. And you got anyway, so that doesn’t hold me back. All right, we’ll stick with bomb. No, you’ve been with You’ve been with calm for years. Of course. E. I was thinking balmy. You put a y in maybe.

[00:10:28.64] spk_0:
Yes. Okay. This is you living at the beach. Be

[00:10:32.73] spk_1:
for beach. Alright. So let’s let’s define com for folks who are not part of the non profit marketing guide community. And then we’ll talk about how that how that helped folks during the pandemic. So your collaborative, agile, logical and methodical What

[00:11:18.50] spk_0:
do you mean so collaborative? When you are being collaborative us, the communication staff are working with your management team with your program ah, leaders with your fundraisers, if those are on a different team and really collaboratively developing and implementing a communications plan. In contrast, to that. We often see communication staff that are just sort of thrown in the quarter by themselves, and they only communicate with others when those people are coming to dump work on their lap. Yes, yes, it’s so. You know, we use a lot of metaphors, that non profit marketing guide. So the metaphor for this is like, Are you the drive thru fast food window where people are just coming and barking orders at you? And then you have to turn around and quickly deliver a somewhat mediocre product often, um, or are you more like a You know, a nice restaurant where people are coming in and sitting down and having conversations about what they’re going to eat, and it’s more of a collaborative, high quality product at the end.

[00:11:46.09] spk_1:
You can even bring over the Somalia if you wanna. You wanna high end wine choice

[00:12:56.54] spk_0:
right? It’s a little different than just the like barking orders and get in the back of seat out the window, so that’s collaborative. When we talk about agility, it’s really about trust. Ultimately, so do the managers of the organization. The program managers trust the communication staff, trust their ability to do a good job, trust their intentions and supporting the goals of the organization or not. And when that trust is there, the communication staff have the ability to really be responsive to what’s happening in the world. And to do that very quickly and to have their professional judgment about how to make those changes be trusted and followed through. They are the experts on a lot of the communications work. You know, a lot of executive directors come up through the program side. They don’t know anything about marketing on dso. You know, the agility really comes and building those trusting relationships and trusting the professionalism of the communications staff again. On the flip side, as you can imagine, when that trust is not in place, there is tons of second guessing what the communications staff are recommending. There is a really inability to make a fast decision. Uh, people just get really paralyzed. And I think we saw a lot of that, um, paralysis and decision making, uh, in the comments that we saw in the trends report.

[00:13:23.54] spk_1:
Okay, how about logical? Methodical?

[00:13:57.44] spk_0:
Yeah, it’s a logical is all about. Does your communications plan makes sense for what you’re trying to achieve. So when we talk about you know what is your objective? What are you really trying to accomplish with your communications? Have you thought that through, or are you just making all the things? So the people who I would say are less logical are the ones that air just doing the stuff, putting this stuff online because that’s what you dio the people who are more logical, understand what they’re actually trying to achieve through their communications and methodical is really about workflow and process. It’s kind of the boring stuff, in a way, but it’s the it’s the kind of secret sauce. It’s the things that we tend to geek out on most at non profit marketing guide. So things like Do you have an editorial calendar? Have you talked about the process by which people will create drafts and who’s gonna edit those things? And who has final say, How many times do people get to see things? Or is it just these endless review loops, you know? Is there a style guide all of these sort of process and workflow things that keep communications moving and produce high quality product relatively quickly

[00:14:37.73] spk_1:
keep things orderly.

[00:14:39.32] spk_0:
Exactly. Exactly. And so again, organizations that don’t have that in play, um, tend to be the communication staff that burn out very quickly on get very unhappy on Don’t produce good results because it’s really just kind of chaos And how stuff is produced and approved and published,

[00:15:14.64] spk_1:
Right? So what was Cem? Were some bad Some bad spots? Or maybe still are. I mean, we’re still in a pandemic. Of course. Right. Um well, uh, I was like, I want to end with Yeah, I wanna end on the upward trend. You gotta start low. What are some? And and of course, you learn from mistakes, too. I mean, this is basically asking what not to do when when your besieged by by a crisis at your non profit or worldwide, you know, what should we be avoiding? So what do we see? That’s not such That’s such good work,

[00:17:21.24] spk_0:
right? So we asked people to explain in their own words. You know what we’re what? Problems were exacerbated by the pandemic. So we were We were assuming that some of these things were kind of already in play, and then the pandemic made the worst so well, that’s how we asked the question. And so we saw a number of themes come out from those answers. One won’t be a big surprise to anybody that’s been working in our sector a long time. The having to cancel all those in person events was obviously traumatic for everyone. Whether you were successful in doing something different or not, there was a big split there. So the organizations, like I said that are not calm in particular, not agile, ended up just canceling and not really doing a lot of replacements or took a very long time to make those decisions. So staff were just constantly scrambling around and there was a lot of mixed communication and a lot of confusion. Um, so you know, that was a problem. We also saw. You know, a lot of organizations have not invested into their digital communication strategies. They have old, clunky websites. Uh, their email lists are pretty small or un engaged. And so when we really had to shift to more of those communications channels, a lot of organizations just weren’t ready for that, and, um then failed toe move quickly. Again, it goes back to that agility and be able to make fast decisions and to ramp things up quickly. And they just weren’t able to do that. We saw a lot of people complaining about additional sort of crisis. Communications associated with the pandemic piled onto the workload, but nothing being taken off the plate. So this sort of ignoring the reality that everything was changing pretending like they were going to keep doing things, Um and and just not really changing quickly.

[00:17:45.24] spk_1:
Do you know how this cuts across? Um, organization size,

[00:18:28.44] spk_0:
You know, we have found in our research. And it was true this year that the organization size by itself doesn’t make that much of a difference. Nor does the mission over the organization or where they’re located. Um, the things that really make a difference are the communications team size, which does not necessarily track with organization size. So you have some very large 10 $20 million organizations and bigger that have a single communications staff person. So those two don’t necessarily track. Okay, so it’s really across the sector. Yeah. Yeah.

[00:18:32.74] spk_1:
How could How could an organization be that big? I mean, $10 million organization with a single communications director. I mean, a person. How can that function organization with that much staff and that much activity? And there’s just one person talking to all their constituencies.

[00:19:28.34] spk_0:
Yeah. Yes, it does. It does. It does No. And you know, how are they doing that? Well, in a lot of cases, they’re not doing it very low. Um, and in other cases, you know, it’s just it comes down to how they view the role of communications. And and so if they think that, well, all of our program staff are capable of communicating, uh, then you know, they’ll just have that one person that basically tries to play traffic cop with everybody else putting stuff out. But when you know, you take a look at how those organizations were performing, it’s usually not fabulous. Um, you know, some organizations have more need for communications than others.

[00:19:33.04] spk_1:
How about one of your questions reveals level of control that you have over your workload.

[00:19:39.84] spk_0:
What

[00:19:40.96] spk_1:
do you What do you I guess. What have you seen over time and what we’re seeing now in this report?

[00:21:32.64] spk_0:
So that is definitely one of those indicators that we look for when I’m coaching communications directors. It’s one of the first questions I ask, because it really gives you a sense for whether, um, they could be strategic or not. If they if they feel like they have some level of control, then that tells me that they are willing to say no to requests. Or maybe not yet. Or maybe if you know, they can push back on it. Just the overwhelming number of requests that air. It’s just endemic to our sector, like the communications have always being asked to do more than they can. So whether they have the control to really be strategic about what they actually dio and what they say no to or push off is a pretty big indicator for us about whether they’re going to be successful, long term or not. And, of course, in the pandemic, we did ask people, uh, if something’s changed. So we saw more planning, more collaboration, but basically less or the same amount of a feeling of control. And I think some of that is natural, like all of us are in this pandemic. And you know, none of us have control over the pandemic. But um do you have control over your reaction to the pandemic and your response to it? And so you know, we would like to see more people saying Yes, you know, I had a role in deciding the strategy going forward. That wasn’t always the case, you know, in part again because of the I think that our over reliance on in person events and the sector is a big part of this with canceling all of those events or putting them online. That was a huge communications lift for non profits. We’ll see if you know now that people have some experience with the online events there. We’re seeing a lot of organizations that are getting better engagement now reaching out to different kinds of folks through the online events that they didn’t get to the in person. So I think it’ll be really interesting to see a year or two or three from now what that mixes between in person and online events.

[00:22:37.04] spk_1:
You know, folks have been talking for years about diversifying beyond events. Those conversations were always focused around the value of having different streams of revenue, whether it’s earned income, individual giving, corporate Azaz event sponsorship monthly sustaining etcetera. So, you know, obviously nobody anticipated they’re being a Nev ent. That would cause all events to be canceled. But it certainly does go again to the the value of diversification in in all realms, whether it tze fundraising or communications channels. Um, you know, it’s it’s risky to be to be dependent on 11 source of In this case, we’re talking about one source of revenue and it all be events. And plus we know how much time events take versus return on a lot of

[00:22:48.26] spk_0:
them. Exactly. And, you know, again, this sort of goes back to the logical. It’s like how many of these organizations were actually paying attention to just how effective those events were with that are Oh, I was. A lot of them aren’t paying attention to how much staff time is included, or they only pay attention to the event coordinator. They don’t add in all the communications time associated with marketing those events. So I do hope nonprofits will take a much closer look before they just sort of revert back to what they used to Dio.

[00:23:26.94] spk_1:
Yeah, good. Critical. Look. Right. All right. So we know that the organizations that maybe maybe thrived is overstating it but succeeded during the pandemic. Those are those are the calm

[00:23:30.59] spk_0:
ones.

[00:26:31.44] spk_1:
It’s time for tony. Take two. The people have seized power. My concern is that non profits are not exempt. Stopping the work of the U. S. Congress seizing the capital. Five people dead, maybe even more now. Ah, suicide from one by one of the officers. And just this week bringing Wall Street hedge funds to their knees so that they needed many billions of dollars of infused capital. Thio keep them going. Groups of people are organizing collective izing and seizing power, seizing it from Washington, seizing it from Wall Street. My concern is that nonprofits are not exempt a crowd. However they put themselves together, however they organize could easily see that or could easily decide that your good work isn’t so good to them. That might look like some kind of attack on your website. It could even look like an attack on a physical office. I mean, does that really seem impossible now? So these air my concerns that the non profit community we need to be planning for the possibility that these insurgency’s hit us hit our organizations. I don’t think it’s so far fetched. Folks are seizing power from institutions and nonprofits, our institutions. So I just want you to be thinking about it. Planning for it. I don’t know how overt overtly you plan. I mean, certainly in terms of disaster recovery communications, you don’t know when it’s gonna happen. In it happens. I think in an instant I just wanted folks to be conscious of it. That’s all that the non profit community isn’t, isn’t isolated and is not immune from the whims of large groups. That is tony steak, too. Now, let us return to communications trends report with Kivi LaRue. Miller, you wanna you got a story of or a case you can share of somebody. That was some organization that was exemplified. Calm

[00:26:37.49] spk_0:
calmness. Sure. So we we saw a number of people talk about, um they’re essentially their leadership team, sort of stepping up and saying yes. Now I’m ready to listen, and I’m ready to invest because their hands were really forced, right? So you know whether it may have been a little collaboration before, we did see a number of organizations really step up from the programmatic management side as well, a sort of the executive director side and say, Okay, we’re with You were ready. What do you need? And so those organizations that really gave that attention and time and resource is to their communications staff. We’re able to really make some great things happen. And we saw a number of organizations really beat their fundraising goals, beat their community engagement goals. Um, so you know, it really speaks to having that sort of full collaboration across the organization around those strategic communications goals.

[00:27:38.04] spk_1:
Talk about engagement a little more now. You mentioned twice. You’ve some organizations. So higher rates of engagement in the pandemic. What what was what were they doing that caused that?

[00:29:56.54] spk_0:
So when we talk about engagement, it’s It’s almost like everything other than fundraising, right? So a lot of people are communicating for fundraising goals, but about half of non profit communicators don’t actually consider fundraising to be a primary goal for them. What they’re usually trying to do instead is the sort of big term community engagement, so it’s trying to get it depends on the organization, but for some of them, it’s people that are actually using their programs, and service is so recruiting them and keeping those people engaged in in those service is other people. It’s more of an advocacy or education or awareness kind of engagement where they’re trying to get people to care mawr or to think differently or act differently on different issues. Um, so you know, we saw a lot of successful organizations really experimenting this year, particularly with moving events online and the ones that were really willing to try some new things, I would say moving events online. We saw a lot more people talk about video this year than we ever have. We have been, you know, preaching video as engaging online content for many years now. But, you know, it’s kind of hard, and people get nervous about being on camera on DSO. The pandemic has really again sort of taken that barrier away. And we saw a number of organizations say, You know, I could never get my program staff to do a video for me before they just always No, no, no, no, no. And now they’re you know, people are used to being on Zoom. They’re more comfortable using their own phones to video themselves. So now we’re seeing tons more program staff, cooperating with their communications departments on creating video in particular. So that’s been really nice to, um, you know, just mawr attention to the online channels in General Thio email to social media. Whereas those might have been considered sort of nice toe have sorts of things before now. Leaders we’re really seeing them is essential tools to communicate for fundraising and engagement. Instead, attention is nice.

[00:30:15.24] spk_1:
The attention is nice. Yeah, leads. Thio leads to calm leader leaders got dragged by the pandemic. Thio Thio. Execute what you’ve been saying for for years. Be calm. Let’s be calm. Email. You got a lot to say about email. Email is not dead by any means, but no, no, not only not dead, but it’s resurging. You’ve got ideas around anybody. All right, so first, let’s start with the resurgence of email. What happened?

[00:31:30.84] spk_0:
Yes, so you know, for as we said, this is the 11th year of the trends report and then the first five or so we you know, every year we would ask Okay, what is your most important communications channels? And we kept getting the same answers every year. It got kind of boring. So we stopped asking. So we haven’t really asked in five years. And the last time we asked, you know, websites were always number one and then email and social media kind of flip flop between two and three. Well, so we waited five years, we asked. Email is now number one, and I don’t think that’s just because of the pandemic. I think in part it’s because, you know, it’s still a direct way to communicate with people, unlike the website, which you sort of have to draw people to. But you have so much more control with email than you do with social media, you never know what Zuckerberg and all the rest of them are going to do with their algorithms and what changes they’re gonna make to the way. Yeah, you know. So it’s extremely frustrating for folks. Um, so, you know, it makes a lot of sense that email is now number one. But there’s some problems too now, I

[00:31:45.54] spk_1:
see. Yeah. Um Okay, well, you’re the guest. So you talk about the problems, I cease? Um, e c. Some dissonance between importance and use, but we’ll get to that talk about the problems that you see with email, please.

[00:33:29.54] spk_0:
So there are a lot of best practices associated with email, and this is true for anybody that’s using mass email, not just the nonprofit sector. So managing your email list, for example, paying attention when people stop opening, you really have to stop emailing them. Um, it goes into what’s called your sender reputation, and that effects how often your stuff shows up in the spam folder. And I don’t think nonprofits really appreciate that. There are these algorithms at work, much like there are in social media, where the inbox providers. So the Google’s and Microsoft’s of the world are deciding whether to send your email to spam or not. And, um, you know, I bet tony, if you look at your inbox, I know I see this. When I look at my inbox, I’m subscribed to a lot of different non profit newsletters, etcetera. Sometimes those things show up in my inbox and other times, same organization. It will show up in my spam folder, and I honestly never go look in my spam folder unless someone has told me I missed something or I’m trying to do some research like this. So a lot of non profit content is going to spam. How do we stop that? Well, there are a number of best practices, and unfortunately, in our surveys both this year and last year, you know, maybe 25%. Maybe a third of nonprofits are implementing those different best practices. The overwhelming majority of nonprofits are not doing it. So while email is becoming more important, the likelihood that you’re nonprofits email is going into that spam filter is going up a ZX.

[00:33:30.53] spk_1:
Well, all right. Um, personalization s. So we got to talk about the things that that are simple organizations should be doing thio over. Overcome the the algorithm, the spam filter algorithms personalizing. You mentioned personalizing subject lines. Even

[00:33:50.24] spk_0:
so, is that your name

[00:33:52.55] spk_1:
in the subject line?

[00:33:54.84] spk_0:
Sure. So that’s one way you could do it. Another way to do it is to like if it’s a fundraising email is thio put in the body of the email? What? Their last gift, waas or the last time they gave? If depending on how robust your data tracking is, you may know which programs people care about the most. And so another way to personalize email is to, you know, send them the content that they care most about. You know, we just sort of simplify it. We say, Okay, if you’re a humane society, like, who are your cat? People who’re your dog? People like you want to put the dog photos and the dog people emails and the cat photos and the other one’s

[00:34:31.12] spk_1:
right.

[00:34:43.54] spk_0:
Exactly. So that’s kind of all related to personalization. And we do see nonprofits doing that of of all the different things we asked about. The majority of nonprofits have tried some level of personalization, so that’s a positive for

[00:34:48.48] spk_1:
sure. I see you have 59% but we’re still missing for that. We’re still missing 41%. Yes, like 40% of non profit. They’re not doing that

[00:35:00.14] spk_0:
right. All right,

[00:35:01.04] spk_1:
I’m not I’m not focusing on the negative, but, you know, pointing out everybody is not. This is That’s a pretty simple practice, like Hello, you know, first name code. You know, that’s not hard. I mean, even I do that.

[00:35:23.74] spk_0:
It’s it’s not hard, you know. The thing is, it’s like it’s it’s more than just copying and pasting email template and going right. You have to pay attention. And but

[00:35:25.05] spk_1:
there’s value in doing

[00:35:33.94] spk_0:
so. Yes, you have to test it. But it’s time consuming. Like all of these little extra things, you have to dio take time. And so if you’re super busy and dot com, you don’t have the

[00:35:43.84] spk_1:
time. You’re the one person, the one person shopping, a $10 million organization. You don’t have time for the 1st 1st name code,

[00:35:55.64] spk_0:
right? And then also, you know, to really do that, you have to have confidence in the data. So if you have a really messy old database, it could be a little scary to think about what they might be merging into that first name slot.

[00:36:01.19] spk_1:
It might be a letter, right?

[00:36:03.63] spk_0:
Yeah, I could

[00:36:05.81] spk_1:
be any name,

[00:36:06.42] spk_0:
or it could be nothing. You know, you might not even have first names in your database, so yeah, so it could be a mess.

[00:36:17.33] spk_1:
Alright, Data integrity. What else s O A. B testing is another common simple that you mentioned it. You could test subject lines. You could test just about anything the color of the, uh, color of the give now button the body of the text, the photos, the videos.

[00:36:48.83] spk_0:
Yeah, and the email service providers. Most of them are making that a little easier, but again, it’s an extra step you have to take. And then you have to sort of think about Okay, What makes sense to test? How do I keep track of all this? It sounds like you’re

[00:36:49.92] spk_1:
you’re very empathetic.

[00:36:51.77] spk_0:
You

[00:37:03.13] spk_1:
do for the I can see it. E c it, I hear it do. I’m sure listeners gonna hear it. So what do you do for the one person in the $10 million organization who can’t find the time or doesn’t feel she confined the time and which means she can’t? She feels she can’t. We’re not looking at it objectively. Subjectively perception. Find the time for the for the first name code. How do you meet that person where they are?

[00:38:21.42] spk_0:
Well, what we talk about is really getting riel about their workload. They’re often trying to do too much, Um, and to manage too many channels and talk about too many different things. And they don’t have the trust. They don’t have that ability to say no or not yet. So we go back to basic boundaries, you know, I mean, all of us that do any kind of coaching work ultimately end up talking about boundaries, what the people were coaching because so much of that comes back to people sort of personal control and agency and ability to say yes or no to things. And so that’s usually where I start. And then once I can help them kind of get rid of some of the noise that’s not really contributing to success or to just give them the confidence that they’re not going to get fired by saying no to something stupid within their organizations. Um, then we can talk about, you know? Okay, if we can just get two hours a week, we can implement a lot of these best practices that are going to make a huge difference. It really doesn’t take that much time. It’s just kind of getting over that hump.

[00:38:23.42] spk_1:
What about advocating for more help for these beleaguered communications directors? Do you talk about trying to make the case toe leadership absolute for adding another person who’s a professional

[00:38:36.37] spk_0:
community? Yes, absolutely. We talked about that a lot Andi and we’re seeing some of that, you know, like we do a number of different coaching programs and I’m just starting a new group. And there are a number of people in that group that are growing their team from 2 to 4 or 3 to 5, even because they were finally able to make that case.

[00:39:01.22] spk_1:
How about when it just comes down to This isn’t direct place for you. You just You just should leave E mean your coach, and you have to be

[00:39:05.85] spk_0:
absolutely

[00:39:07.82] spk_1:
good for the good of right,

[00:39:10.72] spk_0:
right? It’s It’s one of the secrets of our training and coaching programs that we don’t advertise. So, yeah, just for you, tony and your listeners. But, um, you know, lots of times, we’ll get nonprofits that pay for training and coaching with us, and then I end up encouraging those people to find another job, and they do. They they you know, they realize that they’re working in an environment that is not supportive and that there are lots of other opportunities to work in an environment that is supportive, and they go find those jobs so

[00:39:44.12] spk_1:
well. Our listeners are the CEOs, so they could be on that side of it. But our listeners are also focusing communications, and they may be beleaguered. And so they need to know the the range of opportunity available to them. Of course, yeah, waiting, that’s the last. That’s the last step After you.

[00:40:01.44] spk_0:
It is, but, you know, but

[00:40:07.81] spk_1:
other less drastic methods. But But it has, uh, it’s a possibility,

[00:40:08.72] spk_0:
right? And, you know, I think we all know there are some really bad managers in our sector, just like there’s bad managers in every sector. Just because we’re trying to do good doesn’t mean that, you know, everybody is a perfect human being who’s got all kinds of training and how to be an exceptional manager. That’s just not the case.

[00:41:34.11] spk_1:
Yes, I’ve heard rumors to that effect. Yes, yeah, time for our last break. Quote. There’s nothing as simple as dot drives. Our executive team meets once per week to sit down and go through our dot drives pipelines. It’s fun to watch them have a healthy dialogue and to see them get excited about their numbers rising toward their goals. DOT drives has allowed us to take those key relationships and bring them to a deeper level and quote, that is Wendy Adams, director of donor engagement at Patrick Henry. Family Service is dot drives Prospect to donor. Simplified. You get the free demo, and for listeners, there’s a free month. You do that at the listener landing page. Tony dot Emma slash dot We’ve got but loads more time. I’m glad of that. We got, but loads more time for communications trends. Report. You got one more that I really like, uh, welcoming, welcoming and re engaging campaigns around. Email s. So if you have a lackluster list that’s not engaged on and to bring people on board the on board them to your to your organization talk about those those two potentials.

[00:41:45.81] spk_0:
Yeah, these air super easy things again like it doesn’t take. It’s not a lot of time on going. It’s a It’s a little bit of time up front, right? It’s one of these prevention kind of things, like you do the thing up front so that you don’t have to worry about the problems later. So there’s some things you could do with your list to keep the vaccination

[00:41:59.92] spk_1:
your vaccination and then you need occasional childhood boosters

[00:42:03.38] spk_0:
exactly. So Okay, so we’ll stick with your metaphor here. So you’re welcome. Syriza’s your vaccination, right? Someone gets on your list. The hard part is really done. How do you keep them on the list? So the welcome Siri’s? It’s just a quick Siri’s. We recommend three emails over the course of a week or 10 days, where you really just sort of introduce people more to the organization and how they can be involved. You really want to get them excited about this new relationship and try to build that relationship. And so there are a lot of different approaches that you could take to a welcome Siri’s. But the idea is that you’re really trying to say, Hey, we see you, We’re glad you’re here. Let’s do some amazing things together to change the world. And

[00:42:42.79] spk_1:
And don’t email providers often have. Ah, excuse me. Have Ah, a process that you you for on boarding, You know, You know, you’ve got a new you know, you’ve got a new member to your organization do list. And so within 24 hours, you want them to get this and then 36 hours and then 72 hours and there’s your like, there’s your three.

[00:44:34.99] spk_0:
You just gotta go. You just gotta go fill it in. But, you know, making the decisions about what goes on those emails is sometimes too hard a decision. So again, it goes back to whether you have collaborative support from your leadership about what should be in those emails or the authority to just decide for your organization. So filling that out, you know, really, it doesn’t take that long, so going back to your your booster idea. So let’s say people are on your email list. They’re open an email cruising along, and then they just kind of stopped. For whatever reason, who knows? Right, but haven’t opened an email from you in six months. At that point, most of those email companies both the inbox providers and the people sending your email are going to consider that person un engaged. And that again has implications for how often that email will be in the inbox versus spam. So we want to re engage, so you can also do another set of emails just to those people who haven’t opened an email recently and what you’re trying to do. There is basically to get them to open or click on the email, so you’re sending them your best content. It’s the sort of in case you missed it kind of messaging. Sometimes people will do kind of, you know, funny little. Oh, you know, Do you still like us? Are we breaking up? You know that kind of thing? Not my favorite, but you know, it’ll work for some organizations, but you’re basically telling people, Hey, we’re still here. Do you still want to get our email or not? And if you don’t, you should stop emailing them. And that’s a really hard thing. We find that the overwhelming majority of nonprofits just cannot.

[00:44:43.83] spk_1:
They’re not. They’re not stopping there. They’re

[00:45:01.79] spk_0:
not. They’re not. And it’s really bad because they’re going to continue. I mean, that’s That’s the nut. That’s sort of the worst thing you could do is continue. Thio email people that are not opening your stuff and haven’t opened it for months or years. At this point that really tanks your

[00:45:02.45] spk_1:
your sender reputation. It all goes into your algorithm. I

[00:45:05.57] spk_0:
mean, it doesn’t know

[00:45:07.22] spk_1:
that the email providers know how your emails are being treated

[00:45:12.29] spk_0:
right. Sometimes people will call us and they’ll say, Can’t be I subscribe your email, but it’s in spam. I wanted you to know it’s in spam and you know my response to that is, Well, that’s really your behavior problem less than mine because I know I’m not sending bad content. The problem is, you’re probably not opening enough of our emails. So what I need you to Dio is go ahead and rescue it out of the spam folder, and then the next couple times you see it come through. Just go ahead and open that email and that will send the signal that you know, you don’t consider a spam.

[00:45:44.49] spk_1:
How did you get the great name? Kivi? What a lovely

[00:45:46.52] spk_0:
name. Eyes

[00:45:47.85] spk_1:
that from Yeah, it’s It’s like I think of a little bird like it reminds me of a hummingbird. What? What?

[00:45:54.17] spk_0:
What? It’s a Hebrew name, But, you know, I also joked that I was born in 1969 in Northern California. So my parents thought they were hippie, so they wanted to give me a fun name.

[00:46:04.28] spk_1:
It was a fun name, but it’s just Hey, Bru, what does it does it mean something in Hebrew.

[00:46:09.38] spk_0:
I believe it means protected one, although I might have

[00:46:13.83] spk_1:
that non protector. Maybe it’s protector.

[00:46:39.48] spk_0:
Yeah, it tze something nice. It’s also a male name in, I think, something like a one of the Scandinavian languages and it means stone. It’s a it means stone or rock, I think in a e Don’t know camera. But when a camera Which name? Yeah, it’s a male. It’s a male name. So sometimes if you if you’re like looking at Kitty’s online, it will be a bunch of tall blond guys,

[00:46:53.28] spk_1:
right? Right, eating, eating a lot of salmon or swordfish. I like the protector or protected one. Now, uh, contrary to what I usually do, I let you mentioned something. So I said, You’re the guest, So let’s go there. I usually don’t do that.

[00:46:59.78] spk_0:
Yeah, that

[00:47:00.16] spk_1:
surprised ultimately, for you as a za marketing communications professional, because usually I take

[00:47:12.08] spk_0:
over. Yeah, I was a little surprised when that happened, but resume your normal personality. Tony, please. Let’s talk about

[00:48:13.07] spk_1:
the center of the universe is me in this show. The the dissonance I see between your respondents say that email is either very important or absolutely essential is like 50/50 percent, 53%. But then the usage Oh, and then and then Facebook. They about about the same percentage. 54% say Facebook, not at all important to them. But then you have a lovely another lovely, colorful bar chart on community use of communications channels. And Facebook is being used week, either several times per week or daily by 80% of the org’s. And email is down like only 21% are doing daily or or then 53% of doing several times per week or daily. So I see a distance between the the importance the relative importance of email on Facebook and their actual usage.

[00:49:19.07] spk_0:
Well, I guess I don’t quite see that because they’re they’re just different channels, right? And so what would be considered best practice is going to vary so on Social media, You know, people update its shorter updates more frequently, um, than with email, which is somewhat longer content. But you know, most organizations probably shouldn’t be emailing every day, whereas they probably should be posting everyday on social media. So with email, what we really say is, you know, if you’re on Lee doing email monthly or even quarterly. It’s like, Why are you even bothering if you’re only emailing people quarterly? But you know, we we try to really encourage people to move in the direction of weekly for email. Now, of course, it depends what they’re doing, right? Like the organizations that air really actively involved in advocacy work. Our political topics for things were changing very quickly. There’s tons of breaking news, you know. They are going to email daily in a lot of cases, but even kind of your average non profit. That’s not doing super newsy things. You know, I would still encourage them to do a short email once a week. A short email once a week is better than a long email once a month.

[00:49:59.67] spk_1:
A short email once a week is better than a long email. Yeah, yeah, more, more frequency. People only hear from you 12 times a year. That just in 2021. That just seems completely inadequate from educations standpoint. Month. Yeah, they’re gonna forget you in between. All right. All right. So I understand. Maybe there’s not the dissonance that I that I saw Just What about Facebook, you know, Do we still have to be? You have to talk about it because there’s 30 you want me to get Julia Campbell to talk about it, E

[00:50:10.23] spk_0:
I recommend.

[00:50:11.68] spk_1:
Yes, I know. I’ve We’ve We’ve had her. We’ve talked. I’ve talked to her. Um, Alright. There are still 3.5 for whatever billion

[00:50:18.62] spk_0:
people there. You

[00:50:19.39] spk_1:
still have to be

[00:50:20.47] spk_0:
there. I mean, it’s still the, you know, the big the big monster. Right?

[00:50:26.49] spk_1:
So

[00:51:43.06] spk_0:
you know, what I encourage people to do is to really think about how to use Facebook, though. So when you look at what is most engaging on Facebook and where Facebook itself is investing, most of its resource is it’s into video, particularly Facebook Live or it’s into the group’s function of Facebook. You know, tony, I don’t know if you’ve how much time you spend on Facebook or, you know, if you really analyze your own personal use, but I know the overwhelming majority of time I spend on Facebook is in Facebook groups, okay? And so, you know, a group isn’t right for every organization, but if it if you’re interested in both communicating with people and having those people communicate with each other. So you’re really interesting in organizing that community and facilitating that community conversation. Then I think a group can make a lot of sense on. Then again, Like I said, video is something that ah lot of people are embracing now with the pandemic, they’re just going for it. And so Facebook live could be really helpful in that way, too. Um, you know, I don’t encourage people to spend tons and tons of time on just sort of random posts on their Facebook pages. Um, I think there’s a better ways to use that time. Okay,

[00:51:48.06] spk_1:
what would you like to wrap up with? What should we say about the non profit communications trends report that we haven’t talked about yet?

[00:52:59.95] spk_0:
Well, you know, I think you mentioned how empathetic we are, um or I enormously. Yeah. I mean, I am not, like, normally, a cheerleader type of person, but this is the one place in my life, you know? Besides, maybe my girl scouts that I do feel like I am a cheerleader is is really trying to encourage calms, folks, Thio, uh, you know, step into the role to lead in the role to really move their organizations forward. And, you know, I think we’re seeing some of that take place. Every time we do a trends report, we can see MAWR, especially in the open ended questions where people can really talk in their own words, about the changes that are going on on. We’re continuing to see that, and I think the pandemic was a great test of that. The organizations that are doing the calm, the collaborative, agile, logical, methodical are able toe whether even this horrible pandemic on. So I think I find that encouraging and hopeful. If they could get through this, they could do anything. Just imagine the possibilities.

[00:53:21.78] spk_1:
The empathetic Give You Lulu Miller non profit marketing guide at non profit marketing guy dot com and at I’ll Say It one more time. N P M K T G D. On Kivi is at key BLM at TVL M. Well, I’ll be talking to you before you and the girls go toe, but I’ll say I hope you have a wonderful trip thio to Belize, but I’ll be talking to you before then. Thank you very much, Kevin.

[00:53:27.83] spk_0:
Thanks for sharing

[00:54:20.75] spk_1:
my pleasure next week. I just can’t say at this point, But have I ever let you down? If you missed any part of this week’s show, I beseech you find it at tony-martignetti dot com. Sponsored by turn to communications, PR and content for nonprofits, your story is their mission. Turn hyphen two dot ceo and by dot drives Prospect to donor Simplified tony-dot-M.A.-slash-Pursuant demo and a free Month Ah, creative producer is kiddies. Friend Claire Meyerhoff shows Social Media is by Susan Chavez Mark Silverman is our Web guy, and this music is by Scott Stein. Thank you for that affirmation. Scotty, you’re with me next week for non profit radio. Big non profit ideas for the other 95% go out and be great.

Nonprofit Radio for August 19, 2016: Your Supercharged Board & Your Content Calendar

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Laura Norvig, James Porter & Kivi Leroux Miller: Your Content Calendar

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What belongs in it? Who do you need to help create it? How do you get buy in? And how about resources to help you? Our can-do content calendar committee from the Nonprofit Technology Conference is Laura Norvig from ETR, James Porter at The END Fund and Kivi Leroux Miller, founder of Nonprofit Marketing Guide.

 

 


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Hello and welcome to tony martignetti non-profit radio big non-profit ideas for the other ninety five percent. I’m your aptly named host. Oh, i’m glad you’re with me. I’d grow a foe set if i saw that you missed today’s show you’re supercharged board dolph goldberg reveals his wisdom for keeping engagement civil, revitalizing your board committees and making your board meetings effective. He’s, the author of the book successful non-profits build supercharged boards and you’re content calendar what belongs in it? Who do you need to help create it? How do you get the buy-in and how about resources to help you? Our can do content calendar committee from the non-profit technology conference is laura norvig from e t r james porter at the end fund-raising founder of non-profit marketing guide between those on tony’s take two solitude. We’re sponsored by pursuing full service fund-raising data driven and technology enabled, you’ll raise more money pursuant dot com and by we be spelling super cool spelling bee fundraisers. We be spelling dot com. I’m glad that dolph goldenburg is with me. He is managing director at the goldenburg group. Before consulting, he was executive director of an aids service organisation. In atlanta and an lgbt community center in philadelphia, he has more than a decade of fund-raising experience dafs company is at goldenburg group dot com dolph welcome. Thank you, tony it’s. Good to be on. And i have to give you a very you know, it’s, i’m not tryingto humble myself and, uh, you know, be in your in your pocket right away. But i have to apologize because, uh, when i first introduced the segment, i called you dolph goldberg, but that is not correct. Your name is dolph goldenburg. No worries at all of the common short shorthand for the name. Well, okay, well, but inappropriate shorthand. You you have it’s, like calling me martignetti. You know, there is that there is that syllable in the middle. So it’s, dolph goldenburg all right. And you were just recently married. Just last month. I wa sai wass after about ten years together, my husband and i decided to make it legal. So we had a very small wedding with just friends and family outstanding. And that was up in new england, right? That actually was indeed deep, deep south georgia. We’re going ok. Thie twin city metropolis twin. City of helena mcrae, georgia. Okay. I don’t know where i got northeast, but new england. But you are exactly opposite. A small town, georgia. Wonderful. Congratulations. Thank you. And congratulations on this book. Um, why, uh why do we need a book on supercharging boards? That’s. A great question. I have been an executive director for about a dozen years. And? And what i found is an executive director. Was that both my my work as a needy, but also the organization’s mission was was always either supported or made more difficulty because of the board. And what i found was that the time that i would invest in board development and the board would invest in its own development always paid strong reward. You have an interesting personal journey. Is tio how you came to write the book? I do. Actually, i i had been at a housing aid service organization gosh, for about almost five years or so and and realized that i was starting to have a midlife crisis. And so, unlike most people have a midlife crisis, i didn’t have an affair. I didn’t get a corvette. What i did do was i gave ten. Months notice that my job as an executive director and i planned an eight month long sabbatical and my my plan really on that sabbatical. Wass to think about what? What i had done well in my career what i had done poorly in my career and then really kind of put all of that down in terms of my lessons learned around board development and so through that door during that sabbatical, i sort of travel the world. I went to vietnam and cambodia for two months. I hiked around in peru for a month. I hide out west for a month. But between each of those trips, i would come back home. And i would work on this book, which, while it is very short, took, you know, about five or six months to write, and it has tend different zoho areas of topics of improvement for boards were only going to have to time to touch on three, maybe four depending how we go. But, you know, so the message is, you know, you gotta buy the book for the foot for the full ten. I love that message. Thank you. Thank you. All right, and and you’re you’re being very gracious there. I messed up your name. I got your wedding location wrong. We’re starting. I i can’t imagine interview it’s starting worse. But you’re being very kind and gracious, so we’ll get to it. It can only get much better now. Hopefully, i have more the facts, correct. You know, i feel like the interview’s going well, thank you. I do two. Absolutely. All right. Let’s get started. Rules of engagement. You want you want to seymour? Civility on boards? Yeah, and, you know, and and not just not just civility, stability is really important. But board have to sit down and say, what rules are we going to live? These are not the governing rules. These air, not the expectations that every boardmember should have, but they’re really you know, how are we going to interact with each other? What behavior is okay? And his not okay. And civility is a big part of that, you know? But you know, as some other examples we have all seen the boardmember who was the naysayers? Whatever comes up, they try to shoot it down and that’s not on ly unproductive for the board, but it’s also really unproductive for that individual boardmember because what ends up happening is if every time they open their mouth, people sort of roll their eyes. And they just tuned the naysayers. Yeah, this is the person loses credibility. But right now, how are we going to deal with this? Ah, this gadflies, this nay sayer. Well, so i believe that the first thing we do is we help the board developed its own rules of engagement. And so as an example, what would come out of that is, you know, being the naysayers is not okay. And once the board has generally come to alignment on that note, i did not say concensus, but actually come to alignment because, you know, if ninety percent of the board feels that way that’s probably what it should be. So, you know, so once the board has come to an alignment on, for example, may saying is not okay or, you know, or what happens in the meeting stays in the meeting, those types of things. Then when people move beyond that and kind of step outside of the rules of engagement, then the board chair or the governor’s chair can have a conversation with that person and really start to bring them back into alignment on the rules of engagement. Okay. And, of course, the naysayers air going toe may say that rule so on your your your point about alignment? Not not one hundred percent consensus, right? Right. We want to be prepared for the naysayers today. Say that they saying rule right? Yeah, i love the way you said. Okay, well, i spit it out fast. All right? I’ll tell you what, let’s, take our guy lily for a break. And dolph, of course, you and i are going to keep talking about the supercharged board, revitalizing committees and making meetings effective. So stay with us. You’re tuned to non-profit radio tony martignetti also hosts a podcast for the chronicle of philanthropy fund-raising fundamentals is a quick ten minute burst of fund-raising insights published once a month. Tony’s guests are expert in crowdfunding, mobile giving event fund-raising direct mail and donor cultivation. Really all the fund-raising issues that make you wonder am i doing this right? Is there a better way there is? Find the fund-raising fundamentals archive it. Tony martignetti dot com that’s marketmesuite n e t t i remember there’s, a g before the end, thousands of listeners have subscribed on itunes. You can also learn maura, the chronicle website. Philanthropy dot com fund-raising fundamentals the better way. Welcome back to big non-profit ideas for the other ninety five percent adult let’s let’s hit a few more of these rules of engagement. Ah, i don’t want you don’t want this to sound like a battlefield plan or something, but but ah, in fact, your first one is the is the civility rule. So this the board meeting’s should not be a battlefield. All right, working through committees, we’re going. We’re going to talk a little about revitalising there shortly, but you gotta work through the structure, right? Right. So so one of the rules of engagement the board’s often come up with is if someone has a great idea the place to bring that is to the appropriate committee, not to the full board. And then you really let the committee deliberate on that idea developer recommending agent if it’s appropriate and bring that the full board because really, the full board just doesn’t have time to deal with all the good ideas that are percolating up. Is that it? Absolutely. The the work of a bored is done in its committees and one of the one of the things that i always kind of saying, this is sort of the committee math, if you will, is that if you have got five committees that meat between every board meeting for just ninety minutes, what that means is that committee dill deliberation is seven hours boardmember can’t be seven hours long, but when you have five committees each meeting for ninety minutes, you get more deliberation and you get better recommendations and decisions coming to the board. There also is an expectation that boardmember sze will prepare for committee and full board meetings. Absolutely, you know, nothing is more demoralizing both to senior staff and bored leadership, then for board members to show up having already received the meeting packet, but not having read the reports on these financials because then, really, what happens is the committee reports are just reading what they’ve already written what’s mohr has part of that expectation not also means there’s an expectation on the staff, and that expectation is that meeting packets go out with enough lead time that board members can actually review them. I swear i’ve been to board meetings where there are members opening their their packets for the first time, and, you know, they’re there cramming ten minutes. Before the board meeting is about to be called to order, right? And you know what those boardmember often don’t realize is that it is painfully obvious in the meeting who read the meeting minutes and the meeting packet and who did not read the meeting packet it is it comes out, you’re you’re gonna be you’re gonna be you’re gonna be exposed, you might not be called out, but it’s going to be obvious, right? All right. Um, confidentiality right way got to keep the organization’s promise is close to us, right? And it’s, not just confidentiality within, like, in terms of inside the organization’s. Obviously, what is said in the board meeting does not go outside of the organization, but it all does not go to other staff. So, you know, so any staff member not present in the board meeting should also not be privy to the deliberation of the board and one more that you have rules of engagement dahna whether you have authority to represent the organization, talk about that one, right? So, you know, so oftentimes they’re our board members, i shouldn’t think oftentimes sometimes there are board members who feel that they have the authority to speak on behalf of the organisation every now and then. In fact, when i started one, jobs and executive director someone to actually find a contract on behalf of the organization, they were not a boardmember they did not have the authority to do so, and we had to find a way to back out of that contract, you know? So they also do not have the authority to individually sign a contract unless the board has voted and given them that authority. Now all these rules should be adopted by the board, right? That’s what you were saying earlier, but right, right, but and i also think that the board should sit down and see and have a discussion and see if there’s other rules of engagement that are appropriate for them as a board and again to meet these air different from expectations, you know, you know, expectations are, you know, attendance personal giving expectations are a little bit higher level than rules of engagement, right? And that’s, another part of your book expectations, i just i feel like a lot of guests have covered those, but i’ve never seen you know, we haven’t talked. About rules of engagement and and some of these that you’re talking about, like the like the civility and the the the naysaying, the naysayers way have covered those before. So i like like, this whole this also area the book, and if i could say the civility is really a very positive way of saying no bomb throwers kind of like naysayers, we’ve all seen bomb throwers and board meetings and it’s it’s not effective for the board, you have any, uh, any and any bad stories you want to tell. Oh gosh, you know, i’ve only been permanent executive director of your organization, so i don’t want to get anybody in trouble by telling that story, but by telling a story, but but i will share with you that that i have seen one board where, at every single meeting, you know, this person was completely and totally negative, not just being in a sayer, but completely and totally negative about everything and, you know, was literally throwing, you know, little mini bombs into the meeting to kind of set up disagreements between other board members and then we just sit back and watch them fight for goodness. And obviously that someone who we had to move off the board, i should say, right, right, totally negative influence. Yeah. Okay. Um, let’s go teo to our committee structure, revitalizing committees. Why don’t you want to open this when our pal you want to start with with this kind of work, you know, one of the things that i said before that, you know, really ineffective board, a supercharged board does the vast majority of its work through committees, committees will always have a larger bandwidth and a deeper bench of expertise to deliberate on strategic issues that are facing an organization is part of that one of the things that i recommend is that every committee have an annual plan, so, you know, so they know what they’re responsible for that year. Ideally, they’ll have to read a four goals for the year, but then they also say, ok, if we’re gonna have, you know, six meetings every other month, meeting one we want to cover x meeting to we want to cover something else meeting three, so so that way they’re always moving the ball forward on these projects, but they’re they’re also making sure that what? They do is in alignment with the strategic plan and the organizational goals. You said it earlier. The work of the board is done through the committees. Right. Okay, so we need our committees to be effective and revitalized. As you say in the book, let’s, talk through some of the essential committees. Just in case people are not familiar with the work of the executive committee is so, you know, so often times. And let me say that some organizations have justin executive committee. Some organizations have just a governance committee, and some have both and there’s. And depending what the structure is, sometimes there’s some overlap between those two committees. But, you know, typically what the executive committee does, is it it sets the agenda for board meetings. It it liberates or makes decisions on behalf of the board between meetings when absolutely necessary, that should not happen on a regular basis. And then if there’s not a governance committee. Oftentimes the executive committee is also responsible for enforcing expectations, you know, ensuring the committee’s air meeting on a timely manner, ensuring that conflicts of interest are disclosed and deliberated and voted on by the full board. But if there is a governance committee that typically goes to the governing committee now, just like the committee’s air setting ah plan for the year is the executive committee setting up a board plan for the year? Absolutely, you know, ideally in its first month of the year, the new executive committee wants to sit down and think about what the strategic plans goals are for the year, determine which committees can help drive those goals forward and then and then work with those committees. They developed their annual plan as well. Now off. And i think also a part of that, and this is going to bleed over a little bit latto making meetings effective. The executive committee also needs to figure out what the organization’s calendar is, including the board calendar, and make sure that that is in the plan as well. The all the committee chairs sit on the executive committee, right? And it depends for some organizations. Every committee chair sits on the executive committee and other organizations. That’s, just the officers and, you know, again, to a great extent, it probably depends whether there’s a separate governance committee or not. Okay. Okay, so it’s so. Meaning, if you have a separate governance committee, then what? You, you don’t need all the committee chairs on the board, on the executive committee. So, you know, so, so if you’ve got a separate governance committee, then you might actually want all of the committee chairs on your executive committee, because because then what they’re doing, they’re setting the agenda, and and they’re doing sort of, like, very high level board work. But if there’s, not a governance committee and the executive committee, is also responsible for enforcing expectations, ensuring disclosure of conflicts of interest, you know, those those legal obligations that every board needs to be taken care of? You probably want a smaller group of people working on that, okay, so strike three for me, it’s a good thing. I’m the host of this show because i misread that one, too, okay, sorry here, all right. Yeah. It’s a good thing. I’m in charge of the show. All right, let’s. See what else? Another committee finance. And i was finance. Is this the same as the investment committee on a lot of boards krauz investment? Yeah. So? So a lot of aa lot of boards called the finance committee, the finance and investment committee. Some board called the finance an audit committee, but, you know, but typically, especially in the smaller organizations, the finance committee ends up being responsible for the audit, for investments and everything that falls underneath it. Okay. And, of course, a lot more detail in the book. You gotta you just gotta get the book. I’m going to say successful non-profits build supercharged boards. Now the committees that we have they are they’re all supposed to be meeting in advance of full board meetings, right? You i think you recommend a couple of weeks before, right? Right. So in the in the ideal world between every board meeting, all of the committee’s need as well, because every committee is in some way responsible for goals in the strategic plan and it’s helping to drive that forward. So if the committee’s air not doing their work between board meetings, the board meetings are just honestly, no, do not do not move the organization forward is not all right, let’s talk about the fund-raising or development committee what’s your advice there. So, you know, in terms of the fundraising committee, i think it is absolutely critical that and again, this is often for small and medium sized organizations that either have did either have limited or or no fund-raising staff, it is absolutely critical that they start their year looking at actual fund-raising strategies from the prior year determining what was effective, what isn’t, or going, what, as a committee and an organization they want to do again in the coming year and, you know, and i also think it’s it is essential that the fundraising committee have a voice and what the board give get is going to be they don’t ultimately have the decision, but they should have a voice in that on that that goes over to one of the expectations of board board e-giving right, okay, right now, each of these committees needs to have a staff liaison. This is this is going to get a little staff intensive, i am i? I am all about every committee should have a staff liaison. And and really, the role of that staff person is not to run the committee, but it is to help keep the committee on track. And so, as an example of the staff liaison, would help the chair buy-in putting together an agenda and sometimes that’s a friendly reminder sometimes it’s being pleasantly persistent, which is a nice way to say kind of nag, but, you know, but to make sure that the chair puts together an agenda and that it goes out to arrange all logistics for the meeting, so is a room reserved. You know, if you normally have iced tea at your meetings is they’re iced tea there to make sure that the agenda is sent to all of the committee members before the meeting, along with any other information that they’re supposed to review. And then finally, in the ideal world, your staff liaison also takes minutes at the meeting and then send those to the chair of the committee to review and approved before they get sent out. What about the executive committee? Is the ceo or executive director? They have a staff liaison to the executive committee. So in really small, non-profits, you know, so organizations that might only have two or three staff members, yeah, than absolute. The executive director end up serving as the staff liaison in a medium sized organization where the where the ceo or executive director has an executive assistant themselves. They might task the executive assistant with that. Okay. All right, that’s, the that’s, the well we should. We should talk on touch on that that there might be a program committees also that based on your you all your programmatic work, right? And the tough thing with program committees, especially when when the organization has staff, is to ensure that the program committees are operating at a strategic level and not an operational level, and to make sure that the committee really understands what their role is in that respect. And so on example, that i that i often give is, you know, whether whether program operates from seven thirty to three, thirty or eight to four is probably a staff decision. You know where as whether or not a program measures its outcomes is a strategic decision. Okay, right. We don’t want our board meddling in the day to day operations hiring, hiring and supplies and mundane things like that that are taking away from the boards much higher and much more strategic purpose. Right? Okay. All right. Let’s. Look att effective meetings now you talked about the agenda is the importance of agendas. Anything more you want to say about about how important those are? Oh. Absolutely so to me, the real point of putting together an agenda is not just to tell everyone that’s going to be in the meeting, what will happen at the meeting, but it also forces the act of putting together an agenda forces the person leading the meeting to really think through what their goals are for that meeting and to make sure that what happened in the meeting supports those gold. I like your suggestion of putting time limits on each agenda item. I do that when i for the few meetings that i that i conduct usually i’m sitting in them, but i’m not leading them, but when i do, i like to put the time limits so everybody sees it in black and white, and i don’t know how you feel about this. I appoint a timekeeper so it’s it’s somebody different than me? I’m paying attention to the substance of the meeting and the flow, but not the exact timing. Absolutely. I always believe there should be a timekeeper in the ideal world, someone different from the person running the meeting, but the other thing on time and this is something that i’m really adamant about. Especially when there’s a call an option or if or if it’s an entire, you know, teleconference meeting is the meeting has to start on time, so, you know, so even if you don’t have a core on well, you go ahead and you get started when we when we delay the start of a meeting, what we’re really doing this, we’re punishing the people that showed up on time, and we’re rewarding the people who did not show up my welcome. What can we do without what could we do without a quorum, though? Well, so so there’s some things you could do, like, obviously you can’t take votes, but you can start to have some of those strategic discussions. So, you know, so anything that is a report out or just a strategic discussion you can still do without a quorum. You can’t take any votes without a quorum, but you can, you know, but you can have those discussions, okay? And, um, i also think that from from day one, your first meeting, you tell people it’s going to start on time and then you actually do start on time and the late comers they’re going to get the message from meetings too and forward, right, and and also share with you, especially again when there’s a call an option or if the meeting is entirely by phone. You know, i am all about the meeting starts on time, but also late comers. You hear the ding. But we don’t stop the meeting to reintroduce you, to tell you who is present, to tell you what we have already done because otherwise will interrupt the meeting three or four times. So the way i tended when i run those meetings, the way i tend to ask people calling into phone conferences late is to wait until they have something to say in a conversation, and then they introduce themselves. And so for example, they would say, this is dalton, and i want to add, and then they would essentially say they’re comment. Okay, okay, we just have a minute before we have to before we have to wrap it up and let’s leave people with the the importance of minutes in our minute. I’m starting the importance of the minutes, the committee, and it went on the board minutes, you know, so the minutes are the official record of what the committee has done, as well as what the board is done. And, you know, in the ideal world, someone from the outside should be able to read those minutes and have a good sense of the official action of the organization, as well as its goals and issues that it is working on resolving outstanding. We’re gonna leave it there. Dolph the book, thank you, my pleasure. The book is successful. Non-profits build supercharged boards, get the book there’s so much more in it than we could cover here on non-profit radio, i thank you very much. Thank you, your content calendar coming up. First, pursuant, you know who these people are? They have developed tools that help small and midsize non-profits raise the money raised the money that you need to raise falik prospector and velocity. You know, i talk about thes time after time because they’re helpful, and they’re perfect for our audience, even the velocity tool, which was developed for their internal consultants pursuing consultants, running campaigns for their clients. Well, you could get the tool without the without the consultant and that when his velocity and prospector, one that helps you manage time against goal full dashboard keeping you on task day after day, week after week toward that campaign goal, check out these tools at pursuant dot com and we be spelling spelling bees for non-profit fund-raising this is not the spelling bee you grew up with, probably because they bring in stand up comedy, there’s, dance, there’s, booze, there’s, live music. And somewhere in there, the squeezing a spelling bee and fund-raising and not just fund-raising that night, but fund-raising in advance. So it’s ah, i love this because it’s just unusual fund-raising model i haven’t seen spelling bees for fund-raising i got knocked out of a spelling. Bee once on the word lettuce, can you believe it? Let us because spelling bees i don’t know if they’re this formal, but the ones i was in you couldn’t make a mistake and i went, i said, l u e t you see, but it’s too late. I had made the mistake. You’re out out on the word lettuce killed me and the winner of that spelling bee one on aeronautics hyre like i could’ve had the whole thing, but i choked on lettuce. Ever since then i’ve only eating kale. All right, check him out. We be spelling dot com and b is b e now, time for tony’s. Take two solitude. This is important for you because you work in a giving profession. You’re even if you’re back office, you know that your office is giving. Your organization is giving its saving lives. It’s, it’s changing the world. This is this is draining, exhausting work. And you have to take time for yourself. So i strongly suggest. And i hope you did this summer. Or you will as the summer comes to a close. Get time alone. Unconnected. No phones, no text, no e mail disconnected. No. Instagram no snapchat get away and i urge you ah, a little a little jovially in my video this week, it is way beyond typical weekly videos. This one even has a cast and crew. So we need to check out my solitude video. No, a solitude with a cast at tony martignetti dot com. And that is tony’s take two leinheiser love. They will do it a little concisely this time live love going out to everybody. Who’s listening. Now, at this moment you know who you are. You know where you are. The live love goes out. It goes out every single week. Whether alive or pre recorded, the live love goes out. What follows that it’s the podcast pleasantries. I am so grateful for all the tens of that tens. Ten thousand over ten thousand not quite tens of thousands, but the over ten thousand listeners listening in that time shift whatever device, whatever time, whatever activity you are engaged in pleasantries to you and likewise affections to our am and fm affiliate listeners throughout the country, from upstate new york and outside philadelphia in lancaster county to washington and oregon and california and points in between. Affections to our affiliate listeners on the am and fm stations here’s, a panel from ntcdinosaur, and we talked about your content calendar. Welcome to tony martignetti non-profit radio coverage of sixteen ntc non-profit technology conference were in san jose, california, at the convention center, and this is also part of ntc conversations, my guests, now our laura norvig, james porter and heavy larue miller going to meet them very shortly. First, i have to shout out the inten thie ntc swag item for this interview is popcorn from microsoft, microsoft popcorn, and i have it from our production assistant, anna hannah who’s. Excellent, that this is very good popcorn. Great. We’re gonna add this to the swag pile carefully. Of course, they don’t want it disseminated across the pile and making everything oily, but i will take a couple pieces for myself. Microsoft popcorn okay. See, the closest to me is laura norvig she is a digital media strategist at tr james porter is associate director for external relations at the end. Fund-raising clolery miller is a founder, the founder of non-profit marketing guide, which is that non-profit marketing guy dot com laura james e-giving welcome, thank you. Thank you telling e-giving welcome back. Absolutely good, thank you. Content calendars and you creating communications harmony. That is your seminar topic. Uh, let’s start the star in the middle. James, what do you think? Non-profits they’re not getting quite right could do better about content calendars or maybe even just having one? I don’t know, right? Yeah, well, it starts off with just having one, but i think a lot of the the problems stem from first of all, not knowing what you want or what you need. There are a lot of tools out there and so is something that i wanted to get across. Was that you, khun? Try things and if they don’t work that’s okay, but i think one of the biggest problems is just not not realizing what you need and what what you want. And if you need something from or long term planning. You need something for data. The project management. Do you need a tool? That’s going to be everything? Or do you just need to fill in gaps with some of your existing tools? There’s a whole host of other problems. But i think step one is just really trying to figure out what you want and what your organization needs are. Okay, laura, anything you want to add at this overviewing point? Well, i know sometimes people struggle with as james said, trying to make your calendar maybe do too much and you wantto keep it simple. One of the other things people experience is getting people to actually use the calendar, so keeping it simple can help. Okay. Okay, kivi, anything for us to get us started kick us off. I think people know they need to plan, but then they don’t have time to plan, and so they run around and don’t feel strategic field too busy feel like they’re too many priorities. But then they don’t give themself a chance to stop and think. And the editorial calendar really is a way to stop and think and be more strategic. Okay, on the editorial calendar is the same, but it’s our can’t content calendar, right? Something okay, um all right, so let’s, let’s, uh, let’s get started with what should be in one? I don’t know e-giving you want to kick us off? What some ideas? What? Sharing your content calendar. So in order for it to be an editor of calendar there three pieces one is the communications channels you’re sending out your content in the second piece is the timing behind that when things are going out and the third piece is the messaging what you’re actually talking about so it’s, what you’re talking about when you’re talking about it and in which communication channels, you have to have those three things or in my mind, it’s, not an editorial calendar. Okay, james, you’re doing a lot of nodding. Yeah, i would also add to that that it’s important to also have who is responsible and who is the driver for these things and for for our content calendar anyway, because if you have a lot of people using it, you need to know who to go to jazz questions about that item who’s going to be in charge of posting. It so i think it’s also important to have that, and then i i also would add that making sure somewhere maybe it’s, not in your exact tool, but we’d like to put it in our tool is to also include your audience so that, you know, for each item in your editorial calendar who the audience is going to be, that that’s the right who the messages that particular messages for yeah, but to be very specific about it. And so we you could even do it, split it out by channels so that if you have different audiences on different channels, but the for me that it’s very important to be specific about the audience. Okay, okay, laura, anything you’d like to add about what belongs in our calendar. I think those are pretty much the basics. And then, uh, we sometimes layer on top the pushing out to social and so you could use your calendar as a tool to track so again the channels. But yeah, tracking them twitter and facebook, as well as a block poster newsletter. Okay, okay, very good. What? Yeah. So? So where were you? We’re developing a calendar. That’s got that gun, each message or each campaign? I mean, does it have has our campaigns that also has messages within the campaign? Is it? Is it that granular? I think that’s going to depend on your organization. You know, whether that’s the way you messages through a long campaign and that’s, one of the things we talked about was the long term planning. You can stretch the campaign out over time, but not that’s not gonna fit all or yeah. Okay. Yeah. And i would just add that for us, it does include every message. So for example, we had campaigner on giving tuesday. That was a video campaign, and we had a different video being pushed out every day. And so each one of those messages was individually posted on the editorial calendar. Along with what channel they were being pushed out through every day. For how long? How long before giving tuesday did you start this? There were five. There were five videos, and then the whole campaign we started when you got a tease, it let people know things were coming, so yeah, it was about about a week in total for the campaign. Okay. All right. Anything else you want to say about what belongs? What that covers it. Okay. I like the idea of making sure somebody’s responsible for each each item, right? You gotta know who to talk to without responsibility. This calendar is not goingto not going to get accomplished. Yeah, we actually go to the level of kind of the process planning. So not only who’s maybe writing a block post. Who’s got snusz edited who’s going to copy, edit it. Who’s goingto posted who? You know. So, dan, are you? There were a lot of non-profits that only had one person in their communications department. However, so in that kind of situation, you know, you don’t need to write your name on every single box, right? Well, that could be a message for the ceo. That’s i like that. Look at all this. My name is next on all this and expect me to achieve this. All right? Uh, who was involved in adopting this this calendar? Because we need to have make make sure that the organization is going to accept it. It’s going to buy-in, but they need to be a part of the process. I would think that makes it a lot easier to have them accepted, so give you let’s start with you had around, we start to get this thing well, at what stage we bring others in, right? So i think it is going very from organization to organization and then session. We did talk a lot about getting buy-in from program staff because they’re often the source of the content that’s where the really good stories come from and getting there buy-in as content creators really seeing themselves as communicators is really important, but then it’s also important to get the executive team involved because they’re the ones that really need to set the strategy for the messaging and lots of times there’s a lot of conflicting priorities, too many priorities, too much going on, really a lot of mixed messaging and in those situations it’s really up to the management team to provide some direction. But you know, those air, those air, often times for communications, director’s relationships that have to be built over time. And so i always urge a communications department to just do it, do it themselves. Do it to manage their own workload. And then hopefully over time, you’re really making it a much more organization wide tool. Okay, how does it work within your organizations? Get getting the organizational buy-in yeah, yeah, i would just say that i think you khun get people’s opinions, but it really matters the most of the people who are going to be using it the most on the day to day, those people have to be the most comfortable with it and really be the most okay with it. So, yeah, it is important to get by and from other people, but it it could also be a problem when you have an existing tool that is there already. And you have a new staff coming in and the new staff say, ok, this tool doesn’t actually work for me. So it was something that i mentioned in the session that i thought was important. Wass that to do periodic check ins. And maybe every six months, you kind of a gut check and ask the staff are using the tool. Is this tool still working for us? Do we need to add anything to it? Do we need? To consider changing it because just because you’re using it doesn’t mean it’s working. So i think it is also important to have kind of periodic check ins to make sure that it’s doing what you needed to do, okay, get laura has that work in europe? Well, that yeah, that’s one of the things we talked about in the session was was not being afraid to change your tool if it’s just not working in sometimes that’s a little hard to dio, as i was saying, we work in an orgy where sharepoint is kind of designated bi i ity but it really wasn’t working for us, so i did have a small enough content team that we just kind of went rogue, and and we’re using our own solution with trey lo and yeah, yeah, any other online resource is that you want to share for creation of your of your editorial calendar, a valuable patrol? Oh, fan myself. I’ve also used a base camp before they base camp base camp base camp has been useful and something i mentioned the session to was that i thought it was useful to for me anyway. Tohave in one place. Both a project management software and a content countering which trailer could do as well? It’s a certain degrees, you know, but and it starts getting messy when you have lots of systems and lots of tools, so the more you can integrate things or just have one tool that could do most things. There’s, no one to look and do all but that’s. Why i like to i like to base camp for having the project management and also a more robust calendar. I’ve seen a lot of organizations use google calendars very successfully because you can layer them what you can do with sharepoint too. But it but there could be so you could have separate calendars. But then you can have a view where there rolled up and you can see all of the calendar’s together. So maybe you have, you know, one of your silos if you have a siloed organization development or something and maybe program staff and they’re each working on their own calendar with either ideas or post there actually writing and then the editorial staff could see them both together. Get a bigger picture. Okay, xero the conflict points right cd you. Have too much content, too little. Yeah. Okay. All right. Where else should we go with with our content calendar? You know, we have ah, good. Another ten minutes or so together. What? What else should we be talking about? Well, i definitely think in this session, the buy-in was still a big issue. I don’t know give me waited like audience members were having trouble with having getting buy-in yeah, what? I think that was a big one, as well as the too many priorities and not enough strategy. So, you know, i really encourage people to just do it themselves if they’re not getting direction on what the limited number of messages should be or what the strategy really is. I say go ahead and you decide is the communications director and believe me, you’ll get feedback if you do something, they didn’t like it but it’s better to go ahead and provide some of that internal leadership from sort of managing from the middle, then to keep kind of floundering around. Yeah, and i think it also can be very tempting to say, okay, we have this editorial calendar, um and that’s our strategy, but it’s it’s not having editorial calendar isn’t a strategy and of itself, so we did talk about long term planning and needing that strategy, so the editorial counter needs to be informed by a strategy, but i think you can fall into the trap that you have the editorial counter, you’ve put everything on it, but then you forget about the strategy, okay, it’s, when you go over and you do the strategy and it doesn’t match with your editorial caldnear calendar, i think that was that was a problem that that came up in, that those two things don’t planning and strategy aren’t always hand in hand, and i would also just add that there was a fair amount of angst in the room about people feeling like planning than miree resulted in this rigid system that they couldn’t then produce any timely content within on. So, you know, what i always tell people is, you know, practice the rule of thirds, so a third of the calendar should be original curated content. Another third is you repurpose ing your original and curated content, and then you leave a third of your calendar open because, you know, stuff is going to come up, you may not know what it is, but something’s going to come up, so don’t over plan, but make sure you do have strategy built into that original content in that third in the in the repurpose content in that second, third, ok, yeah, that’s, really important. So i used to work for the international rescue committee, and they deal with man made and nature made disasters. And so you always needed to have that flexibility in your calendar. So even if it was a big women’s themed campaign in the spring that you have been planning for six months, you need to be able to have a little bit of room within that messaging to be flexible. If a tsunami happens or an earthquake happens or, you know, there’s, famine somewhere you need to be able to quickly pivot. Teo needs that. You need to react you right away without jeopardising everything else that you’re trying to get accomplished and a good content calendar. As katie said, we’ll leave room for those things. Like what you’re hearing a non-profit radio tony’s got more on youtube, you’ll find clips from stand up comedy tv spots and exclusive interviews catch guests like seth gordon. Craig newmark, the founder of craigslist marquis of eco enterprises, charles best from donors choose dot org’s aria finger, do something that worked neo-sage levine from new york universities heimans center on philantech tony tweets to he finds the best content from the most knowledgeable, interesting people in and around non-profit to share on his stream. If you have valuable info, he wants to re tweet you during the show. You can join the conversation on twitter using hashtag non-profit radio twitter is an easy way to reach tony he’s at tony martignetti narasimhan t i g e n e t t i remember there’s a g before the end he hosts a podcast for the chronicle of philanthropy fund-raising fundamentals is a short monthly show devoted to getting over your fund-raising hartals just like non-profit radio, toni talks to leading thinkers, experts and cool people with great ideas. As one fan said, tony picks their brains and i don’t have to leave my office fund-raising fundamentals was recently dubbed the most helpful non-profit podcast you have ever heard. You can also join the conversation on facebook, where you can ask questions before or after the show. The guests were there, too. Get insider show alerts by email, tony tells you who’s on each week and always includes link so that you can contact guess directly. To sign up, visit the facebook page for tony martignetti dot com. I’m christine cronin, president of n y charities dot orc. You’re listening to tony martignetti non-profit radio big non-profit ideas for the other ninety five percent. How do you deal with the case? Where you’ve you’ve got your calendar on dh? The organization is not respecting it. Maybe i don’t know if this is just the buy-in but, you know, other other other teams are saying no, no, no, i need this now, you know, or or some some something comes up from above that comes down from above that is now impinge ing on your ability to keep up with your own calendar, you know? But you respected my calendar when i showed it to you six months ago, and now you’re ignoring it for this other administrative thing or for this program problem or this fund-raising problem. But what you you dissing my calendar? What? What do we do? Stop dissing might stop beating up my calendar. Whatever you do, laura. What? Teo? Well, i think one of the things we talked about was showing people the process of what it really takes to roll out communications to kind of push back on that last minute. Itis because there is a process and it needs to be followed. So unless it’s an emergency coming directly from the ceo, you know, like step off, i can’t make that a priority now waken talk later. I mean it’s a process of education. So gotta make yourself heard. Yeah, i would agree with that. I think the mohr outside players can understand how much times something takes, how much time it takes it posa blogged, or to edit a photo or something that they the constant calendar maybe doesn’t do a great job of articulating that. Like how much lead time you need? Sure, it doesn’t get x product up, so it might be very tempting to say oh, well, you’ve got this big, you know, forge a hole between item one and item to let me put something between those two. And no, i need those four days to get item to done. So i think the education that you have to be able to say no and i need the four days i cannot do that. Otherwise item two will get done. So i think content calendars are not good at that. So that’s where the education piece comes. And james, you also talked about reinforcing it in face to face meeting. So if you have, like, a regular staff meeting where you khun very quickly go over the calendar, then it’s it’s going to start to become more clear. Okay, make it public office. Oh, yeah, we we go over. So we have ah, communications meeting once a week. And as part of that meeting, we review the content calendar with somebody from our program’s staff is balls that they’re aware of what’s going on? Sometimes you do need to check what’s in the plan right now. So i think in those situations, you just need to be very clear and articulating the trade off. So if you’re going to bump something, you’ve been planning for something that’s more timely. You need to actually say hay. We’re bumping this thing way, rescheduling it. Or are we completely throwing the work out? There’s an implication here? All right. And there is no plan for this reason, right? There was a purpose for this. And this is what is not now going to be fulfilled. Right? And sometimes you can use it later. You know, if it’s more sort of evergreen in nature, you just bump it down a month. Other times, you know, it’s lost work. But those were strategic decisions that you have to make and that’s where again, having some executive understanding of the communication strategy is important to help the communications team really make good decisions in those situations because they do come up all the time. All right, when are our boundaries respected? Right? Yes. Like i said, stop dissing my calendar. All right, so you guys spent the you all spent a lot of time, uh, in your session. What more should we be talking about? We’ve got another, like, four minutes for five minutes. What else? Whatever we talked about or what more detail maybe about something we we didn’t cover in sufficient detail. Come on. How’d you do ninety minutes together? What would you do for ninety minutes? Well, we turned it back on the audience quite a bit and had them tell us more about what the challenge is, where they were facing so and then you want share some of those challenges that we haven’t talked about? Yeah, short for detail going. You know what? One of the one of the challenges was also just time straight up. We don’t have enough time. So something that can can happen with a constant calendar, which i mentioned. When i was talking with then you have to schedule into your schedule the time to put things on the content calendars, it becomes another task on your list, you know, there’s another half hour of my time when especially for non-profits i don’t have a huge communications staff, it almost seems like it’s, just another thing that you have to do and there’s only two of you and you need to get everything else done. Anyway, i was thinking even just one yeah, i know we had a lot of people we did a little poland said, how many of you are our team of one? And you’re like a third? Yeah, of people who are just by themselves on, and so i think time was a big thing, but but i think that it content calendar can actually give you back some time, because if you’re it helps you plan longer term, if you’re going to use it that way, and so you, then you don’t have to constantly be thinking, well, what am i turning out next week? What am i posting on facebook on friday? Because of, you know already you’ve already done it, so yeah. It can it can take time to do, but it can also make you use your very precious time better than you would without it. All right, so you think it’s worth doing it for the one person short? I think it’s worth it for the one person shot because it just kind of keeps you accountable for what you’re doing rather than every day saying what my posting today, you know, one of the things i shared was that i originally used to do a lot of winging it, and i had a certain kind of a siri’s of facebook posts that i wanted to do, and every monday i was sitting down and thinking of one, and then when i kind of laid it out in a spreadsheet is like, you know what? I can plan like ten of these and schedule them in advance, and now i don’t have to think about it again, so thinking ahead in a calendar kind of way, actually, it did end up saving me time. Good is it worth if you don’t feel you can put every you know, every facebook post into account encounter having you’re bigger, you’re bigger items. All right, we know there’s gonna be a press release required for this announcement, and we know there’s going to be something coming out of the board of trustees meeting and this month, you know, so maybe just putting the biggest items there, you know, maybe not the day to day at least you got something down, right? You got a framework give me to work from yeah, so like a lot of people will just do their block post in their email, assuming that they’re going to repurpose all that into social and so they don’t talk about every single thing they’re going to talk about on facebook same thing with video that tends to be a little more production heavy, and so you’re doing video. You kinda want to treat that almost like a block post in terms of the production schedule to give yourself the time to do it, but you’re right, there’s bigger chunks of content are usually what goes on the calendar, and then a lot of people just sort of in their daily work process. No, that that’s going to go out on facebook or twitter, what other social channels are using? Okay, all right, laura, why don’t you wrap us up with final motivation? Why this is worth doing well, it’s going to help you see the big picture and it’s going to help you navigate your daily to do list a cz well and i think it’s just going to keep you more confident that you’re staying on task and hitting the themes you want to hit for your communications. Okay, thank you very much. Laura. James givi. Thankyou. Thankyou. Tony there. Lord norvig, digital media strategist that e t r james porter, associate director of external relations at the end fund-raising guide and also author and you’re listening to tony martignetti non-profit radio coverage of sixteen ntc thank you so much for being with us next week. Design on a budget and communications mythbusters. If you missed any part of today’s show, i beseech you, find it on tony martignetti dot com responsive by pursuing online tools for small and midsize non-profits data driven and technology enabled pursuant dot com and by we be spelling supercool spelling bee fundraisers, we be spelling dot com. Our creative producer was claire buyer off sam liebowitz is the line producer. Gavin dollars are am and fm outreach director shows social media is by susan chavez. And as music is by scott stein. Be with me next week for non-profit radio. Big non-profit ideas for the other ninety five percent. Go out and be great. Duitz what’s not to love about non-profit radio tony gets the best guests check this out from seth godin this’s the first revolution since tv nineteen fifty and henry ford nineteen twenty it’s the revolution of our lifetime here’s a smart, simple idea from craigslist founder craig newmark yeah insights, orn presentation or anything? People don’t really need the fancy stuff they need something which is simple and fast. When’s the best time to post on facebook facebook’s andrew noise nose at traffic is at an all time hyre on nine a m or eight pm so that’s, when you should be posting your most meaningful post here’s aria finger ceo of do something dot or ge young people are not going to be involved in social change if it’s boring and they don’t see the impact of what they’re doing. So you got to make it fun and applicable to these young people look so otherwise a fifteen and sixteen year old they have better things to do if they have xbox, they have tv, they have their cell phones. Me dar is the founder of idealist took two or three years for foundation staff, sort of dane toe add an email address their card it was like it was phone. This email thing is fired-up that’s why should i give it away? Charles best founded donors choose dot or ge somehow they’ve gotten in touch kind of off line as it were on dno. Two exchanges of brownies and visits and physical gift mark echo is the founder and ceo of eco enterprises. You may be wearing his hoodies and shirts. Tony, talk to him. Yeah, you know, i just i’m a big believer that’s not what you make in life. It sze, you know, tell you make people feel this is public radio host majora carter. Innovation is in the power of understanding that you don’t just put money on a situation i expected to hell you put money in a situation and invested and expect it to grow and savvy advice for success from eric sabiston. 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Nonprofit Radio for February 26, 2016: Communicate With Your Communicators & Your Event Pipeline

Big Nonprofit Ideas for the Other 95%

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Kivi Leroux Miller: Communicate with Your Communicators

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Kivi Leroux Miller has tips from her 2016 Nonprofit Communications Trends Report, on how to work effectively with your communications team. She’s the founder of NonprofitMarketingGuide.com and an award-winning author.

 

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Hello and welcome to tony martignetti non-profit radio big non-profit ideas for the other ninety five percent on your aptly named host oh, i’m glad you’re with me, i’d suffer aniko maiko, sis, if you touched me with the idea that you missed today’s show, communicate with your communicators. Kivi larue miller has tips from her twenty sixteen non-profit communications trends report on how to work effectively with your communications team. She’s, the founder of non-profit marketing guide, dot com and an award winning author, and the event pipeline get committed major donors from your events by making them transformational, not merely transactional. Pat clemency has before, during and after event ideas. She’s, president and ceo of make a wish metro new york and western new york khun learn lessons from rochester and buffalo and that’s from non-profit radio on october twenty fourth. Twenty fourteen on tony’s take two thank you. We’re sponsored by pursuant full service fund-raising data driven and technology enabled, you’ll raise more money pursuant dot com also by crowdster online and mobile fund-raising software for non-profits now with apple pay mobile donation feature crowdster dot com i’m very glad, very pleased, very thrilled to welcome kivi. Larue miller to the show she’s the founder of non-profit marketing guy dot com and author of the books the non-profit marketing guide high impact, low cost ways to build support for your good cause and content marketing for non-profits she’s also a certified executive coach. You’ll find her on twitter at kitty l m welcome to the lm hi, tony. How are you today? Terrific. Welcome. Welcome to non-profit radio. Thank you. Tell me about this report that i believe is in its sixth year. Your non-profit communications trends report. How did this come about? Well, you know, there’s a lot that data out there about non-profit management in general and a fair number of reports about development staff. But no one was really looking at communications directors, and those are our primary interest. So we started it. So communications director’s kind of ah, like, like, step children. I mean, there had been a get for gotten sometimes. Well, you know, i think in some of our darker moment, maybe we define it that way. But what i really think is happening is that it’s, a relatively new profession and, you know, ten years ago, communications director, pretty much. Handled pr and maybe some print work. And that was pretty much it now. Of course, things have changed a lot. And so the job is much more complicated, and people are recognizing they need to actually staff it with professionals who are dedicated communications skills in developing their skills. Okay, so young professional. Okay. All right. That’s. Interesting. Because we’ve been communicating for well, as long as we’ve been been been walking, where did radio communications used to fall before we had communications and marketing directors? You know, i think that our people handled it, uh, or you might have had someone who did event marketing and pr. It was often times the executive director’s job or within the fund-raising department, but i think the job has become so big now primarily because of that that really didn’t demand its own staff. Yeah, of course. I’m good. Yeah. I’m just wondering where it used to be. Because, uh, before we had a communications director. Okay, um, what’s the, uh, what’s the background of the report. How do you how do you gather the data from how many people and stuff? Hey! Sametz this year, it was about six hundred. I’d say about forty percent of those people identify themselves with communications staff. Another twenty percent is development staff on another twenty percent as executive directors with a few others. Okay, um, you’re cutting out a little bit heavy. We’ll keep trying it, but we might have to have you call back. We’ll see. Okay, yeah, it’s not, i don’t think. Is anything you’re doing? I think it may just be the nature of digital communications will just just say okay, well, i could try a different line if you need me to. Okay? We’ll see. We’ll see how we do now. You have this broken down very nicely. You have your your four d’s for effectively working with the communications team for the executive director to work nice and effective with the communications team. Um, we will dedicate and define and delegate and discuss. This is all very ysl communicated. Very well. I hope your hope, you know that. Thank you. Yeah. It’s all very it’s laid out very nicely. That’s the report is just very pretty, too. Um, it seems like this is all just, like, falling into just being the executive director being committed to the communications work, i think that’s, right? And, you know, the other thing i would say is that somebody has to make some choices because there are so many different ways to communicate. Now somebody has to get this about what’s going to be the most effective way to communicate with the community based on your gold you’re trying to achieve and unfortunately, in a lot of non-profits people are not really making the decisions, they really are trying to do it all and so that produces a lot of frustration on the part of communications staff, and a lot of our guidance is tio executive directors to either say, hey, you need to make a decision or you need to delegate, then let your communications have to make a decision, but you can’t do everything. Yeah, ok, let’s, let’s, dive into some of your ideas that i mean, there are many more than then we can cover, but we’ll make sure we know well, why don’t we do it now? How can people get get this report very easy? You can go to non-profit marketing died. Dot com slash twenty sixteen and download them with report there. Okay, excellent, if i remember or if you remind me will say that again at the end too, but also because in a lot more to it than the section we’re going to cover. But i’d like to cover this working effectively between executive directors and the communications team. You like to see the communications director on the senior management team? Yes. So many decisions are made early in the program development. Say you’re starting a new program and then all the sudden the communications director it us to market that program. All right, i’ll tell you what, give e um okay. Giv e way lost you there. So would you would you try back on? I don’t know if there’s a different line you can call back on. We’re going to go out early for our break. And, um, when we come back, you’ll be back. And, uh, the number that we need you to call is, uh oh. We want you to call. Uh, you gotta hope you could take this down to one two, seven to one eight. One, eight, zero, two, one, two, seven to one eight. One eight zero we’ll go. Out for a break, we’ll have kitty right back. Stay with us, you’re tuned to non-profit radio. Tony martignetti also hosts a podcast for the chronicle of philanthropy. Fund-raising fundamentals is a quick ten minute burst of fund-raising insights, published once a month. Tony’s guests are expert in crowdfunding, mobile giving event fund-raising direct mail and donor cultivation. Really, all the fund-raising issues that make you wonder, am i doing this right? Is there a better way there is? Find the fund-raising fundamentals archive it. Tony martignetti, dot com that’s t i g e n e t t i remember there’s, a g before the end, thousands of listeners have subscribed on itunes. You can also learn maura, the chronicle website, philanthropy dot com fund-raising fundamentals, the better way. Welcome back to big non-profit ideas for the other ninety five percent e-giving sounds clearer now give you they’re right, i am okay, that that’s okay, i don’t think it’s your fault at all. Let’s, go let’s, go back to this idea that the communications director should be on the senior management team. Why is that right? They should be on the scene or senior management team because they need to be involved earlier in strategic conversations about fund-raising decisions and programming decisions lots of times, their routes to market something at the very end and little changes that could have happened earlier in the program would make a big difference in the result, but because they’re just sort of handed this finished product it’s often hard sometimes for them to do is get a job everyone would like, okay, and even just even just simple preparation, right? So they can prepare the team? Absolutely, absolutely. And, you know, most people don’t realize how long things take it’s like, oh, put up a new website for, you know, get a bunch of brochures printed. These things take time, especially when you have to work with other professionals buy-in graphic designers. Or editors. And so, you know, people that have never done that kind of work before don’t have an appreciation for just how long it really takes to get it done, right? Yeah, what what what do you feel about when you see a communications marketing directors reporting to the director of development or the or the vice prime? It doesn’t have to be just director, but the vice president development or, you know, the chief fundraiser, i guess that’s not what you want to see well, and we actually don’t see that all that often the most common organisational formats we see are either and integrated communications and development team where they’re already reporting to one senior manager, which i think is the best approach for you sometimes also see the more traditional kind of siloed teams where you have the communications people over here on the development people over there, and they have different bosses but there, more or less at the same level within the organization. Ah, either way, you want people to have access to the decision makers, to be able to move very quickly on decisions because so much of good communications needs to be nimble. And so you don’t want to just bury your communications director away and never talked to her. Which, unfortunately, is what happens a lot. Okay, well, that’s, why that’s? Why? I like this section of the report. Because it ah, hopefully will spark conversations between the executive director and the communications director or communications team. You know, maybe, you know, get some things. Start getting talked about that. It just kind of simmering and nobody’s really having a discussion about these issues school. Um, you like the executive director to understand the basics of communications, right? So we talk about a quick and dirty marketing strategy. Where the first question you wanna answer it? Who were you talking to? Your target audience. The second one is what’s your message to those people. The third one is one of the right channels or ways to deliver that message to the people super easy, right? If you just answer those three questions. Ah, lot of times what happened is people focus on that third question. They just focused on getting the message out without focusing on the target audience. Or if the message is really appropriate and oftentimes executive directors will. Say they don’t like something i don’t like this neither. I don’t like that colors on the website and our responses. Well, you’re not the target audience. Those materials need to be created for the intended community. And but if you don’t have any kind of concept of target audience and trying to reach people with a message that resonates with them, it’s difficult for you to be a good decision maker about communications, so you don’t you don’t want the executive director to be saying you put this out on twitter. This goes on facebook, we need a print brochure for this. Put this on the website. I mean there’s there’s more to it than that. It’s got to be much more strategic thought even just from the executive director at a basic level. Absolutely. Absolutely. Are the people you’re trying to reach in to motivate to do something using those communications channels. You got to answer that question first. Yes. Where are they? Right versus where would you like them to be or what? Yeah. Okay. Okay. Um putting some limits on the scope of the work for the communications team. You see them getting dumped on? Absolutely. And without a doubt, we hear the too many competing priorities or urgent tasks overtaking important ones as really big challenges for communications directors and, you know, not only that not only are there too many good communications choices, but lots of times that communications staff end up being the ones who are really good with computers, and so we often see them saddled with responsibilities or because they type well, now they’re doing boardmember way, see, all kinds of things get thrown into communications director there really limit their capacity to be good communications directors don’t dump on me. You see that on you see that on community on director’s desks as you’re mentoring them don’t dump on me. Well, i try to encourage them to stand up for themselves and to say, look, if you want me to be really good at managing our social media channels, creating great newsletters and guess what? Don’t expect me to go fix joe’s computer every time he blows the thing up. Yeah, yeah, that’s. Interesting because you do mentoring is a good part of your work. Um, how do you encourage these conversations that hopefully the report will stimulate but where? It doesn’t. How do you get the executive director and the communications director having this conversation? Well, you know, a lot of it is very interpersonal, right? So lots of times i tried to figure out okay, what is that really relationships that these two people have? But oftentimes we found that executive directors do respond to that outside expert that’s the classic thing where the staff says something, they’re not listen to you. Hyre the consultant consultant says the same thing and suddenly it’s the word of god. Right? So i end up playing that role a lot and really sort of backing up what staff are trying to tell their communications directors and if they can hold me up as an expert, sometimes that’s all they need other times, i give them different ways. Teo open conversations, we’d like to let people have really good examples of what other organizations were doing so they can demonstrate that they’re really not the first non-profit to try this new tactic that often works pretty well, too. Okay, um, have you seen things change over the six years i’ve been doing this report? What are what are some things that you’ve seen either either for the good or bad, you know, i think there really is a nice growing level of sophistication in the field. Like i said earlier, this is a relatively new profession, and people are asking harder questions of themselves, i think, and asking harder questions of people like me and, you know, really trying to be more strategic and not just do do do all the time, i think people do realize that they are overwhelmed with choices and they’re starting to get more savvy about realizing they need to make choices. So i guess, ah, marketing communications plan in being more strategic on dh that helps you make choices? Absolutely and saying, you know what? These three things are the most important things were going to do this year or these three communications channels or where we’re going to be our best, and we’re not going to do some of these other things, even if they’re the popular thing that’s in the news right now, we don’t need to be there. You have to make choices. You just have tio okay, yeah. On dh, prioritize the three most important things. So if something else intervenes, you know that these top three, if it’s competing with one of these, you know, these things take priority, and you know what, tony? People have a really hard time even putting things in one, two, three order you would not believe how difficulty that is for people when they’re talking about their communications, they want ten priorities, and they don’t want to put them in order. So that’s another challenge? I really pushed on communications staff in their executive director’s ok, i promise we won’t publish this. We won’t tell anybody, but i want the two of you to sit down and say what’s number one what’s number two and what’s number three and that’s really hard conversation for a lot of organizations, and what do they usually putting in those ways talking about events that they’re publicizing or programs or channels? What? What are those like? What categories? Of those one, two, three or one through ten for organizations that have a lot of different programs? For example, social service agencies tend to run scores of different programs that could be a really tough decision, you know, they can’t talk about all twenty things they dio in their newsletter. Or a social media the which of those twenty are going to get priority? That’s a really tough management call in other organisations, it tends to be, you know, are we going to speak more to our donors or we’re going to speak more to the people that were trying to serve and given the limited number of hours first on staff who’s most important at any given time again, people don’t want to have to decide, but if you don’t make a decision, you just sort of do it by default and that’s not really any better. Yeah, that’s not strategic, right? But i could see how these air difficult conversations toe have decisions to make, because do we put our volunteers ahead of our donors? Do we put our service beneficiaries ahead of our volunteers? Um so does it help when you say nobody knows except us? Well, it definitely helps them have the conversation with each other, and i think from there duitz they can decide who else has brought into that conversation and whether it really becomes public or not. You know, most people don’t actually publish their marketing and fund-raising strategies, so it does end. Up being an internal conversation, but even just bringing in some of those other program staff who’s, maybe their programs don’t make the top of the list or bringing in board members who have different opinions about fund-raising strategy, you know, they could be sensitive conversations. Okay, so that’s interesting. So do you often bring boardmember cz into to these conversations that you’re having between executive director and communications director? I think it really depends on the board and how active they are and again, whether they have marketing expertise, if you have someone on the board who has those skills and experience, that can be a great asset to the organization. But again, you don’t need someone just spouting off about things that they personally think they really don’t understand how to do communications at a professional level. Yeah, i really like that newsletter we did three years ago when we go back to that format, right? Or, you know, then there’s the one boardmember had to deal with one time who insisted that facebook was really just for perverts, so that was helpful, you know that she insisted the organization shouldn’t be on facebook because of a pervert. So you know, those kind of situations you just latto sort of move them along and get back to creating a real social media strategy. I think she was a friend of mine. Actually think that i got okay. Uh, that’s. Interesting. Cool. Okay, um, um, professional development you want to see? Oh, i think my voice just cracked like i’m fourteen professional development you want to see invested in? Correct, right? This is perfect. This is professionally. Yes. And it’s. We’re so blessed, really. And the communications field and i guess it’s no surprise, because we’re communicators, right? But there are so many good communications bloggers and people who are doing free webinars and free e books. Orsino certainly paid opportunities as well, but you could start with just the free blog’s and learned an incredible amount and both fund-raising and communications. So i really recommend that all communications staff take atleast an hour a week, if not more. But at least an hour a week to disclose the door, turn off the email in the social media and just read. Just read for an hour. That alone can really advance their own skills. How about conferences? Is there? A conference that you recommend? Sure. There are a couple, you know, there’s. Not one conference. Really? That is specifically for non-profit communications directors. However, there are a few events that i think you’re doing a decent job at meeting their needs. So my favorite national conference is intends. National technology conference. I try to make that every year there are a couple of regional events. There’s, a relatively new conference in north carolina called create good that is focused on non-profit communications and marketing. That’s another great a regional event. Ah, you know, some of the other events, we have a piece of it. Okay, just ah, well, let’s not highlight those because we want the ones where it’s you know, it’s it’s a premiere. Now you’ll be it. You’ll be a ntcdinosaur in san jose, this six coming march in march. I well, okay, looking for it. And i’ll be working with on two different sessions. Oh, cool. Oh, you’re presenting. All right, i’ll be hosting the live stream, the live audio stream and tc live. So we’ll shake hands. They’re absolutely all right. Um another thing that you like to see done is allowing your communicators to say no to the executive director. What do you mean by that? Well, lots of times executive directors get very excited about things, you know, lots lots of executive directors were really visionary people, and so they all come up with big ideas like we need a nap, you know, that’s when we hear a lot, yes, and odds are you probably don’t need a nap and may, even if you maybe do you probably can’t afford it. And, you know, we deal with a lot of small and medium sized organizations, and ap is something that really requires some pretty strategic thought is not something that you could just turn around and have online in today. So, you know, those are the kinds of things that we want communications staff to feel okay? Saying, you know what? I hear you? I know you’re excited about that. I’m gonna i’m gonna put that in my good ideas file for now and and not end up getting distracted and working on an app for the next two days when they need to be doing other things. Oh, app development could be there six months. Well, an expensive said and expensive too. You know, but lots of times what we see is an executive director saying, oh, you know, go find out the app thing, and then the communications director has to spend that day researching what it takes to create an app. Okay, well, knowing that they’re never going t to do an app and so that time hasbeen wasted. Okay? Aps yeah, i hear that occasionally. Do we need a nap, right? Um, you wantto see regular editorial meetings? What what? What’s an editorial meeting an editorial meeting is where you sit down and talk about what you’re going to talk about, and we’re going to talk about it. So what’s going in the new hey, brother what’s going on facebook? What event? Marketing you need to dio what presentations different staff are doing and how you can capitalize that already and reuse that content. So it’s really about focusing on, you know, what are the most important messages this week in this month? And how are we going to get them out the door? And again? This is where a lot of the triage has to take place. You’ve got fifteen different things you should probably be talking about. That because you have been planning that well, you can talk about all of them. You gotta prioritize. And so that’s the editorial meetings allow that to happen on a regular basis. It’s sort of forces the decision to be made and helps the communications team better plan their work. Going forward is a lot of that covered in our annual marketing and communications plan. You know, you can plan for sure, but so much of good communication is being about being responsive and really tying your work into what people are hearing about in the news today. So you can’t predict any of that, right? So you always need to be able to say, ok, this is what we want to talk about today. This is what’s actually in the headlines. This is what we’re hearing from our clients. This is what our donors air saying, what really does make sense to talk about, you have to adjust, and you have to tweak things. Okay? For sure. So i got you. All right. Um, internal communications you like, you know, you can’t really have good external without good internal. Absolutely. And, you know, i think the editorial meeting is a nice way to start those conversations. But what we talked about earlier about how teams were structured and making sure that the communications staff are not segregated from the development staff and they’re not segregated from the program’s staff. You know where people sit within a building or how often they talk to each other just throughout the course of their work can have a big impact on how well they work together. And then how well they communicate is a team outside the organization? Yes. Okay, you’re very good at explaining these very concisely to school. Thank you. Good. You’re a professional communicator. Um, how did you get into communications? This, uh, former step child profession. How did you how did you find your way here? Well, when i graduated from high school, i wasn’t sure if i wanted to be a journalist or environmentalist, and i ended up going to uc berkeley and they had a better environmental program than underground journalism program. And so i went the environmental route, and we’re in the environmental community for about ten years, but always kept writing. And so when i have the opportunity to move to the east coast and start my own business. I decided i was going to be a freelance writer for environmental groups, and it just sort of blew up from there, okay? Ah, i’ve been picking all the topics we have just about a minute or so left what what’s one that you’d like to cover, that we haven’t talked about. Well, let’s see, we’ve hit a lot of you know, i think one of the most important things that we can really do to help communications directors get the work done right is, too give them a boost of confidence. A lot of what i feel like i’m doing when i’m entering people is encouraging them to start these hard conversations with their executive directors to leave their offices and go hang out with their program’s staff to find the stories and really get the good information from people you know, like because this is such a new profession, people aren’t sure how to do it all the time, and they need a little extra shove in the right direction. And so, you know, i just want to encourage people to take it upon themselves to try to make something happen. Hilary miller you’ll find her at non-profit marketing guide dot com. And if you put forward slash twenty sixteen after that, you’ll find the report. Did i have that? I get that right for the report. E-giving that’s, right, ok, and on twitter, you’ll find her at k v l m. Thank you so much, kitty. Thank you, tony. A real pleasure. The event pipeline with pat clemency is coming up first. Pursuant, you have a problem? Uh, the problem solution statement. You have a problem. You need to raise more money. One of the solutions pursuing pursuing dot com. They’ve got these tools velocity for managing your fund-raising and helping your fundraisers manage themselves in their activities. And there their deadlines, their solicitations, etcetera, and then also helps you manage the fund-raising function. Um, prospector, which helps you find the upgrade ready donors that five hundred dollar donor-centric giving fifteen hundred or five thousand it’s using your data to find the people that you should be spending more time with and trying to get them upgrade. That’s the prospector tool these air, you know, made for small and midsize non-profits because you don’t have big fund-raising staff, um, you need help and pursuing ties, the technology that that does it. And you pick the tools that you need. That’s. Why, i think it’s ideal for small and midsize. You take what you need, leave the rest and all those tools are at pursuant dot com also crowdster with their new one of a kind apple pay mobile donation feature. It’s going to increase your mobile donations, which again pain, pain solution or problems solution statement you got to raise more money. I have a solution crowdster they obviously do crowdfunding site easy interface for your donors. They’re elegant looking sites. They look cool. You can check this all out at crowdster dot com and also the back end. Very helpful for you administering your crowd funding campaign now, tony’s, take two. Thank you for supporting non-profit radio. I don’t know. I hope i don’t say thank you too often, maybe that’s not possible, but i am grateful that you listened to the show and whether it’s live listeners or affiliates to get our affection or podcast listeners that get my pleasantries. I’m grateful for your support of the show if you getting the weekly alerts about who the guest star each week into your inbox. Thank you for that. If you’re with me on twitter, facebook, thank you. However it is, we’re connected. You’re supporting non-profit radio and i’m grateful. Thank you so much for being there. That’s tony’s, take two here is pat clemency from october twenty four ah twenty fourteen show on the event pipeline welcome to tony martignetti. Non-profit radio coverage of fund-raising day two thousand fourteen we are in times square, new york city at the marriott marquis hotel with me now is pat clemency. Her seminar topic is the event pipeline turning event guests into major donors. Pat is president and ceo of make a wish metro, new york and western new york that clemency. Welcome to the show. Thanks, tony. Pleasure to have you. You have ah, pretty desperate territory, new york city and western new york it’s an interesting territory, but i think it really is empowering in the sense you get a chance to say all sorts of markets in which you can raise money and it’s really the opportunity to understand how donors react in their markets and and you know what the universal is? They won’t want to make a difference. And how far west does western new york go in your for we cover the major cities of buffalo and rochester, seven ending counties. It’s just go over to buffalo. It does. Okay, so we don’t have the middle of the state. But we have a new york city in nassau county and then seventeen states counties upstate. What do? You see that non-profits are not quite getting right around events and transitioning donors from events. Oh, you think, you know, we all start with special events? I mean, there’s, no question about it, but i think it is the recognition that there is a discipline that can make those events were quarter and smarter and are part of a major gifts strategy if we see it as an event that we efficiently come into and go out of without seeing its capacity to build a pipeline of donors for other kinds of fund-raising particularly major gifts, i don’t think we make it a ll that it can be. So today we really talked had a great dialogue around the issue about some of the things that we can do to make a special event. Three distinct parts. It matters deeply what we do before going into the event. We’ll talk a lot about planet absolute, but planning in a different way, that really makes us understand who is coming, who are the prospects, but the day of the event. How do we really connect the donor’s? Not just with the event, but with the mission and how they can. Make a specific difference and how we then engaged him in the journey, not with the event but with the organization over time. He’s really the third ingredient in and so it really is very helpful to think about it as more than simply even itself. I’m gonna ask you to talk even closer to the mike because we have now we have the background noise because lunch is lunch is over, so stay nice and close. We don’t pick up too much outside background noise. Well, let’s start with the natural place of planning. What? What should be redoing as we’re planning the event? Planning for transitioning attendees to teo to our donor, right? I think we’re all too often we start with logistic rather than the strategy. What are we trying to do and who are we trying to attract? We also need to cast a wider net if you think of the donor pyramid. I mean, we’re looking at our past event guests and hoping people who will be new to the event will also come but we’re not looking for the clues that people give us on dso we found there was great opportunity looking at direct male donors give one hundred dollars more, and when we did some wealth screening, we found out they gave us one hundred dollars, not because that was their capacity. We had a box and they checked it and they gave us one hundred dollars. But we understood it. When we looked at it, they had so much more capacity, but we never got around to asking them. So looking a little bit more broadly and thinking about the strategy of engagement, we basically said, if you look at an event just as a single time, we’re going to invite him again next year. But if we look at the event and over late, a lot of the major gift strategies we have the ability to change the whole dynamic your oil to feet of the event. It could be that the institution and would be a longer term engagement. We get that right in the planning stage. That’s what we want, right? We don’t want this coming up year after year. And does this include people who come? They may only come one time because there connected with the honoree or just a friend of the organization brought them. Wait, convert those kinds of people. Well, you know, it’s very interesting. We learn a lot from our buffalo rochester offices because they have a very different evergreen strategy. Honorees are looked at differently than we look at them in new york city, and they are on it for body of work. So as a result, most of their strategy is thinking about how do you get the same donors to renew at higher levels each and every year? So now we’re beginning to implement that, saying, regardless of the honoree, how do we get more of our sponsors to renew? And then for those one time donors who come because of a gala honoree, we need to do some more screening and think about who else in our boards within the make-a-wish family knows them so that the relationship can transition to the organization, not simply around the honoree. What else can we learn from rochester and buffalo? Well, you know what? I think it is universal, so what? People want to make a difference? And we just have to make sure that we’re not leading with what we need, but we understand that the first conversation is the donor’s needs and the donor wants to be able to make a difference how our job is to take them on the journey by showing them how treating them like an investor, and that is a really key difference. Very often we ask for what we need, and we never think from the donor perspective, what about the organization will really resonate with them for the long haul? Do you really feel that upstate or western new york is better than downstate new york at this? No, no, i mean, they they’re scale is very different than ours. I mean, it’s a smaller scale the week that i think the best thing about fund-raising is if we are open to understand the best practices exist everywhere they learnt from us, we learn from them and i think it’s one. But i think the interesting thing is in every market, if you begin to institute this practice of looking at a bent donors not just as dahna sporting event on an annual basis, but really, truly look at it as a pipeline, we have seen donors go from seventeen hundred dollars to ten million dollars, or from our five thousand dollars. To five hundred thousand dollars. It isn’t a journey overnight, but the fact of the matter is some of our very gorgeous major gift donors entry point was at an event was how we dealt with that that made all the difference as to whether or not that became a continued transaction. We sell a ticket, you come to our event or if it really became a transformational relationship, the mission of the organization, are there other specific things that we should be doing in our planning? Aside from the concept of the lifetime donor, the longer term relationship, are there things specific to go to the invitation? Who invites them how they’re invited before the event? What else should we be doing specifically? Well, we began talking about if we were to really make this part of our major gifts strategy, what are the ships that we need to make? And when you think about it, our invitation is to an event we needed t even change the messaging were not just inviting you to invent we’re inviting you to share and join in this extraordinary mission and that’s very subtle, but it’s a very big difference, and so we even change the fact that when you come to a gala is a perfect example think about how we spend the first hour at cocktails just kind of wandering around. Instead, registration is outside, so the minute you enter the doors, you are coming in and part of a community of like minded people who believe that this is some of the most important work we could do for kids, and you are meeting wish families and volunteers on board members course searching you out as the guest that evening in that first hour becomes a really important message about we welcome your involvement in this remarkable work. How do we convey that message in our cocktail hour? Well, it’s really about storytelling and changing who tells the story? So if you think about it very often at a gala, whether it is during the cocktail hour, it’s during the main speeches of the night, putting up the ceo, they’re putting up the board chair. We’re talking about the past. We’re actually talking about statistics and how much money we raised in our case, somebody wishes granted when we changed the dynamic of who the storyteller wrists really should. Be the people who experienced the mission first hand and as we tell the story through their eyes, it says to a donor here’s exactly what your donation would do here’s exactly how it makes a difference in that moment for a lifetime that’s a very different relationship from the beginning of the point where that donor enters the gala. If we’re going to focus on storytelling at our events and it might be a very big one memory big gala or it might just be a smaller could be anything smaller, gathering, maybe even a meeting. Absolutely, we need thio sounds like have a very consistent message that the leadership is conveying that trickles down to all the employees and then also the board is conveying right when we need to have consistency and messaging. Well, you have to be have consistency in a couple of things. I think you have to have consistency and messaging for sure, but you also have to build a culture where the board and the staff are engaged in thinking about who’s there, you know, there’s, not a throwaway seated any event, and when you think that it matters most, there is a greater level of engagement on the part of the board and the staff and pretty work that gets done who’s at those tables. Who should we know how we welcome them? What would be important to them? And it allows boards to be successful. You know? Somebody tells you hear from boardmember i’ve given you every contact i have there’s, nobody else i can approach this empowers boards to reach out to other people that the organization knows and be champions that night for the cost. So they’re assigned we’re assigning people too, to meet specific people during the evening during the event. Absolutely and beyond that, you’re the eyes and ears. Every single person has a role kind of just surveying the room and learning what what they’re hearing that night and reporting, in fact so justus, we schedule an event on a day before that event takes place. We also have the debrief date by which boardmember volunteer staff get together. What did you hear? What did we learn? In very often? One piece of information about somebody was in the room is magnified then by another piece of information. And out of that then becomes thought. Okay. The event is over, but it’s on ly really big beginning in terms of engaging that dahna long term now on the way for the organization, and so part of the debrief is what’s next, what are some of the opportunities? And you’re right, we have to be on the same page. If someone were to say to us post event, i’d love to be involved how we ought to be able to convey what the options are many and there’s not going to be one that works for everybody. But everybody needs to know here some of the ways that you could be involved on an ongoing basis. So we’ve transitioned from beginning in the planning stage two day of now. We’re at our events. What else? A little bit there. Sorry, that was allowed. What else should we be thinking about? Oh, are executed the day of create this transition? Well, i think the other thing that you could do very, very well is start with strategy what’s the message that you’re trying to convey that should be the threat of connection to everything that’s being done that night and for us was really talking about the ripple. Effect of wishes in the ripple effect of wishes is a moment in time, yes, but it also has a lifelong impact. So one of our speakers was a thirty five year old executive with a wall street firm. He was a wish child seventeen years ago, and so the impact for him wass it had a ripple effect through his life, the life of his brother, who they really had a hard time when he was diagnosed with cancer. As the family would tell you, everybody’s diagnosed cancer, you know, said everybody has cancer feels like and so the threat of connection of his wish was in that mama with his brother. But it was also over his life he became a wish raining volunteer, helping others but imagine his role now explaining to people in his way that this investment that you will make tonight in support of this event, hasn’t it has an impact. Come on, the future generation of kids were just like me, that’s a that’s amazing way to tell the story, so the first part is what we’re trying to do. We’re trying to show the ripple effect over time across families in communities. And so all of those voices were part of the program that once that strategy is that you can always worry about the logistics next, but you’ve got to get that piece of it too often in event planning for the night of we think about the logistics, but we haven’t really thought about the strategy and that that’s, what we lead with and that story telling is is just a one part of it. Next is if you’ve told the story, then you’ve got a provided tangible way for people to make a difference, and so we don’t we do a lot of fund-raising at night, but its not around and for things we had one great item this year, and the rest is all about an auction to allow people to sponsor wishes and that’s the meaning of it. You go from the programme, which told the story from the perspective of families who have experienced it and then give people the opportunity to share in joining the mission by sponsoring future wish it was incredible to watch the little store ones, and some don’t respond to the wish. A season for wishes any or twenty five thousand. Dollars. Donation. In the room. An individual wish, right down to a thousand dollars and watching the room right up. Every time somebody was part of the community that was making a difference was really an extraordinary thing. It allowed people to know that this was a really special thing, that in this time and place, we’re all making a difference. Like what you’re hearing a non-profit radio tony’s got more on youtube, you’ll find clips from stand up comedy tv spots and exclusive interviews catch guests like seth gordon. Craig newmark, the founder of craigslist marquis of eco enterprises, charles best from donors choose dot org’s aria finger do something that worked. And naomi levine from new york universities heimans center on philanthropy tony tweets to he finds the best content from the most knowledgeable, interesting people in and around non-profits to share on his stream. If you have valuable info, he wants to re tweet you during the show. You can join the conversation on twitter using hashtag non-profit radio twitter is an easy way to reach tony he’s at tony martignetti narasimhan t i g e n e t t i remember there’s a g before the end he hosts a podcast for the chronicle of philanthropy fund-raising fundamentals is a short monthly show devoted to getting over your fund-raising hartals just like non-profit radio, toni talks to leading thinkers, experts and cool people with great ideas. As one fan said, tony picks their brains and i don’t have to leave my office fund-raising fundamentals was recently dubbed the most helpful non-profit podcast you have ever heard. You can also join the conversation on facebook, where you can ask questions before or after the show. The guests are there, too. Get insider show alerts by email, tony tells you who’s on each week and always includes link so that you can contact guests directly. To sign up, visit the facebook page for tony martignetti dot com. Lively conversation, top trends and sound advice. That’s. Tony martignetti non-profit radio. And i’m lawrence paige, no knee author off the non-profit fund-raising solution. Dahna oppcoll i’m going to ask a little just sort of a digression just about the logistics of that that auction for wishes did you have people predetermined that would that would be bidding on on any of the any of those auctions and those wish auctions way we thought about wass how could we make it? And i don’t mean to suggest the whole thing’s written? No, no, what did you have one or two people who you knew would get the ball rolling? They were all legitimate bits. We wouldn’t do that, but but there’s a couple of things that we were able to do before tony. So three board members came forward and said for new donors who never made a donation before to make a wish, the ability to come and make a difference for a child that’s a pretty important thing, but how much more would they feel? The impact of that initial donation if we came up with a challenge match, so three of our board members got together and one hundred and seventy five thousand dollars was put up in advance. They pledge this and they would donations of two hundred seventy five thousand, so that was a huge thing. We also knew from a couple of donors at the wish auction for somebody who couldn’t be at the gala, they were out of town was still a way to participate, so for people who weren’t there and want to participate that’s part of our culture now you always have this opportunity give even if you can’t be there. So we knew a handful of dahna they do it? What’d you do for the ones who couldn’t be there, so they have already pledged it, and they’ve made that commitment right before, and so we let people know that we were able to do that. Those two things are done in advance. We know that if if people know that thie donation they make is going to be doubled, there’s a likelihood that they’re going to give a little bit more on dh, then the other one to find a way to let donors who just can’t not be there that night. How else could we participate when it’s about wishes anybody can participate? And i think that helped a cz well, so that’s kind of the two things we know going into the night. Come and then way announced to the audience and then the third part of our trilogy stories after the event, what do we need to be now? Follow-up should be planned during planning, right way we should be thinking about what our follow-up is gonna be while we’re doing the advance planning it is, but we’re hearing a lot that night, and you’re understanding what the individual journey might be for donorsearch we can talk about on overall strategy were also listening to the donors needs as well, and that we hear that that night so that’s that’s an important thing. But, you know, i i think there’s a couple of great examples, our ten million dollars donor started out as a seventeen hundred dollars, went on. He bought tickets to a mets game where they were doing a benefit for make a wish and to see the journey after some of the events it was where he got to the transitional stage was when he was able to make a difference for the individual wish, so he began to grant wishes and then began to think, well, if i could grant a wish, i wonder if i could do more then he began to grant a wish a month for five years. Sixty kids, when you think about that, and that his attitude wass. But i couldn’t hyre others by this, and i have to lead by example. So in his office building, he took down some of his paintings and put up something that we have designed, which was simply a tree, acknowledging those wishes that have been granted so simple. First name of a child and a wish. When you came up into his hobby, you immediately saw that. This was somebody who was champion the cost. So he then, as he got closer after, after having been an event donor. And so when it became time to start thinking about the next generation wish children, you know, in two thousand thirteen, we were thirty years old, and we had grand on ten thousand wish, and we had a big bowl dream for the future. We wonder, grant the next ten thousand wishes because we understood now importance and impact want to grant those ten thousand wishes in a decade? Well, how do you sell somebody on a big, bold dream? Will you go to your best investors in the cause? And he said, well, i’d like to give you a down payment on the future, and that became the largest individual gift in the history of make-a-wish worldwide from an individual and think about that for the for the future of this organization, you know, here was somebody who went from seventeen hundred dollars, two, ten million, but it was never about ten million dollars for him. It was about the ability of change ten thousand lives. And so you think we moved from transaction, you know, i give you tickets to this event because you gave me a donation moved to the transitional stage where we could say thank you for making a difference for that child to the transformational stage would thank you for making a difference for the future of the mission that’s where the journey goes. If we take our special event and understand that each of those stages the preplanning the night of and what happens after are all distinct but equally important segments that can help that donor journey. Okay, we still have a couple of minutes left. Anything you want, teo. Hopefully you do have something you want to share that we haven’t said yet. Well, i think you know, one of the things that i was really struck by wei had our gala on june twelfth this year. And there was a couple who had come forward and they were security. They secure the honore, and they were great in helping support the fund-raising around him. And as they thought about sending a letter out two people to solicit funds from business colleagues and family and friends, i learn a lot when you see the letters, say, right, and this one just simply said we got involved with make a wish because we learned about Micah 6 year old who want to be a ballerina. We stayed involved because over the years we’ve seen hundreds and thousands of kids whose lives have been forever changed, and what i realized was here was a couple who came to an event was a cultivation event, just learn about make-a-wish and they heard that story and that stayed with them, and now we have an event for which they were such an incredible catalyst as a couple raised one point, six million dollars the fund-raising they did was extraordinary, they’ve been doubt a wish in perpetuity, and yet they never lost sight of the fact that it was at an event that was learning about that one child that touch them and made them want to do more. I don’t think i really understood the power of their motivation until that moment, but what i did no that’s, the discipline that we need to put in place and that’s the story telling you a story telling all the way in which we don’t look at this as a transaction it’s so much more and event can be so much more and could be such a powerful part about how we welcome donors into the extraordinary missions that we all support don’t leave it there. Ok, tony. Thank you. My pleasure, pat clemency. She is president and ceo of make a wish, a true new york and western new york and thank you for bringing lessons from rochester and buffalo. Thank you, my pleasure or listening to tony martignetti non-profit radio coverage of fund-raising day two thousand fourteen. Thank you so much for being with us next week. I just don’t know what’s going to happen next week. We’re pre recorded today, but have i ever let you down? If you missed any part of today’s show, i urge you find it on tony martignetti dot com. I’m just not sure about the singing. For twenty sixteen, we’re sponsored by pursuant online tools for small and midsize non-profits data driven and technology enabled pursuing two dot com and by crowdster online and mobile fund-raising software for non-profits now, with that apple pay mobile donation feature crowdster dot com our creative producers claire meyerhoff sam liebowitz is the line producer gavin dollars are am and fm outreach director. The show’s social media is by dina russell, and our music is by scott stein be with me next. Week for non-profit radio. Big non-profit ideas for the other ninety five percent. Go out and be great. Hey! What’s not to love about non-profit radio tony gets the best guests check this out from seth godin this’s the first revolution since tv nineteen fifty and henry ford nineteen twenty it’s the revolution of our lifetime here’s a smart, simple idea from craigslist founder craig newmark yeah insights, orn presentation or anything? People don’t really need the fancy stuff they need something which is simple and fast. When’s the best time to post on facebook facebook’s andrew noise nose at traffic is at an all time hyre on nine a, m or p m so that’s, when you should be posting your most meaningful post here’s aria finger ceo of do something dot or ge young people are not going to be involved in social change if it’s boring and they don’t see the impact of what they’re doing. So you gotta make it fun and applicable to these young people look so otherwise a fifteen and sixteen year old they have better things to dio they have xbox, they have tv, they have their cell phones, me doris, the founder of idealised, took two or three years for foundation staff to sort of dane toe add an email. Address card. It was like it was phone. This email thing is right and that’s, why should i give it away? Charles best founded donors choose dot or ge. Somehow they’ve gotten in touch kind of off line as it were on dh and no two exchanges of brownies and visits and physical gift. Mark echo is the founder and ceo of eco enterprises. You may be wearing his hoodies and shirts. Tony talked to him. Yeah, you know, i just i i’m a big believer that’s not what you make in life. It zoho, you know, tell you make people feel this is public radio host majora carter. Innovation is in the power of understanding that you don’t just put money on a situation expected to hell. You put money in a situation and invested and expected to grow and savvy advice for success from eric sacristan. What separates those who achieve from those who do not is in direct proportion to one’s ability to ask others for help. The smartest experts and leading thinkers air on tony martignetti non-profit radio big non-profit ideas for the other ninety five percent.